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The screaming would come.
Followed swiftly by the panic attack that always reduced him to a gasping, breathless, broken seven-year-old boy.
I remembered the first one just as vividly as the day it happened.
After all, I had been there to witness it firsthand.
The trauma.
The devastation.
The thought barely had time to register in my mind when the first cry ripped from his throat. It was a torn, shrill, agonizing sound that cultivated from a memory I couldn’t erase for him.
“No!” Thrashing helplessly, he bolted out of bed, knocking over my nightstand in his bid to break free from the demons in his dreams. “Please don’t…”
“Gerard!”
I had enough experience dealing with his night terrors to know that giving him space was the worst thing I could do. Therefore, I scrambled off my bed in my haste to get to him.
“Shh.” Even in sleep, he knew my touch enough to let me cradle him in my arms. “It’s me.” His entire body was soaked with sweat but that didn’t stop me. “I’m here.” I leaned in close, nuzzling his cheek with mine. “Shh, Gerard, it’s okay.”
“No, no, no…” Pained groans turned to weak mewling as even in sleep, he frantically sought out my touch. “I can’t make it stop.”
“It’s over,” I tried to coax, cupping his cheeks with my hands. “It’s just a nightmare now.”
His sharp intakes of breath took on a desperate note, quickly shifting into panicked gasps.
Like he couldn’t draw air into his lungs.
Like he was drowning.
With them.
“I’ve got you,” I continued to whisper, melding my body to his, knowing this was exactly what he needed to come back down from the edge. From the pain. “I’m right here with you.”
Slowly, his body relaxed to the feel of mine, taking me in, hearing my words, smelling my scent, breathing me in until he was mine and I was his. Until we were us again and he was safe.
“Claire?” His body stiffened then, and I knew he was awake. “Claire. Claire?”
“It’s me.” Releasing a shaky breath, I tightened my hold on him and buried my face in his neck. “I’m right here, Gerard. It’s okay…”
“Yeah, I know,” I whispered, blinking away the memories of last night when he wandered into my room in a frantic state of blind panic. “But they’re getting a lot worse.”
I felt him nod against me.
Lately, Gerard’s nightmares had frequented to the point of being almost a nightly event. It was as unsettling as it was heartbreaking. Because I knew he was battling his demons—or should I say his ghosts. The ones from his childhood that he refused to talk about.
“What happened in last night’s one?” I asked, feeling just as helpless this morning as I did every morning that I woke up with him in my bed.
Finding Gerard in my bed wasn’t a new thing for us. In fact, in the past decade there was only a handful of nights he hadn’t slept over.
“Same as always,” he replied in a vulnerable tone, sounding nothing like the comedic joker the rest of the world was privy to. “Listen, I’ll get you to wherever you need to be on time, I promise.” He shifted closer, tightening his big arm around my waist. “Just snuggle me for a bit first.”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth when my bedroom door swung inward with such force that it smacked off the plaster on my wall.
“Did I just hear that asshole ask you to snuggle?”
“What the hell, Hugh?” I shouted, wrestling free from the giant teenage boy in my bed to stop the giant teenage boy charging toward him from throwing down. “We have rules in this house, remember?” Scrambling off the bed, I rushed to intercept Hugh before either one could choose violence. Gerard and Hugh’s relationship was more like brothers than friends and rarely came to any serious blows, but there had been a couple of occasions down through the years that I didn’t want to see repeated. “Ever heard of knocking?”
