In Your Dreams // phan

t h i r t y f i v e

I shook Dan awake after entering my room, tears streaming down his sleeping face and his body rigid and shaking with sobs. He had a fistful of paper in his tight grasp, and his teeth were clenched. He was whimpering as I pressed my hand softly against his shoulder. I tried to lie to myself and say that it could be something else, but I knew, deep down, what he was dreaming about.

The crash was the most traumatic experience of my life, but the aftermath might have even been worse. Calling the emergency line and trying to explain that my dad needed help while choking on blood, trying to pull my seat belt away from my bruised body but fumbling aimlessly. I could barely see, I couldn't think. My heart was pounding and my face was wet and sticky. Was I crying? Was I screaming? I couldn't tell.

Just thinking about it made me run my hand subconsciously along my chest. I had broken three ribs in the crash, and my nose. But I was lucky. The other driver had broken her legs and was currently in a wheelchair. But even she was lucky when it came to my dad.

My dad was the most amazing person. He was always so kind, so selfless, he was funny and strong and romantic and family oriented. He looked intimidating with his piercing eyes and large stature but he was a teddy bear. If there was anyone, anyone in the world who didn't deserve to die, it was him.

For a while, I slipped into the same kind of depression my mum had. I wouldn't eat, I wouldn't sleep. I got the amount of bed rest I needed to heal because I never got up. For a year straight I just stayed in my bed, the only time I really ever changed my position for more than a bathroom break or a realised starvation prevention, was when we moved. My mum explained she couldn't be in that house anymore. Everything reminded her of him. I suspected I did too, I looked almost exactly like he did when she met him, which I think is why she left me alone. I liked to think that was the reason she almost forgot about her youngest son. I hoped it wasn't because she blamed me for his death.

She didn't have to. I blamed myself enough.

But after we moved, I remembered that life existed, and that I had to move on. I'm not sure what exactly happened to shake me out of my stupor. It could have been my older brother going off to university. Maybe it was remembering I was in a whole new city with whole new people. Maybe it was something deeper than that, as if I knew, somewhere out there, my soulmate awaited me, and he needed me to be strong to help fix him, to pull his broken pieces together and make him whole again. I couldn't sit here wallowing in a puddle of my own tears. Crying wouldn't bring my dad back. The thousands of pounds in insurance payout that the driver gave us wouldn't make us happy. The only thing that could make me happy was getting back outside. Smelling the fresh air. Meeting some new people. Finding love in a place other than the one I had known it. With Martyn gone, and my mum emotionally so, I had to love myself. And that started with the end of all my blaming and the start of a newer, happier Phil.

But that never changed the deep, subconscious hate I had for myself for killing my dad.

Dan awoke with a start, mumbling and crying and moving around quickly as if he felt trapped. I shushed him quietly, rubbing his arm as he shook, his eyes still shut tight. He finally looked up at me, quickly, eyes wide and full of tears and terror. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. I had lived it. I knew what was happening in his head.

Instead, he just grabbed two fistfuls of my shirt and pulled his face into my chest, crying hard. It was a different kind of crying than ever before. This crying wasn't so broken, but it was so, so sad. He cried and cried and I just hugged him, tightly, soothing him the best I could. But I knew that my shushes wouldn't actually make him quiet down. I knew that my softly rubbed circles on his back wouldn't stop the tears. He had to cry it out.

I knew this would happen. I knew that this dream would come to him, and I just hopped he was stable enough to handle it. I already lost my dad to that car accident. I couldn't lose Dan too.

Soon, his sobs slowed to hiccups, and he wrapped his arms around my waist, holding me tightly.

"I love you," he cried. "I love you, I love you, I love you." My heart always fluttered when he said it, no matter how many times, and I loved the way it made me feel so much better, like each time he said it was a cup of warm coffee on a cold day, filling me up with a kind of content warmth that I couldn't put to words. He didn't say anything else for at least half an hour, and all I whispered was that I loved him too. And of course I meant it; I loved him so, so much that it was like physical pain when he cried.

Once he had quieted down all the way, his whimpers now deep breaths, his tears all dried in the rough cotton of my shirt, he began fumbling with the bottom button so he could run his fingers along the bumps that jutted along my chest, my ribs slightly slanted from the improper healing. Soon, my shirt was all the way off and he was just pressing soft kisses against my ribs, breathing deeply. I just watched, my stomach churning. The room was dark and the only light was supplied by the lamp that was down the street, it's soft orange glow making the room feel warm.

Or maybe it was Dan's tongue along my skin, or the deep moans he made from his throat, his hands clutched tightly around my wrists. Maybe it was the uncontrollable urge to undress him as well, push him to the floor, kiss him senseless, until he felt no fear, no sadness, until he felt only the love I had for him.

But I pulled away. This passion was grief driven, and as much as I wanted it, now was not the time. He was breathing hard but seemed to understand why I pulled my shirt back on.

"I don't want to go back to sleep," he whispered, his first words that weren't 'I love you' since I woke him.

"Don't." He pushed his face back into my chest. "Let's go somewhere."