Letter 13 — The Waking Dream

Dear Lilith,

I have been asleep on purpose since I was twenty-three.

Not lazy-sleep, not the kind you apologize for. I mean I arranged my whole life around getting back to a particular gray shoreline as fast and as often as I could. I took the jobs that let me nap at lunch, dated men I could leave without much damage, moved twice for towns that smelled like the right kind of cold water. My friends think I have an unusual relationship with rest. My mother thinks I never got over something, though she's never said what. The truth is smaller and stranger than either guess: eleven years ago I fell asleep in a dormitory bed with the window cracked to a thunderstorm, and I woke up somewhere else, and someone was waiting for me at the edge of it.

He told me once, dream-told me, which is its own kind of telling, unhurried, half in symbols, that the tideline is not his home so much as the only place he's allowed to keep meeting me until I decide otherwise. He never explained further than that, and for eleven years I never pushed. You don't interrogate the only steady thing in your life. You just keep coming back to it.

I'm thirty-four now. I catalogue found objects for a maritime museum: other people's shipwreck buttons, other people's love letters gone soft with brine, the debris of lives that ended up on beaches because the sea decided to give them back. I live alone in a rented house at the very last edge of town, close enough to the water that the window frames swell every spring and won't quite shut. I chose this house for the smell before I chose it for anything else. Salt and old wood and a cold that gets into the glass. I told the realtor it reminded me of somewhere. I didn't tell her where.

Tonight was the king tide, the highest of the season, when the moon and the sun pull the same direction and the water comes up further than it has any right to. I'd read about it in the tide charts I keep the way other women keep horoscopes. I made tea I didn't drink. I lay down early, on top of the covers, still dressed, facing the window so I could watch the water climb the seawall in the last of the light, and I let myself go under the way I always do: not falling asleep so much as walking into another room of the same house.

He was already at the waterline when I arrived, the way he always is. I have never once beaten him there in eleven years, and I've stopped being surprised by it.

I want to describe him honestly, because I think you, of all listeners, will understand the difficulty. He doesn't hold still the way a man in a photograph holds still. His hair is dark and always a little wet, like he's just come up from somewhere. His eyes are the color the water goes right before a storm, that flat pewter that isn't gray and isn't green. He's tall in the way the sea is tall: you don't notice the scale of him until you're already standing close, and then you notice all at once, low in your stomach. And his hands are always cold when they first find me, always, every single time, cool as the underside of a shell, and always, within minutes, warm from touching me, as if my own heat is the only fire he has access to and he spends it carefully.

He calls himself Triton. I've never asked if that's a real name or the one the water gave him for my benefit, something my sleeping mind could hold onto. I stopped needing it to be literally true a long time ago. What I needed, and what he gave me, every single visit for eleven years, was patience I had never once been offered awake.

That's the part I have to explain to you plainly, Lilith, because it's the whole shape of this letter. He never took anything from me that I hadn't already said yes to first. Not once. Not when I was twenty-three and terrified of how much I wanted a dream to be real. Not any of the nights after, when I got braver and he got no less careful. He'd stand at the edge of the tide where it turns to foam and let me close the distance, every time, and even after I closed it, even after his hands were in my hair and his mouth had found the place under my jaw that makes my whole spine go loose, he would stop. He would just stop, hold still, breathing against my throat, and wait. Like there was a door still ahead of us and he refused to walk through it until I said the word that opened it.

I never said the word. Not in eleven years. I let him hold me at the threshold a hundred times and I never once told him to come the rest of the way in, because some coward part of me understood that a dream you finish is a dream you might lose, and a dream you keep almost-finishing can go on forever.

Tonight the tide came up higher than the seawall.

I felt it before I saw it: the ground under my bare feet going soft, then wet, the foam reaching my ankles in a place that has never once, in eleven years, let the water touch me. I looked down at my own feet disappearing into the tide and when I looked back up he was closer than he'd ever stood without my crossing to him first.

"It's coming in early," I said, stupid with surprise, the way you're stupid in dreams even when the dream has been the realest thing in your week.

"It's not the tide that's early," he said. His voice is low and a little rough, like something spoken through water. "It's the house."

I didn't understand him. Not right away. The truth is I stood there with the foam climbing my calves and asked, "What house," and he reached out, slow, the way he does everything, giving me every chance to step back, and put his cold palm flat against my sternum, right over the place my heart was going too fast.

"Yours," he said. "It's letting the water in tonight. If you want it to."

I felt the tide against my ankles and I thought, absurdly, of my swollen window frame that wouldn't quite shut, and something in the dream-logic of it made a sense that would have sounded insane if I'd said it out loud in daylight. I didn't ask him to explain further. I have learned, across eleven years, that he only ever tells me exactly as much as I can carry, and never more, and that trusting the gaps is part of what makes this, whatever this is, safe to keep returning to.

