I suffered from my own nightmares. It had never occurred to me that Sean must have his monsters to face, too.
On the surface he seemed so calm, so solid and, despite what I might have thrown at him in anger, so in control. I’d never considered his doubt or pain. Yet here he was, crying out in his sleep and needing comfort of his own. Did I really have anything to offer him that hadn’t been irreparably damaged in transit?
Hesitant, I stood, pushed back the sheets and slid into bed alongside him, reaching out to him. His body was heated, febrile, so that where our skin touched I almost expected it to sizzle. For a second he resisted, tried to push me away. If he’d continued I think I would have let him, but he didn’t.
He seemed to rise a layer out of the hell where he’d been burning. Not enough to wake, but enough to recognise me. Or somebody like me.
He let me slink under his arm, sneak my head onto his shoulder and wrap my limbs across his shuddering body, anchoring him in this reality. His roughened chin skimmed the top of my head. I could feel his breath in my hair, slowing.
I lay awake and listened as his body began to drift, as his pulse climbed down. And I decided, fiercely, that I would give as much as I was able to. As much as Sean would take. Two broken halves could not necessarily be put back together to form a whole, but I had to try.
For both our sakes.
Twenty
When I opened my eyes the following morning, it was to find Sean lying on his side facing me, arm bent, head propped on his hand.
“Hi,” he said quietly, giving me one of those slow-release smiles.
“Hi yourself,” I said, feeling my breath hitch, my heart stutter. I stretched, hiding a yawn together with my self-consciousness behind my hand. “What is it with you and watching me sleep?”
He laughed, little more than a bubble of amusement, and reached to smooth a tangle of hair out of my eyes, using that distraction to neatly dodge the question. “You’re very peaceful when you sleep.”
“Not always,” I said. I paused. “And neither are you.”
The smile faded and Sean rolled away onto his back. The light filtering through the thin curtains touched on the healed scar at his shoulder and just for a moment I wished all his injuries had been merely physical. Instead, the one that had hurt him the most was the savage blow to his psyche and, as I well knew, treating those wounds could be a much more hit-and-miss affair.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what had brought you all the way over here from your own bed.”
“You don’t remember?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Nothing specific,” he said. “I never do unless something wakes me in the thick of it, so to speak.”
I passed over the admission of frequency. For the moment. “And then?”
He shrugged and it was my turn to rise up and lean over him. “Talk to me, Sean.”
A long sigh, a slow letting of breath. “Yes, I have nightmares,” he said at last, closing his eyes briefly. “Gut-wrenching vicious bloody nightmares.”
“The same one, or different?”
“Variations on a theme usually,” he said, using that flat emotionless voice I’d heard from him so many times before. “I’m either watching people die and doing nothing, or I’m killing them myself.”
“Who?”
He opened his eyes and flicked them sideways to meet mine. I saw him calculate whether to tell me the truth or just a version of it. Finally, he said frankly, “People I know. People I . . . feel strongly about. People I was in the army with, my friends, my family. The number of times I’ve slit my father’s throat in my sleep, the old bastard. Trouble is, I slit my mother’s alongside him without distinction. And then . . . there’s you.”
I laid a hand on his chest and told myself it was purely for balance. Under my palm his skin was taut and hot, a slightly elevated heartrate the only trace of his distress.
I stayed quiet, let him find his own way. “It’s like something’s trying to tell me that I’m only going to end up hurting you, Charlie,” he said then. “And not just you, but anyone I care for. It . . . worries me, sometimes.”
That was a dramatic understatement, I knew, but getting this kind of confession out of him at all was an achievement so I let it pass.
“Dreams are just a way of coping with the dross that’s going round in our heads,” I said at last. “I have them, too, y’know? I get to relive what happened to me in glorious Technicolor – the four of them, the dark, the cold. And it’s so powerful I can’t shake the reality of it. I can wake up freezing in the middle of a heatwave. And sometimes, yes, there are weird twists.” I hesitated, but he was being brutally honest, so why shouldn’t I? “Sometimes the only face I can see is yours.”
He winced. “Christ,” he murmured. “I’m not surprised you knocked me flat on my back the other night. I guess I was lucky you didn’t kill me.” He brushed a fingertip across the mark on his cheekbone and allowed his lips to twitch in bitter self-contempt. “God knows, I showed you enough ways to go about it.”
“Yes, but it does not have to be this way,” I said, angry with the effort of trying to keep the anguish out of my voice. “We can do something about it if we want to.” His eyes were on mine again, black like sorrow, and I couldn’t read a glimmer of his thoughts beyond them. “All we have to do is want to enough.”
“Oh, trust me, I want to,” he said with quiet feeling. I caught the gleam in his eye only a fraction before he reared up and tumbled me back onto the pillows. He swooped for the hollow of my neck like a vampire, muttering almost to himself, “Of that you can be quite certain.”
My hands clutched convulsively at the bedclothes while he feasted at the jagged pulse that raged beneath the scar at my throat, robbing me of breath along with logical thought and any willpower I might have once possessed. Flames ignited like arson along every nerve-ending until they threatened to engulf me totally.
At last, when I thought I’d go crazy under him, he came up for air. Both of us were gasping. His mouth traced lazily across my shoulder and my hands came together of their own volition to meet at his spine, delicately sketching the ripple of muscle beneath the skin. I felt him quiver under my touch. So tough, so strong, so vulnerable.
He shifted suddenly, rolling onto his back again and this time taking me with him, hands firm at my waist. I ended up sprawled along the full length of him, leaving me in no doubt just how badly he wanted me. But there was reticence about him, too, a shadow of restraint.
He was holding back to let me make all the running, I realised, doing nothing that was going to trip any alarms. Not this time. I put a fist either side of his shoulders and arched my back so I could look down at his face.
“I never thought of you as the kind of guy who’d lie back and think of England,” I said, and my voice was husky.
Sean laughed softly. “Oh, it’s not England I’m thinking about,” he said. The laughter fell away in the face of his sudden intensity. “It’s you, Charlie. It’s always been you.”