Something With a Prince

Chapter Forty-Eight: Which Heart is Ours

Tallethea

I don't know what came first, the consciousness, the heartbeat, or the scream as I tore myself from sleep.

The room lay empty around me. Foreign curtains and a bed too large to be mine. There was the smell of dust and rain, it clogged my nose, suffocating me like a pillow over the face. A face rife with sweat and hair that came loose from my braid. It was dust from a palace that had not been visited in a while, not the cellar. The sheets twirled and constricted my legs. Not her creatures.

For a minute, I allowed myself to want it back. That emptiness. The dull wings of fear were now blades, fluttering inside my lungs and up my bloodstream. Paranoia, hurt, worries... I hated them all. But my anger was no longer as poignant now that the damper had been released. Emotions flooding in left and right. Some I recognized, others I did not. It seemed sleeplessness was now my curse. Funny how you can never be without a curse once you've had one. It's like a crutch and a chain all at once. Your favorite meal is poison. Your favorite dream is a nightmare.

Sitting up required some deep breathing, but eventually the suppressed scream in my throat stopped thrashing against my voice box. It was a small relief but relief, nonetheless. Until a knock sounded at my door, and it swung slowly open with a creak.

Had the shadows always been so dark? The window grew smaller, the bedsheets coagulated into rope around my ankles.

But it all slowly died away when he walked in. Fading like a bad dream. Because the prince was in his pajamas, padding into my room with bare feet and tumbled hair. The moonlight made a pathway for him as he rubbed his eyes.

Unable to speak, either from the remaining fear or just plain confusion, I watched as Lansing crawled onto my bed. His shirt bunched around his shoulders as he moved by my side with half closed eyes. Without a word to me, he flopped down on the empty pillow and extended his open palm out to the center of the bed. He hadn't even tried to get under the covers.

"What are you doing here?" My throat was still scratchy, so I cleared it and repeated myself. More sternly.

He just flexed and unflexed his fingers, half his face stuffed in the pillow, the other half facing me with closed eyes and shivering eyelashes.

Sinking down under the covers, self-conscious in my nightgown, I ignored his hand further, "Lansing, are you sleepwalking?"

He made a noise that could have been no. It could have also been a snore.

Staring around the room, helplessly, I decided that I was going to wake him up. But the second I tried to rock him awake, a deep voice rumpled out of the feather down pillows.

"Could you not question me, for once, and take my hand?"

I almost yelped. Almost.

"What are you doing here? How did you find my room?" I was whispering, staring at the open door like someone was about to walk in at any moment and catch the prince in my bed.

"I guess not." He mumbled. Then he was opening his eyes, and staring at me over the pillow, "I heard you from down the hall. You were having a nightmare."

He said it like a statement, but at the chance it was a question, I replied, "Yes? And that gave you cause to be in my bed because?"

It was a little too much. Him being in here and so close and with sleep in his face.

"And you were frightened?"

"A little," I answered.

"Then, trust a veteran insomniac for five minutes, and take my hand."