Sweet Romance15 min read
He Dreamed Me Back: The Months We Lived Between Sleep and Daylight
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I first knew Dalton Bullock as a shape in morning traffic, an efficient voice in meetings, and a face I could not stop writing small, private stories about in my head.
"Do you remember which slide goes next?" Aldo asked me once in the conference room, and I looked up, blinking, because for a second all I could see was Dalton's profile at the head of the table, the way his jaw was always calm.
"It's the financial one," I said, though my voice trembled a little. "Third slide." I hated that he could make my pulse skip without even knowing me.
I had been carrying him like a secret for a year. I told nobody the dream details. I told nobody that sometimes, at two a.m., I would wake from a night that had felt more like another life: him warm, patient, amused. I told nobody that I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and practice saying his name out loud—Dalton—like a charm.
"You're way too quiet today," Julia Howard whispered beside me when we pushed through the elevator doors. "You look like someone stole your dessert."
"I am fine," I lied. "Just tired."
He never knew. In waking life, Dalton hardly noticed me beyond the polite nods you might give to a neighbor in an office building. In my dreams, we lived the kind of small, soft things that become the daydreams of someone who has learned to love in fragments: shared umbrellas, clumsy kitchen kisses, his hand like an anchor at the base of my spine when thunder made the windows sing.
"Stop staring," Julia said later over cups of burnt office coffee. "He's not your poster boyfriend."
"He's not even my poster," I mumbled. "He's a dream."
"Then keep dreaming," she said. "It's free."
It felt cheap at times, like a private corner where I could keep tenderness without risk. But the dreams were not always gentle. Once, he stood outside my apartment in the rain, shivering and febrile, his breath clinging white in the air.
"I tried to remember the address," he said once in a dream voice that I could still hear when I woke, the way someone speaks under water. "Are you near the old river street?"
I woke, soaked in sweat and needing to move. There are people who call those impulses coincidence, hearts that simply tune to the world. I decided to check. I wrapped a coat around my pajamas and ran through the city rain to the only late-night pharmacy I knew.
"I have trouble breathing," I told the pharmacist, and the clerk's blank look made me feel absurd. I bought cold medicine, fever patches, three boxes of pills and a pair of cheap masks.
"Who are you getting these for?" the pharmacist asked, bagging them. "You look like you need them yourself."
"Someone else," I said. The answer landed with a weird, guilty warmth.
I did not have Dalton's address. I had cribbed at office chatter and that small world of numbers and floor plans. I used an old company directory entry that gave me a building number, and I walked until I found his door. My fingers trembled when I left the package on his stoop and rang the buzzer with a borrowed courage.
The door's small peephole slid open a crack. "Who is it?" a sleepy voice asked.
"Delivery," I lied, and then I was running away because that's what cowards do when their hands are full of hope.
"You are being ridiculous," Julia told me the next morning. "This is borderline stalker." She was right, but I kept doing the ridiculous thing. I kept thinking of him because the dreams bled into the day in strange ways. When he had a fever, I somehow felt cold. When he had an odd scar by the ankle, somewhere in the dreams my hand had brushed the same place.
"You're giving evidence that you're emotionally attached," Aldo once said without malice, sitting across from me in the cafeteria. "Healthy obsession, maybe."
I smiled like a person allergic to attention. "It's not obsession. It's... familiarity."
At work there was Brynlee Martin. Brynlee had a smile that would hold still long enough to fool people; it was the perfect smile for midnight messages and edited photos. She was good at being in the right place at the right time. She wore silk blouses and the kind of perfume that spoke of dinners with lighting. She was also the woman who, when I left a little box of medicine on Dalton's stoop, brought up-to-date stories the next morning about who had taken care of him.
"Who left the medicine?" someone asked at lunch once.
"It was—" Brynlee answered first, and I froze. "A colleague. She was very sweet to bring it. Thank you, Sara," she said with a twinkling nod as if she had saved a life.
I felt my throat close around a small, sour stone. "That wasn't me," I said into my tea. "I didn't—"
"Sure you didn't," Brynlee said too loud. "You would have called us so we'd all fuss over you."
