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It’s 3:00 AM and she can’t sleep.
No matter how many sheep she counts, no matter how many deep, relaxing breaths she takes, no matter how many muscles she tenses and relaxes, sleep eludes her, like it always does the first time she’s in a new bed.
Ray is sleeping soundly next to her, every so often a snore puncturing the sounds of summer on the water that drift in through the open windows. She listens to his soft, steady breathing and tries to match her own breaths to it.
No dice. Still awake.
Rolling her eyes in annoyance, Heather sits up slowly and swings her feet to the floor. She reaches for her backpack next to the bed and rifles through it quietly for the notebook and pen she carries everywhere. Ray keeps all the windows in his bedroom uncovered at night and moonlight streams in. Most of the room is cast in long, creeping shadows but Heather finds a place beneath a window and sits on the floor. Crossing her legs, she flips open the notebook to the next clean page.
Once upon a time,
The story starts like so many of hers do, but she pauses after the phrase. Her pen shakes above the paper and she bites her lip. The words are there and ready to be written, but she doesn’t know if she can write them. If she should.
Breathing deeply, she does.
there was a boy made of contradictions.
Heather glances back to the bed. Ray is still sleeping, his back to the wall. Moonlight washes over him and he looks peaceful in a way Heather thinks probably only happens when he’s asleep. One arm folded under his head, the other thrown over top of it. The blanket is over his legs but his naked chest is uncovered and she watches it rise and fall as he breathes.
He had a hopeful heart, a dreamer’s heart, but he wore armor made of quick wit and met expectations and rebellious conformity, closing himself off from everyone around him until all that was left was the person they wanted to see. The armor had come to him when he was a little boy and the world was a big place. He didn’t know what the armor was the very first time he put it on, only that it made him feel less small and scared.
An owl’s call splits the night and Heather glances reflexively at Ray. He’s shifted since she looked last, now laying on his back, one arm at his side and the other across his stomach. His head turns at the sound of the owl, but he stays asleep.
So he put the armor on every day. It was too big for him at first, too heavy, but he learned to carry it, because he knew it was the only way to protect himself from the world. In the armor, his dreamer’s heart was safe. And soon, he grew into it.
A sound from inside the room catches her attention this time and her eyes dart up to the bed. The noise was something between a snore and a groan and when Heather’s gaze lands on Ray he looks less peaceful than he had minutes before. His hands are gripping at the bed, fingers tangled in the sheets, and Heather can see that his jaw is clenched even from a few feet away. But still, he stays asleep, and after she watches him for a few moments she lets her eyes fall back to the paper.
Sooner, though, he started to grow out of it. The boy noticed the armor getting tighter against his skin each morning when he put it on, and it was harder to pull it from his body at the end of every day. The act of removing his armor became painful, as if he the dreams in his heart were going out one by one each night. One night, he found the armor wouldn’t move at all. His armor stopped being protection and turned into a prison.
Ray moves in bed, more heavily this time. He’s restless, his legs twitching under the blanket and his hands clenching and unclenching around the sheets. Even his breathing has changed, no longer deep and steady but shallow and erratic.
Before long, he couldn’t tell where the armor ended and he began. It was a part of him, even though the dreamer’s heart he had needed the armor for in the first place had been put out long ago. Instead, the armor served as a reminder of all he could have been if he had never put it on.
“No,” Ray moans quietly in his sleep, the sound choked out at the end.
Heather’s head whips up and her eyes fall on the bed. Ray is thrashing, trying to kick the blanket off but tangling his legs up in the process. He covers his face with his hands and moans again.
“Ray?” Heather whispers, setting her notebook on the floor and getting to her knees. When he doesn’t respond she tries again, calling his name softly. “Ray?”
He’s still for a minute, but his face is a mask of terror that makes Heather’s own heart pound. Her pulse somehow races faster the next second, when Ray twitches and he moans, “Let me out!”
“Hey, Ray,” Heather murmurs, hating the way her voice shakes at a fear that isn’t even hers. She crosses the room in three quick movements, kneeling next to the bed and sitting back on her feet before reaching out to touch him gently. He’s hot under her fingertips and he’s broken out in a sweat that makes his skin sticky. “It’s just a dream.”
