Tailored Hats, Cats and White Rabbits Original

29// "Off With Your Head"

29// “Off With Your Head!!”

The rain had stopped sometime during the night, when Mom told me that it wasn’t appropriate if Alisa slept in my bed—with me. I had argued that she couldn’t sleep downstairs in the dark with no one to come to her if she got scared or needed something. To back me up, Alisa pouted and gave my mother those big puppy blue eyes. That broke Mom and so she said it was okay but she better not hear anything for the next ten hours or Alisa was out.

Keeping to our promise Alisa had had no problem with jumping right into my bed and me crawling in beside her. Of course we slept at either ends of the bed since I had a king sized bed that completely swamped the tiny room. But I couldn’t sleep, not for a while. The rain had calmed down to a light shower, rattling against the roof and beating against the windows. Not to mention that Alisa was only an arm’s length away from me, wearing nothing but my sweater. My alarm clock on my bed side table read 12:36am when Alisa finally broke the tension.
“Hatter? Are you asleep?” her voice was tiny and like a bright light in the darkness of the room. I rolled over so that I was facing her in the gloom.

I sighed before whispering, “No”. Alisa in turn gave a sigh and I felt her shuffle closer to me under the covers till her bare leg hit mine.
“Neither can I” her voice whispered back in the darkness. There was movement from her as she shifted even closer and then her blonde hair was pressed against my cheek and her small arm came to wrap around my waist. It didn’t take much for me to encircle her in my arms, our breaths copied each other’s as we laid in the darkness with the minimal clothing keeping us apart. Two layers if I was to be precise not that I was thinking about what Alisa was wearing—or not wearing—underneath my sweater because I shouldn’t be thinking about those things in such an intimately beautiful moment. Especially since I had just told her that I loved her only mere hours ago.

Oh god…I told her that I had loved her. There was a certain uncanny regret battling against a reckless flippant attitude. I had never told anyone I loved them except Mom of course but that was ages ago when I was like nine years ago and I didn’t know the meaning of love. Mentally shaking the thoughts from my head I relaxed as Alisa and I fell into a rhythm with our breaths and heartbeats. I could feel her heartbeat thrumming against my chest. The blood pumping through her veins, the tiny figure pressed against me in the darkness it reminded me of a forbidden romance in all of those soppy romance books that Mom always read. Except this time I was in the soppy romance and it was awesome. I had always ridiculed those who fell in love end over end until they didn’t even know that they were falling.

But now I was the one falling, crashing, tumbling—shit—down the rabbit hole.
“I’m afraid to sleep Hatter” her voice was closer than I anticipated, tickling the shell of my ear.
“Alice, I’m here you don’t need to be afraid” I hissed to her quietly. I felt her arms tighten around my middle, her nose buried into the crook of my neck. If I was ever asked the best moment in my life, it would be now.
“I used to be scared of falling asleep. Nightmares awaited me in dreamland, I never slept at the institute”
“You never slept?” now it was my turn to hold her tighter. The puzzle of her spine rose slightly under my fingertips. I trailed my hands up and down her spine in a slow movement feeling the bones of her rib cage rise up and down comfortably.

“Not unless McTwisp gave me a draught to fall asleep” Alisa answered finally, I felt her give an outtake of breath as my hands worked her spine slowly.
“And even then” she ceased to finish the sentence her sighs filled the air in the bedroom. I didn’t press her for what she never said, I didn’t want to speak again tonight. If ever there was a moment in history that spoke of hidden demons and demented dreams in a dark place it was my room at this moment, when two teens who knew nothing about the world but its corruption and judgement spoke of something better while entwined in each other.
“I’ve never been sleepy” Alisa’s voice was so quiet even the dark shouldn’t have heard what she had said, “but I’m sleepy now, Hatter.”