Amelia's eyes flew open as she was jarred awake by an unfamiliar sound.

It took a second for her to even remember where she was, why she was lying in an unfamiliar bed. That noise she just heard—it was as if Henry had cried something out, but was it real? Or had it come from the land of her dreams, something she conjured up in the state halfway between sleep and waking?

Rolling over onto her side, she reached for where she'd left her phone on the nightstand. She had to squint as the bright, white light shone into her face; the time was 4:17 a.m. She'd only been asleep for a few hours.

She edged herself out of the bed, the soft carpet greeting the bottoms of her feet as they touched down onto the floor. Now that she was awake, Amelia felt like she ought to go check on Henry. If he was still sound asleep and she'd just been imagining things, she should be able to tiptoe away without him stirring.

She strained to see her surroundings as she stepped out of the room, but she didn't want to turn any lights on without knowing if he'd fallen asleep with his bedroom door open or closed. So she inched forward tentatively, taking the steps slowly—it wasn't like there was anyone else around to observe how silly she might have looked doing it.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she saw that his door was cracked and the faint bar of light that trailed out from inside suggested that he was, in fact, awake. Not wanting to startle him, Amelia nudged it open as gently as she could.

Henry was sitting up in bed, one hand rubbing at his bleary eyes. His cheeks went slightly pink when he saw her there and he hurried to grab his glasses and hearing aids off the nightstand.

"Shit," he mumbled as he was putting them in and she was hesitantly approaching to sit at the edge of the bed. "Did I wake you up?"

"I thought I heard something," she explained, the mattress dipping slightly as she lowered herself onto it. "Are you okay?"

"It was just a nightmare," he said quietly, staring down at the duvet. "I didn't realize I'd made any noise—I guess there's not usually someone else around to tell me."

Her eyebrows furrowed as she studied his face, the circles under his eyes. "Usually...so this has happened before?"

"Yeah," he mumbled. "It happens most of the time."

"You have nightmares every night?"

Henry gave her a look that was probably meant to be reassuring, a small attempt at a smile, but it didn't meet his eyes. "They're not a new thing for me, no. I've learned to deal with them, they've just been worse these past couple of months with..." he swallowed. "You know, everything."

When he struggled to get the last part out without his voice wavering, Amelia knew that he wasn't nearly as okay as he was letting on. And her mind was transported far away from the anger she had harbored towards him earlier—all she could feel was tenderness for him, the desire to take him in her arms and rest his head on her shoulder and murmur to him that he was going to be okay.

"I didn't know," she said.

"I didn't need you to know. You couldn't have done anything to help me."

They slipped into a steady silence, the question of where they stood hovering unspoken in the air between them. Finally, Henry tilted his chin back towards her.

"I really am so sorry about earlier," he apologized again. "But...I'm not sure I fully understand everything that happened. I knew that I startled you, but when you came out of the kitchen and you seemed like you couldn't even breathe, I was scared senseless. I didn't know how to help."

Amelia's chest tightened, throat constricted. Her fingers were starting to fist themselves in the blanket, but she forced them to relax, gradually opening up like flower petals.

She had told him that they were going to talk about this and she needed to keep her word. After tonight, it was obvious that she wasn't going to be able to keep up this game of hiding the truth from him much longer.

"Yeah," she said tightly. "I need to talk to you about that. Just...I need a second."

"Of course," he said softly. "It doesn't—it doesn't literally have to be right now."

"Yeah, it does," she mumbled. "You need to know the truth."

She took in a small breath through her nose, then let it out. Then repeated it once more. Then decided that she wasn't going to look at him while she told this story because she wasn't going to be able to get through it otherwise.

"What you did. With the glass. I know you weren't trying to, like, intimidate me or something. I'm sure that wasn't even crossing your mind. But, um, it affected me pretty badly," she admitted. "When I was with Colton..."

She could already feel her eyes wanting to water up, so Amelia stared up at the ceiling, finding it slightly easier to speak into the emptiness, as if she were merely narrating this to herself and not another person.

"...He would, he would do stuff like that. Like breaking things when he got angry, when we were fighting. And he'd, um...sometimes he would throw them at me. Or shove me into things, or...or hit me."

Another breath in, another breath out. Don't cry yet. Don't cry.

"–I just saw him a few hours ago, you know? And I couldn't cry or anything in front of him. I know that going in the first place is my fault. My point is just that I was already thinking about all of that when you came to get me, so when you threw that stupid glass, I just—I guess I just thought the worst. That you were going to hurt me because that's what always happens to me."

Amelia scrunched her eyes shut, fighting back the hot, wet tears, fighting against the wobbling of her voice.

"I can't watch that happen again," she managed to get out. "I can't stay with you if I'm scared of you, Henry, please, please tell me it's not going to happen again."

She knew that she had just stunned him into silence and she couldn't blame him for that, but she was relieved when he finally shifted over to put his arm around her, to draw her to his side and cradle her against his shoulder. And she cried even harder when he pressed a kiss to the top of her head, as he whispered to her that he was never going to let that happen again, that he never wanted to do anything to hurt her, that she was safe with him and he would do anything in his power to make sure she felt like she was.

"I know you didn't know," she eventually hiccuped. "I know you didn't think about it and I'm not—I can forgive you. You can be upset enough that you want to throw stuff, but you have to promise me that you're not going to do it regardless, not even when you're alone. You're going to hurt both of us if you do."

"I won't," he promised her, his breath faltering against her skin. "I don't even know what got into me. I'm not that kind of person."