Everyone laughed like they were at a light dinner show. No one noticed the tremor in my fingers. No one saw how my dreams grew heavier that night.
"I hate how easy she is with words," I told Julia later. "She smiles and suddenly everyone believes she is the hero of the story."
"People like her," Julia said. "And people like you are invisible until you decide not to be."
"I don't know how to decide," I said, which was true. In dreams I decided for hours. I made him laugh until he choked; I told him secrets about my childhood that I had never told anyone. I believed those minutes were real. They felt like rehearsed truth.
Then things began to twist in ways I couldn't have planned. Dalton started appearing in my dreams more often—not as a gentle stranger, but with a clarity that frightened me. One night he looked at me with an expression I could only name as pleading.
"You remember this?" he asked in the dream.
"Remember what?" I answered.
"The apartment," he said. "You promised to say yes."
In the dream he took my hand with a gravity I had not seen before. I wanted to push back and pull away, but my body listened to his voice instead of my reason.
When the dreams multiplied, I panicked. I went to see my cousin, Katherine Barber, who was part-time a counselor and part-time a certified hypnotist. Katherine lived in a tidy apartment with books stacked in even columns. Her voice always smoothed the edges of whatever crisis I brought.
"You can break a pattern," she said, along with the calm that comes from someone who has read the right textbooks. "Dreams can hold you. I can help you let it go."
"Can you?" I asked. I had loved him in a dream for months. I had no idea how to be someone who could give that up.
"I can place an anchor," Katherine said. "I can give your mind a steady place to land so the nightly movies stop casting you in them."
"Do it," I said, and the word felt like closing a bargaining with fate.
Katherine's session worked in ways I did not anticipate. The first night after, the sky above my bed was quiet. I slept and did not wake to the warmth of another man's made-up breath. It felt like sorrow, like letting go of a small house I had been building from spare wood. I returned home to my family for a few weeks to steady. My mother, Sandra Masson, fussed, and my father, Francisco Daniels, talked about how cities ate people in slow ways.
"Stay here," my mother said. "Eat. Don't get lost in the wrong things."
"I'll be fine." I wasn't sure if I was telling the truth.
While I was away, little by little, I learned to notice the day. I noticed the taste of hot corn soup. I noticed that the sun on the county road looked different from the city. I even liked the rhythm of a small town where people said hello to each other without expecting anything in return.
Weeks passed like clean sheets. Dreamless nights folded into one another. I thought the strangest part of my life had been closed like a book. Then, on the quietest possible afternoon, I walked out of the bakery and saw him—Dalton—standing by the newsstand, utterly real, like a person who had been waiting on a page to be reread.
"You're here," I said, because the noise of my heart had to be heard.
He looked at me with a look that was both startled and unbearably calm. "Emersyn," he said, and my name in his mouth unbuttoned some shy courage.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Work," he said. He didn't meet my eyes for long. "I was driving through."
"That's not a real excuse," I said, but even as I spoke I felt my voice turning soft.
He surprised me then. "Are you okay?" he asked.
I could have told him none of this. I could have kept the way the dreams had made me fragile. Instead I said the stupid, honest thing. "I can't stop dreaming about you," I said.
"Dreaming?" His brow crumpled. "Like—about me?"
"Yes," I finished. "For months."
He did not laugh. He looked like he had been struck by a train of small, private facts. "I thought I was the only one," he said quietly. "I thought I was losing my mind."
That was the first time I heard him say that we had been carrying the same strange thing. We stood on the sidewalk like two people who had met in a story halfway through. He told me then, in the silver light of a city afternoon, that he had been dreaming about me for six months.
"Every night," he said. "You were... always there. You were stubborn, and kind, and you called me silly names in your sleep once. I kept hoping the mornings would teach me how to behave differently around you."
I laughed—an involuntary, small sound that broke the tension in the air. "I call people silly names in my sleep?"
"Yes," he said, and his mouth twitched. "You said 'dalton, stop reading the cat's diary.'"
My knees wanted to go. "The cat's diary?"
"I don't know," he admitted, smiling. "I think your subconscious has an imagination."
