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“It’s like a waking nightmare. My eyes are open, and I can see the room around me, but my mind is still dreaming and projecting things into my environment. It feels real. Sometimes I wake myself screaming for help, and it takes a while to come down from it.”
“Fuck. That sounds horrible. I hate it when I have a regular nightmare. I couldn’t handle that.”
“They’re not fun. I have to sit up for a bit after. Watch TV and distract myself. Bring the adrenaline down and try to get into a place where I can fall back asleep. You know?”
“I can understand that.” He nods. “But why the floor?”
“I swore I saw someone out the window. A male figure staring at me and trying to get in the house. Obviously it was my dream. Just feels better to be away from it right now.”
“Jesus. Okay. Well, you know you can come out into the living room?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Trix. You’re not a bother. I was already out there watching some TV. I was about to head to bed to finish watching the show when I saw your light on. Why don’t you come watch with me?”
“Oh, I…” I’m short of excuses again, and he grins, stepping forward and holding out his hand for me.
“Come on. We’ll grab some snacks and set up in my room. Watch a movie and then if you fall asleep and have another nightmare, I’ll be right there to wake you up.”
A short while later, I’m sitting in Cooper’s bed, propped up against a pile of pillows while he flips through streaming services, looking for a movie we can watch. We have snacks set up between us.
“What are you in the mood for? Action? Fantasy? Rom-com?” Cooper’s brow furrows as he moves through the suggested list.
“Documentary?”
“Documentary?” He gives me a curious look.
“I mean, if the goal is to fall asleep…” I trail off.
“Okay, documentary it is.” He starts scrolling through the list of documentaries, but most of them are unsolved crimes, airplane crashes, or shows about cults. “You sure these are going to help you sleep? Because…” He gives me a worried look.
“Okay. Maybe not a documentary.” I laugh.
“Don’t they make any like… cute nature ones anymore?” His teeth run over his lower lip in a distracting way as he scrolls through a list of about twenty more crime documentaries. “Lizzy used to love watching them all the time when she was younger. It was all we could put on TV. You know how most kids like cartoons or those educational kids’ shows?”
I nod and take a bite of the puppy chow mix we put together in the kitchen while Cooper had me explain more about my sleep paralysis.
“Well, not her. It was nature documentaries. All the time. All day. All night. And like… some of those shows are pretty graphic.”
“Oh yeah… I’ve had to turn them off sometimes. Too gory,” I agree, remembering one where a raptor was tearing a poor animal to pieces.
“Yeah, well, that and all the…” Cooper waves his hand around. “Mating stuff.”
“The mating stuff?” I giggle when I imagine Cooper having to watch horrified as animals got it on on the screen in front of his poor, innocent daughter.
“Listen, kids ask questions, okay? And then I have to give answers to tests I didn’t study for. I don’t know how to explain all that.” His brow furrows, and he looks stressed just remembering it.
“Well, at least you didn’t tell her Jaws was a documentary. Xander did that to me. Made me watch it and then told me it all really happened. I was scared to get in my bathtub for a week and refused to take a ferry or get anywhere near the Sound or Lake Washington for months. My parents wanted to kill him.”
“Oh, fuck…” Cooper laughs. “I can see Xander doing that too.”
“Yeah. He was always giving me a hard time. I was happy when football gave him someone else to terrorize.”
“Sibling rivalries are tough.” Cooper shakes his head, his laughter fading slightly.
“Yes. Lucky for Lizzy, she doesn’t have to deal with that.”
“Just her dad trying to explain to her what mating is without actually explaining it.” He laughs again.
