Before You Wake
To: @lunarbreaksblog
Happy christmas :)
From @redseeker
Rating : SFW
Every day the love of his life walked past Eddie’s shop window.
With sandy blond hair and features as delicate as a girl’s, the young man passed Eddie’s humble storefront at the same time each morning, and again at the same time each night. Eddie didn’t know where he went, where he worked or what he did for a living. He didn’t even know his name.
Eddie spent hours daydreaming about the life they would have together. While he worked mending suit jackets and altering prom dresses, he pictured the dates he and his love would go on and all the places they would travel to. They would go to Paris for their honeymoon, or maybe Venice. Eddie had always wanted to see the world, and with his true love at his side he would finally be able to get a stamp on his passport.
It was a cold day in December when Eddie came downstairs from the little studio he slept in, unlocked the shop door and turned the handwritten sign in the door to “open”. The shop was so cold that ice had formed inside the window. He stamped his feet and rubbed his hands together as he waited for his ancient space heater to warm up. Snow had fallen in the night and covered the little street outside his shop in white.
Eddie glanced at the clock and smiled. Sure enough, a moment later he spotted his love walking down the street. He was wrapped up in a padded coat that concealed his slender figure, and his blond hair was covered by a hat and orange earmuffs. Eddie kept the shop lights off so he could linger in the shadows and watch the man go by. He was looking down, absorbed in his phone. He looked troubled, Eddie thought, and he wondered what might worry his beloved so much that his lovely brow scrunched up in a frown.
Suddenly his beloved stepped onto a patch of ice and his foot slipped out from under him. Eddie gasped, but his love righted himself before he fell. His darling ought to be more careful, Eddie thought. The fresh dusting of snow concealed treacherous ice beneath.
Recovered from his near miss, Eddie’s darling resumed walking, only to pause and tap furiously at his phone.
He didn’t see the flatbed truck come around the corner far too fast, nor did he see when it hit a section of ice on the road.
The truck lost control and skated on the icy road. The driver tried to right the vehicle’s course, slammed on the breaks, but the truck’s own momentum carried it forward. Eddie’s heart stopped. He was seconds away from seeing his true love die.
Eddie threw the door open and ran out of the shop.
His love had seen the danger now but was frozen in the face of the oncoming vehicle. The driver blasted his horn, but Eddie knew it was too little too late. He slammed into his love at full speed and used his powerful body to propel his darling out of the way of the careening truck just before it could mow him down. Eddie and his love fell to the ground and the truck swerved once more and crashed into a streetlamp, knocking it over to forty-five degrees and leaving the front of the truck a crumpled, steaming wreck. Inside the cab, the dazed driver wrestled with his airbag.
Eddie didn’t spare the driver a thought as he lay atop his darling in the snow. Beneath his love’s head, the pristine white was stained with splashes of red.
“Darling?” Eddie whispered. His love’s eyelashes fluttered, but otherwise he looked just like he was sleeping. Eddie cradled his head and stroked his pale cheek.
“Darling, don’t leave me,” Eddie said as his eyes filled with tears. “Not before our life together can really begin.”
Eddie didn’t leave his love’s side until an ambulance arrived to take him away. Even then, he was reluctant to let go of his hand.
“Our wedding was going to be beautiful,” he murmured sadly.
“Do you want to ride with him?”
Eddie turned to the EMT who had just put his love in the back of the ambulance. She was a fresh-faced young woman with compassionate brown eyes.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“I said, did you want to ride to the hospital with your fiancé?” the EMT said.
“I… Yes,” Eddie said. “Yes, that would… Thank you.”
The EMT smiled.
“Is he going to be all right?” Eddie asked. “I only thought about getting him out of the way of that truck, but he must have hit his head when we fell…”
“Don’t worry, sir,” the young woman said. “You may just have saved his life. Now just leave the rest to us.”
On the way to the hospital, Eddie slipped a hand in his darling’s inside coat pocket and found a wallet. Inside were some cards, a little cash, and some photographs of a dark-haired woman and two smiling children. Eddie pocketed the pictures to dispose of them later and turned his attention to the cards. There was a driver’s license with his beloved’s picture, and finally Eddie learned his beloved’s name: Waylon Park.
Eddie sat by Waylon’s hospital bed for three days. He dozed in the chair and only left to relieve himself and to eat. The nurses whispered amongst themselves of his devotion and sighed over his chiselled jaw and piercing blue eyes. Eddie ignored them entirely and watched the gentle rise and fall of his beloved’s chest as he slept on.
When he wasn’t doing that, he was perusing social media on his phone as he learned everything he could about Waylon Park. The man Eddie was going to marry was a software engineer from California, who graduated cum laude from Berkeley. An only child, Waylon’s mother was deceased while his father lived in Florida with a new wife and daughter. Waylon himself had two children with a woman named Lisa, but their relationship was “complicated”. There were only a couple of pictures of the family publicly posted. Lisa looked like any other harlot, but the twin boys were cute, with identical rosy cheeks and glossy brown hair. He followed the links to Lisa’s profile and found a post from just that morning which featured her in a scandalous bikini, posing on a sun-lounger with a cocktail while the children played in the pool behind her.
“Whore,” Eddie muttered. What kind of a wife gallivanted off on vacation while her love lay at death’s door?
He put his phone away and took Waylon’s hand in his.
“Everything will be so different now, darling,” he said lovingly. “I’ll take better care of you than she ever could. If only you would wake up.”
It was late in the evening, and the sky outside was dark. The ward was quiet, and the bustle of the city felt far away. Eddie sat on the edge of his chair and held Waylon’s hand in both of his, before tentatively brushing his lips against Waylon’s knuckles. Waylon did not stir. Eddie stroked Waylon’s hair as he studied every detail of his face, from his long eyelashes to the subtle pout of his lips.
“Forgive me, darling,” Eddie whispered, and bent down to press his lips against Waylon’s.
The world stopped, and everything in Eddie’s life made sense in that moment. He kissed Waylon again, already hooked on his taste. When he felt Waylon’s lips move against his own, he sighed happily and slipped his tongue inside Waylon’s warm, sweet mouth, only to draw back in surprise a moment later.
“Darling? You’re awake?”
Waylon’s eyes opened. He looked up at Eddie in bewilderment, and then licked his lip.
“Who… are you?” Waylon said.
Eddie’s precious fantasy was about to unravel. He closed his eyes, not willing to let go of the moment just yet.
“Don’t you recognise me, darling?” he said.
“I don’t remember,” said Waylon. The last thing he did remember was… nothing. His mind was as blank as a fresh field of snow. He knew his name, and he could tell from his surroundings that he was in a hospital.
The man at his bedside was a stranger to him, but the affection in his eyes and the taste of his kiss on Waylon’s lips spoke of intimacy and belonging. He was tall and muscle-bound, with pale skin and hair as black as an oil slick. He had a heavy brow, thin lips, and a nose that had been broken at least once, but the overall effect was not unpleasant. Maybe he wasn’t classically handsome, but he was certainly attractive.
“I don’t remember you,” Waylon said. “But I wish I did.”
“You had a nasty bump on the head,” the man said with a smile. “A bit of a near miss, to tell the truth. I almost lost you.”
“I… I’m sorry, but who are you?”
“Oh, my love. My name is Eddie, and I’m the man you’re going to marry.”
30 notes
·
View notes