I picked up the T-shirts and went to the closet to hang them. “I know it’s lame,” I began, shutting the door and looking at Jun, “but would you mind if I took a quick nap? I’m supposed to take it at one, but better late than never.”
“It’s not lame,” he answered. “Go right ahead. How long do you need? An hour?”
“Oh no, twenty minutes,” I said. I flopped on the bed and rolled to my side. “Any longer makes me groggy.” I fished my cell out of my pocket and set the alarm before putting it on the nightstand. I looked back at Jun and patted the bed in invitation. Exhaustion was already weighing me down. It took me under a minute to fall into a deep sleep—but at least I’d felt Jun slide his arm around my waist before I was off to never-never land.
NARCOLEPTICS DREAMa lot. That’s not surprising, since even though I crashed for twenty minutes and REM sleep doesn’t start for ninety in a normal person, I fall into it almost immediately. What a lot of people didn’t know was the surprising number of nightmares we tended to have.
I remembered a lot of my dreams, and this one hadn’t started out scary at all. I was walking down Duval Street with Cher—I think because Jun had mentioned her being on the radio and that nugget lodged itself into my brain. We were looking for a rake, but when we couldn’t find one anywhere, that’s when the panic started seeping in and turning the dream into a nightmare. We needed a rake to stop the skeleton in the closet.
And I know—what the fuck kind of logic was this? Cher + rake = certain victory. But a dream was a dream, and in that moment, I knew if we didn’t find a rake, we were so up the creek without a paddle.
Cher and I never saw the skeleton, though. I’d managed to wake myself up before my nightmare had the chance to scare the piss out of me, but coming back to the real world was sluggish and…disjointed. I opened my eyes, but the rest of me was, to put it simply, still asleep. Sleep paralysis. Typically when people fell asleep, our bodies paralyzed themselves so we didn’t act out dreams and hurt ourselves. But sometimes when I woke, my body hadn’t always received the message.
It’s difficult to explain. Sometimes, in the moment, I knew what it was, but sometimes I didn’t. And every time, no matter what, it was goddamn terrifying. My mind was going a million miles a minute and couldn’t understand why the rest of me wasn’t responding. I typically had hallucinations too. Nuts, right? Once, I hallucinated an alarm clock was creeping across the room to kill me. But that was tame compared to what I woke to this time.
Skelly was staring at me from the side of the bed. Only the top half of him, slumped forward like how he’d been in the wall. He lurched suddenly and grabbed the edge of the bed to pull himself up.
I tried to shout. I tried to kick and thrash.
Tried and triedand, Jesus Christ, he was coming! Rightthere, touching my leg and—
I bolted upright in bed suddenly, gasping for air, the dying end of a scream coming out of me.
“Aubrey?” Jun was there beside me. He petted the back of my head with sure, gentle strokes. “Are you all right?”
My chest heaved as I caught my breath. “N-no, what? I—bad dream.” I turned and stared at Jun. “Sleep paralysis,” I corrected as the fog in my mind began to clear. “It’s scary.”
Jun frowned. He moved his hand around to cup my cheek. “Can I get you anything?”
“Just you,” I said. It came out like a reflex. I didn’t even realize I’d said it until it was too late.
But he smiled. Big. The twinkle in his dark eyes returned. Jun leaned forward, closing the space between us. His mouth was only an inch or two away from mine.
Do it. Kiss him.
Wewereofficially dating, after all.
I tilted my mouth to meet his.
And then my alarm cockblocked me—Nicki Minaj telling haters what they could blow.
I WASa romantic at heart.
I didn’t wantakiss; I wantedthekiss. So I didn’t push when the moment between us had been lost. Another would present itself, and it’d be the best goddamn kiss I’ve had in my entire adult life.
Neither of us had been particularly hungry for a full meal around dinner, so I made a plate of bruschetta with tomato and basil, and we parked ourselves in front of the television. Jun had a glass of wine. I stuck with water.
I was shaky with watching movies. I never lasted through the entire thing, ending up micronapping through the important bits and waking for the boring ones, so I stuck to short television episodes. Under thirty minutes was about all I could take with passive activity. Except this time I wasn’t home alone and bored with the same three shows I never strayed from. Jun was right beside me, and it was pretty fantastic.
I really liked him. He made my stomach do summersaults.
So instead of getting up after two episodes and three nap attacks to do something else, I stayed right there beside him. Jun wrapped his arm around my shoulders and let me lounge in and out of consciousness against his chest. Everything about him was good. Hell, Jun evensmelledright, if that made a lick of sense.
I opened my eyes when the room went quiet. Jun was flipping through Netflix. “Oh, that,” I said suddenly, making him pause.
“Since when do you like horror movies?”
“You’ll protect me.”
