The Boy and the Beast

4| oblivion

I feel slender fingertips softly stroke through my hair, tracing soft, plait patterns over my scalp. My cheek is pressed up into my eye socket, my head resting atop of a fleshy, hard surface with no solid shape. I blink the sleep out of my crusty eyes a few attempts before the thought hits me like a bullet.

I did not have a nightmare.

My eyes focus, legs stretched out in front of me. My arms are firmly wrapped around the knees of this person beneath the red fleece blanket—a bad sign.

A really, really bad sign.

I shoot up, wiping the drool cascading off my cheek like a surplus amount of water tricking down a rocky mountain. My entire body aches of oversleeping, my throat is burning and my ears are plugged. I fell asleep on someone and I'm not supposed to have fallen asleep on someone. I was supposed to either stay awake or keep my distance from the surrounding aliens, but instead my body didn't have a discrepancy and decided to switch off right when I didn't want it to.

Damn you, sleep deprivation.

"Ah, shit," I breathe-whisper to myself, sitting up. "I'm sorry I fell asleep on you," I bury my head in my hands, my heart throttling. My head shoots with a dull ache, sauntering down the back of my skull. "I was just really, really tired."

Dominic's chuckle is good enough as an accepted apology. A flush blanket wrings around my body, rubbing against my bare arms. I don't completely understand why I fell asleep on someone I know, little known why I didn't have a nightmare. Maybe PTSD is finally leaving my body and blessing me with a normality. It's giving me false hope.

"You drooled on him too," Smurf-hair girl snorts, amused. The girl is stretched out of the sofa against the wall, parallel to the mattress. Her bright hair is under surveillance of a raven beanie, patted down, but still revealing her azure fringe. It doesn't help calming down her hair at any matter.

"Oh my god," I slam my palm into my forehead, examining the amused smirk curled on Dominic's face. His hair is still in his face—just a bedhead mess and less straightened—but he still hides behind the locks. "I'm sorry."

If my face resembled any fruit as of now, I would be a red apple, splotched with patches of scarlet and olive—not a pretty sight. Not that my morning appearance displayed any difference on a daily basis. It was always same: hell, water, death by dumbbells.

"Now I can say I slept with a football player," Dom jokes, pushing my shoulder playfully.

"I swear this doesn't usually happen," I heave an unimpressed grunt. I've never been quite this embarrassed—I just fell asleep on someone I met this week. "Sleep dislikes me immensely; usually I don't even sleep," I fall backwards, slapping my hands over my face. "Oh my god."

"I thought football players don't get embarrassed," Demi snorts. "You're usually all macho and no emotions."

"Shut up," I growl into my hands. My words are muffled by my fingers, my breaths condensing on my fingers.

"It's okay," Dominic laughs, shrugging. "You were really out of it yesterday." A frown clouds down on his demeanor. "You literally just blacked out in the horror, we thought you passed out of the blood and guts on the screen," he shrugs, "so we left you and thought you would wake up." I swallow hard. I don't even remember falling asleep, albeit the memory of the movie is lodged somewhere in my brain unable to be erased and holding Dom's hand...

"When you didn't wake up, Demi wanted to call your parents, because you started twitching and you were asleep on my shoulder."

His hazel gaze reaches out to find me, a question mark reflecting his pupils. "You woke up after we started watching Get Hard, but you didn't respond to anything. You literally just stared at me with a cold fuck you expression for five minutes and mumbled something about a Jacqueline before repositioning yourself on my lap."