The Ocean Remembers

The Space Between Us

I come awake all at once, as though something has forced me to the surface rather than allowed me to climb.

The lights are gone. The rain is gone. There is no highway, no windshield, no hand reaching back towards me from the front seat. There is only the ceiling, the darkness of my room, and my own breath coming too fast.

Something about it feels wrong.

For ten years, I have woken from the same nightmare: the dark ocean, the chair, the faceless figures with their fists full of rope. I know the texture of that fear as intimately as I know the scar it has left on me. I know how it settles in my chest, how it steals my breath, how it makes the darkness feel crowded even when I am alone.

But tonight, there was no ocean.

There was a car, a wet road, and my mother teasing my father about the way he drove in the rain. There was my father's voice, warm and familiar, telling her to leave me alone because I was thinking. There was laughter. An ordinary moment between three people who had no reason to believe anything was about to change.

Until the lights came.

That is what leaves me shaking. Not just the terror, but the ordinariness of everything that came before it.

The ocean has always felt like something my mind constructed, a nightmare assembled from pieces I cannot understand. This felt different. It felt like a room I had been locked out of for ten years and had suddenly, briefly, been allowed to enter.

I do not know what it was.

I repeat that to myself because the alternative is to believe I have remembered something, and I have spent a decade learning not to trust a feeling simply because it arrives with conviction.

A feeling is not evidence. A dream about my parents is not proof of what happened on the night they died.

It only wants to be.

My hand reaches towards the stool beside the bed. The movement is automatic. The medication is there, exactly where I left it, and I know what usually comes next: the tightening chest, the trembling hands, the long, miserable climb back to feeling like a person.

My fingers find the edge of the stool.

Then I see her.

A figure sits beside my bed, close to the floor. For one disorienting second, my entire body locks. My eyes struggle with the darkness until the shape begins to make sense.

Camille.

She is asleep on the floor, her head resting against the side of my mattress and her cheek pressed into her folded arm. A chair stands nearby, slightly angled away from the bed, as though she pulled it close and eventually settled down without ever properly sitting in it.

She is close enough that I could reach out and touch her hair.

Her face is turned towards me. The faintest smile rests on her lips, the kind that belongs to someone having a pleasant dream. Her breathing is slow and even, undisturbed by the panic that has dragged me out of mine.

I stare at her.

And something strange happens.

The panic I have been preparing for does not come.

My hand remains on the stool. The medication stays untouched in its bottle. I wait for the familiar pressure to gather in my chest, for my body to remember what it is supposed to do.

Nothing happens.

I do not understand it. I am almost afraid to question it, as though examining the absence of fear might be enough to summon it back.

She stayed.

The words arrive quietly, but they carry more weight than they should.

I spoke to her tonight as though I wanted to make certain she would never come near me again. I was cold deliberately. Cruel deliberately. I saw the hurt in her expression and told myself it was necessary. Then I heard her leave, and I assumed that was the end of it.

I thought her anger would carry her as far away from me as this penthouse allowed.

Yet here she is, asleep beside my bed.

She has no reason to be here. Nathan did not ask her to sit beside me through the night. Her job does not require her to watch me sleep. Whatever she thinks of me after our argument, she could have left me alone and justified it without difficulty.

Instead, she is here.

Perhaps she heard how badly my nightmares affect me and worried about what might happen if another one came. Perhaps she simply could not bring herself to leave me alone with it.

I cannot know for certain. She is asleep, and I have no right to turn her silence into an explanation that suits me.

Still, the thought settles somewhere inside me.

Someone has chosen to stay.

For once, I do not immediately look for a reason to make that choice a mistake.

I watch her.

The strands of hair falling across her cheek. The slight crease between her brows that appears and disappears as her dream changes. The quiet rise and fall of her shoulders.

There is something disarming about seeing her like this. Awake, Camille looks directly at me. She asks questions I do not want to answer and notices things I would rather keep hidden. She has a way of standing her ground that makes my usual defences feel less reliable than they should.

But asleep, she is simply Camille.

A person breathing quietly beside my bed.

