Page 76 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Julian

I dream about Eli often enough that my sleeping brain has stopped pretending it’s original.

Sometimes the dreams are old. Younger versions of us at the lake, all sunburnt shoulders and bad beer and laughter too loud for the hour. Sometimes they’re newer and crueler, built out of details my body has no business storing so carefully—the line of his throat when he tips his head back to laugh, the heat of him in the den, the look on his face when he finally stopped pretending he didn’t want me too.

Sometimes the dreams are just hunger masquerading in whatever setting my subconscious thinks will do the most damage. Tonight’s dream starts soft.

That should probably be the first warning sign, because the soft ones are the dangerous ones. The dreams where we’re already close, already over the hardest threshold, already existing in a world where wanting each other is not the problem and never really was.

In the dream, we’re lying next to each other on a bed that feels warm and familiar beneath us, our bodies turned inward like magnets finally allowed to admit their own nature. The room is quiet in that deep way that rooms only get at the very edge of morning, when the dark has thinned but the day hasn’t fully arrived yet. Eli is on his side facing me, hair messy, heavy-lidded eyes softer than anything in waking life should allow, and all of it feels so real that even in the dream I know I’m in danger.

We aren’t talking much. That’s another tell. Dream-Eli doesn’t need words half the time, because my brain is apparently cruel enough to give me the version of him who already understands everything I’ve never been able to ask for. He’s just there, close enough that our legs are tangled under the blanket and the air between us has no room for anything but heat. His hand is resting against my chest, fingertips spread over my shirt.

I’ve had this dream before in different shapes. Not the exact script, maybe, but the same ache. The same moment when Eli looks at my mouth, and I know exactly what comes next before it happens.

He kisses me first. Even in the dream, that always wrecks me. His mouth brushes mine once, tentative and warm and just shy of disbelief, and the sound that comes out of me is low enough that it almost startles me awake right there. Then he does it again, and the whole thing deepens with the kind of natural hunger my sleeping brain loves to torture me with. There’s no awkwardness in the dream, no panic or interruption. Just Eli’s hand sliding higher to the side of my neck and his mouth opening against mine with a soft little breath that sounds too real to belong to sleep.

That’s the first thing that shifts—the sound of him. Not the imagined version I’ve built and rebuilt in the dark so many times it should be dull by now. This groan is rougher. It vibrates through me in a way that doesn’t feel dream soft or half invented. My mind snags on it even while the kiss keeps moving into something fuller and deeper.

Eli presses closer in the dark, his chest against mine now, and there’s weight to him. Real weight. Heat. Breath. The scrape of stubble against the corner of my mouth.

I open my eyes and realize I’m really kissing him.

I genuinely think I’ve lost my fucking mind. That has to be it. Some full psychotic break brought on by too little sleep, too much wanting, and the general emotional disaster that our lives have become. But no, Eli’s hand is really at the back of my neck, and his mouth is really on mine.

His lashes lift slowly, blue eyes still half drowned in sleep and dream, and for the briefest second, everything in him goes still. The kiss doesn’t break. It just pauses in that suspended, impossible place where two people wake up inside the same moment and realize it’s reality at exactly the same time.

I stop; every muscle in me is suddenly too aware and stunned. I know what we almost did in the den, but I also know waking up to your mouth on your best friend’s is the kind of thing that can go catastrophically wrong in under a heartbeat if one of you panics.

Eli does not panic. He blinks once, still half out of the dream, and I see the confusion pass through him in real time. Then his fingers tighten in my hair, and he kisses me deeper.

It isn’t graceful. It isn’t careful in the measured, overthinking way waking Eli tends to be about everything that matters. It’s sleepy and instinctive and a little rough. He makes another low sound into my mouth, softer and more confused than before, and then he shifts closer with a kind of helpless need that nearly tears me in half.

My hand slides up between his shoulder blades on reflex, pulling him in because there is no universe where I’m stopping him now if he’s the one moving toward me.

I kiss him back with more hunger than I should probably admit to even inside my own skull. Years of it are packed too tightly under my skin to come out as anything else. His mouth is warm and soft and still a little clumsy with sleep, and none of that makes it any less devastating. If anything, it makes it worse because it’s honest.

His leg slips between mine under the blanket, and he makes another low sound into my mouth when our cocks rub against each other. This time I’m the one who breaks the kiss from sheer overload.

We’re both breathing as if we’ve just been sprinting. He’s braced half over me on one elbow, hair mussed from sleep, mouth swollen from kissing, blue eyes wide and still clouded with the last haze of dreaming. I know exactly what I must look like too—wrecked, stunned, probably halfway to worship if my face is giving away even half of what my body’s doing.

The room around us comes back in pieces. The faint gray morning light. The low mechanical hum of the white noise machine from the other side of the room. Mila’s bassinet is just beyond us, thankfully still quiet.

Eli blinks at me once. Then, in a voice still rough with sleep and completely ruined from kissing me, he says, “Hi.”

I stare at him.

That is not what I expected after waking up to making out with my best friend. Just hi, as if this is somehow the most ordinary, earth-shattering moment in the world.

“Hi,” I say back, because apparently my own vocabulary has also deserted me.

Eli’s mouth curves immediately—that small, disbelieving, warm smile that starts in one corner and then catches on the rest of his face. It is devastating and probably the sweetest thing I have ever seen in my life; considering I’ve just been kissed half senseless by him, that is saying something.

“You’re awake,” he says.

I can’t help the breath of laughter that slips out of me. “Yeah,” I answer. “That usually happens when somebody starts kissing me.”

His smile widens, and then the realization of what I just said catches up to him. The color that rises in his face is slow and gorgeous and so fucking endearing that I have to bite back another laugh before it turns into something softer and much less safe.