Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

now,” dad said. Everyone flinched at his tone.
“You can sleep with me,” Jade said, but she looked uncertain, “since your room’s – well, you know.”
“I’m really – I’m really sorry,” I choked. My eyes were still watering because of the smoke.
The area around my room windows was blackened, an ugly reminder of what I had not been able to control.
Caleb wrapped up my arm silently. I kept looking at him, for some reason. Now that I had faced whatever it was that lay in those eyes, there was no incentive to draw my gaze anywhere else.
But he took extra care not to come any closer. He didn’t even look at me.
It was only later, when I lay in a makeshift bed in Jade’s room, listening to her gentle snoring, that I realised what it was about Caleb that I was so afraid of, but also involuntarily drawn to.
I had never really believed Blake had left me. Caleb was proof of it.


Four


“It’s easy to be brave from a safe distance.”
~ Aesop (Greek fabulist, 620BC – 560BC)


There was hardly anything to be thankful for when morning came, but I was. I was thankful I didn’t have to lie in that restless darkness, wakeful and worried, anymore.
When it was finally a decent enough time to wake up, I slid out of bed and washed up as quietly as I could, hoping to sneak out for a walk before another one of my useless therapy session.
There was no chance of that, however, because Caleb was already at the kitchen table, nursing a huge bowl of cereal over a book.
The night had withered, now shrivelling to let the light of dawn take its place. Morning was my favourite part of the day, if only because everything that had happened within the night died along with it.
The faint glow of sunlight reached in, mingled with morning mist. Caleb sat in a slowly growing pool of golden light, looking up when I approached.
He nodded once. “Morning.” And then he went back to his book.
“Morning.” I shuffled my feet, and sat myself beside him at the table. Waited.
There were only a handful of people I knew who could lose themselves entirely in a book. Blake and I could sometimes sit next to each other on the couch for hours, just reading. My mother would cry, aggrieved, “How can you two just sit there and read? When I was your age, reading was the last thing on my mind when I was snuggled on a couch with your father.” Blake and I would then be too grossed out to continue reading.
“You’re up early,” I ventured, shaking myself free of those thoughts. I had promised to sweep them under the carpet before I came here.
“So are you.”
I let it stop there. So did he. He was supposed to say something. I sat down and silently appraised him.
Only after what felt like ten minutes did Caleb stop crunching on his cereal as he read. He shut the book. It was a hard-cover, dark blue with gold letterings on the spine. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway.
“Kristen?” Caleb said, his brows creasing. I realised I was staring at the book with my face pinched.
“That’s a … book.”
He stared at me like I was insane. It was probably the stupidest thing I could ever say.
I tried again. “Hemingway.”
He frowned slightly and leaned forward on his elbows, staring at me. I flushed, painfully aware of the hyperactivity of my eyes.
And then, slowly, carefully, as though he expected me to leap up from my seat and start flinging knives at him, he said, “Yeah, well. Hemingway’s my favourite.”
So was Blake’s, I thought involuntarily. So many things I thought now came without me meaning to let it.
“Blake.”
My eyes flew to meet his. Had I said that out loud?
“What’s your favourite, then?” he asked
Right then, I was grateful for the diversion he offered. “I don’t really have a favourite.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, shaking his head but smiling a little, as though he didn’t want to indulge me. “You must have one whom you really love. Shakespeare? Austen? Bronte?”
“I’m not really a …” I let out a mirthless laugh.
Hadn’t Blake always teased me for being so smitten with Charlotte Bronte and Shakespeare? He had always said those were for diehard romantics like me. Oddly enough, they held no more appeal for me. I was now able to see what an idiot Jane Eyre was, for wasting all that time she had with Mr Rochester, for leaving him, for making them both so miserable. And now I could only see how simple it had been to make Lysander fall out of love with Hermia.
“You’re not really a what? A romantic?” Caleb said.
His eyes widened when I suddenly stood up and made to leave the table. How could two people who had never met each other be so similar?
Caleb held onto my wrist. “Wait – did I say something wrong?”
I stopped. It wasn’t his fault that he reminded me so much of Blake, especially when he didn’t even know him. I was being rude.
Still.
“I’m really sorry about –” The words clogged up my throat. “Well, about everything that’s happened since I came here.”
“Hey, we’ve had worse tenants,” Caleb said, shrugging. “Nothing that we haven’t seen before.”
“Did anyone else burn the house down?” I fiddled with my fingers, realising how close we had slowly shifted towards each other. The familiarity and strange ease I felt in such close proximity to him was unsettling, so I leaned back in my chair.
“Well, we had one who choked up the water pipe so badly that when I was in the bathroom and the pipe exploded, I almost drowned.”
It took me by such surprise that I laughed. He looked as shocked as I was when I did, staring at me with such wonder it was as if I had just brought Hemingway back to life.
“We had to tell him to find some place else. My mom was hysterical. I’d never seen her so mad before,” Caleb went on, smiling.
The tenderness in his eyes rattled the flimsy foundation I was perched upon, and I had to look away again.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Caleb began.
Here we go, I thought. The last thing I needed was some guy prying about my nightmares when I barely knew him.
“Why do you always avoid my gaze?” he asked.
I blinked and looked up at him. Curiosity made his eyes wide, as surprise must have made mine. Everything about him was heart-breaking, for reasons I couldn’t even explain.
“It can’t just be a self-esteem thing, right?” He shook his head. “I mean, I get that you’re shy and don’t like company all that much and everything, but it’s just … I don’t know, every time you look at me, you sort of seize up and look away. Almost like you’re afraid of something. I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of creep, because as far as first impressions go, I like to think I’m pretty normal.”
It was almost funny how worried he looked when he said that.
But contrary to what he said, I found myself now unable to tear my gaze away from him.
“But if you don’t want to share,” he hurried to add, “it’s fine. I mean, I understand secrets –”
“Do you?”
“I do,” he said, in a voice firm and low.
A brief silence passed between us.
“So what’s on your agenda today?” He crunched on another spoonful of milk-sodden cereal.
It made no sense, but the less he asked about me, the more I was willing to share. Which was why I told him about the useless therapy session I had later on that I had been going to since something terrible happened. Those were my exact words.
“So why do you still go, then?”
It was a question I had asked myself often enough, and I thought I already had the answer to it hammered into my head, but when I said it out loud, it sounded weak even to me.
“It’s what my dad wants me to do,” I said. “He said I should give it a shot … It makes him happy,” I added.
“But if it’s useless, then it doesn’t really help you get over what made you sad in the first place, does it? So it’d just be a vicious cycle, where you, being sad, go to therapy, which doesn’t help, so you become even sadder, which, ultimately, does no good for anyone.”
I shook my head. “What makes you think I was sad in the first place? Just because I’m in therapy?”
“You said something terrible happened. And it shows. It shows in everything you do.” He nodded like he was breaking a piece of bad news to me. “I mean it. Everything.”
“No, it doesn’t. You wouldn’t even know that if I hadn’t told you.”
“You think?”
He knew he was right. We both did.
So I let another bout of silence grow between us until it became so huge that there was no way to return to that topic.
There was so much to say, but it was too much for that morning. The weight of everything left unsaid that could have been said was smothering. But it left me with the notion of an unfinished conversation.
In the thick of all that was Wroughton, that left me something, at least, to look forward to.

