He didn’t move, though. He couldn’t have if he’d wanted to, and he didn’t want to. Even though he was terrified of what he was pretty sure was coming, he could no more have run from her than he could have run from the sun. Instead he just screwed his eyes shut tight, trying to banish the sudden bitter chill overtaking him from the inside out, and forced a deep breath into lungs that didn’t want to cooperate. As he did, he thought about the night he first realized he loved Tessa. It had been another of her nighttime visits, before the talk about teleporting into people’s bedrooms had sunk in. What she didn’t know was that even though he protested, he always liked those visits. So much repression during the day meant that he had more nightmares than most, as his mind tried to vent the emotions he couldn’t let out while waking, and since most of them were negative they lead to some genuinely disturbing nightmares. Tessa’s nighttime visits would wake him from those, wake him not to the dull grey paint on his ceiling but to the smiling face of his best friend, and that smile banished all the demons that haunted his dreams. So even though he panicked at the thought of his parents finding her there, even though he told her that she really needed to knock first, he couldn’t help smiling in spite of himself. That night probably seemed no different to her, but to him, it was. She’d woken him from a particularly bad nightmare, a nightmare about what would happen if he ever gave in to the anger he caged up in his head like an untamed beast, and for a second it had taken every ounce of strength he had not to break down, not to give up. Then he’d seen her face, and somehow, as bad as the nightmare had been, as much horror as it had inspired, it all just melted away at the sight of her smile. The deadly cold that had threatened to settle into his heart fled and instead he felt relieved warmth spread throughout him. Right then, he’d had a moment of clarity, a moment most 12 year olds couldn’t hope to have, but for Patrick, at 12-going-on-30, it came like a curtain being drawn back from his eyes, as if he’d always known it but now was the first time he’d been able to see it.
Watching her across the bed as she’d just grinned impishly back at him while he tried to explain, not for the first time, that she needed to knock before teleporting in at 2am, the epiphany came, revelatory and sudden and causing a momentary heat as intense as any he’d ever felt to spread through him. I love this girl. It didn’t matter to her that she wasn’t really supposed to be there at 2am. It didn’t matter that if his parents caught them, they would likely be in for some trouble. Maybe she didn’t even do it intentionally, but somehow she could always just swoop in and take the broken, tangled mess of his mind and make everything better, set everything to rights just by being her. Right at that moment he hadn’t been able to imagine his life without her, couldn’t imagine any life worth living that didn’t also include Tessa Lewis. He knew she wouldn’t feel the same way about him, knew that at such a young age neither of them were really even supposed to understand that sort of love, so he’d kept his mouth shut and given her the usual half-hearted lecture, but he hadn’t been able to keep himself from smiling a little anyway, even if that was nowhere near the happiness he’d been feeling inside at the time.