"Come here," I said instead, because that was the sentence I knew how to say, the one I'd said a hundred times before, and he came, the way he always comes: unhurried, like a man who has never once in his existence been in a rush to reach something he already knows he'll get to.

His hands found my face first, the way they always do, cool against my jaw, thumbs tracing the line of my cheekbones like he's reading something written there in braille. I tipped my chin up. His attention held on my mouth for a long moment, not rushing to the kiss, the pewter of his eyes gone dark at the edges, and then he kissed me, and it was the same as every other time and it was nothing like every other time, because the water was still rising around our ankles, cold and real in a way the dream-water never usually bothered to be.

I made a fist in the front of his shirt, plain linen, always plain linen, soaked through at the collar the way it always is, and I pulled him closer, and he let himself be pulled, which is its own kind of gift from a man built like the tide. His mouth was patient and thorough and tasted faintly of salt, and when I opened for him his breath went ragged against my lips, not a groan exactly, something quieter, something that told me this cost him restraint to hold back.

"Triton," I said, when I finally pulled back for air, "why is the water in the room."

"Because you finally let it be," he said. "You've been asking me across the threshold for eleven years, Leila. Every night you didn't say the word, you still asked. With your hands. With how long you'd let me hold you before you woke up. I heard every one of those askings. I just couldn't answer them until you were ready to mean the real one."

I stood there with the tide at my shins and understood, all at once and without any of the alarm I would have expected, that I wasn't asleep in the ordinary sense anymore. That the window frame that never quite shut had let something in that had been waiting eleven years for an invitation, and that I was standing in my own bedroom and on my own dream-shore at the exact same time, and that the two had stopped being different rooms.

I want to say I was frightened. I wasn't. I have spent eleven years more at home on that shoreline than I have ever been in any waking bed, and if the shoreline had finally decided to come find me instead of the other way around, I couldn't summon a single reason to send it back out.

"Say the word," he said, low, his forehead against mine, his hands sliding from my face down my throat, my collarbone, resting there, waiting, always waiting, even now, even with the water climbing my knees. "I'll go as slow as you need. I'll go slower than that. But I need you to ask me all the way in, Leila. Not the almost. The whole thing."

"Come in," I said. "All the way. I mean it. I've meant it every night for eleven years, I just never had the nerve to finish the sentence."

His shoulders dropped, not with urgency, he doesn't rush even now, but with a kind of permission, like a held breath let out slow. He kissed me again, deeper this time, and his hands finally moved with intent instead of patience alone: one sliding into my hair, the other working the buttons of my sleep shirt, unhurried even here, giving each button its own small attention like he intended to remember the order of them.

I helped him. My fingers were clumsy against his shirt buttons in return, not from fear but from eleven years of wanting arriving all at once in my hands. He laughed, low and startled, an honestly human sound I'd never once heard from him in all that time, and the surprise of it, that he could still surprise me after everything, made me laugh too, both of us fumbling at each other's clothes like teenagers instead of whatever ancient, patient thing he actually was.

When my shirt finally slid off my shoulders the cold air found my skin and I shivered, and he caught the shiver with his mouth at my collarbone before it could finish, warm now, warmer than he'd ever been this early. "You're warm," I said, surprised.

"You're generous with your heat," he said against my skin. "I told you. I only ever borrow what you offer."

He walked me backward as he said it, not shoving, guiding, a hand at the small of my back reading my balance the way he reads everything, careful of the water at our shins, careful of me, until the backs of my knees found the edge of the bed. I hadn't noticed the bed was there. I hadn't noticed, either, exactly when the tideline became my bedroom floor, dark wood instead of wet sand, though the water was still climbing, cold around my ankles, and neither of us seemed troubled by a room that no longer followed its own rules.

He undressed me the rest of the way with the same unbearable slowness he'd given every other threshold: my sleep shorts, the plain cotton bra I'd forgotten to take off before I'd lain down, each piece released like it deserved its own goodbye. Cold air, warm mouth, cold air, warm mouth, until I was bare on the edge of my own bed and he was still fully dressed above me, his attention on me steadier than any waking man had ever managed. Not desire alone, desire I've had aimed at me before, it's easy enough to earn. This was closer to reverence. Like he was memorizing something he intended to keep memorizing for a very long time.

"Your turn," I said, and reached for his shirt, and this time he let me undress him without slowing me down, though his breathing changed, shorter, rougher, when my palms finally found the bare skin of his chest, cool going warm under my hands exactly the way his hands had gone warm on mine. He was beautiful in the plain, overwhelming way water is beautiful. I won't pretend I have better language than that. I have spent eleven years failing to describe him and I'm not going to succeed tonight either.

