Guarded Dreams

by L. J. Evans

  “I’m not exactly sure. We might have to try that again.”

  He didn’t wait for my answer; his lips were already back on mine, exploring, touching, tongue slipping back between my lips. The ache in me to be one grew, surrounding my heart, filling my chest, expanding until my entire body wanted to melt into his. And when I tried to do just that, leaning forward into him, he let out a sharp groan that had nothing to do with the beauty of our kiss, and I pulled away.

  “I hurt you,” I said, looking down his body to the cast, unable to ignore the bulge that had appeared under the thin sheet and the hospital gown that was partially over his body.

  “You didn’t, the break did,” he said wryly. A faint hue of color filled his cheeks when I looked back at him. “I’d apologize for my body’s reaction to you, but…”

  He shrugged as his words faded away, that glorious, almost bashful, smile still on his face. The one that I was almost a hundred percent certain no one had seen but me.

  “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean my body doesn’t feel the same way,” I told him with my own flush at the bravery of my words.

  I was just happy that I could keep the grin on his face. His hand traced my cheeks, following the bloom I knew I wore that matched his.

  “You’re beautiful,” he told me.

  It wasn’t that no one had ever told me that before. Somehow, I’d never really believed it, though. It was like it had always been said as a means to an end, or from my friend who couldn’t see clearly because of her affection for me. Eli said it like it was a simple fact. To him, I was beautiful.

  We sat like that, close, touching, sharing words that weren’t spoken, until the afternoon started to fade and the room crept into darkness. At one point, he fell asleep, his body weary. I watched him in awe that this gorgeous man had somehow found his way back into my world.

  My eyes drifted to his leg, and I wondered what it would mean for him. A broken knee in the military. They discharged people for less than that, right? Let alone a screwed-together knee that would forever be a handicap, healed or not. It didn’t sound promising. It made me hurt for him in a way I’d never had to hurt for Eli before.

  When he woke with a new groan, I pushed the call button before he could stop me. The nurse came and went, promising more pain meds.

  “What did the doctors say?” I asked with my fingers finding their way back into his.

  He shrugged, and I could tell he was darting around the truth. “I’ll be out for a while, at least.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, because I was.

  “We seem to use that word a lot with each other. There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” he told me.

  I nodded. “I just don’t want it to stop you from having everything you’ve worked so hard for.”

  He took that in, eyes going to his cast, mind thinking thoughts that I couldn’t read for the first time since I’d come into the room.

  “Tell me something,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What stopped you from pursuing your dream?”

  I looked up at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t. Don’t do that with me. We both know what I mean.”

  He was right. I did know what he meant, but I was still surprised, when I shouldn’t be, that he’d seen what I’d done with my life. How I’d turned it into something different from what I’d told him I wanted when I’d first met him.

  “It’s hard to put into words.”

  “Try. For me.”

  My brow furrowed as I tried to think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t sound like I was giving up. So that he’d see that I wasn’t tucking my tail between my legs in failure.

  “There’s this quote by Mary Webb that goes, ‘Saddle your dreams before you ride ‘em,’” I told him, and I could see that I’d confused him more than helped. I tried again. “I think I had this dream that I hadn’t really envisioned or thought through. I hadn’t tamed it into my own, and once I did, it wasn’t the same horse.”

  “I still don’t think I understand,” he told me.

  “When I went to Nashville, I thought I wanted to be a country singer, and I worked on that dream really hard. Put myself through junior college, played at a lot of open mic nights, and applied again for Juilliard.”

  “Again?”

  The fact that he didn’t know why it was “again" was proof that we hardly knew each other, regardless of what our bodies told us. “The first time I applied to Juilliard in my senior year, my dad called a friend—one of his collections— and they had the application pulled.”

  I could see the storm in Eli’s eyes at the thought that my dad had done that to me.

  “That’s why you ran away?”

  “Partly. He didn’t even tell me he did it. I had to call Juilliard to figure out why I hadn’t gotten my rejection letter like the rest of the kids. When I found out, I swore I wasn’t going to stay, and I didn’t. You know how that turned out.”

  I gave him a weak smile, and he ran his hand up and down my arm, as if he could go back in time and take away the pain. Thing was, pain and my dad were synonymous. I wouldn’t say I had come to terms with it, but I was closer than when Eli had first met me at the beach house.

  “When Juilliard accepted me, I was over the moon.”

  “I know that feeling. It was how I felt when I signed on with the Coast Guard finally,” he told me.

  “I hadn’t had contact with my dad since I’d left Galveston. It was like he had known that I was going to still pursue Juilliard, and he waited patiently for me to do just that.”

  “But…you got in?” He was puzzled.

  “Yes. That wasn’t what he was waiting for this time. This time, he was waiting to serve me papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “To take away the trust fund that my grandparents had left me like he’d threatened you he would. It was money that was supposed to be mine when I turned twenty and would pay for Juilliard. He knew I couldn’t afford to do it otherwise.”

  “He couldn’t do that after so many years had gone by since they’d died, could he?”

