"Right here, like this." I tried not to hold him too tight. "This is fine."
"Okay," he said, closing his eyes.
I closed my eyes, too. "Okay."
"Goodnight, Gerard," he said, quietly.
I found his skin with my lips, brushing either his cheek or his forehead or just somewhere random on his face. "Goodnight, Frank."
And I felt something touch my lips, soft, barely there, and I didn't dare to open my eyes. I hoped desperately that it wasn't just my imagination that a butterfly had rested itself on my lips for just a few moments before fluttering away in fear.
---
I forced myself to sleep that night, all tangled up with Frank. I woke up a few times, jerking in surprise at some invisible monster in my dreams, but I was more or less okay. I liked night like this, when I slept easily. I don't think it was Frank's presence that was soothing my nightmares, but it might've been the knowledge that he wasn't going to leave again that was comforting me.
We left the lights on, but I'm not sure if it was because we were too lazy to stand up and turn them off, or if we were too scared of what could happen if we did.
I was mostly alright, throughout the night. The only one time I really panicked was when I thought that Frank wasn't there, when I thought he had left.
The bed was so fucking cold without him, I hated it. I wanted to scream for him but my throat already felt raw, like I had already been screaming, so I just looked frantically around the room, staring at my open bedroom door, feeling my heart beat faster in a natural reaction to the fear of rejection.
I immediately began to wonder what I had done wrong.
"Frank," I said to the empty air.
My voice sounded sadder than I though it would, it cracked half way through his name.
"Hey," he said from the door.
I looked at him in surprise, jumping slightly. "Wh-"
He leaned against the door frame, cigarette clutched between his fingers. "You okay, sweetheart?"
I glared at him. "Fuck. You," I choked out, feeling the fear escape my lungs with a both relieved and angry breath of air. I curled my hands into the sheets, trying to slow my breathing back to a normal pace. "Where did you go?" I asked desperately.
"Bathroom," he said simply. "For a cigarette." He flicked the ashes on the floor and made a small sound to let me know that he'd clean them up later. "I didn't want to wake you up so I went in there so I could open the window. Didn't want the smoke to freak anyone out."
"Oh."
I focused myself on his silhouette, the way his clothes wrinkled in some spots and clung to him in others, the way how his hair was all tousled and messy and sticking up in awkward places.
I watched him for a few minutes, watched as he smoked the cigarette and let out a slow breath of sighed smoke that made me want to kiss him; he was a burning butterfly and I wanted to put out the fire.
"I heard you scream," he explained, looking down at his sock-clad feet. "That's why I came back."
"I screamed?"
"Yeah." He closed his mouth tightly for a few moments, a muscle in his jaw twitching. "You sounded... You sounded really fucking terrified, actually."
Chapter Nineteen - Gerard's POV
Start from the beginning