He calms slightly at her touch, turning a little bit towards her in the bed. It only lasts a few seconds before he twitches again. His head whips back and forth and his arms beat the air above him. Heather has to dodge his hands as he speaks again, louder than before. “Let me out!”
“Ray!” Heather half-yells, raising her voice to meet Ray’s. She reaches for his hand with one of hers and towards his head with the other, brushing hair out of his eyes and cupping his cheek. “Ray, it’s just a dream. Wake up!”
Heather squeezes his hand but he doesn’t wake up. Instead, he calls out again, fear dripping from the single word.
“Please.”
She pulls herself up onto the bed and perches on the edge. Ray’s hands are swinging again, like he’s clawing at an invisible barrier, and she reaches for his shoulders.
“Ray,” Heather says, her voice almost begging now. She shakes him, gently at first, remembering the times she’d tried to wake Lily up from nightmares and the way her sister would lash out and hit her. Ray would hit her harder, for sure, but she trusts him not to as she begins to shake him harder. “Ray, please wake up. It’s just a dream.”
When Ray finally wakes up, after what feels like an hour of shaking, it’s violent. He comes to with a gasp and he wraps his hands tight around Heather’s wrists. At the same time he tries to shrink away from her, drawing back against the wall in fear and pulling her forward on the mattress. She can see that his eyes are wild with fear, even in the uneven light, and they dart around the room before settling on Heather.
“Hey,” Heather murmurs quietly. “It’s me. It was just a dream.”
She feels his grip on her wrists loosen, but he doesn’t let go until she takes her hands off his shoulders. One settles on his chest and she reaches up to brush his cheek with the other.
“Fuck, Heather, I’m sorry,” Ray mutters, his voice thick with a mixture of dread, sleep, and embarrassment. “Was it…was it bad?”
Once upon a time, there was a boy made of contradictions.
“It’s okay. I wasn’t asleep,” she says with a shrug. “You, uh, just moaned a bit. And yelled, ‘Let me out.’”
Ray’s eyes meet hers in the moonlight and she sees hesitation in his stare. They’re both silent for a few moments, letting the musical sounds of the night wash over them. Heather watches a battle rage in his eyes, going to war with himself over the explanation he would offer. He sighs heavily and runs his hands down his cheeks, then looks back at her. He sits up slowly, turning his back towards the wall along the side of his bed and leaning against it. He pats the space next to him and Heather crawls across the bed. She settles down next to him and feels him shivering. When she reaches her hand into his lap to lace their fingers together she half expects him to pull away, but instead, she feels him relax a little bit more.
“I used to have dreams like that all the time,” Ray confesses quietly. “Started when I was maybe four, five. I swear, I just about drove Luke crazy with them.”
He laughs but the sound is humorless. Heather can sense he has more to say so she stays quiet and waits for him to speak. She rests her cheek on his shoulder and feels him press a kiss to the top of her head before he starts again.
“Remember when I told you about my grandpa and whiskey?” Ray moves as he talks, leaning back to look at her. When she nods, he continues. “He got mad on whiskey. Sometimes for shit we did, usually for shit we didn’t do. Always for something that needed punishment, though.”
Ray lets his eyes fall from Heather’s, then he turns to gaze out the window. “Sometimes, he’d just hit us. With whatever he could get his hands on, and if there wasn’t anything around, then just his hands. Those were…those were the better nights.”
Silence settles over them again and Heather turns to look at Ray. She can’t read his expression in the moonlight, but she can watch the muscles in his jaw working furiously as he clenches his teeth.
“The bad nights, though,” he continues. “When he’d say he didn’t wanna see my face until morning, threaten that he probably wouldn’t even wanna see it then and that maybe he’d just leave me locked up forever, like father, like son anyway. Those were the nights he’d lock me in the basement, a closet, whatever was closer. At first I would, uh, I’d pound on the door, and I’d scream and cry, and I’d beg someone to let me out. Sometimes Luke would try, then I’d listen to grandpa beat the shit out of him for it.”
Heather wants to speak, but isn’t sure what to say. Hey, thanks for sharing your most traumatizing memories with me? What do you say to someone who was opening their heart and pouring its contents out in your lap, even when you wanted them to do it? She leans further into him, pressing her arm against his in what she hopes is a comforting way. When he leans back into her a second later, she realizes he’s shivering again.