  “He gave it a good old-fashioned try. Mostly to hide the fact that he’d slowly been bleeding the trust dry,” I told him.

  I could see Eli’s anger increasing, and we’d gotten far away from my dreams and why I wasn’t chasing the one he thought I should be chasing.

  “I found a lawyer, and we went to court. That was the last time I saw him, outside the courtroom, after he’d lost. He told me that I was, ‘A waste of humanity, a talentless and reckless nobody who would always be a nobody.’” I was proud that my voice didn’t shake when I said the words aloud to Eli.

  “You are the furthest thing from any of that,” Eli sputtered out, almost as if he was going to rise to his feet and start a fight with my dad when he wasn’t even in the room.

  I laughed, and that stunned him enough to relax. “You’d think I’d be upset, right? I wasn’t. It was the same thing he’d told me for nineteen years. And I knew the truth. The truth was, I had enough talent to get into Juilliard. He couldn’t take that away from me.”

  “Ava. You are so talented. The stage and you…when you’re on it, it’s like it comes to life. That inanimate object rises up and joins you—becomes a part of you.”

  I held my breath, letting his words soak into me. “You find such lovely words to say to me. How do you do that?”

  He looked embarrassed again but didn’t respond to my question. I moved on with my story, willing him to see what I wanted to believe myself.

  “When I got to Juilliard, I was overwhelmed with the talent there. The pure genius of the kids.” I shook my head, still in awe. “It’s incredible. Indescribable. And at first, I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be there—because of my dad, and his words, and just the volume of talent surrounding me. My advisor told me that a lot of students feel that way, but that I truly wo
uldn’t be there if I didn’t have the talent Juilliard expected, and I chose to believe him instead of my dad.”

  “I’m still not understanding the saddle analogy,” Eli told me, bringing me back.

  I grinned. “The dream I had that I was trying to ride…it wasn’t really mine once I really looked inside and found the things that made me happiest. I love music. I love words. I love putting those things together and sharing them with the world. I don’t want to let others control how and when I do that. So sometimes, I can do that onstage, but sometimes, I can give them to someone else who’ll take my words and make art out of them.”

  “Like Brady?” he asked.

  “Yes. Maybe someday, others, too. I want to give my words away so they become the aurora borealis.”

  “The aurora borealis?”

  “You know, a magical display that seems like more than a mere natural phenomenon. Something life changing.”

  He took me in, seeing me as I was, assessing if I was being honest or if he should call bullshit on me for the third time in a day. I was being honest. As honest as I could be at that moment. I believed what I told him.

  “You’re already the aurora borealis to me.” He pulled my head to his and kissed me on the lips. Sweetly, gently, as if trying to deliver a sermon that I must hear and take to heart. “You’ve changed my life.”

  I wasn’t sure how that had happened, or what he thought changing his life looked like, but I didn’t get to ask him because the doctor came in with the hospital administrator folks to release him.

  I was surprised.

  “You’re letting him go?”

  “Nothing more we can do for him here.”

  Eli called Truck to come get him and then asked if I wanted to go back with them to their apartment. I did. I wasn’t ready to walk away from him yet. My fear from the night before that I’d never hear his voice again was still echoing around the kisses and words we’d shared. So, I went with them. My heart, rather than Eli, not giving me a choice this time.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  I woke with a start, my face against a warm body with a heavy arm draped over my shoulders. The sound of a TV, almost muted, was in the background, and it took me quite a few more seconds than it should have to get my bearings.

  I was at Eli’s apartment. In Eli’s bed.

  We’d come back to their all-male apartment full of leather and electronics, and Truck had gone to get Chinese food. After trying to get comfortable on their loveseat and in one of the armchairs, Eli had given up and headed down the hall.

  I had followed, not nervous—because I knew there wasn’t really any way we were getting naked tonight—but still unsure about being in his room. I hesitated at the door, and he noticed.

  “I promise to keep all my hands and toes to myself tonight.” He was gray and tired, the bruise on his cheek standing out more, and his voice sounded tired too now, when it hadn’t at the hospital.

  “Do I want to know what you use your toes for?” I teased, and he chuckled.

  “I’m sure I can come up with something creative.” He lay down with a huge groan and a sigh. “Just not tonight.”

  “Do you need more pain meds?”

  “Not yet.”

  He eased himself over on the double-sized bed that still dwarfed the small room and patted the spot beside him. I rolled into the bed, my body pressed up next to his.

  “This is so much better.” He sighed again.

  “I really should go. You’re just going to fall asleep, and I have an early session in the studio.”

  “What are you recording?” Eli asked, trying to hide a yawn.

  “You’re being stubborn. I can come back tomorrow…That is…” I trailed off, having just invited myself to his house.

  “Tomorrow. The day after. Every day. You are always wanted here. Welcome here. I still don’t want you to go.” I lay there, feeling the hum of his body matching the hum in mine, the energy from our kisses still wafting between us.

  “I’ll stay until you fall asleep, but only because I’m sure that’s going to be in like five minutes.” I smirked at him.

  He nodded and then proceeded to be stubborn, flipping channels on the TV and settling on some Japanese cartoon.