From that day, things shifted like tectonics. We began to orbit each other in daylight the way we had in the night. He began leaving small coffees on my desk. He would watch me in meeting rooms with a look that mixed curiosity and a tenderness I hadn't known I deserved.
"You look like you are trying not to laugh," Julia said once as she watched me across the room. "It's cute. Stop being tragic."
"It's terrifying," I said. "He is terrifying."
"It's also nice," Julia replied.
And yet, there was always Brynlee in the room. Brynlee liked attention the way moths like flames. She seemed to glide into the places we shared and take small, perfectly posed moments as if they were pieces of property. She smiled so much at Dalton that sometimes I thought the lights dimmed between them.
"She is trying to get close," Julia said bluntly one afternoon. "Stay close."
"I try," I answered, "but it's like trying to speak over a siren."
"Don't let her rewrite the story," Julia said. "You have the receipts, right? The pharmacy messages? The time stamps? You know—evidence."
I held onto the memory of the day I left medicine at Dalton's door. I never told the team; I had never wanted credit for doing something that felt like a kindness. But kindness had to be defended when someone else took the scene and posed with it in the morning like a trophy.
Then one night everything unspooled in a way I could not have expected. We had a department gala at a downtown hotel—an obligatory spectacle full of forced laughs and sparkling lights. I wore a dress that made my shoulders feel broad in a way I liked, and I tried to breathe slow.
"You're not going to sing, are you?" Julia asked me as a dare.
"Absolutely not," I said. "My voice is a hazard."
But the evening had other plans. The program forced pairs on stage for a duet. Dalton's baritone filled the room and built a space where my chest felt too tight to breathe. Brynlee was close to him at the start, her hand sometimes touching his in a way that made my stomach flip.
"Sing with me," he said to me eventually, because he had a way of making impossible things feel like invitations. "Come on, you always make a scene."
My hands shook. The song started. I watched Dalton like a tether. I sang the wrong words sometimes. People laughed as if I was a comic act. The truth is, every wrong note felt like a small and necessary honesty. I didn't belong up there, and I didn't belong in the dream, and I didn't belong next to Brynlee's practiced smile.
That night, when the music faded, Brynlee posted a photo of herself with the caption: "Lucky me, I get to be close to the best baritone in the city." The comment got hearts. Dalton sent one emoji—an ambiguous smile.
It was enough to make me ache. I stopped pretending not to care.
The breaking point came later in the break room, of all places. We gathered around to sample a cake that the office had ordered. "Who left the medicine?" someone asked into the chatter.
"I did," Brynlee answered without a beat. "Took the poor guy a little care package. Just thought someone should."
"Really?" I said, and something clean and cold opened under my breastbone. "You did?"
"Yes," she said, delightfully composed. "I couldn't just see anyone cold and sick."
"I left the medicine," I said. My voice was small but present. "I was the one who left it at Dalton's door."
Her smile flickered like a damaged bulb. "Oh," she said, like someone admitting a small, inconvenient truth. "I must have mixed it up."
"Mixed it up?" I echoed. "You lied, Brynlee."
Faces turned. The small office crowd became a theater. I felt my pulse rise in my throat as if I had swallowed something sharp.
"Why would you lie?" Aldo asked, because Aldo always asked the simple questions.
Brynlee's face changed slowly, like a cloud rolling over a plain. "I thought it made me look good to help," she said. "I was trying to be kind."
"You pretended to be the one who cared for a sick colleague," I said. "You took the credit for something you did not do. You lied in front of everyone."
Her smile thinned into something brittle. "It wasn't a big deal," she said at first. "People exaggerate."
"Not a big deal?" I asked. "You posted about it. You accepted thanks that were meant for someone else."
The crowd around us pulled in. Some people murmured; some took their phones out as if to record the unfolding thing. Brynlee's breath hitched. Her eyes darted to the door. She realized, perhaps, that this was no longer a small office tiff but a place where people would decide whose truth mattered.
"You think you own kindness," she said, the sarcasm a thin paper cut. "You think you own being good because you left a bag on my boss' doorstep?"
"I left it because I wanted him well," I said. "I didn't want thanks. I only wanted him to get better."
