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1.
The first time Kendall ever sleeps at Stewy’s house—they are thirteen, fourteen, something like that—he’s woken up by someone crying out. He sits bolt upright, convinced for a second that it’s Shiv or Roman, and then sees Stewy, also upright next to him. Stewy’s tangled in sheets and drenched in sweat, eyes wide open and unseeing, tears on his face. Kendall’s terrified. He’s used to the kids having nightmares but he thinks of Stewy as invulnerable, and he has no practised response to this. Anyway he thinks they might have fucked up; there’s a perfectly good bedroom across the hall, made up just for Kendall, but he’s fallen asleep in Stewy’s bed after they stayed up watching horror movies, and it’s a school night, and is this weird? Have Stewy’s parents noticed? Tentatively, he puts one hand on Stewy’s shoulder. Stewy jerks away, then looks blankly at Kendall, then seems to come back into his body, slowly, blinking, confused.
‘Hey,’ Kendall says, softly, a little awkward. ‘It’s okay.’
‘Where am I?’ says Stewy.
‘You’re at home. At your home. In your room. I’m just here because I fell asleep, sorry.’
This seems to mean nothing to Stewy, who just stares at him, his chest rising and falling with hitching little breaths.
‘I’ll just, I’ll go to the other room, I’ll just be—there.’ Kendall inches away across the bed, then climbs down and moves towards the door, quietly in case Stewy’s parents are still up. He should slip out, he thinks, before Stewy really wakes up, because he feels like he shouldn’t be here, that Stewy wouldn’t want him to know.
‘Okay,’ Stewy says, and before Kendall has left he lies down again, curls onto his side.
‘Shit,’ Stewy says in the morning, over cereal. ‘Did you fall asleep in my room last night? I had this nightmare, it was like—there was this huge fire and I was trying to put it out but I only had this tiny cup of water. And there was this, like, fucking, fire demon. Then you were there at the end. I thought I woke up and you were there.’
‘No,’ Kendall says, not sure why he lies, except that denial is something he tends to do automatically when he’s not sure what the right answer to a question is.
‘Huh,’ Stewy says, and goes back to his cereal.
2.
There’s no actual reason for them to share in college, it’s not like they need to split the rent, but it makes parties and clean-up so much easier, and if it means they fall into each other’s beds habitually—well, it’s just college, not real life, nothing really counts. Kendall likes getting fucked up with Stewy—coke, weed, pills, vodka, it all works—and then getting messily naked with him. And Stewy lets him do anything, is up for anything, is insatiably curious and experimental when it comes to sex. Kendall doesn’t want to be fucked, it scares the shit out of him, but Stewy lets Kendall fuck him hard, get so deep inside him that Stewy is gasping, needs to be held afterwards until he stops shaking. Then they sleep, sticky, twisted up together, and when they wake up like that it’s so intimate that Kendall is always terrified for about five minutes, before Stewy kisses him lazily, rolls out of bed to make coffee and smoke a cigarette before class.
A lot of times it goes like that. Sometimes, randomly, no pattern to it that Kendall can see, they fall asleep and then Kendall wakes a few hours later because Stewy is thrashing around, mumbling ‘no, no, no’ in his sleep and fighting some imaginary enemy, or is lying rigid on his back with his eyes wide open, hyperventilating, or sitting up and staring at nothing with tears running down his face and one hand gripping Kendall’s arm so hard that it will bruise, which is something that Stewy would never do if he was awake and is horrified by when he sees it in the morning.
Stewy’s exhausted, those mornings, they both are, but Stewy is the master of a perfectly calibrated coffee, cocaine and nicotine regime to get him through, and he never seems upset. He only remembers vague details of his nightmares. Fire, sometimes. Random monsters. He recounts them without anxiety.
‘It’s not trauma, Kendall, get a grip,’ he says, when Kendall tentatively tries to explore possible reasons for it all. ‘It’s like, a brain chemistry thing, it’s just neurons and synapses, some random genetic shit. It’s fine.’
