SLEEPSONG (BoyxBoy)✔️

Chapter 30

Sebastian was leaning over me, curly hair plastered to his skull, dripping water onto my cheeks.

His eyes were almost shining white and he looked murderous.

"Can you hear me?" he hissed past his teeth. "Can you understand what I'm saying?"

I blinked and nodded a little weakly.

"Then, tell me, are you hurt?" he spit out; I numbly shook my head, but he snatched my bandaged shoulder and shook it. "Are you still having trouble breathing? Any trouble moving? There was water in your lungs, and you weren't breathing for almost three full minutes."

I opened my mouth to tell him that I was fine, but instead I started hacking up more water. I squeezed my eyes shut as I spluttered, spitting up the salty fluid, feeling it chafe and burn my insides in a way I thoroughly hated. Sebastian's large hand smacked against my back, forcing more of it to come rising. My shoulders heaved and my stomach knotted as I spit it all out. 

Once I finished, breathing hurt a little bit, but I was able to draw in air without dying of cough. I shivered as I lay there on the beach, freezing and completely soaked through, some part of me wondering if this was even real, if it was just a strange dream.

It didn't feel real to me.

None of this felt real. Not being here, not kissing him, not falling, not even this beach. My eyes blurred over as a wall of repressed emotion burst through a dam I didn't even know was there and sent me spiraling into the worst existential crisis I've ever had. 

I was paralyzed.

There's no simpler, or even more elaborate, way to put it. I don't know how long I lay there crying since time had lost all meaning, but at some point Sebastian's massive, intensely warm hand slid beneath my head and I was being lifted into his lap.

I trembled silently, cradled against his bare chest, cheek resting against the burning skin of his abdomen, and a moment of delirium went through me as I wondered where his shirt and jacket had gone. Fingers slid into my soaked hair, near my scalp, and fisted in it tightly, tingling.

I should have, by all rights, had a psychotic break in that moment. 

With the amount of stress and fear and anxiety and depression I'd been silently avoiding, by myself, for more than half a century, it was a fucking miracle that I hadn't already snapped. Right then, I was on the verge of going into a full-blown emotional and psychological collapse, but you know what? 

I didn't.

Intentional or not, Sebastian had a knack for driving me to extreme lows, but the thing I was beginning to notice with him was the pattern to his behavior: he hated me, and some part of him wished I was dead, that he could force me over the edge, but he always ended up caving to the part of himself that knew he was in the wrong and saved me before things went too far. 

Impossible as it seemed, his friends had been right: deep down, he was a good man. Sure, I didn't know his history or why he hated vampires, I didn't know anything about him, not even his last name, what he enjoyed, what his dislikes were, or why he wanted me alive.

The extreme hot and cold behavior towards me, the contradictory behavior, the reason he held such interest in me, my vocal gifts, and who had turned me into a vampire when I was nineteen, I didn't know anything about this man who wasn't even really a man, but a werewolf.

And yet... even though I knew nothing, his arms still soothed me and brought me away from my inner panic. I hadn't been held by anyone the way he was holding me, ever, not even by my first love, or my parents, or even my sister. His arms made me feel, for the very first time in my life...