Chapter 28
Benji
In the dream, I was eating s’mores. This was immediately suspicious, because I hated marshmallows.
I’d hated them since I was nine, when my best friend dared me to fit six in my mouth at once.
The resulting texture experience, a kind of sugary suffocation that coated every surface of my oral cavity in synthetic sweetness, had permanently disqualified the entire food group from my life.
I didn’t eat marshmallows.
I didn’t eat things containing marshmallows.
I had once sent back a hot chocolate at a café because the barista had added a fistful of tiny bobbing marshmallow turds without consent. Mia described that as “the most unhinged boundary I’ve ever seen you enforce.”
But in my dream, I was eating s’mores with great enthusiasm beside a campfire that was also, somehow, a stove light.
The graham cracker was a Post-it note. This made perfect sense in the way that dream logic always makes perfect sense until you wake up and realize your subconscious has the narrative coherence of a toddler high on Pixy stick sugar while reading a screenplay.
But it was more than just the dream state that didn’t make sense.
The marshmallow was wrong.
It tasted like cotton and lavender soap and . . . ash? Who ate ash? And the particular dry nothing of—
I opened one eye.
And realized I was biting down on a pillow.
I had a mouthful of pillow.
It wasn’t a corner or an edge. Oh, no, I had somehow, during the night, committed to eating a significant portion of a pillowcase.
My mouth was full of cotton and the ghost of whatever detergent Peter used, which was unscented because of course it was, because Peter believed that fabric should smell like fabric and not like “a chemical approximation of a meadow that has never existed.”
And yet, somehow, it tasted like lavender.
I spat out the pillow.
Squeezed my eyes shut, then blinked.
The world was blurry, which was normal, because the world was always blurry for the first several minutes of consciousness. I was not a morning person. This cannot be overstated.
I wasn’t even an afternoon person, most days.
I was a person who achieved full cognitive function at 7 p.m., which was convenient for bartending and inconvenient for everything else. The process of waking up for me was less “rising to greet the day” and more “slowly being dragged from a warm, dark place by a universe intent on continuing.”
I blinked again.
Inputs resolved into data. The ceiling was white. The light was, well, morning light. The blinds cast horizontal bars of sun across—
Wait, I didn’t have blinds on my windows. I had curtains like a good gay.
Only then did I realize something was on my chest.
Not something.
Someone.
More specifically, someone’s arm.
A warm, heavy arm lay draped across my bare chest with the unconscious weight of a body that had reached for another body during the night and held on.
I felt the forearm against my ribs, the hand resting flat against my sternum, fingers slightly spread.
The weight was grounding and specific and absolutely, definitively not a marshmallow turned pillow or a cat or any of the things that had rested on my chest during the previous three months of sleeping in the foster room.
My brain, which had been operating at approximately four percent capacity, surged to something closer to sixty percent.
Pillow. Blinds. Sunlight. Arm. Chest. Bare skin. Not my arm.
Peter’s arm.
Peter’s bed.
I was in Peter’s bed.
The remaining details arrived in a cascade that my groggy brain processed in the wrong order, like a computer loading a webpage with the images before the text.
First, the sheets (not my sheets, higher thread count, Peter sheets), then the mattress (firm, because Peter believed that sleep surfaces should provide support rather than comfort, a philosophical position I disagreed with but that my back was currently endorsing), then the smell (clean, warm, the specific scent of Peter’s skin that I’d learned last night was the same everywhere, consistent and understated and exactly right), and finally, the sound, which was breathing, slow and deep and coming from approximately four inches behind my left ear.
Peter was behind me.
Peter was asleep behind me with his arm on my chest and his breath on my neck and his body curved toward mine with the unconscious geometry of a person who had, during the night, arranged himself around another person without waking up, the way water arranges itself around a stone, not because it decided to, but because that’s what water does when something is in its path.
I lay very still and let my brain finish booting up.
Last night had happened. All of it.
The text in the parking lot.
The unlocked door.
The living room and Peter on the couch with his glasses on and General Tso behind his head and absolutely nothing else.
My brain supplied the image with a vividness that made my pulse do something that Peter, if he’d been awake and monitoring, would have classified as clinically significant.