‘Because, I mean.’ Kendall, nervously clearing his throat. ‘You could tell me. I tell you a lot of stuff. You could tell me if there was something—you know, in your childhood, or—’
‘Oh my god.’
‘—maybe something you don’t remember, even, something you’ve repressed.’
‘How could I tell you if I’ve repressed it?’
‘You could have therapy, maybe, hypnosis, they use it for PTSD, I think, it’s supposed to—’
‘Oh my god! I don’t have PTSD, Kendall. I haven’t been to war. I’m trauma free. You, on the other hand.’
‘I know, I know.’
Stewy’s lack of concern doesn’t stop Kendall fixating on it, making nervous suggestions—could he have been abused? Is it the trauma of the immigrant experience?—which Stewy ridicules him for, endlessly. But Kendall eventually lets it go, accepts it. Stewy has nightmares like some people have allergies, it’s genetic. All the drugs they do probably don’t help, but he has nightmares when he’s sober too—they usually sleep in their own beds when they’re not fucked up, but sometimes Kendall hears Stewy thrashing around or mumbling and crosses the hall to his room, climbs in next to him, just in case it helps.
Kendall already maybe has a bit of a problem, drugs-wise. He’ll buy booze that Stewy doesn’t know about, then drink it before Stewy gets home, and take the bottles down to the street so Stewy doesn’t see them. He’ll steal from Stewy’s stash while Stewy’s at class and get high alone, or do an extra line that Stewy doesn’t know about before they go out. Still, they’re in college, and nothing really counts.
One night he wakes up at three—there’s a storm outside, branches snapping at the window—and he’s awake so he wants to drink, and there’s a bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter and it’s so clear in his mind it’s like he’s already holding it. Creeps out of his room so as not to wake Stewy, who he assumes is asleep in his own bed, but then Stewy is on the couch, staring blankly at the muted TV, holding a pillow against his chest.
‘Hey,’ Kendall says, making Stewy jump.
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘You scared the shit out of me, Kendall.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Can’t sleep. What are you doing?’
‘Yeah, can’t sleep. Same.’ Kendall clears his throat. ‘You, uh—you want a drink? Might help?’
Stewy shrugs. ‘Sure.’
Kendall pours them both a glass, sits next to Stewy with their hips together, knees touching, both sunk deep into the couch. ‘Nightmares?’ Kendall says.
‘Nah. Just, my brain’s keyed up wrong, won’t shut down. I don’t know. I thought TV might help but now I’m like weirdly invested in this NYPD Blue episode from 1994.’
Kendall looks at the screen, but doesn’t really take it in. He’s comfortable, and Stewy is warm next to him. He feels his eyes start to close before he’s even finished his drink, feels Stewy take it out of his hands before it spills, put a blanket over him.
When he wakes up it’s morning, the storm has cleared and bright sunlight floods the apartment. Stewy is sitting at the kitchen island. He’s dressed for class, looks utterly exhausted, and is tapping out a line on the counter—two, in fact—which he then snorts in quick succession.
‘I know, I know, way too early, I have a problem,’ he says, when he sees Kendall looking at him. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I’ve been awake all fucking night, dude, so you can’t judge me.’
‘All night? Why?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I just couldn’t fucking sleep.’ He shakes his head, rakes his hands through his hair, which sticks up wildly. ‘It’s fine. It’s fine. Just gotta get through two hours of economics, then I’m done, I’m back here, I’ll sleep all afternoon.’
‘It’s Lauren Cooper’s birthday thing tonight.’
‘I know, it’s fine. I’ll sleep this afternoon.’
‘You look—’
‘What?’
‘Fine. You look good.’ He does look good, he always looks good, tired suits him the same way everything suits him—but Kendall can see a tremor in his hands.
