crickets at night @cricketsatnight - Tumblr Blog

what dreams may come

kingdon oneshot - M - 5k - developing relationship, fluff

Frank has never been very good at sleeping. Scratch that—he’s never been good at falling asleep.

As a kid, he overflowed with energy and ideas from the minute he woke up to the minute he fell asleep. His mom tried to keep his bedtime routines contained, reading and singing and putting calming CDs on, but he would continue talking and squirming around and asking questions until she left him alone in his room. Apparently, he would then start up conversations with his toys, mouth and brain firing until he finally passed out.

His siblings hated having to share a room or, God forbid, a bed with him on vacations. They’d complain before, during, and afterwards about how annoying it was for him to bounce around the room, how he scattered his belongings everywhere, how he kicked and flopped about in his endless quest to find a comfortable position.

(continued below the cut or read on ao3)

His parents eventually figured out that the main thing that worked was to keep Frank busy every second of the day, especially with some built-in time for him to tire himself out physically. They got a dog when he was in middle school; it was a two birds, one stone kind of situation, since he was sent to take her on long walks around their neighborhood for both their sakes. They encouraged him to join cross country, swimming, track—a sport each season to keep him moving.

In college, no longer a thrice-over Varsity athlete, he discovered that weed was really great at quieting everything down enough for him to fall asleep more quickly. Alcohol worked, too, but he hated how it made him feel the next day, so he mostly stuck to taking a hit or two when he was starting to wind down for the night.

He hoped that sex might have a similar effect or that sharing a bed with an actual partner would help. He’d never gotten the chance to try to stay over with his high school girlfriend, but the thought of cuddling and whispering on the pillow together always sounded really nice to him. He liked to imagine it on random nights when he was bored of staring around his room. He’d come up with the conversations he could have and try to guess how it would feel to have somebody else pressed up against him.

The reality was less nice. The first time he tried to stay over at a hook up’s for the night, he was banished after half an hour of tossing and turning and “thinking so loud I can hear it.” He walked of shamed back to his dorm feeling a little like George Michael doing the sad walk on Arrested Development. After the third such occurrence, he stopped trying to stay over, opting to come off like an asshole instead of wasting another forty five minutes of both of their time.

He knew Abby was different when they didn’t hook up at the party where they met. They exchanged numbers and glances and lingering touches but no more on that first night. Instead, they hung out and grabbed meals and got to know each other before escalating the physical side of things, which meant that his expectations of cuddles and pillow talk were at an all-time high when he was finally on the cusp of staying over with her for the first time.

But then, just as he started to wrap himself around her, lamps turned out and goodnights exchanged:

“What’re you doing?”

Frank froze, his arm hovering just over her waist and leg slotted between hers. He couldn’t get a read on her tone, but it seemed less like genuine confusion, more like skepticism.

“Um...cuddling?” he tried.

Abby huffed out a breath and flipped over, their foreheads almost touching on her pillow. His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that he could see the inviting shine of her lips, the tilt of her eyebrow, the curls splayed out around her head.

“Frank, you’re like a human furnace. It’s nice, I like it, but I don’t want to spend the whole night sweating. You stay over there and I’ll stay over here, ok?”

Frank tried not to feel let down as he nodded.

“Oh, yeah, for sure. Sorry about that.”

He went to turn over, put his back to her, but she stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. When he looked, he was surprised to find her smiling at him, dimples on display and all.

“You don’t have to say sorry. It’s really cute that you tried. We’ll just cuddle during the day, yeah?”

There was nothing to say to that, not really. Cuddling is a two-player sport, and if one player opts out, that’s that.

“Sounds good, babe.”

She leaned forward and dropped a kiss on his shoulder, which helped soothe the sting of disappointment.

Really, he felt lucky that Abby was so good at falling and staying asleep, since it meant that she wasn’t annoyed by his endless repositioning and sighing and twitching as he tried to find the right way to let his body and brain finally turn off for a while. He could watch her breathing even out within a few minutes of the lights turning off and then flip over, ruck the covers down and then back up, stick one leg out from the covers and then the other.

His childish dreams of holding somebody against him at night and their mere presence finally putting his mind at ease slipped away, easily replaced by the vivid realities he never thought to imagine: the tickle of her hair against his nose when she leaned her head on his shoulder, the swirls he could trace on her shoulderblades as she basked in the afterglow, the red marks left behind from the faintest scrape of his nails against her glistening skin in the shower.