“I learned quick that the noise only pissed him off more, though,” Ray says, his voice quiet. “If I cried too long or screamed too much, well, that just meant he was more likely to keep me locked in there. Especially the closets. ’Cause I couldn’t see light the next morning, so he could keep me in there as long as he wanted. I never knew the difference. Just…just the fear.”
Instead of saying anything, Heather just squeezes his hand.
“The night after he locked me in the basement for the very first time, I couldn’t sleep. I’d shut my eyes and feel like the room was collapsing around me. When I finally did go to sleep, I screamed myself awake just in time to see him slamming the bedroom door open and grabbing for me.”
Ray takes a few deep, shaky breaths before he goes on.
“Thus began my second night in the basement, and a lifelong fear of small places. The dreams mostly went away after a while, once I was old enough that he couldn’t lock me up anymore. Until they put me in that fucking morgue. Now I don’t dream about anything except locked doors and walls closing in on me.”
Heather remembers Ray’s individual challenge and thinks of the terror he must have felt being locked in a cage full of dead bodies. Red-hot anger at the game burns through her body.
“It’s like I can’t close my eyes without going back there.”
This time it’s Heather who breaks the silence, her voice soft but clear. “I know, Ray,” she confesses. There’s a lump in her throat that makes it hard to speak. “I know it’s not the same but…I can’t close mine without seeing a tiger growling at me, at Lily. I dream it’s chasing us and when I look back it’s leaping at Lily and I try to jump in front of her, but…that’s when I wake up. Always. I never know if I save her. But I’m…I’m so terrified of what’ll happen if I don’t wake up in time.”
“Jesus Christ, we’re a fucked-up pair, aren’t we?” Ray asks. He laughs again, with feeling this time, and presses another kiss to the top of her head.
“I thought you knew that,” Heather says, turning to smile at Ray. “Isn’t that why we make sense?”
“I guess that is part of it, yeah,” he agrees. Heather can hear the smile in his voice. He waits a few moments before he speaks again. “So, what were you doing at…3:47 in the morning, if not sleeping?”
Heather’s eyes dart towards the notebook, long abandoned on the floor across the room. “I can’t usually sleep in a new place. So I was writing.”
“Well,” Ray says, stifling a yawn, “I think that just means you should sleep here more. Until you get used to it, you know?”
Ray shifts as he talks, turning to lay down again and pulling Heather down with him. He pulls the blanket back up from the end of the bed, letting it bunch around their waists, then runs his hand up and down her arm. She faces him and looks up to meet his eyes. He lifts his head to press a kiss to her lips, and in it she feels all the unspoken words they’d both choked back all night. Some of them dance on the tip of her tongue and she decides to give them life.
“Yeah, I can do that,” she whispers into the silence as she pulls away to meet his stare. “And thanks. For telling me, I mean.”
Heather can see another piece of his armor fall away in his eyes at her words and she wonders if his honesty has ever been met by anything but violence from anyone else. He drops his gaze away from Heather’s eyes and stills his hand on her arm before he speaks.
“Thanks for listening. Nobody’s really done that before,” Ray murmurs.
Heather’s throat tightens at the pain in his voice. The terror and honesty he’s shown her all night is overwhelming and she knows he’s given her a glimpse into a part of himself he rarely shows anyone.
“Well, get used to it,” Heather whispers, because she can’t trust her voice not to crack if she speaks any louder.
“Yeah, I think I can do that,” Ray echoes the promise she’d given a minute earlier with a smile. He moves his hand from her arm to her hip and pulls her into him. She nestles happily into his arms, pressing a kiss to his chest and wrapping her arm around his waist. It’s warm, but she feels safe and knows somehow that he does too, as if being wrapped around Heather could replace the armor he’d willingly stripped away in front of her.
Ray falls back to sleep a few minutes later, and as she listens to his steady breathing, she feels herself drifting off, too. Before she does, she thinks back to the story she’d started.
Once upon a time, there was a boy made of contradictions. Armor of quick wit and rebellious conformity and met expectations hid a dreamer’s hopeful heart, armor that he grew into and that became a part of his very skin. Armor that shut the world out, because he felt safe that way.
Until he felt safe enough to take it off.