He does not sleep that afternoon. Kendall is home, half-heartedly reading a textbook, when Stewy gets back. He immediately strips out of his jeans and goes into his bedroom, but he emerges forty-minutes later, looking a little insane. ‘I can’t sleep in the daytime, fuck this,’ he says, almost to himself, before brewing the largest, strongest coffee Kendall’s ever seen. They make it to Lauren Cooper’s birthday, where Stewy gets wasted out of his mind, and then wants to go on to a club he’s heard about, and by the time they stagger back it’s nearly five am. Kendall goes straight to sleep, wakes up at nine, and Stewy is sitting next to him in the bed in the same clothes he was wearing all night, looking at him desperately. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he says.
He sleeps for maybe an hour or two, later that day, but then he’s awake again, and from what Kendall can discern, is awake all that night. They’ve never had that much of a regular sleeping routine since they’ve lived together—there’s parties or deadlines or sex or the upstairs neighbours who like to vacuum in the middle of the night—but now it’s fucked beyond recognition, and almost immediately night and day start to collapse into each other without much distinction.
Insomnia, it turns out, is really fucked up. It obliterates Stewy, for a while, just totally wrecks him, his entire Stewyness destroyed.
‘I was taking these pills,’ Stewy tells him, after a week of it, ‘I got these pills from Danny Everett, you know his mom is like a sleep doctor or something, like a neurologist, but for sleep, she has a sleep clinic I think, like one of those places—‘
‘Stewy.’ Kendall puts his hand on Stewy’s arm, and Stewy puts down the teaspoon he’s been frantically tapping against the coffee table. ‘Take a breath. It’s okay.’
‘Yeah, so, yeah. He gave me this shit, thirty days of it, I think it’s kind of like clonidine or something, because supposedly according to his mom it works for nightmares, they’re doing a trial, probably for little kids or something but I thought I’d try it, but, like—it’s fucked me up, dude, it’s like—it’s stopped me having nightmares because I can’t fucking sleep.’
‘Have you stopped taking it?’
‘Of course I’ve fucking stopped taking it, Kendall, of course I fucking have, what the fuck.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Kendall is hurt, a little petulant, that Stewy had procured some random shit from Danny Everett and not told him, and that he’s taken it to try and stop the nightmares that he’s always told Kendall he doesn’t care about. But he sets that aside. ‘So I think you need to see a doctor. Right? So we’ll go tomorrow, I’ll go with you, they’ll give you something to like, counteract it, right?’
‘Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That sounds good.’
‘Okay. And I’ll stay up with you tonight, yeah? I’ll stay up with you, because maybe being alone is making it worse, you’re sitting out here on your own while I’m asleep and you’re just getting in your head and it’s making it worse. So I’ll stay up with you and maybe we’ll both fall asleep.’
‘Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay.’
Kendall tries. He really tries. He drinks coffee while they lie on the couch, it’s fucking NYPD Blue again, and he pinches himself, slaps his own cheeks when he feels himself starting to fall asleep, but it doesn’t work, he’s gone by two am, and when he wakes up, there’s breakfast news on the TV and Stewy is at the end of the couch with his arms wrapped around his knees, looking utterly betrayed.
The doctor is deeply, deeply unimpressed with the list of everything that Stewy has been taking in the last few months—legal, illegal, prescribed, unprescribed, smoked, snorted, swallowed—and refuses to prescribe anything else.
‘All of this,’ she tells him, ‘needs to clear your system before you put anything else in there. We can’t diagnose you with anything because we’ve no idea how your body is functioning without drugs, we don’t know what normal is, for you.’
‘He has nightmares,’ Kendall says. ‘He’s always had nightmares, even when he was a kid, so it’s nothing to do with drugs. Could that be a thing? Like, to do with sleep?’
He is sitting next to Stewy like a concerned parent, because Stewy has barely slept eight hours in a week and is not functional, can’t be trusted to cross a road or hold a conversation on his own. It’s not totally clear to Kendall that Stewy really knows where he is right now.
