That familiar sensation coils around my bones, tighter and tighter, until the thorns sink deeper—not just into muscle, but into organs, puncturing places I never learned how to protect.
I know what comes next. I can taste it already. Despair gathers on my tongue like a film of acidic ash, the bitter residue of what’s about to swallow me whole. Soon, there will be nothing left but hollowness, the familiar echoing void I’ve been running from all my life.
It’s not the flames that terrify me. Fire is loud, violent, visible—it gives warning before it devours.
It’s the cold that follows afterward, the cold that settles into every crack inside me once the burning stops. The cold that seeps beneath the surface and stamps itself into my soul, refusing to release me.
Refusing to thaw.
A soft dragof fingers glides across my face, pulling me up from the depths and coaxing my eyes open. The blur dissolvesslowly, sharpening into the contours of a face that carries with it a spiraling sense of ease.
A trembling exhale ghosts across my cheek as her arms slide around me, gathering me in, fitting her body to mine so seamlessly it feels as though the world reshapes itself around the outline of us. There’s no separation, no fracture—just one complete thing held together by touch.
Our hearts beat against each other, each thrum echoing back, merging into a single rhythm that sounds like longing, like sorrow, like something wordless but painfully familiar.
Reality filters in by degrees. My gaze sweeps across the room, washed in silver moonlight. Slowly, the memories of our night rise again, pushing back the nightmare’s remnants, clearing the residue of terror that clings to my nerves.
I swallow, and it feels like forcing down a throatful of rust and nails. The edges of the dream slice through me on their way down, carving lines of ache beneath my ribs. I’m still bleeding somewhere inside, but it feels faint now, almost like background static.
Whispers linger at the edges of my mind, dark laughter curling through the shadows behind my eyes—like a sudden storm blooming out of nowhere on an otherwise bright day.
I inhale, steadying myself against the tightening paralysis still gripping my muscles, and push my arm around Estella, pulling her closer until her body molds fully into mine.
Her heat sinks into me like the first touch of sunlight after a long, punishing winter. She thaws something deep, something buried in frost and fear, and for a moment, we both fall into stillness.
It takes a few long minutes before my mind unknots enough to comprehend what just happened. For the first time in years, I had a nightmare—not a fleeting bad dream, not the kind that evaporates the second consciousness kicks in.
This one rooted itself in my bones. It felt lived-in. Real. Too real. Like I’d sleepwalked straight into a pit of old horrors. My limbs had been dead weight, useless, while something shoved at my back like a violent gust of wind.
And underlying it all was that same thread of familiarity I keep failing to name. It’s as if every conversation with Estella has chipped away at the sealed-off corners in my mind, cracking open a hidden chamber I didn’t know existed. As if we pried open a Pandora’s box and brushed our fingers over a version of me I was never meant to meet.
Now I have to teach myself how to breathe again. My lungs drag in air like they’ve forgotten the mechanics, my chest still locked tight, as if the nightmare hasn’t fully released its hold. I look down and find nothing wrapped around me—no wire, no constricting thorns, no phantom claws slicing into my skin. Just reality.
Justher.
Estella’s head rests on my chest, her arms looped around me with quiet certainty. My sweat clings to her skin in a slick sheen, but she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away. She holds me as if the mess of me doesn’t matter. As if she doesn’t even notice.
I lift a hand to her shoulder, fingers gliding over the texture of her scars. I follow each line with a softness I didn’t know I could offer. She doesn’t ask anything of me. No questions, no explanations demanded.
She just… listens. Listens with her body pressed against mine, with her breathing syncing to my uneven rhythm, with the way she lets our hearts find each other’s beat.
My fingers continue their slow exploration of her scars, drawn to them by something deeper than curiosity. The moonlight pours across her body in a turquoise glow, conjuring memories with a force strong enough to push the nightmare back into the shadows where it came from.
Good, warm memories drift back—Estella barefoot in the kitchen, making fries; my stupid question and the way her lips felt when she said yes without needing words; her being in my arms, weightless, as I carried her to the window to kiss her under the moon.
And now here she is again, dragging me from the edge of the abyss, holding me together with nothing but her warmth and the quiet, unspoken promise of her presence.
I look down at her, and a thought slips in. A thought I’ve never let myself consider before.
I don’t want this to end.
This moment. This quiet. This impossible peace.
I want to exist here with her, as if time could be tricked into stopping. And I know that neither of us would ever grow tired of it.
Because this kind of calm, this gentle stillness, is something neither of us has ever been allowed to have.
Not once. Not until now.
