Page 129 of Daydream

Yours always,

Henry

Each page I turn has more and more Henry between it. His art is sketched onto the pages, over my words, binding us together. Every drawing fills me with more and more life, and I don’t realize I’m crying until a tear drops onto the page and spreads across the ink.

As much as I don’t want to, I pause the audio.

I have some calls to make.

Chapter FortyHENRY

NATE TOLD ME TO TRUSTthe process and I’m trying to listen to him, but as it turns out, I’m not really a trust-the-process kind of guy.

I can be laid back, sure, but am I trusting that urge to just let shit play out? No.

I like predictability. I like routine. I like certainty.

Which is why when I sent Halle that email, I threw all those things I like into chaos, and I’m going to have to practice patience—something I’m not known for—to wait a week until she gets home to find out what she thought.

After only a handful of text messages to make sure she knew I was thinking about her during the month, I can hardly expect—okay, I’ve been told by the guys that I can hardly expect—her to contact me right away.

JJ said what I haven’t learned from hooking up with whomever I want and then moving on is that when you do really like someone, it is inevitable that you will, at some point, cause a fucking mess that you need to fix.

All the guys agreed, so I’m taking this as one of those times JJ gives out okay advice.

According to him, followed by a team cosign, this is my “grand gesture” to make sure she knows how much she means to me.

After Russ finally caved and let me look at the book, I was immediately mad at myself for not insisting Halle let me read it sooner. I loved seeing her words on the page, recognizing her voice but seeing it tell someone else’s story. It was magical, and maybe if I’d spent more time encouraging her and less time distracting her, we could have reached this point sooner.

Someone knocks on my door, and the beeping of the code being entered follows when I shout come in. Russ appears with a cup of tea for me, an unfortunate habit I’ve developed in the past month. As a rule, I hate listening to Aurora, but I’m going to let her have this win.

“Halle good?” Russ asks, putting the mug on my bedside table and sitting at the foot of my bed.

“I think I should have called her first. I caught her off guard; she poked me for some reason. I don’t know how to describe it properly. She seemed… out of reach. Even though I could touch her. She seemed far away.” Russ rubs his neck. “Go on. Say what you gotta say.”

“It’s hard saving someone from themselves,” he says. Russ repositions himself to face me, leaning against his knee. “It might take her a minute to find her footing again. You guys went from spending every spare minute together to nothing, when you were still only just starting. Things were never going to be totally normal when you shut her out.”

“But I didn’t only shut her out, I shut everyone out. And in the end, I was trying to help her.”

“It’s hard for people to understand that other people sometimes just shut down; that not everyone’s brain works in the same way when dealing with stress. I think she gets you better than anyone, though.” I nod in agreement. “She knows that if you’re left unchecked,the chances are you’ll spiral and procrastinate and all the other shit, okay? But she also knows, like the rest of us do, that the more she forces you to try and do something, the longer it’ll take for you to do it. You know that you’ll hit a point and then you’ll fix it. It’s not the same thing, but with addicts it’s called hitting rock bottom.”

“The past month felt a lot like rock bottom.”

“Yeah, exactly. For her, you know that she’ll drop everything for you, even if it means putting herself last, which you obviously don’t want. I don’t mean this in a mean way, dude, but Halle wouldn’t have finished her book if she’d helped you stop spiraling and get up to speed last month. You were keeping her away to help her help herself, while suffering because you missed her. And she was staying away because you asked her to, suffering because she missed you and probably believed that she could fix it. Am I making sense?”

This feels a lot like a riddle, but I think I’m following. “We both had to struggle for a while and do what we needed to do for ourselves, for everything to work out now?”

“Basically,” Russ says, nodding.

“That was a really long-winded way to say what you meant. You spend too much time with Aurora.”

Russ laughs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I know. I’m sorry, I’ll leave the motivational speeches to Nate.”

“Is Aurora mad at me?” The question’s been playing on my mind because Aurora, who normally spends a lot of time at this house, has hardly been here. “I’d understand if she was.”

He thinks about it for a minute, mouth pinching while he considers what he wants to say. “No, is the easy answer. Rory gets that how we would deal with something together is not how everyone else would. I think she just feels very protective of Halle, and maybe a bit guilty? They’ve been in the same classes for two years, and it took you befriending her for her to realize that she called her a friend, but she wasn’t really her friend, I guess?”

“Halle didn’t think she had friends when we met. She told me,” I say, thinking back to when I asked her why she lived alone.

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