The Boy from the dream

Aria's alarm went off at seven fifteen.

She had been awake since seven.

She lay there for a moment the way she always did staring at the ceiling, letting the last threads of the dream dissolve the way sugar dissolves in warm water. Slow. Inevitable. Until all that was left was the feeling of it, sitting in her chest like something swallowed whole. The gold. The cloth. His hand over hers on the glass.

Gone now. Just a ceiling. Just morning.

She sat up and got on with it.

The bathroom was cold the way bathrooms are cold in winter the kind of cold that wakes you more completely than any alarm. She washed her face, ran wet fingers through her hair, looked at herself in the mirror for exactly as long as it took to decide she was functional.

She dressed without thinking much about it — dark jeans, a cream sweater that was a size too large and therefore exactly right, her old jacket that had two working zips and one that had given up entirely. She made coffee in the kitchen while Lena slept with the dedicated commitment of someone who had made a lifestyle out of the last possible moment.

"Lena." She knocked once on the closed door.

A sound from within. Not a word. In the general direction of a word.

"Eight fifteen," Aria said.

"I know," said Lena, who absolutely did not know.

Aria drank her coffee at the kitchen window and watched the street below come alive in its slow winter way. A woman walking a dog that had strong opinions about a particular lamppost. A man in a coat too thin for the weather moving fast with his hands in his pockets. The bakery across the road with its lights already warm and yellow against the grey morning.

Ordinary. All of it beautifully, boringly ordinary.

She rinsed her mug, picked up her bag, and left.

The walk to college was her favorite part of the day and she had never told anyone this because it sounded like the kind of thing that needed explaining and she didn't have the words for it. It was just twenty minutes of being no one in particular, moving through a city that wasn't paying attention to her, her mind going quiet in the way it only did when her feet were finding their own rhythm on familiar pavement.

The cold was sharp and clean against her face. Her breath made small clouds. The trees lining the road had lost most of their leaves and stood in their stripped winter elegance against the flat grey sky, branches tracing complicated patterns against the clouds like handwriting in a language she almost recognized.

She thought about the dream anyway.

She always thought about the dream on this walk, which rather undermined the part about her mind going quiet. Three weeks of the same classroom, the same gold sky, the same impossible cloth descending through the clouds. Three weeks of the same boy beside her with his careful eyes and his warm certain hand on the glass. Three weeks of waking at 3:47 AM with her heart loud in her ears and her right hand curled around nothing at all.

She had started writing details down. In her notes app, in those first raw minutes after waking the color of the light, the exact words he said, the way his expression changed when the window broke and everything dropped away and she saw what was underneath.

Four pages now.

She was not going to think about what that meant.

The college building came into view at the end of the road — familiar red brick, wide stone steps, the noticeboard inside the entrance always layered with flyers for things she never went to. She took the steps and pushed through into the warmth and let the morning crowd carry her toward the stairs.

Third floor. Second corridor. Room fourteen.

Her room, in the way that rooms become yours after enough mornings — the specific chair, the specific window, the particular angle of light at nine AM that fell across the third row like something deliberate. She sat down, set her bag beside the chair, opened her notebook to a clean page and wrote the date at the top.

Outside the window the sky was flat and grey and entirely itself.

She looked at it for a moment.

Then she looked at her notebook.

Students drifted in around her — familiar faces in familiar configurations, the low comfortable noise of a class assembling itself before anything was required of it. Someone sat behind her. Someone across the aisle ate something that smelled like a breakfast they'd grabbed on the way. Lena appeared at eight fifty eight, slightly breathless, dropping into her seat to Aria's right with the satisfaction of someone who had once again beaten the odds.

"Made it in time," Lena said.

"You always make it," Aria said.

"And yet it never gets less impressive."

Mr. Calloway arrived at eight fifty nine — his habit, his small consistent lateness that was technically punctual and everyone had agreed to accept. He was a broad unhurried man who taught with his hands and paced when he was making a point he considered important, which was often. Aria liked him for his genuine enthusiasm about things that had no business being enthusiastic about.

He set his folder on the desk and looked around the room.

