I tensed. Old habits died slow, bloodied deaths, but before fear could take root, Luke’s voice, soft and a little sleep rough, filled the silence.
“Hey. Sorry to disturb you. I woke up crazy thirsty and needed some water. Couldn’t sleep?”
“Nightmare,” I mumbled.
“Do you want company?”
“I... I don’t want to keep you up.”
“I don’t mind,” he said through a vocal yawn. “Ignore that. I swear I’m awake and I’d be happy to stay down here if you wanted.”
Shame and the desire to not be alone waged a brutal fight inside me. I hated how I craved comfort now, how fiercely I wanted to lean into him. After a moment, though, driven more by a need greater than any shred of pride, I whispered a small, trembling “Yes.”
“Do you want me to sit on the floor or the couch?” he asked. Whenever my trauma hovered too close to the surface, Luke seemed especially conscious of letting me define the boundaries, offering his presence without presumption, his nearness without intrusion.
“Couch,” I said.
He settled himself on the cushion at the far end of the other side of the couch.
“Can you...” Uncertainty and shame cut the sentence off. While I did appreciate the power Luke granted me, I had a hard time asking for what I wanted. I feared he would reject me, or worse, get angry with me.
“What is it, Ollie?”
When he spoke like that, his voice became the auditory equivalent of a fleece blanket—soft, insulating, and full of comfort. The sound soothed my frayed nerves, and the fear clamped around my ribs loosened its grip.
“Would you sit closer, please?”
“Can do,” he said, moving to the middle cushion next to me without a hint of reluctance or sigh of annoyance.
It still didn’t match what I wanted. The mean voice in my head whispered that I asked for too much, but longing overpowered my hesitation. Inch by inch, I moved closer until my head rested in Luke’s lap. I waited for him to push me away, to scold me for being a stage five clinger.
He didn’t. Instead, he reached for the pillow. “Sit up for me a moment.”
Obeying, I lifted my head while he laid the pillow beneath it. “There. That’s got to be better than my tree-trunk legs. They might be built for squatting, but they sure as hell aren’t built for being squatted on.”
He teased, but I wanted to tell him he was wrong. To me, every piece of him embodied safety incarnate, the opposite of everything I’d ever been taught to fear. But I didn’t want to make things awkward and have him pull away. So I stayed silent.
He ran his fingers through my hair. I leaned into it, the comfort too enticing to resist.
“Do you think you can fall back asleep?” he asked.
“Not unless you stay,” I said. I might have been showing too much of my hand in that statement, but I couldn’t take it back now.
“That works out pretty damn perfectly, because I’ve got news for you, Ollie.” He shifted his weight with a dramatic grunt, settling deeper into the cushions. “I am officially parked. I have fused with the furniture. This couch and I have become one. If I stand up, I’m pretty sure I’m ripping off upholstery.”
How did Luke manage to treat me as whole even when I came across a weak, cowering mess? Over the last week he’d had every chance to handle me with pity, but didn’t. He let me be frail without making me feel fragile, let me struggle without making me feel less.
Despite his comforting presence, the alertness in my body and the tension in my muscles didn’t dissipate. The memoriessaturated every crevice of my brain, a never-ending carousel of Vincent’s greatest hits pummeling through me.
“When I was six, I wanted to be an astronaut, and not just any astronaut, no, my plan was to be the first guy to build a house on the moon,” Luke said, disrupting the mental cache of horror.
“I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Your collection of books about the moon, all the documentaries of the moon landing and space expeditions you own. You’ve always had an obsession with space, haven’t you?”
“Pretty much,” he laughed, the sound rumbling under my cheek where it rested on him. “I had it all planned out, like you do at that age when your dreams are large and nothing feels impossible. I even made blueprints in crayon. Super legit. A bright purple house with four slides on every side that shot you straight onto the moon. One even dropped into a crater.”
Mourning stirred within me. I yearned for a childhood that had granted me those kinds of memories, ones full of innocence and imagination, but I chased it away, choosing instead to live inside his memory with him.
“Carrie decided,” Luke went on, a smile in his voice. “That if I was serious about my moon mission, I needed proper astronaut training. She duct-taped pillows to the bottoms of my shoes and called them moon boots. To practice low gravity, I launched myself off our backyard trampoline. Every time I landed, she’d mark the spot with chalk, tracking my jumps. Very official stuff.”