At his bachelor party, his friends ribbed him for settling down so fast, for marrying the first girl he dated as an adult, but he shrugged it off.

“C’mon, man, there’s gotta be something you wanted to do that Abby’s not down for,” his high school buddy Wes cajoled. “Now’s the time, dude.”

Frank rolled his eyes. What, like he’s going to try to have a fucking threeway at a bar in suburban Pittsburgh the month before he got married?

(Not that he actually wanted to have a threeway. It sounded stressful, honestly. How did everyone keep track of where their limbs were? How was time evenly divided between all parties?)

“Is there stuff you wish you got to do, though?” Ben, his best friend since middle school, asked in a low voice after the rest of the group had moved on to bigger and better topics of discussion: fantasy football. “Not that I think you should cheat on Abby or anything. I’m just curious.”

Frank tilted his head and thought about it for a minute, taking it seriously now that Ben was the one asking. He flipped through the dumb horny dreams he had as a teenager and was a little proud to see how many of them he’d checked off, a combination of what he got up to during his slutty years before Abby and her willingness to try new things at least once. His mind flashed absurdly to how he used to imagine spooning his person at night, at the unfounded belief that cuddling before bed could be the ticket to getting him to finally chill out and sleep . That’s not the kind of thing he’d ever admit out loud, not even to Ben.

“Not really,” Frank shrugged, tossing back the end of his drink. Ben clapped him on the shoulder.

“Lucky man.”

And he knew he was lucky, so lucky, which is probably why he fucked everything up, the way he always did.

First it was the lack of time together, the strain on their relationship from going from spending every evening and weekend together to rarely being able to watch two episodes of a show before Frank started to fall asleep on the couch. Then it was the distance between raising their kids full-time and working in an emergency room full-time, his inability to take her valid concerns seriously and her discomfort in hearing his stories from work. The pills and the lying and the diversion were enough to tip it all over—not just what he did, but the fact that she never noticed, that it came as a complete surprise, that it wasn’t even hard to keep it from her.

He knew that insomnia and sleep disturbance were some of the most common symptoms of withdrawal, but he didn’t think it would be that bad, not when he’d already been doing a taper himself. He was, yet, again, wrong, of course.

He’d never slept worse than he did in rehab.

He became overly familiar with the ceiling of both his rooms—the one where he went through the initial withdrawal and then his long-term dorm—to the point where he could probably draw pictures of them with his eyes closed. The water stain in the corner of the first room. The metal base of the globe encasing the light in the second. The thin strips of silver outlining the tiles in both.

He was working on being aware of his own body, what it was telling him and what it needed, after he had done so much to quiet all of that down. None of it made sense at night, though, and it frustrated him to no end. Why would he start to feel too hot with the blanket on, but too cold with even a toe outside of it? Why did he feel the need to roll over, like that would fix anything?

Why couldn’t he just fucking sleep?

It got worse when he left, which was the main thing that led to his relapse, really.

The best part of the benzos, the part he missed the most, was how it quieted everything down, especially when he got into bed. It was like his brain finally got the memo that it didn’t need to go so fast every second of the fucking day. Without them, everything was too slow and too much and too real, like he’d been fast forwarding and skipping through scenes, but now he’d lost the remote. He’d give everything to skip ahead a bit, to fast forward past those unending hours of staring into darkness.

Not much improved the second time around, except that he was in less denial.

He understood better what it was that he was missing, what it was that his body really craved, and it made the gulf between himself and everyone else in his group therapy and then his NA meetings feel so fucking huge. He didn’t get high, not really. He just came down a little bit, enough to breathe and close his eyes.

When he got out the second time, he thought, somewhat absurdly, about whether he should be trying to go out and hook up with people, whether he might find a one-night stand who’d let him sleep over and hold them and quiet his brain down. The cuddle hypothesis remained untested, though, and even if Abby hadn’t so much as kissed him in eight months, he wasn’t going to step out like that.

When he got his own place, he tried out some of the suggestions he found from other people whose thoughts were too loud at night. He tried a white noise app and cycled through the options, the static and the thunderstorm and the ocean, but that made it worse, because his brain kept coming up with new questions: who made these recordings? How did they license them? Were they exclusive for white noise apps like this, or was this audio also the kind of thing used in the backgrounds of shows and movies? Were there people who went around just recording audio of those scenes, or was there a video of the same thing somewhere? How much did people get paid for that job? Did they travel, or was it the kind of deal where the company found somebody near an ocean to do one, then somebody in a forest to do another?