He came down over me slowly, bracing his weight on his forearms, and kissed me again: mouth, jaw, the pulse under my ear, the hollow of my throat, working his way down with a patience that had my hips lifting off the mattress before he'd even reached my breasts. He took his time there too, mouth and hand trading off, until I was arching and breathless and saying his name like a question I wanted answered with more of the same.

"Please," I said, when his mouth finally moved lower, ribs, stomach, the soft skin just above my hip bone. "Triton, please, I already said the word, you don't have to keep asking permission for every single—"

"I know," he said, looking up at me from between my thighs, water-pale eyes gone dark. "I want to anyway. Every single time is its own asking, Leila. That's not a rule I'm keeping you to. It's the only way I know how to want someone."

Then his mouth found me properly and I stopped being able to argue with his methods.

He was thorough the way he is thorough about everything: no part of me left unattended, his tongue slow and deliberate against my clit until my thighs were shaking around his shoulders and my hands were fisted in the sheets. When I finally broke apart under his mouth it wasn't sudden. It built the way the tide builds, wave over wave with no single line you could point to and say there, that one, just more and more of me arriving at once until there was nothing left to hold back with.

He gave me a long minute after, forehead resting against my inner thigh, his hand stroking slow up and down my calf like he was gentling something. Then he came back up my body, unhurried even now, and settled beside me instead of over me, and gathered me against his chest, my back to him, one arm sliding under my neck and the other coming to rest low on my stomach.

"Like this," he said, against the back of my hair. Not a question, not quite. An offering.

I understood without him explaining it. He wanted to hold all of me at once: my back against his chest, his mouth at the nape of my neck, nothing between us he couldn't reach. I pressed back into him and felt exactly how much he'd been holding in check this whole slow hour, and reached behind myself to guide him where I wanted him, and he let me guide, the way he lets me lead every threshold, even this one.

He entered me slowly, from behind, one long unhurried slide that had us both going still for a moment just to feel it. His breath caught against my ear, mine caught in my throat, and the water somewhere near the foot of the bed lapped soft and patient, as if it too was willing to wait for us to be ready. Then he began to move, and there was nothing hurried in it even now, deep unhurried rolls of his hips that had my whole body answering in the same slow rhythm, his hand sliding down from my stomach to find my clit and circle there in time with him, so that every part of me was being asked the same question at once.

I turned my face into the pillow and he caught my chin gently, turned me back. "I want to hear you," he said, low against my ear, not a command so much as a request he already trusted I'd grant. So I didn't muffle it. I let him hear all of it: my breath breaking, his name repeated like the only word I still had, the slow climb building again low in my belly even after everything he'd already given me once.

He held that unhurried pace even as I felt myself getting close a second time, his fingers steady against my clit, his hips steady and deep, his mouth at my shoulder murmuring things I only half caught, there, just like that, let me feel it, I've got you, until I came again with his name breaking against my own lips this time instead of his, my whole body pulling tight around him in the dark. He held still through it, letting me ride out every last pulse of it against him before he finally let himself go, slow at first and then not, his forehead pressed to the back of my neck, his hand tightening at my hip, a low rough sound against my skin that I felt more than heard.

We lay there a long time after, tangled and unhurried. The water, I realized slowly, was no longer climbing. It had come up exactly as far as it meant to and stopped, lapping quiet somewhere near the foot of the bed, in a bedroom that still had driftwood on the windowsill and salt-swollen frames and also, now, damp footprints on the floorboards that led from the window to the bed and back, though neither of us had walked them barefoot.

"You're not going to disappear when I wake up," I said. It wasn't a question either, by then.

"No," he said, and I felt him smile against my hair. "You already let the water in, Leila. It doesn't go back out just because morning comes."

I woke, if that's even the right word anymore, and I'm honestly not sure it is, with the gray dawn coming through a window that was, for the first time in the two years I've lived in that house, standing open. Salt air moving through the room. Sand, actual sand, fine and pale, in a thin drift along the sill. And a weight behind me in the bed that hadn't been there when I lay down, warm now, entirely warm, breathing slow and even against the back of my neck.

I haven't tried to explain any of this to anyone but you, Lilith, because you're the only one I trust not to ask me to choose which room was real. I don't think I have to choose anymore. I spent eleven years asking for him in a language only my sleeping self was brave enough to speak, and last night I finally said it awake, and the house let the water in, and it hasn't gone back out.

I don't know what I'll tell the realtor when she asks about the sand. I don't much care. I have spent my whole adult life half-tethered between two lives, patient with a longing I never let myself finish naming. I'm done being patient about it. He waited eleven years for me to ask him all the way in. I intend to spend considerably less time than that thanking him properly.

With the tide still in my floorboards, Leila