Chapter Text
She couldn’t catch her breath.
It’d felt so real, the dream just then. A mirage hazy and tinged with violet, colored with violence. Nic saw herself convulsing someplace.
A parking garage.
Nothing too descript, but she remembers the rafters on the ceiling. They looked thin. And dark, darker than night typically allowed.
Her head hurt, so she tiptoed out of bed for a glass of water. The nightmares had been approaching her for a few weeks now. Ever since the car accident, her brain seemed eager to spin disastrous tales. Like she was rehearsing for a worst-case scenario.
Conrad was asleep, and she didn’t want to wake him. She was lucky enough that she hadn’t caught his attention when she’d leapt out of the dream and into a haze of sweaty palms and bedsheets. Nic was a little jealous of him at that moment. From the expression on his face, he was probably having a much nicer dream.
She checked the clock; 2 AM. It’d be hours before the sun came to wash away the evening.
Nic walked around the house in mismatched socks and sipped her water. The glass was cool in her hand. With the other, she touched the picture frames on the walls. Though it was too dark to see, she could remember what they looked like. The wedding, mostly. And a few pictures scattered in between. Hospital galas, friends’ birthdays, a graduation ceremony.
Nic knelt over Georgia’s crib and felt the breath rise in her chest. She gripped the wood where she rested her arm. The baby was asleep 一 she’d gotten pretty good at that ever since she turned one 一 and Nic felt… she felt the quiet lingering in the bones of the house. There was quiet in the kitchen, soft like a fog. There was a different, greyer quiet in each of the bedrooms.
The nursery was decorated with a spinning mobile of the moon and stars. With her fingertip, Nic played with one of the stars. It jingled as it spun.
She would tell Conrad about the dream in the morning. She would tell her therapist next Tuesday. She finished the water, relishing the final drop in the glass. Nic thought about the gashes in the left side of the car where she’d run off the road. Like the pictures, she could envision everything. The car looked like it’d been punctured by something with claws. That tended to happen when a deer became fixated by headlights.
Nic’s hip felt sore, just a little. She set the glass down in the kitchen and found herself in bed again. Same sweaty bedsheets. Her palms were cooler, at least.
The next dream was three days after the last. Instead of crashing, she merely came close, and the seatbelt dug into the skin of her neck as the car shuddered to a halt.
When she woke up, Conrad was already pulling her into an embrace. She didn’t want to say that this wasn’t even the worst of it. So she left that out of the question, instead just… just finding him, finding his arms wrapped around her, finding his breath soft as he muttered words over her shoulder. He was close, so close, so immutably close.
“You-” she tried to smile and her mouth came out heaving a sob instead. “You.”
“Hey, you.”
She wept into his chest.
He counted sheep with her so she’d fall asleep again. Around one hundred and sixty-two, Nic also leaned and browsed around the dresser drawer for her sleeping pills. She’d gone back to taking melatonin, but the sheep were a cuter solution to the problem.
“How long should I do this, exactly?” Conrad asked, and Nic said nothing, which meant a while longer.
Nic’s legs pressed against his, and he counted for another fifteen minutes. She started laughing around two hundred nineteen.
“What’re you doing?” Conrad asked, and Nic just shrugged. She swung a moment in the rocker where she was holding Georgia in her arms.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he said, looking to both of them.
Another shrug.
“I wish I could be like her sometimes. Innocent.” She smiled. “I was young once, and now I can’t even sleep in the middle of the night.”
He walked over and kissed her forehead. “To be fair, babies are pretty bad at sleeping, too.”
“Ah, you’ve got me there.”
Nic turned the chair around to face the window then. She tried to name the stars for her daughter, but she couldn’t identify anything aside from the Big Dipper. She and Conrad did pretty well with fake names, though 一 Aquarius here and there, and Andromeda, and Picard and Spock when they couldn’t think of much else. They stayed until Nic’s arms grew too heavy, and they bid Georgia goodnight.
“Good morning is more like it,” Nic said. But she didn’t mind.
He buys her flowers, petals stained indigo with dye like a science project.
“What, I need an occasion?” Conrad asked when prompted. The petals fall over the kitchen table in the coming weeks; he loves me, he loves me, there is no loves me not, Nic thinks. At 3 AM when the baby’s howling loud enough to wake the chickens, light barely catches anything in the kitchen. The moon is kind enough to light up the flowers grey. Nic tucks a daisy petal into her palm, relishing the airy scent.
She presses the blooms into an old photo album to keep them around.
Conrad buys her flowers next month, too. Anything to make her smile down at the kitchen table.
Nic kisses him awake, and he feels her warmth blossom over his skin like a star being born.
“Hi,” she whispers. The windows brim with sun. With worn thumbs, she squeezes his shoulder through his black t-shirt. “Once in a blue moon, huh?” Another glance to the bedroom door. They’ve managed to get days off from the hospital, plus they’ve achieved the feat of keeping a sleeping baby at peace.
“This happens even less than that,” he scoffs. Then he’s underneath her, his forearms gentle against her waist and legs brushing over shins.
“Guess we oughta take advantage of it.”
He likes her laugh anytime, but it’s especially nice in the mornings.
There are melatonin supplements scattered over the dark brown wood of Nic’s dresser. She takes a pill, then another with a sip of water.
“I wanna see if I can start lowering my dosage,” she tells Conrad. He’s told her about that before. It’s a continuous wave, figuring out how much she wants to take.
“I hope you can.”
He nestles into the sheets before giving the baby monitor another gentle glance; Gigi went to bed ages ago yet he still likes verifying. Why not?
The glow of the moon coasts across Nic’s dresser, glinting over oily capsules and the chipped plastic of her pill container.
Nestled in a sea of threads, she drifts off. It might be the melatonin, but she likes thinking Conrad has a hand in it as well. He strokes her hair even after she’s dozed off.
“I really like being married to you,” Nic tells him the following morning over applesauce (Georgie’s) and oatmeal (hers and Conrad’s.) He’s got this grin on his face ー Gigi figured out how to pronounce her ‘p’s! ー and the compliment catches him off-guard, catches his sensibility and wrings it out until it’s reduced to halos and dizzy stars.
“Funny, me too,” Conrad says.
In the moment Gigi decides that, nope, she’s not getting enough love right now, and mashes applesauce into her thin blonde hair as a way of garnering attention.
It works. Nic kisses her husband on the cheek, then on the other one, before picking up Gigi and heading back to the bathroom. This isn’t the first time, and it certainly won’t the last.
It won’t be the last kitchen ‘I love you’ either, thankfully, and that notion pours into her thoughts like light into an empty room.
Conrad’s got a shift at the hospital, so he leaves Nic a note on the fridge.
you should know - I’m the lucky one in this marriage.
And, again, light pours everywhere once Nic reads the message.