“Then we’ll watch a movie, and you can have nicer things to think about,” Hanna said.
He glanced at her and gave her a sideways smile. “That, I certainly will.”
* * *
Somewhere,a baby is crying.
Gregory doesn’t know where. He cowers in a darkness that smells of old wool and sharp chemicals, and wills it to swallow him whole. Even with his hands over his ears, he can hear the crying – but there is always crying. Always shouting. Tonight, however, it sounds different, and he wants no part of it. Just let the darkness swallow him, and the shouting will stop.
But it doesn’t. The darkness does not want him, no one does, and the shouting does not stop. It grows louder in a cacophony of anger and frustration, until he cannot hear the crying anymore. Just shouting. A voice yells, “What have you done?” Then silence.
The silence is the worst of all.
Gregory startled awake and almost tipped his desk chair over as he did. His heart hammered in his chest, a fast, frantic rhythm that felt as though it battered against his ribcage. He gasped for breath and looked around, assuring himself of his surroundings. The office, not an unknown darkness. No crying. No shouting. Not even the silence, now that his own loud breaths echoed from the walls.
“I should have gone to bed an hour ago,” he said to the empty room, as winded as if he’d just run a mile sprint. “But I think I’ll hold off on that a little while. Maybe get a drink. Maybe watch a movie. Let that– Let that fade a bit.”
He couldn’t even remember most of the dream. Just the darkness, and the shouting, and the dread in the pit of his stomach. When he spotted Hanna as she eased down the last two steps of the great staircase, he recognized a kindred soul in insomnia. She looked like she’d battled her own nightmares, or whatever specters haunted her sleepless nights.
Perhaps he could fend off whatever had disturbed her. He didn’t believe she’d simply come downstairs in search of a drink. And perhaps she could help him keep that awful silence at bay.
“I wondered if you’d had bad dreams, too,” he said, as they rummaged in empty kitchen.
“I– I think I might have fallen asleep in the bathtub. Spooked myself but good,” she replied. “Guess that will teach me to take a bath when I’m tired. Drowning wasn’t on my plan for tonight.”
“Let’s keep it off the plan entirely, all right? Ah. The cook decided to give in to my American tastes.” He took a box of hot chocolate mix packets out of the pantry and held it up for her to see. “Want a mug?”
She beamed. “Please. What about you? Do you have bad dreams often?”
“That’s not an easy question.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to pry.”
“No, no, that’s not it. You can ask whatever you want to. I like talking to you.” He offered her a reassuring smile, then put the kettle on. “It’s just that I’m not sure what the right answer is. I think it’s ‘yes’, but it’s hard to say. I wake up unsettled a lot. More since I got here, which I suspect is the stress of a move and everything that comes with it.”
“It’s not easy to sleep well when you’ve got so much on your mind. Hey, cookies.”
“I think they call those ‘biscuits’ here. You should put some on a plate for us so we can verify their biscuit-ness.”
She glanced over her shoulder, around a fall of drying hair. “Biscuit-ness. Is that a word?”
“Is now.”
“Fair enough.” She fetched down a plate. “Should I get the jar of peanut butter and a spoon, too?”
“Why not. You want a jug of milk to bring with us?”
She laughed hard enough that she had to pause in the act of getting the plate down. “Maybe just the cookies. Biscuits.”
He laughed, too, because her laugh was contagious. “Probably for the best. Anyway, the dreams feel like impressions. Dark places. Yelling. A lot of yelling. Sometimes a baby crying. It’s never an outright nightmare, but I never wake up with the sense I had a good dream, either.”
“No, that sounds frightening and unpleasant.” She arranged the cookies on the plate.
“When I have them, it’s best to stay up a little while. Let it all fade out, replace the bad images with good ones. You know you don’t have to keep me company if you’d rather rest.” Though he hoped she would and felt selfish for it.
She shook her head as she turned around. Both motions conspired to allow tendrils of damp hair to frame her face. Combined with the pajamas and the casual, almost vulnerable manner, she looked more beautiful than he’d yet seen her. Not on her guard or dressed up to impress an employer. Just a woman with a plate of cookies and a lovely smile, and eyes that held nothing but care for him.
His chest squeezed.I don’t care about the English countryside. This is the view I want to have every morning and every night.