Her tears having receded enough that she could take a proper breath or two again, Amelia carefully shifted herself out from the crook of Henry's arm so that she could rest her head on the pillow and see his face.

"You're not an aggressive person," she agreed quietly. "You're the opposite, and that was part of what drew me to you in the first place. I saw you and I saw someone who was so different than what I was used to. And that was what I needed, but I think I might have accidentally made you out in my mind to be a perfect person because of that. Or at least an always calm, always collected person. So...even if you hadn't thrown that glass, if you'd had some other sort of outburst, I think it would have rattled me a little bit regardless."

Her fingertips were stroking along the soft fabric of the pillowcase as she watched him lay down to face her, his expression contemplative.

"That all makes sense. But if that person is who you want me to be..." He shook his head softly. "I can't give you that."

Henry looked like he might have just broken his own heart, as if he wanted more than anything in the world to be able to give her that illusion of him that she'd conjured up.

"Sometimes," he confessed to her quietly. "I wake up in the morning and I just feel like a time bomb, like at any second I'm going to run into whatever the thing is that finally sends me over the edge and crack entirely. You're not blind for not having seen it—I think I've tried to hide the extent of everything from you so that I wouldn't scare you away. But I'm a mess when you're not around, Amelia. What you're seeing right now, the person who's stressed and upset enough that he wants to throw things even if he's not going to do it anymore? That's the honest version of how I'm doing."

She saw the slight motion of his throat as he swallowed, as if he was nervous about what he was going to say next. "But...I'll understand if that's too much for you to handle right now. If you need us to...take a break, I guess."

Something inside of her felt like it was collapsing in on itself, the air getting trapped in her lungs. "Do you want to take a break?" she asked in a strained voice.

"God, no," he whispered, gingerly reaching up to touch her cheek. "I could never—of course I don't want to leave you. But I can see now that I've been naive about how much you've been dealing with and I don't want to turn into another guy that does nothing but hurt you over and over and–"

A tear streaked down his cheek and he hurried to look away from her, pull his hand away from her, but just the sight of it, the fact that it was her grief and not his own that reduced him to tears, was enough to overcome her.

"Henry," she exhaled, touching his shoulder, trying to get him to look at her again. "I wasn't ready to tell you yet. That doesn't mean you've been neglecting me—you make me feel more understood than anyone else I've ever known. My whole life I've felt like people just look at me and don't actually see anything at all. Like I'm invisible. It's different with you."

He slowly nodded his acknowledgment, his face turned up towards the ceiling where she could see it again, but his eyes were wrenched shut as if he was in pain.

"I've already hurt everyone else in my life," he said hollowly. "If you knew the things I've put them through–"

"We all hurt people," she stopped him. "That doesn't mean I want to give up on you."

After a moment, he finally nodded, trying to accept it. And Amelia was, too. It was never going to be easy, coming to terms with the fact that to truly know someone also meant you had the power to truly hurt them. And you would. It was inevitable.

But she didn't want to measure herself by how many mistakes she made, how many times she said or did the wrong thing. She didn't want to see Henry as a mere accumulation of his faults.

Sure, she could measure their worth in their wrongdoings, how many times they argued. But she could also measure it in how often they helped each other back up afterward instead of only saving themselves. And she knew which one she wanted to pick.

So she tucked her head onto his chest, and he lifted a gentle hand to touch her hair, to hold her close. Amelia closed her eyes, feeling happy that this was what she chose.

His voice was a tender flutter against her hair. "Amelia?"

"Mmm?"

"Promise me you won't go back to him again for my sake. I don't think I can live with myself if I know you're putting yourself in danger for me."

"I promise. It was stupid."

"We all do stupid things sometimes."

Her hand came to a rest on his chest, her palm touching the place where she could feel the steady beating of his heart. But Henry took her hand in his and turned it over.

"You're hurt," he murmured.

The small line where she'd accidentally cut herself on the glass was still tender and red, but her mind had been in so many different places since she woke up that she hadn't even been thinking about it.

"It's just a little cut. It's okay."

But he was already shifting his weight out from under her so that he could stand up. Amelia watched him retreat to the bathroom, listened as he quickly scavenged through the drawers for something. When he returned, sitting back down at her side, he held a bandaid and a tube of Neosporin.

So she held out her hand to him. He gently cradled it in his own, her palm still facing upwards, and used his other hand to carefully dab a dot of the cream onto the cut. Amelia was watching his face, the look of concentration he wore, eyebrows slightly scrunched, lips parted. The warm light of the lamp on the opposite side of the bed haloed his hair in amber, and he handled her as carefully as if she were something holy.

"There," he said delicately once he'd wrapped the bandage around her finger. "All done."

She leaned over to place a kiss on his lips, to linger there for a long moment and to hope that it captured all the things she couldn't say with words.

"Thanks," she murmured, her nose rubbing against his. Her heart started to flutter in her chest. "Would...would you hate it if I wanted to stay here with you for the rest of the night?"

"Please stay," he breathed back.

Silently, she nodded, and he drew back from her so that she could slip herself under the blankets. Henry crossed to the other side of the bed to turn off the light, sending them into a peaceful darkness that was softened by the faint glow of a distant streetlamp outside. She felt him pull back the corner of the blankets, felt his steady weight settle onto the mattress next to her.

And she closed her eyes when she felt the crescent of his body come to shelter hers, his lips pressing a kiss onto her cheek.