They always ended with me in a sweat, waking up startled. Occasionally, I would wake up screaming. Other times, I woke up sobbing.
I was thankful this time it was only the scream. It was easier to blame it on a nightmare. It would get harder if we kept getting closer. If we kept sharing the same bed. Eventually, she would be there for a worse dream. A dream I woke up fighting from.
She needed to know before that happened, but I just wasn’t ready yet. Not to let someone in that deep. The good thing was, usually, when I went back to sleep it was dreamless. My brain would give me the mercy of blank, empty sleep after the nightmares. Like usual, I drifted back to sleep quickly and dreamed no more.
When I woke up, Desiree was already awake. She hadn’t moved out of the bed yet but was sitting up. She was on the last few pages of her book when I glanced at her. She saw me looking and closed the book, a tight smile on her face.
“Good morning,” she said. “Did you get any more sleep?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go make some coffee. You finish your book.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind making it.”
“No, stay comfortable,” I said, sliding out of the bed. “I slept too late anyway.”
Making my way into the kitchen, I turned on the coffee maker and began the routine of making a pot. It was another of the changes to my life that had happened since she came into it. I used to wake up, drink water, and work out straightaway. Coffee didn’t make its way into my system until breakfast. Now, I woke up and made coffee first thing, often starting breakfast before downing my water and starting a modified workout I could do while I was cooking.
As soon as the coffee was going, I drank water and tried to shake off the feeling that I was getting too close. I knew this is what people did. They molded around each other. It was part of forming a relationship with someone. But I didn’t really know how much of a relationship we had. How much of this was real and how much was just because I was in the process of trying to keep her alive? I didn’t really know.
What I did know was that she was trying to get me to open up to her. And I wanted to, but I held a sense of hesitation and that bugged me a lot. A big part of me wanted to open up, to tell her about what the nightmares really were. What my reasons for being in the cabin alone were. I was starting to feel myself crack. But I didn’t want to let her in, not when it would mean she would see all the bad parts of me. All the things that haunted me.
And the reason why I deserved every single bit of it. Every single nightmare was well-earned. The ghosts of my past haunted me because I lived, and as long as I kept breathing, it would keep happening. No matter how much I opened up to her, it wouldn’t stop the nightmares. That was if she didn’t run away from me the second she heard them anyway. I wouldn’t blame her.
I deserved that too.
“Thank you,” she said as I brought the coffee into the bedroom.
Normally, I would never eat or drink in the bed. It was just not something I would ever allow myself to do, even when sick. I’d rather curl up on the couch, making a bed with sleeping bags and pillows, than actually sully my bed with crumbs and beverage spills. But something about the way Desiree looked, curled up in the bed, the sheets over her lap, made me want to let her stay there. I sat the coffee down beside her on the nightstand and went back for a cup of my own. I wasn’t going to allow myself to sit on the bed with it, but I sat on the love seat at the end of the bed instead, turned so I could watch her read.
The morning was fairly peaceful after that. I was tired from the way the nightmare kept me from resting during my sleep, but other than that, I felt good. We ate breakfast in relative quiet, but the tension had lowered quite a bit. It was almost a comfortable silence, though there was still a little bit of awkwardness in it. As I did dishes, she finished her book, putting it back on the bookshelf. She seemed like she was trying to work up to asking me something, and I wiped my hands dry while turning to her.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“I need some things from my house,” she said timidly. “I know it seems crazy, but there are some things there that I really need, and I don’t want to bother Brett to go get them. It’s been two weeks, and I think it might be okay to go back there.”