She laughed then—too sharp and too loud. "So noble," she sneered. "Save the sanctimony."
"And you lied to make yourself look good." My voice gathered momentum. "You presented yourself as the savior. You took the story and sold it."
The room shifted. Conversations pressed into silence. People felt the gravity of confession, the delicious discomfort of being witness to someone's rearranged truth.
Brynlee's face had a few stages: first, surprise—because she'd been caught; then anger—because the story she had curated was slipping; then denial—her mouth formed a string of protests; then panic—her hands fluttered like a trapped bird's; and finally, in a very human collapse, she tried to salvage any sympathy she could.
"It was a joke," she insisted, and her voice cracked. "We were all laughing. I didn't mean to—"
"You posted it," I said, careful now. "You took photos. You thanked people publicly."
Her eyes flicked to the phones in other people's hands. "Maybe I overstated it," she said, voice small, eyes suddenly wet. "Maybe I wanted to be seen."
"Being seen doesn't give you the right to steal someone else's moments," Dalton said then, and his voice had the effortless weight that made people listen. He had been quiet until then, his jaw clenched, but he moved now as if into a moonlight he had reserved.
Brynlee's denial unraveled. "I didn't think—" she said. "I didn't mean anything by it."
"That doesn't excuse it." Dalton's face was stony. "Kindness isn't a commodity. You don't take it and put it on display and call it yours."
People started speaking up. "That's not right," someone said. "She should apologize."
"Public apology," another voice suggested. "She should tell everyone who actually did it."
Brynlee's composure broke. She began sputtering excuses, each weaker than the last. Someone in the corner—Alfredo—explained clearly how he had overheard Brynlee telling the story of 'the kind colleague' exactly as if it were a tale she had performed. There was a screenshot of her post. The evidence lined up like blocks.
Brynlee's face went through more color than I thought a face could hold. "You—" she began, but the words failed. She pressed a hand to her mouth. People were taking pictures now. The hum of small talk had turned into a hum of validation for the person who had been wronged.
"Say something true," Julia said, quiet but fierce. "Just tell the truth."
For a long, almost unbearable beat, Brynlee seemed to be calculating. Then tears came—slow at first, then in heavier strings down her cheeks. "I wanted to be noticed," she confessed, voice small and raw. "I wanted... I'm sorry."
People recorded. Some clapped. A man at the table murmured, "At least she admits it." A woman hissed, "I can't believe she would lie like that." Others leaned in to ask Dalton if he was okay. He nodded, but his face had a hard line that made my chest ache. The crowd's reactions were a mix of disgust, whispers of betrayal, and a few who felt pity for a young woman who had been publically unmasked.
Brynlee's collapse became performative for a moment, because she had always been performative. She sank onto a chair as if the weight of attention had become too heavy to carry and began to beg, quietly and incoherently, for understanding.
"I was wrong," she said. "Please. I'm sorry."
Her voice went small. People softened a little, as humans do. A few turned away. Someone called for the HR manager, which made her eyes widen in terror. She began to pace, the entire sequence of her composure falling like cheap wallpaper.
It was ugly and necessary. I did not savor it. I had wanted the truth for the sake of the small kindness I had given him, not to watch a human being unravel under public scrutiny. But the office had been a theater of small thefts, and a theft had finally been exposed.
Afterward, when the room had quieted into awkward clusters, Dalton found me by the drink station.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I am," I lied. "Mostly."
He took my hand then, in a gesture that was gentle and sure. "Thank you," he said. "For telling the truth."
"I didn't tell it for you," I said, surprising myself with the honesty. "I told it for me."
He smiled with a tenderness that felt like a bridge. "Still," he said. "I'm glad you did."
That night the dreams returned, but they were no longer the only language between us. Slowly, the dream life and the waking life threaded together. He learned my weird habits. I learned that he had a scar on his thumb from when he was nine, and that he would sometimes talk to his cat as if the cat were the only wise person left in the world. He brought me home-cooked breakfasts that tasted better than anything I had ever ordered.
"You're clingy when it's quiet," he teased once as he smoothed a hair behind my ear.
"You're clingy when it's noisy," I shot back.