‘Some people have nightmares,’ the doctor says. ‘It could be trauma—’
‘It’s not trauma,’ Stewy says rigidly.
‘—or anything else, but I doubt it’s connected to this. My guess is that when the drugs and alcohol and caffeine start to clear your system, your sleep will start to regulate itself again. And you could try a warm bath before bed, some people enjoy herbal tea—’
‘Okay, thank you,’ Kendall says, because he senses Stewy is about to snap, and because he had a drink himself before they came here and now he’s sure the doctor can tell. ‘Thank you, we’ll try that.’
They try that. They try fucking everything. Stewy gives up on trying to go to classes, and Kendall starts skipping half of his because it’s honestly frightening to leave Stewy alone. He figures they’ll both make it up in the Spring, somehow—it’s November, rolling towards Christmas and if nothing else he feels like the new year will be a reset, surely, surely, Stewy will have remembered how to sleep, by then.
He sleeps sometimes, of course. At random times of day and night, in short intervals. One afternoon he sleeps nearly two hours, his head on Kendall’s lap, and Kendall’s leg goes numb but he doesn’t move an inch, barely breathes the whole time. When he wakes up Stewy smiles at Kendall, looks exhausted as always but somewhat more human. ‘Hey, that was nice,’ he says. Then, of course, he doesn’t sleep for twenty-four hours.
Or so he claims. Because Kendall can’t help it and he keeps falling asleep like a normal person, he doesn’t witness most of Stewy’s insomniac hours. And it seems improbable, impossible even, that entire nights pass and Stewy hasn’t slept at all.
‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Stewy says, when Kendall suggests it. Stewy’s voice is hoarse and shaky, has been that way for days.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Kendall says. ‘I just thought—maybe you’re sleeping a little, but you don’t realise it. That happens to me, sometimes. I feel like I haven’t slept at all, but actually—'
‘I’m not making it up, Kendall.’
‘I know you’re not. Of course you’re not.’
‘You’re calling me a liar. I can’t—you don’t understand. Kendall, I don’t, you have to believe me—I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep.’ Stewy rubs his eyes. He is crying, but doesn’t seem to know it. ‘I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in so long. I feel like I’m going to die. I feel deranged. I think I’m actually going to die, dude, I can’t—please believe me.’
‘I do. I swear, I do, Stewy. Look, we’ll go to the hospital, okay? I’ll take you to hospital, they’ll fucking, knock you out, they have to. We’ll go now.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Stewy says. ‘I don’t want to. I just want to sleep.’
Stewy is ashen; stark, brutal shadows under his eyes. He’s permanently shaky, confused, emotionally unhinged. He forgets conversations five minutes after they happen, struggles to form full sentences. He should be in hospital, he needs to be fucking tranquilized out of his mind, Kendall’s sure of it, but Stewy can’t seem to wrap his head around this solution and Kendall doesn’t know how to force him to do it. Kendall doesn’t like being in charge, not with Stewy; he keeps trying to muster some sort of executive-level decision-making power, but he’s exhausted too.
Days keep grinding on. Kendall holds him, strokes his hair. He lets Stewy lie with his head on his chest for hours, and tries desperately not to fall asleep himself. He thinks very seriously about calling Stewy’s parents, but Stewy might never forgive him—he’s in some complicated feud with his dad and his mom has health stuff. Anyway, the thought that they would come and take him home, take him away from Kendall, is horrifying. Despite absolutely every piece of evidence, he’s convinced he can fix this, somehow.
It only lasts a month, in the end, although it feels like a year. They both miss Thanksgiving with their families—Stewy’s parents are travelling, anyway, and Kendall tells Roman to tell their dad that Kendall is sick and almost certainly contagious—a stomach bug, it’s tearing around campus, they don’t even want to know. It’s a relief to have an excuse this year, although he feels bad for Shiv and Rome. He doesn’t do anything dumb like make a sad two-person Thanksgiving dinner. They order take-out and watch I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Kendall—shocked into sobriety for most of the last few weeks—heads to the liquor cabinet and opens a bottle of whiskey, which they take turns in swigging as the movie plays. As the credits start to roll, Stewy turns to Kendall, smiles at him, eyes a little brightened by alcohol. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I think I slept through some of that. I don’t remember what happened.’