*

The lavender scent never failed to nauseate me.
Add to the equation a phoney psychiatrist who asked too many questions for too little results and I’d end up really sick by the end of each therapy session.
“Let’s take a look at your dream diary, shall we?” Dr Oliveiro now asked, happily opening the hardcover book and perching it on her lap.
The dream diary, if I didn’t know better, could cure Aids, feed the remaining two-thirds of the world that was still starving, discover a new planet and pay your bills. It even looked as phoney as her, the sort a wannabe astrologist would give as a gift, deep purple all over with stars and crescent moons floating about.
I felt a certain vindictive pleasure as she learnt of yet another week of dreamless nights.
“I guess the medication is working then,” Dr Oliveiro said, trying to sound upbeat but not concealing her disappointment very well. “That was four dreamless nights in a row, and the last three dreams were about animals.”
“I guess it is,” I said.
She frowned slightly and shut the book. “Kristen, how are you feeling today?”
“Fine.”
She rubbed her fingers together before trying again. “Kristen, I said before on our first session that I wish to be of help to you.”
There was no sense in interrupting her now. If she wished to kick me out of therapy, it was absolutely fine by me; I’d be more than happy to not see her again. It was stupid to hope – as stupid as it was to love – but right then I was thinking of the day I wouldn’t have to endure all the questions, the searching looks that yielded nothing, and the cloying scent of lavender anymore.
“Now, I want you to record down not just your dreams,” she said slowly, as though I were two, “but also your thoughts, your reactions, to everything that happens to you. It’s now a diary of sorts.”
“It is a diary,” I said.
“Right. So keep a diary. Not just a dream diary.”