Sleeping Sickness || Matt&Lucy

Matt clung onto his pillow, waiting. He knew that Lucy had classes, and that he was going to see her soon enough, but he couldn’t help but worry. What if she was still mad at him? What if this was all an act and she was never coming? What if she wasn’t even real and this was all in his head and he was as crazy as he was beginning to think he was? He stopped thinking at the last part, shaking these consuming thoughts away from him. His breathing was irregular, he found himself clutching onto the soft pillow, rocking back and forth, trying to calm himself down, hoping that the pillow would provide some sort of comfort for the attachment that he was missing.

That’s what he’d done the first few weeks of being back in Vienna, Virginia. His nightmares got increasingly worse as his curiosity with how Lucy was doing began bordering on suspicion and separation anxiety and obsession. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t stop seeing the images from the nightmares. They were permanently embalmed in his brain, and now in his real life, the want, the need for the familiar blonde to be back in his life made him feel like he was constantly in a choke hold, constantly paralyzed and unable to move out of this miserable feeling that he wallowed in.

His stubby fingernails began to bury themselves in their arms, his body shaking and nearly collapsing with anxiety and anticipation and hope and hopelessness and frenzy. He felt his teeth gnaw onto his lower lip, the newly made bite mark now oozing drops of blood onto his tongue. It tasted like metal. It tasted foreign. He was beginning to get wrapped up into his endless sea of thoughts, becoming more and more withdrawn by the minute, when he heard the ring of a doorbell.

Matt sat there on the bed, still, paused, frozen, unsure of what to do. His body went against his calculating mind, jerking as he jumped up from off the bed, running past his cats and Evie’s dog, avoiding bumping into them as he got to the door. He nearly hesitated before turning the knob, opening it slowly to find Lucy Diamant, still blonde, still bright-eyed, still beautiful standing in front of the Monroe’s doorstep.

Matt stood still there, feeling his eyes widen at the sight of the girl he loved standing there. His heart raced, he felt like he would collapse at the door at any moment, he could die happy just seeing her there in front of him and only a few feet away from him. He didn’t know what to do right there. He knew that they had argued before and the ‘sensible’ part of him begged for him to shout at her, to tell her that she was in the wrong. But he couldn’t. Everything else refused for him to do it. It felt so foreign, but it also felt as it if was four months ago, as if it had only been a day that they hadn’t seen each other.

“Luce,” was the only word Matt could get out before reaching over, embracing her, clinging onto her like a child. His breathing was ragged at first, and his heart rate sped, but after holding onto her long enough, he calmed, still clutching onto her small frame, nuzzling his nose into her soft neck now, breathing in the scent that felt like home. He missed this. He wanted this. He needed this.

“I missed you,” he mumbled into her neck, not doing anything else other than embracing her, his body adjusting to having her against him again, the familiar feeling shooting contentedness through his veins.