Kendall has been watching him, and knows that Stewy’s eyes were wide open and fixed on the screen the whole time, but increasingly Stewy’s brain just checks out, independent of his body.
‘Hey, that’s great,’ Kendall says.
‘I think I’ll sleep tonight.’ Stewy says this sometimes, in bursts of optimism that never pan out.
‘That’s great.’ Kendall reaches for him, pulls him close, tucked under his arm, kisses the top of his head, warmed up by the whiskey himself and feeling untethered, emotional.
‘Dude, I’m so sorry,’ Stewy says. ‘I’m fucking up this year so bad for you.’
‘You’re not. It’s fine.’ I love you, he thinks, but can’t quite bring himself to say it.
‘This isn’t me. You know this isn’t me. I’ll be me again soon.’
‘I know.’
‘Or I’ll die. Starting to really think I might die.’
He kisses him again, buries his face into Stewy’s hair. Stewy has been showering two, three times a day, trying to keep himself human, and his hair smells like coconut.
‘You won’t die.’
‘Dude, I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘Did I just say that?’
‘Ssh.’
The bottle is empty and now Kendall badly wants to drink more, but Stewy has gone quiet and motionless against him, his breathing slowing. The kitchen isn’t far, the liquor cabinet—neglected, lately—is full. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the counter, too, and he’d like to stand on the balcony and smoke a while. But he quiets his mind, holds Stewy close, stays as still as he can, as long as he can.
It’s started snowing outside. All the neighbouring apartments are silent and empty. Every second that passes Kendall wants to drink, wants to get high, it’s building in him. But Stewy has fallen asleep, he’s pretty sure of it now, so he can’t, he can’t move. It’s like some kind of test.
He's used to tests. Weird, arbitrary challenges his dad makes up. He fails them, often. Now, he watches snowflakes swirling against the dark window, concentrates on the weight of Stewy against him, the way his body has gone still. Every cell in Kendall’s body is awake, and wanting. Still, he doesn’t move. This is a test. He makes up the rules in his head: Stewy gets better, doesn’t die of exhaustion, and Kendall will sober up. He’ll quit drugs, drink way less, be a good influence. He can do it. He doesn’t believe in God, really, but he knows there’s some kind of karmic balance sheet in life. He knows there are deals to be made.
Outside on the street, there’s a muffled commotion, a fight, maybe, and then a police car must pull up right under their building; no sirens, but for almost half an hour the flashing red lights turn the apartment bright then dark again, spinning across the ceiling like Christmas lights. Stewy sleeps through it.
The snow starts to accumulate against the window, and a hopeful feeling rises in Kendall’s chest. Like maybe he has fixed this, at last.
Stewy never got a diagnosis, never went to the hospital—but it was drugs, obviously. They both knew it. All of them, the symphony of uppers and downers and everything in between that Stewy had been hitting since he was fifteen—it all caught up with him, finally, smashed into the wildly firing synapses of his nightmare-prone brain and just, bam, fried the system, kept him awake for a month while his body did a full shut-down.
They were twenty-one and Stewy had already reached the spectacular low-point of his drug habit. Forever after that, he had it perfectly calibrated again.
And all Kendall’s lows were still to come.
3.
They are forty-one, forty-two, who’s counting, right? They still talk about the insomnia month, the way people talk about where they were on 9/11, this thing they can’t quite believe really happened. In their telling and retelling of it, it gets ever more extreme—Stewy took so much of everything in college that he didn’t sleep for three months, he was put in a coma, his heart stopped. They both know how to tell the story so it’s funny.