He kissed me then, slow and real and clumsy in daylight. The first kiss in the kitchen felt like a confirmation: the dreams had been an invitation, and now we were writing the pages together.
We began to live in the same small orbit. I moved into his apartment. I learned that he kept spare toothbrushes in the cabinet and that the cat—who I had once dreamed about but never expected to meet in reality—liked the inside of my sleeves. He had bought a small pink mug once and hid it in the back of the cupboard because he wanted to surprise me with something silly he'd thought I'd like.
"You planned this for forever?" I asked, when I discovered the back-up mugs.
"File under: predictable," he said. "It's nice to have small certainties."
We fought with a tenderness that made no one lesson—because we had so much else to grow around. Dreams became less frequent, and when they did come, they felt like an old friend's story, familiar and not necessary. We argued about who left the window open. We argued about whose idea it was to adopt a plant that refused to live. We made up by holding each other's hands in public and stealing kisses in elevators.
Not every thing smoothed into simple pleasure. Brynlee kept orbiting like a storm cloud. She tried to press into the spaces between us with the same practiced ease. Once, she emailed our department a long, meandering apology and then, the next day, sent Dalton a passive aggressive message about "trust" that made my skin crawl.
Dalton handled it with a patience that felt like armor. He refused to let her manipulations feel more important than our small, private affection. "We have to live in the light," he told me when I fretted. "Not the shadow of a woman who wants an audience."
And the world obeyed us in strange, gentle ways. One day in the elevator, a junior developer looked at me with wide, grateful eyes. "You lied for that person?" she asked, curiously.
"No," I said. "I told the truth."
She smiled. "Good. It's not always easy."
"No," I agreed. "But someone has to do it."
Months moved like tapestries assembled: some parts messy, some parts exquisite. We made small rituals—a late-night bowl of noodles after a bad day, locking the door and doing a small, stupid dance in the kitchen when we paid a debt early, letting the cat sit on Dalton's lap like it ruled everything.
Once, walking home from the grocery, I asked Dalton the question that had lived inside me like an impatient tenant.
"Do you still dream of me?" I asked.
He smiled, the way one smiles at an honest admission. "Sometimes," he said. "But usually now I dream of the sound the cat makes when you pick it up. Or the way you get wrinkles between your eyes when you're thinking hard."
I laughed. "That's less dramatic than I expected."
"It's more true," he said. "And truth is more interesting."
We had built something that had started as a shared hallucination and become a tender, tentative reality. There were still nights when I would wake with the edge of a dream clinging, but the dreams no longer had the power to steer me. They were ornaments we could look at and then put gently back on the shelf.
One evening, after a long day of mis-sent emails and deadlines, we walked into the living room where the cat was splayed in a ruinous, comfortable pose. Dalton set down two glasses of wine and slid into the couch.
"Do you ever think we should have not told anyone?" I asked, thinking of the way Brynlee had once tried to steal light.
He sipped his wine. "We were always going to be what we were," he said. "A strange connection that turned into something better."
I laid my head on his shoulder and listened to the cat's soft purring.
"Do you regret the way it started?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I don't regret being brave in the dream. I don't regret the person you were while I was asleep. You were honest enough to be sweet."
I smiled. "And you?"
He kissed the top of my head, and the sound of his mouth on my hair felt like the promise of more ordinary mornings. "I would dream of you a thousand times and still want you on the couch next to me," he said. "Because dreams are nice, but coffee is better."
We stayed that night and fell asleep among small, ordinary things. The dream thread between us did not vanish entirely, but it no longer ran the show. It was the delicate seam that had stitched two lives together, sewn by both truth and a public reckoning that had taught us the cost of fabricating kindness.
And when Brynlee's humiliation became a story at work—one people told in gossip and in truth—it served as a reminder that kindness is not a thing to be seized. She left the company months later, her apology a thin echo that the office rooms eventually ignored.
"I'll make sure the cat gets extra treats," Dalton said once, his voice casual. "To balance the karma."
"You should also write a note to your younger self," I teased, "about not dating a girl who likes stage props."
He laughed. "I'll write it in the cat's diary."
We both laughed then, and it felt like home.
The End
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