God, it was exhausting to live with his thoughts.

He was pleasantly surprised when he found a sympathetic ear in Mel, who also struggled with sleep. He privately thought that her issue stemmed more from her insistence that she didn’t need much of it, which meant she didn’t even try to go to sleep until hours after Frank’s bedtime (on paper). He wished he could do something to get her to go to bed earlier, to let herself rest the way she so clearly never did, to trust that the world wouldn’t end when she took a break.

He noticed when his late-night thoughts started returning to her over and over again, but he didn’t have any expectations or hope that it would turn into anything, not when she was the best person he’d ever met and he was a disaster. Not even the kind of disaster you couldn’t look away from; just the regular kind, the kind that was rude to bring up at holiday meals.

But then suddenly it was something, something more than late-night texts and desperate attempts to make her laugh and him staring hopelessly after her braid. It was her taking a deep breath and being brave and trying to press her lips against his. It was her getting his chin because she’s so short and he was frozen from shock. It was him stopping her from running away and their lips actually meeting and the heat that had been simmering beneath the surface for months suddenly engulfing them both, a trail of clothes between the door and her bed and the taste of her on his tongue and noises that he would remember for the rest of his life.

“Stay the night?” she asks him, hours later, eyes already fluttering shut.

“Of course, sweetheart.”

She smiles and turns over, curling her body towards the wall. He stays on his side of her bed, drinking in the sight of her hair finally out of its braid and the slope of shoulders he’s only ever seen beneath scrubs and the curve of her ear, making a mental note to nibble on it sometime soon.

“Why are you so far away?” she mumbles after a moment, flopping a hand behind her until she finds his arm. She drags it around her, tucking it around her waist, and then lets out a deep, content breath, like that’s all she’d ever wanted.

Frank stays still for a second, unable to believe what’s happening, but a nudge of her foot against his is enough to get him moving. He scoots cautiously forward until her back is pressed up against his front, his arm securely draped over her and legs intertwined.

It’s perfect. It’s everything he’d ever hoped for. It’s...surprisingly uncomfortable?

Like. What’s he supposed to do with his left arm, the arm that isn’t wrapped around her middle? Is he supposed to tuck it in the space under her neck? Won’t that disturb her? It’s wedged uncomfortably between them—maybe that’s how it was supposed to be? And...has she always been this warm? He’s the warm one, isn’t he?

Beneath his arm, he feels Mel twitch, her leg spasming in a tiny kick. Her breath remains deep and even, but her shoulders jump, one knocking lightly into his nose. It’s unbearably adorable, getting to see and feel these new pieces of the Mel puzzle, but it’s not particularly helpful in quieting his mind. If anything, he feels like he has more questions than ever, like:

Why did her legs spasm like that? Is it because she was having those weird dreams where you feel like you’re falling and then wake up? Probably not, because it didn’t feel like she woke up at all, right? What does she do to get her hair so soft, or is it just like that naturally? How straight is it, when it hasn’t been in a braid all day? Does she ever go a full day without a braid? When did she start braiding her hair? Are there pictures of a tiny Mel with tiny braids and a tiny grin? She’d always been smiley, right? And—

It’s a long night.

The first thing he sees the next morning is, amazingly, Mel’s smile, inches away from him.

“Good morning.”

Her voice is raspy, her eyes have sleep crusted in the corners, and he can smell her morning breath a whole pillow away.

He can’t imagine a better way to wake up.

After a few minutes of smiling stupidly at each other, Frank realizes that he’s migrated entirely to his side of the bed—they aren’t touching at all.

“I’m sorry if you had to shove me off in the middle of the night,” he says, frowning. He slides his leg across the bed until he finds hers and tangles their ankles together. “Abby always said I was like a furnace.”

Mel shakes her head, one eye disappearing into her pillow with the movement.

“Not at all. You were spooning me when I fell asleep, and when I woke up this morning, you were over there. I figured you’d just rolled away at some point.” She bites her lip, eyes darting around his face. “I’m sorry if I made you feel like you had to, um, cuddle me or something. I know not everyone likes that at night.”

“No, you definitely didn’t make me do anything.”

They smile dopily at each other again for a moment. Frank’s heart feels too big for his chest, like he’s the Grinch and his heart’s growing and growing and growing. He wonders how much bigger his heart’s gotten since he first let Mel into it.

