Dreamless

sky one more time. She wanted it fresh in her mind when she laid her head down that night. She was pretty certain that if she didn’t have some sort of miraculous epiphany, she would never pick her head up again.
    Cleaning the freezing blood off her face as best she could with the edge of her shirt, Helen stared at the slowly spinning earth. It was nightfall on her side of the planet, but she could still make out the gossamer layer of atmosphere. It was just a fragile sliver of nearly nothing that kept life on one side and frozen oblivion on the other. Helen marveled that something that looked so delicate could be so powerful. Another gift from Lucas , she thought, smiling at the humbling sight.
    Helen shut her eyes and let herself float. She was up high, higher than she had ever gone before, and the tug of the earth was so slight that for a moment she wondered if she could cut the final thread of gravity that tied her to the world and drift all the way to the moon.
    A steely hand clamped onto the back of her jacket, yanking her down and nearly tearing her clothes off. Helen twisted around as she tumbled back to earth, and saw Lucas’s tortured face as he pulled her against him.
    “What are you doing?” he gasped into her ear, clamping her tight to his panting chest as he rapidly sank them both back down. His throat was so pinched with emotion his voice broke repeatedly as he tried to talk. “Were you trying to drift off into space? You know that would kill you, right?”
    “I know, Lucas. I . . . it feels good to just let go.” She realized that she had said his name aloud for the first time in ages. It was such a relief to finally have his name in her mouth again that she laughed. “I like to do it sometimes. Haven’t you ever?”
    “Yeah. I have,” he admitted, still clutching at her and digging his face deeper and deeper into her neck as he floated them down from the cold night sky. He whispered in her ear. “But your eyes were closed. I thought you had blacked out.”
    “I’m sorry. I thought I was alone,” she whispered back.
    She knew she should ask, but she honestly didn’t care how Lucas got there. She held on to him tighter and tighter, as if she were trying to push him inside her chest and wrap her skin around him.
    This was Lucas, and she wanted to hold on to him, hold on to the person he was in this moment, before he had a chance to turn into the angry stranger again. He sighed deeply and said her name before pulling back from her hug and searching for Helen’s widow’s walk.
    “Where’s Jerry?” he asked as they hovered over her house. The Pig, Jerry’s ancient Jeep Wrangler, was conspicuously absent from the driveway and none of the interior lights were on.
    “Probably still working,” Helen said, never taking her eyes off him. “Will you come in? Or is this about to get ugly again?”
    “I promised you, no more fighting. It didn’t work, anyway,” Lucas said, and tugged Helen down to land with her on her widow’s walk.
    “You did do it on purpose, didn’t you?” For a moment they stood there staring at each other through the heavy silence. “Did your father have anything to do with it?”
    “It was my choice,” he said heavily.
    She waited for him to explain himself, but he didn’t. He didn’t try to make any excuses or push the blame off onto someone else. Instead, Lucas left it up to Helen to decide what was going to happen between them next. She punched his chest in frustration, not as hard as she could, but hard enough to make him feel something. He didn’t try to stop her.
    “How could you do that to me!” she cried, just short of howling.
    “Helen.” He caught her tight fists and pressed them to the place on his chest that she had hit. “What else could I do? We were together all the time again. Sitting together, telling each other our deepest secrets, and it was confusing you. You have more important things to think about than me.”
    “Do you have any idea how much that hurt?” she asked in a strangled voice, wanting to hit him again, but finding that her hands relaxed of their own accord and smoothed over him instead.
    “Yes.” He spoke so tenderly Helen knew that he was just as hurt by their separation as she was. “And the consequences will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
    Her brow wrinkled with worry. She knew that he wasn’t exaggerating—Lucas had changed. His face was so pale it reflected the moonlight, and his eyes were a