And then everything after the couch.
The bedroom.
The darkness.
The feel of him everywhere . . . and I do mean everywhere.
My brain, now operating at a solid eighty percent, offered a comprehensive highlight reel that I had not requested and could not stop.
I lay in Peter’s bed with his arm on my chest and a mouthful of residual pillow lint and felt my entire body flush in a way that was visible, probably, from outer space.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to the ceiling.
General Tso, who was curled in a perfect orange circle at the foot of the bed—the bed, not the refrigerator—opened one eye, assessed my whispered crisis, and closed it again with the weary patience of a cat who had witnessed the full trajectory of human foolishness the previous evening and was not interested in a morning sequel.
“Don’t judge me,” I hissed. “You were there. You saw the couch situation. You’re complicit, you furry minx.”
General Tso’s tail twitched once. Whether this indicated agreement, dismissal, or a dream about birds, I would never know.
Hiro was on his bed in the corner, watching me with steady, knowing eyes, his tail doing one slow wag.
Hiro had seen everything. Hiro had been in this room the entire time despite Peter’s best effort at closing the door, which meant Hiro had witnessed his owner in a state of vulnerability that I was fairly certain no living creature had witnessed in two years.
Remarkably, Hiro was handling this information with the calm discretion of a therapy dog who understood that some things were private even when you were present for them.
“Good boy,” I mouthed at him.
Wag. Singular. Because he only ever gave one.
I turned my attention back to the arm on my chest and found Peter’s hand.
I knew this hand. I’d watched it perform a hundred precise tasks, such as writing Post-it notes or adjusting his glasses.
I’d watched this hand cradle kittens and wrap Hiro’s leg and hold a giraffe’s face against his chest in a zoo.
Now that same hand was on my chest. It was open and relaxed. The surgeon’s fingers rested against my sternum with the unclenched trust of a man who had, for the first time in two years, fallen asleep holding someone and not let go.
I could feel my heartbeat against his palm.
I thought, This is what it feels like to be in love with someone who folds his boxers before lying naked on a couch, because I’d watched him do that last night.
I’d walked in and seen his clothes on the chair in a neat folded stack, his shoes aligned on the floor beside it, every garment removed with the same meticulous attention.
The folding had almost killed me, though the folding was the most Peter thing I’d ever witnessed.
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
Not because this was funny, but because it was so much more than funny, so much more than any single emotion could contain. The laugh was the pressure valve, the thing my body did when feelings exceeded my brain’s ability to process whatever was happening.
Peter’s arm was on my chest, his breath was on my neck, and I was in his bed.
I was in love with a man who folded his underwear before a nude ambush.
That same man had said my name in the dark with both syllables carrying everything.
He’d laughed afterward, the real laugh, the surprised one, and said, “I forgot what this felt like,” with the quiet honesty of a man who didn’t use words bigger than the truth they carried.
I didn’t move.
I lay there and breathed and let the morning hold me the way Peter’s arm was holding me, with a weight that was not heavy but present, the kind of weight that tells you where you are.
He stirred.
His arm shifted.
His fingers flexed once before settling.
I felt his breathing change from the deep, unmonitored rhythm of sleep to something shallower.
He was surfacing, coming back through the layers. I tracked his arrival by the tension returning to his shoulders, his breathing becoming deliberate, and the tiny adjustment that meant he was orienting himself.
Peter’s hand pressed down against my chest, just slightly, the reflex of a man confirming that what his body was reporting was real.
“Hi,” I said.
His hand relaxed, his breathing settled, and I felt his forehead come to rest against the back of my neck. It was the gesture of a person who had decided the distance between his face and my skin was unnecessary, and I loved him even more for it.
“Morning,” he said, rough with sleep and lower than usual.
“How’d you sleep?”
“I don’t remember falling asleep.”
“You fell asleep at approximately 12:40 a.m. I know because I was watching. You were mid-sentence about the elephant bloodwork you promised William, and your eyes closed. One second, you were prattling on about potassium levels. The next, you were unconscious.”
“I fell asleep talking about bloodwork?”