Heatwaves Dreamnotfound (NOT MINE)

Chapter 11: Negotiations

"This isn't a 'no,' Dream," George says, "it's a 'not yet.'"

Dream's heart courses steady blood through the canyons of his chest, his uneasy stomach, his wrought hands and bending knees. Seated on the carpet of his quiet room, he can see the dust that floats in the light above him, swirls on his beat-up desk, and settles beneath his bed frame.

Not yet. Dream has never heard two words that have warmed him with such bittersweet hope than not yet.

"What is that for you?" He asks George. "I don't want to get it wrong."

"Honestly," George says, "I'm not really sure."

Bitter, Dream thinks.

"I just know I don't want this to be over," George adds quietly.

—sweet. Of course he'd tumbled obsessively for such an enigma.

"And you're sure you don't want to...try?" Dream presses gingerly, a last ditch effort of carefully placed longing.

"I can't," George says, "not now."

Dream can hardly imagine what trying would amount to, with their mercurial friendship and his worrisome dependency. It nearly hurts more, knowing he could have George, and still not being able to. It hurts more than his confusion and loss from the previous weeks.

The strain that'd weigh on their friendship if they swarmed it with long distance affection and endless pining would knock Dream to the ninth circle of hell.

Forgotten fragments of his notes unearth themselves from the soil of his mind, and rise with muddled remembrance. He'd been sitting on the kitchen floor, blinking in and out of sleepless stupor. His thumbs clambered over the keys to George. The landline lay on the counter, mindlessly shoved off the hook in prayer of silence.

Sapnap keeps trying to help me, he'd typed, heavy-chested, but you know me, you know me, please help me know too.

His words blurred with cold tile and drowsy motions and cartoned milk. I want to know me. I don't think I know me.

Phone slipping from hand, last letters ringing out in clatter against the ground, falling into blackness and beaches.

How do you know me?

As it resurfaces now, days in the after, he gently adjusts his headphones cozying his ears while the silence of their call carries him to foreign footing.

"I'm going to spend forever rethinking what I'm about to say," Dream slowly treks, eyes searching the foam panels on his walls aimlessly, "but...I don't think I could try, either."

I'm only beginning, he thinks, to really know me.

"That is," George voices in gentle shock, "not what I expected at all." 

"Yeah, I...clearly have some stuff I need to deal with," Dream continues. 

He thinks of building white pyramids in the sand with his father, as a child.

His words fall to a murmur, "some things to unlearn."

The dark brows lifted by traveling thought on his face slowly draw together in contemplation. He's grown tired of the sound of his own voice, how easily it purges everything inside him to George. It is terrifying to fall open—to be read, to be seen, to be known.

"Me too," George says, "I feel like...like I don't have the right words to explain it, but seeing my grandparents gave me a lot to think about."

Dream shifts where he's seated on the un-vacuumed carpet as he considers how to approach the opening that has been set before them.