  “What the heck is this?”

  “Anime?”

  I sat up and looked down at him. A flush had crept over his cheeks again. “Like Japanese anime. Girls with big lashes and people with squeaky voices,” I said in disbelief.

  He snorted. “That’s so judgmental of you. They have good story lines.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  He waved a hand over to a bookshelf that was under the TV and that I hadn’t paid much attention to. I pulled myself away from him and the bed and went to the shelf.

  It was chock-full of graphic novels and comic books. I vaguely recalled a discussion with him as we’d walked on the beach in Rockport about a manga book being his favorite book of all time. Even then, it hadn’t seemed to quite fit him. I didn’t know what to make of Coast Guard Eli, all-man Eli, all-testosterone-and-no-nerd Eli having a bookshelf full of the nerdiest, cutest bookaphile things. I picked through a few before returning them to the shelf.

  “I see this is not a new fetish. At least you’re not a twenty-something loner using anime as porn.”

  He chuckled, a deep, slow chuckle, as if he was trying desperately to keep his eyes open and only half listening to me. The sexiness of it all called me back to him.

  When I tucked myself up close again, he wrapped an arm around me. A wave of different emotions coursed through me, but the one that resonated most was that I felt like I belonged—for the first time in a very, very long time. Because even at Juilliard, surrounded by people chasing after creative pursuits just like mine, I’d always felt one step removed from them all.

  “Your eyes were what drew me first. You have anime-worthy eyes.” His words were slurred, almost like he was already half dreaming.

  I didn’t respond. I just let myself do the thing I normally didn’t, which was to wrap my own arms around his middle, thinking back to that first moment when I’d turned around on the coffee table of the beach house and saw three enormous men standing in the room. The shock that I’d felt, and then the draw to Eli’s eyes that had made me feel seen in a way I’d never been seen.

  I sighed, closing my own eyes, thinking I’d just soak up the feeling of being with him for a few more seconds before I left.

  I must have fallen asleep in that warm , because now it was early morning. The room was no longer completely dark as the sun fought to banish the night. The weak morning light was easing its way in from behind the slats of the blinds.

  I pulled myself slowly, carefully away from his warmth. He mumbled something in his sleep, but then nothing. His body was tired, trying to heal.

  I stood by the side of the bed for a long moment, eyeing the shape of his chest beneath the T-shirt he’d never taken off. The muscled contours of his arms. The quiet, peacefulness of his face as he slept.

  I was still reluctant to leave, even with Juilliard and the work I needed to do with Brady calling to me. I forced myself away and went in search of my bag in the living room. I tore a page from my latest notebook. I never really went anywhere without one. Some people used their phones; I still loved the feel of the paper and the ink as I wrote. It was a tactile thing as much as a heart and mind thing for me. Music was alive. My words should be too, not caught in just a technological maze of zeros and ones.

  I wrote: “He slumbers…the stuff that dreams are made on, and our little life…will hopefully always be surrounded by sleep. These dreams. These moments.”

  A twisted reference to Prospero and The Tempest, but also the only way to tell him that I wanted many more of these moments with him.

  At the bottom, I wrote: “I’ll be back later, and hopefully you won’t wake regretting it.”

  I signed my name and then shouldered my bag. Truck’s bedro
om door was shut; the apartment was silent. I left, quietly shutting the door and ordering a Lyft at the same time.

  The street was foggy, cold but without the bitterness of the weeks before. There was a hint of a change in the air that spoke to my soul, as if the fog was really going to clear from my life for the very first time. It terrified me as much as it filled me with hope. I knew that Jenna was right. The thought of actually allowing someone to love me was almost as terrifying as the thought of loving someone and not knowing if they’d stay. If they’d stick around for all the pieces of me that weren’t beautiful, that were torn and ragged.

  When I closed the dorm room door as quietly as I had Eli’s apartment door, I wasn’t greeted with silence. Instead, Brady threw a shoe at me—a huge, man-sized cowboy boot to be exact—that hardly missed my head.

  “What the hell was that for?” I asked, dropping my bag and heading to where he lounged, as he always did, on the couch with his guitar beside him on the floor. It seemed like he’d been up all night.

  “You could have at least called. I’ve been worried, babe,” Brady grouched.

  “Wait. What?” I looked down at him, arms on my hips and a frown on my face.

  “I’ve. Been. Worried,” he annunciated slowly.

  I laughed. “Brady, you have my number. Why didn’t you just call?”

  “In the middle of hot and heavy sex? And be like a dad checking up on his errant teenage daughter? No thanks.”

  In surprise, I realized that he was actually upset.

  “There was no hot and heavy sex. His whole left leg is in a cast from a shattered kneecap.”

  I pushed his legs off so that I could sit with him. I’d left one man to curl up next to another, but it didn’t feel anywhere near the same. Brady felt like the brother I’d never had.

  “Don’t come all curling up to me with your smell of another guy and expect me to forgive you with that sweet smile,” Brady responded, but I could see his worry and grouchiness was turning back to his normal Brady lightness a little at a time.

  I whiffed myself. “I don’t smell like Eli.”