She's peaceful when she sleeps.
He knows that as a teenage boy, he should be thinking about her breasts, or her legs, or how close she is to him, but all he can look at is how her eyes flutter as she enters a world that is completely her own, a world of dreams where he cannot follow.
He wants to go everywhere with her. But he can't, of course he can't.
She's been different lately. Distant, cold somehow. He hasn't been able to understand why. Her eyes will glass over while he's talking to her but she'll keep nodding, as if to reassure him that she's there, she's listening, but she's not there, not ever really there.
He doesn't know how to make her laugh anymore. It used to be easy. She never used to stop smiling. But now he has to try harder, desperately hard. He sometimes feels as though he's drowning, screaming her name, and she can't hear, can't understand.
And yet he loves her. Of course he does. He always has. He always will. He loves her when she's with him and when she's not, when she's laughing and when she's crying.
But there's something about her when she's asleep, her guard completely down, that undoes him. He wants to touch her, to wrap himself around her and never let her go. But he can't, of course he can't.
Slowly, careful not to wake her, he reaches out and brushes a long strand of hair from her face and twirls it between his fingers. It smells like lemons, like childhood and laughter and sunlight and Clary, a scent that could never be bottled but envelopes him nonetheless.
Suddenly, she stirs and he drops his hand quickly as if it had burned him. "Simon?" she says groggily.
"Hi," he whispers, managing a smile.
"You're still up? What are you thinking about?" she yawns, burying her face in the side of her pillow.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
"Nothing," he replies quietly.
Say you love me. Say you need me. I love you, I love you, I love you.
"Go back to bed. It's one o'clock in the morning," she says, her voice muffled slightly. He sighs and leans back onto his pillows.
He's drowning all right, that much is clear. But what do you do when the thing that's pushing you under is also the only lifeboat in the storm?