Chapter Four: Shutter Sleep
714 Words
Eliot began sleeping like it was a second life.
He arranged his days around the night — went to bed early, avoided caffeine, closed his curtains against the waking world. Each time he drifted off, it was like returning home. School became a blur of half-listening and heavy limbs. He skipped lunch. Skipped texts. Skipped eye contact.
All he cared about was the space where Noé waited.
In dreams, the world felt alive in a way waking never could. Trees spoke in the hush of wind. Rivers glowed softly beneath arched bridges of crystal bone. Sometimes Eliot and Noé just walked — sometimes they sat together without speaking at all. It was enough.
The loneliness he carried, always quietly — that constant ache behind his ribs — had begun to loosen its grip. Noé asked him things no one else did: what kind of light he liked best, whether he believed memories could have shadows, what he missed that he’d never actually had.
Eliot talked more in dreams than he did in real life.
But slowly, waking began to feel... hollow.
One Sunday morning, Livia paused at his bedroom doorway, watching him adjust the curtains to block out the sunlight.
“You’ve been sleeping a lot,” she said gently. “More than usual.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Tired from what?”
Eliot didn’t answer.
She stepped further in. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were studying him closely. “You know... there’s a kind of dreaming that feels so real, it can start to eat away at the world outside of it. You lose track of which side you belong to.”
He turned. “What if the dream is the real part?”
Livia didn’t blink. “That’s a beautiful thought,” she said. “And a dangerous one.”
Eliot swallowed.
She sat beside him on the bed, quiet for a moment. Then, with strange softness: “Someone I loved once believed a dream could save them. They believed it so deeply, they forgot how to live anywhere else.”
Eliot looked at her then — really looked. She wasn’t being metaphorical. Not entirely.
“What happened to them?”
Livia’s mouth curved into a faint smile — not bitter, not warm. “They stayed. Long after everyone else had woken up.”
The room filled with silence.
She stood, brushing a hand over his shoulder in passing. “If you love something inside a dream,” she said, “just make sure it’s not asking you to disappear.”
That night, the forest greeted him immediately — silver trees, breathing light, petals spiraling through the air like snowfall. Noé stood on a bridge of moonstone, arms folded, watching the river flow below.
“You’re sleeping earlier,” he said when Eliot approached.
“You said it makes you stronger. That the dream holds longer.”
Noé nodded. “It does. You make me real, Eliot. Every time you return, I stay here a little longer.”
“Then why don’t you look happy about it?”
Noé glanced up, face unreadable. “Because the more I stay... the more I fear what you’ll lose to keep me.”
Eliot stepped closer, voice catching. “I don’t care.”
“You should.”
They stood in silence. The river below shimmered with stars that didn’t exist anywhere else.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” Eliot said, the words trembling out like breath.
Noé closed his eyes. And for the first time, Eliot saw him dim — just slightly — like light struggling through smoke.
“Noé?”
The dream-being opened his eyes again, softer this time. “I want to believe it’s safe to love you back.”
“It is.”
Noé didn’t reply. He only reached for Eliot’s hand — not touching, just close. “Then let’s stay here a little longer.”
The wind shifted, and petals turned to ash in the sky above them. Eliot didn’t let go.
But when he woke, the shape of Noé’s fingers still hovered near his skin — like warmth from a fire long gone cold.
And Livia’s voice echoed faintly in the morning quiet: Just make sure it’s not asking you to disappear.
- Writer