The rest of the day unfolds like that, syrupy sweet and slow. They have sex before getting up—emotional sex, with lots of eye contact and tender touches and teary eyes—and then sex again after lunch—desperate sex, with bruising kisses and bite marks left behind and fingers digging into soft skin. She naps on his chest for a while, his hand tracing shapes on her arm while her breath tickles his chin.

He has to leave eventually, too soon, the promise of more to come in the air between them.

They can’t spend that many nights together, all things considered, between his time with the kids and their mismatched shifts and her ongoing attempts to build something stronger with Becca. Knowing that they’ll stay on the phone until they fall asleep on opposite sides of town makes it easier to say goodbye, at least.

But then it happens again. The next time they share a bed—this time her coming to his place—he holds her tight against him, shivering when her breath ghosts over his arm and inhaling the vanilla of her lotion when he presses his nose into her neck, while he slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable, his brain continuing on its wayward trajectory with no signs of slowing down.

When he wakes up on his own side of the bed the next morning, not even her radiant smile is enough to dispel the quiet unease building in the back of his mind.

He’s at a loss. He’s never been in this position before, where he built something up so big in his head and is genuinely disappointed by the reality.

To be clear, he doesn’t feel disappointed in any way, shape, or form by Mel herself. She’s incredible, and every second with her is more than he ever dreamed of. He loves everything he learns about her, every memory they make together, every way their lives are starting to fit together.

And it’s intoxicating to watch her drift off, to feel her odd little twitches and see the steady rise and fall of her chest and smell her hair pressed against his nose. He’s more than a little smug about how well-rested she looks the next morning, eyes bright and skin glowing, refreshed from actually sleeping more than five hours for once.

It’s just: where’s he supposed to put his fucking arm when he spoons her? Genuinely, why isn’t this talked about more? Is the problem that his arms are too big relative to her small head, making the arm-under-the-neck option uncomfortable for them both but somehow doable for most others? Or does everyone else just fall asleep before their arms do, meaning they can get away with tucking them all the way under their partner’s body?

Mel brings it up after their fifth overnight together, a month in.

“Frank, you know you can talk to me about anything, right?” she asks, stirring some milk into her morning tea.

Frank’s sipping on his own coffee—brewed in the coffee maker that appeared in Mel’s apartment after their second night together, which made his heart clench when he saw it—but he lowers his mug, confused by the question.

“Of course, honey.”

She bites her lip, considering something. She squares her shoulders and looks straight into his eyes, some decision made.

“It seems like you don’t sleep very well when we spend the night together. Is there something wrong with my bed? Or with how I sleep? I think it happened when I stayed at your place, too.”

His sweet, anxious girlfriend is far too perceptive for her own good. He rushes to reassure her.

“No, you haven’t done anything. You know I have trouble falling asleep. It’s just that.”

She continues watching him, not looking convinced. Her brown eyes are devastatingly wide across the kitchen table, which is just playing dirty. How is she real? He sighs and scrubs his hands down his face.

“Ok, this is stupid. I know it’s stupid. I like cuddling. This is a thing about me that is known.” Mel nods, probably thinking of how physical their friendship was before it escalated into something more or the cuddle piles Tanner and Penny like to make with him on the couch. “And I always wanted to...hold someone at night, I guess?” Mel’s brow creases in confusion. “Like, to actually cuddle at night? As we fall asleep and then all night long? It just always seemed like something that would be nice.”

“Isn’t that what we do?” Mel asks.

Frank rubs a hand against the back of his neck, feeling a weird sense of guilt.

“Yeah. I mean, I always hold you until we both fall asleep.”

He doesn’t add that it often takes Frank hours to get there, much longer than it takes him alone, even though Mel is out in less than two minutes. The furrow between Mel’s brows deepens.

“So what’s the problem?”

Frank sighs.

“I thought that cuddling like that would help me fall asleep, but it makes me feel so awake. Like my brain doesn’t get the signal that it’s supposed to be closing up shop, and instead I’m thinking about your lotion and shampoo and the scar on your elbow—actually, I keep meaning to ask, how did you get that scar?”

“I fell off my bike when I was seven,” Mel answers without missing a beat. Frank opens his mouth to ask follow-up questions, but she cuts in, “Continue, please.”

Frank swallows his questions and nods. She’s so good at keeping him on track. (Why is that hot?)

“And my arm falls asleep, but then I don’t want to move because what if I wake you up? And then I’m just thinking about how my arm is asleep, which I don’t love, but I want you to get your sleep, especially since you’re finally getting the recommended amount of it, and it just means that I haven’t been sleeping great, I guess.”