I find myself remembering that she was part of my life ten years ago, long before this penthouse became my entire world. She sat two rows away from me at school. She raised her hand when others hesitated. She read the stories I wrote before I learned to keep most things to myself.

She even kept them.

Back then, I barely noticed her. I was fifteen, and the world seemed too wide for me to imagine that any opportunity could disappear. There would always be another conversation, another day, another chance to pay attention to the people around me.

I assumed there would always be time.

Then there was no later.

My parents died, and the world I understood collapsed into questions no one could answer. I withdrew from the people who tried to help me. I stopped going places. Eventually, the penthouse became the boundary between me and everything I no longer trusted.

The years passed. People moved on. I remained where I was, telling myself that distance was the same thing as safety.

And now Camille is here, a decade after I last paid attention to her, having walked into my life without permission and refused to become another person who looks at me with pity.

She has made me laugh. She has believed me when I spoke about my parents. She has looked at the evidence covering the walls of my hidden room and listened instead of dismissing me.

And when I tried to drive her away, she stayed.

I think about what I said to her, and something in me recoils.

I wanted to hurt her enough to make leaving easy. I told myself that was kinder than allowing her to become involved in my life, but I cannot pretend I did not see the way my words changed her face.

I made her feel foolish for caring.

The realisation sits heavily in my chest.

I have spent years insisting that I want no one near me. Yet the thought of Camille leaving the penthouse tonight troubled me more than I was willing to admit. I noticed her absence even before I understood that I was looking for her.

I still cannot explain why.

Perhaps I do not want to.

There is a name for the unfamiliar feeling taking shape beneath my fear and exhaustion. I know what people might call it, and I am not ready to give it that name. Naming it would make it something I could lose, something that could be used against me, something else I would have to learn how to survive.

So I leave it unnamed.

For now, it is enough to know that her presence matters.

A strand of hair has fallen across her face, resting near the corner of her mouth. It shifts slightly with each breath, brushing her cheek.

I watch it for a moment before lifting my hand.

The movement is so natural that I barely register the decision. I reach down and gently guide the strand behind her ear, careful not to disturb her.

My fingers brush her skin.

She does not wake.

The crease between her brows smooths, and the faint smile returns to her face.

I should pull my hand away.

Instead, I remain bent towards her, my attention caught by the small details I have no reason to study so closely. The curve of her cheek. The softness of her expression. Her lips, slightly parted in sleep.

I have not allowed myself to look at anyone this way in years.

The realisation should make me retreat. It should remind me of every reason I have for keeping my distance, every danger I believe surrounds me, every promise I have made to myself about never letting another person become important enough to hurt me.

But none of those thoughts moves me.

Not yet.

The nightmare is still somewhere inside me. The rain, the lights, my mother's hand reaching back towards me. The questions are waiting, and I know they will return as soon as I give them room.

For these few seconds, however, they feel distant.

There is only the quiet room, the warmth of Camille's breath against my wrist, and the unsettling awareness that someone has come close enough to make me forget the walls I have spent ten years building.

I look at her mouth again.

I do not know what I am doing.

If I stop to think, I will find a reason to stop. I will remind myself that she is asleep, that she has no idea what is happening, that whatever I feel has no right to become an action simply because I have spent too long denying it.

But I do not stop to think.

I lean closer.

Slowly, almost cautiously, I let the distance between us shrink. Her face fills my vision until the rest of the room fades around it. I can see the faint movement of her breathing, the delicate shadows beneath her lashes, the small details that disappear whenever she is awake and looking directly at me.

I move closer still.

The medication remains forgotten on the stool.

My nightmare, my parents, the approaching lights, all of it waits somewhere beyond this moment. I know it has not disappeared. I know the questions will still be there when I turn back towards them.

But right now, I am not looking for answers.

I am looking at Camille.

Our faces are so close that I can feel the warmth of her breath. The space between our mouths narrows until there is almost nothing left of it.

Inches.

Less than inches.

Her eyes open.

She looks straight at me, and I see her pupils widen as she becomes aware of how close I am. Neither of us moves. Her breath catches, then escapes softly against my mouth, and our eyes remain locked, with no room left between us for either of us to pretend this is anything else.