"Before we begin," he said, with the mild air of someone making an announcement they find moderately interesting, "we have a new face today. A Transfer student, just joined us." He looked toward the door, which was slightly open. "Come in then."

Aria was looking at her notebook.

She was writing nothing in it. Her pen was touching the page and producing nothing and she was looking at it with the expression of someone waiting for a word to arrive that was taking its time.

The door opened.

"This is Kael Sutherland,"Mr. Calloway said pleasantly. "Transferred from —" he checked something on his folder, "— quite far away. I'll let him say a word."

Around her the class did what classes always do that collective subtle lift of attention, the quiet unconscious assessment of someone new entering a space that has already decided what it is.

"Hi, everyone" said the voice from the front of the room. Low. Unhurried. Slightly unused to being looked at by this many people at once and managing it by being very still. "I'm Kael. That's about all there is to say really."

A few people laughed softly. The comfortable laugh of a class that has decided it likes someone before they've done anything to deserve it yet.

Aria smiled at her notebook.

Something about the voice sat strangely in her chest. Like a word you've heard before in a different language — familiar in shape but impossible to place. She frowned slightly at the page.

"Find a seat for yourself," said Mr. Calloway, already opening his folder.

Then kael walked towards the empty seat behind aria.

She heard footsteps. The quiet navigation of someone moving between rows of chairs, unhurried, choosing.

She looked up.

She looked up because she always looked up when something moved through the room — an old habit, the instinct of someone who noticed things. She looked up the way you look up at a window when you sense the light has changed.

She looked up and her pen stopped and her breath did something it had no business doing.

He was looking for a seat, moving down the aisle between the rows dark haired, jacket, hands relaxed at his sides with the ease of someone comfortable in their own quiet and she knew his face.

Not the way you know the face of someone you've met. Not the vague recognition of a person seen across a room or scrolled past somewhere. She knew his face the way you know the face of someone you have looked at for a long time in a space where no one else could see you looking.

The exact way his hair fell. The set of his jaw. The particular careful quality of his expression the face that said *calm* on the surface and meant something considerably more attentive underneath.

She knew what was underneath it.

She had seen it. In a classroom with a gold sky and a broken window, she had watched every careful layer of it drop away and seen what lived under all that stillness.

His eyes moved across the rows, unhurried, and then they found hers.

Stopped.

The room continued. Mr. Calloway shuffled papers. Someone's chair scraped. Outside the grey sky sat over the city without comment.

None of it reached her.

Because his eyes had found hers and something in his expression was doing exactly what it did in the dream not all at once, not dramatically, but quietly and completely. The stillness changing quality. Something surfacing beneath it like a light coming on in a room you thought was empty.

He knew her face too.

She could see it. The exact moment of it moving through him subtle, unmistakable. The slight parting of his lips. The way he went very still in the middle of the aisle between rows of chairs in a classroom he had never been in before and looked at her like she was something he had been trying to remember for a long time and had just now placed.

Her heart was doing something loud and irrational and she wished very much that it would stop.

He blinked first. Looked away. Found the empty seat three rows behind her and sat down with the quiet economy of movement of someone who has decided not to make anything of the last ten seconds.

Aria turned back to face the front of the room.

Her pen was still in her hand. The page was still blank below the date. Her face was warm in a way she was deeply hoping was not visible.

Beside her Lena leaned two inches to the right.

"Aria," she said, in a whisper with significant weight behind it.

"Don't," said Aria.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to."

"I was simply going to observe —"

"Lena."

"— that he sat three rows behind you." A pause. "Specifically."

Aria pressed her pen to the page and wrote a single word.

Not a lecture note. Not anything Mr. Calloway had said. Just one word that had arrived in her chest and needed somewhere to go.

*Real.*

She stared at it.

Behind her, three rows back, she heard the quiet sound of a notebook opening. A pen clicking once. The small ordinary sounds of someone settling in.

Mr. Calloway's voice moved through the lecture and the grey sky sat outside the window and the class went on exactly as classes go on unremarkably, unhurriedly, as though nothing had just happened.

As though a boy she had only ever seen in a dream had not just walked through the door and sat down three rows behind her.

As though the mark on her left wrist was not, for the first time in her life, faintly and inexplicably warm.

...................... TBC................

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