Mel nods slowly. She drops her gaze to the table in what he recognizes as her trying to organize her thoughts.

“To summarize,” she says, looking back up at him and tilting her head slightly, “you want to spoon me at night. Spooning makes it very hard for you to fall asleep, yet you continue to do it. As a result, you sleep poorly when we spend the night together. Is that accurate?”

Frank nods, chagrined to hear his rambling explanation repeated so concisely. Mel watches him for a moment, her eyes narrowed in thought.

“I’m confused, Frank,” she admits after another moment. “Why don’t you just...not spoon me?”

Frank opens and closes his mouth like the idiot that he surely is.

“Because...because you like it? And it makes you go to sleep? And it’s...nice?”

Mel twists her mouth to the side, head still tilted.

“Is it nice? It sounds like it’s stressing you out?”

Frank sips his coffee to buy some time. On the one hand, obviously it’s nice. He loves to feel her body molding against his, the way she releases all tension and stress between one breath and the next as she snuggles back into him.

On the other hand, she lights up his brain like nothing else, which is wonderful almost any time other than when he’s trying to fall asleep. Last night, for example, he’d been on the cusp of falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV and brushed his teeth with his eyes half-closed, but the second his arm wrapped around her waist, he felt like he’d just downed a Red Bull. It’s impossible to touch her and not want to focus on that.

“You haven’t found any things that help you fall asleep, right?” she asks, changing her approach. He shakes his head, not wanting them to rehash their wildly different views on the effects of white noise. “Have you ever tried to make the way you get comfortable into a routine?”

“I don’t really know what that would look like?”

Mel nods once, decisively.

“Leave it to me.”

Frank’s all too happy to do that. He forgets about it completely as he starts a run of night shifts, even. Mel, obviously, doesn’t forget, as he learns the next week, when they’re finally able to spend another night together.

“Alright,” Mel says, sitting up in bed, her shoulders squared and hands clasped on her lap. It’s impressive how serious she’s able to look in a XXXL Frog and Toad shirt with her hair braided in pigtails, not to mention the lisp that accompanies her retainers. “Here’s what you’re going to do tonight. You’re going to spoon me for about five minutes or until you don’t want to anymore—” As though he would ever want to stop holding her. “—and then you’re going to turn over no more than three times. Try to notice what feels right. You’ll share your findings with me tomorrow morning, okay?”

A curl of heat shoots south at her words and tone, which...should be explored at another time, probably.

“Yes, ma’am,” Frank agrees with a mock salute. Mel laughs, the metal of her top retainer catching in the lamp light, which charms him in a way that he can never, ever reveal to anyone else.

The crazy thing is that it kind of works. He tucks Mel against him, relishing her warmth against his front, the soft give of her abdomen under his hand, the silkiness of her hair against his forehead. He feels her slip under, her leg twitching against him as her breaths even out. He glances at her alarm clock a few minutes later and sees that it’s been six minutes since she turned out the light. He debates ignoring her instructions for a minute, but he never wants to let her down, so he squeezes her tight for a second before releasing her and rolling over to his own side of the bed, which is refreshingly cool. He fidgets a little, sighing and kicking a leg out from under the covers and cracking the knuckles on his hands, as his brain goes on a few tangents—mostly about the different colors of noises, wondering who came up with them and what the science is behind them—but he shuts that down with his first flip, his gaze landing again on the back of her head, the inches between them unfamiliar.

And then—it’s morning.

He wakes up to the alarm, surprised at how hard it is to peel open his eyes. Mel already has her glasses on somehow, retainers nowhere to be seen when she smiles.

“Morning sleepyhead. It looks like someone slept well.”

He sees what she means immediately, the puddle of drool drying on his pillow, and he smiles back sheepishly. His embarrassment intensifies in the bathroom a few minutes later when he spots the creases of the pillow still imprinted on the side of his face.

But when Mel presses herself against his back a moment later, her forehead resting between his shoulderblades, it’s hard to feel too bad about anything. It’s especially hard when she grins up at him a moment later, squeezing toothpaste onto her toothbrush, and asks, “Hey, have you ever read any research about the different colors of noise? Like brown noise and pink noise? I just realized I’ve never actually read the scientific basis of any of it.”

“I haven’t,” Frank says, watching her brush her teeth, some white foam somehow getting smudged onto her cheek. “Let’s look that up later, hmm?”

He can’t wait to see what else he’s going to learn by her side.

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