That month is etched permanently in Kendall’s memory, like a cigarette burn on a carpet. He sees Stewy the way everyone else sees him—immaculate, impeccably groomed, in total control—but can simultaneously conjure Stewy at twenty-one, wrecked and desperate and sitting crying on Kendall’s bedroom floor, delirious with exhaustion. The weird intimacy of it changed them a little bit, Kendall thinks. Sure, they’d been in an ill-defined but kind of mind-altering sexual relationship for several years at that point. But that month was something different.
They’re forty-one, forty-two, Kendall’s got a divorce and kids and rehab and a couple of kind-of suicide attempts under his belt, plus a dead dad and the viscerally unpleasant memory of his sister offering him a crown and then taking it away. It’s a lot.
Stewy has dealt with him in multiple states of despair since then. It’s actually embarrassing. He’s gotten ugly drunk, ugly high, till Stewy has had to actively take drinks from his hand, drag him from bars. He’s gone from catatonic to manic to filled with rage and saying terrible things he can’t take back. But it turns out rage is only about five degrees removed from desire, and Stewy always liked post-fight sex, something about the adrenaline, so yeah, they've ended up fucking again.
And that turns into Kendall staying at Stewy’s for days, weeks on end, until it’s turned into something weirdly fucking domestic, and that’s when he finds out that Stewy still has nightmares, which upsets Kendall for reasons he can’t even articulate.
‘Oh my god. Dude.’ Stewy’s stirring sugar into his morning coffee, not yet showered, barefoot on the kitchen floor. ‘Sleep in the other fucking room if I’m waking you up, but there’s nothing to analyse here. Nightmares are just dreams. You have nightmares. Everyone has nightmares.’
Kendall’s sitting at the counter, hands wrapped around his own coffee. ‘But I know what mine are about. Yours are like—what are they about?’
‘They’re about you. They’re about this conversation.’
‘There has to be something, dude, like there’s something just buried in your memory and your mind doesn’t know how to deal with it. The last three nights in a row, you fucking woke up terrified.’
‘Okay. Okay. It’s true. I don’t like talking about this, but I fought in Vietnam. People don’t know that about me.’
‘Okay, fine.’
‘The things I saw, bro. The things I did. You wouldn’t believe.’
‘I’m actually just trying to help you. This has been your whole life. Aren’t you tired of it?’
‘It’s not my entire life. It comes and goes.’
‘So when does it come? When does it go?’
‘It comes when you start talking and it goes when you shut up.’
‘You cared enough in college that you took a bunch of random pills from Danny Everett’s mom that stopped you sleeping for a month and nearly killed you.’
‘Whatever, everyone experiments in college.’
‘You could just—you could try therapy, you don’t know, it might help.’
‘I’ve tried therapy! I’ve done therapy! It bored the shit out of me. Kendall, they’re just dreams. They aren’t real. Why can’t you let this go?’
‘Because I’m—’ Kendall trips on his words, has a sudden, terrible thought. ‘Is it me? Is it something to do with me? Is it just when I’m with you?’
‘Oh my god. Ego, much?’
‘I should, you know, I should, I don’t have to, I could.’ Stewy looks at him, waiting for the end of the sentence. ‘I don’t have to be here, so much,’ Kendall says, finally. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be here all the time.’
Stewy’s face goes blank. He sips his coffee, puts it down. ‘Okay, cool,’ he says. ‘And what have I said to make you think that’s what I want?’
‘I don’t know. You’re having nightmares.’
There’s a long pause. Kendall can’t quite meet Stewy’s eye. Then Stewy says, ‘You know what, maybe it is you, Kendall. Knowing you is kind of—I mean, it is kind of traumatising. The first time I met you you had a black eye. You remember that? Literally the first time. You said you took a tennis ball to the eye.’
‘I did,’ Kendall said, softly.
‘Yeah, ‘cause your fucking dad hit a tennis ball at your face. Do you know how—’ Stewy stops, looks away like he’s organising his thoughts. ‘Loving someone,’ he says, ‘and not being able to help them, is a real headfuck. I mean, really.’
‘I know,’ Kendall says. ‘That’s why I’m—that’s why. The nightmares.’
Stewy’s eyes go soft. He sits down, opposite Kendall. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘You can help me. You want to know how? Fucking, get your shit together and try and be happy. Try and fucking chill out. Spend your money on some stupid shit you like, and stop getting high without me. That’s it. I refuse to be fucking narcotics anonymous around here, but you seriously—you seriously need to wind it down, ‘cause I’ve watched you go off the rails a bunch of times now, it’s actually not that entertaining, and I’m not fucking getting sober just to be a good influence on you, okay?’ He pauses. ‘That’s it.’ His voice goes gentle. ‘And don’t—don’t leave. Maybe don’t leave. Stay here. Stay here really. Get your shit. Move here. Stay.’
The whole scene is already so fucking domestic it’s almost obscene—early morning, first cups of coffee before phone calls start or the housekeeper arrives, Stewy’s scruffy beard and tired eyes. And Kendall is tired, too, and so it’s hard to process what Stewy is saying.
‘Uh huh,’ Kendall hears himself say, stupid. He swallows. ‘Well, yeah.’
‘Yeah what?’
‘I could stay.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You think you’ll stop having nightmares?’
‘No, dude. I don’t. You can’t fix my problems, Kendall, and I clearly can’t fix yours, okay? But it’s nicer to wake up and you’re there. So if it’s like—’ he stops, waves a hand vaguely—‘if you think it’s nice that I’m there, and excuse me while I kill myself for saying this, then let’s do that, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Kendall hears himself say, unmoored by the conversation, feeling like something enormously important has happened and he's almost missed it.
Stewy grins at him. He looks the same as he always has, really, the same eyes, the same rough glow of confidence he had at fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five.
‘Perfect,’ Stewy says. ‘Fantastic. And look, if it helps, I’ll try and unearth some trauma for you. You’re right, there has to be something I’ve repressed. Really dark stuff, make your dad issues look like a walk in the park. I’ll dig it up, it’s in there.’
‘Thank you,’ Kendall says. ‘That’s, yeah. I’d appreciate that.’
Later, just gone midnight, Stewy is already asleep. Kendall wraps himself around him, presses his face into the back of Stewy’s neck. Stewy mumbles something vaguely into the pillow. ‘Sorry,’ Kendall whispers. ‘Don’t wake up.’ They both have an early morning—Stewy a conference call and Kendall some stupid lawyer’s meeting. Kendall can’t sleep, but he tries not to move around too much. Ever since that month in college, it’s always been something of a relief to know that Stewy can sleep; the idea of accidentally waking him is awful.
Kendall’s still awake an hour later when he feels Stewy’s legs start to twitch, feels the whole length of his body go tense, his throat catching as he breathes. ‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Kendall whispers, wondering if he can cut a nightmare off before it has a chance, slide himself into Stewy’s sleeping brain and divert, without ever waking him. There’s got to be a technique for this, a book he could read, a website. ‘It’s okay, dream about something nice,’ he whispers, right against Stewy’s ear. ‘Everything’s good, Stew.’
There’s no light at all in the room, Stewy insists on black-out blinds and no electronics at night. So Kendall can’t see him, can’t tell if his eyes are open. ‘Everything’s good,’ he whispers again, with all the conviction he can find, in the dark. Then he lies as still as possible, pressed up against Stewy’s back, waits until he feels Stewy relax again, until his breathing evens out.
It fucking worked, he thinks: nightmare diverted. Stewy’s sleeping peacefully. It’s tempting to wake him up and tell him. I slayed the demon, dude. I put out the fire. Who fucking said they couldn’t fix each other’s problems?
He’s asleep himself minutes later, dreams of snow against the window and flashing red lights.