“Hello,” I say.
“Hello.”
He doesn’t turn around, just continues to look out at … nothing. He’s gazing into the darkness. I put my arms around him, because I don’t want him to be sucked in.
“Go back in the house,” he says.
“No,” I tell him. “That’s not my house anymore.”
“Was it ever?”
“No.”
I bury my face in his back, between his shoulder blades, and breathe him in.
“Will you leave me?” he asks.
“No. Never.”
“If you do not face the enemy in all his dark power, one day he will come from behind, while you face away, and he will destroy you.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so I hug him tighter.
He turns to face me, and my breath is caught between his beauty and his words. Muslim.
“Come with me,” he says.
“What about Kit?” Kit is leaking into this dream, already the red lights are turning yellow. I can hear a voice calling me from somewhere in the distance.
“You already tried that dream.”
I laugh, because I have. In my waking life, I have spent the last year fighting to understand that dream. To obtain parts of it. Maybe I’m tired of trying to fit into that dream. I’m not an artist. I’m not a wife and mother. I’m not anything. Just Helena.
“Then let me wake up,” I tell him. “So I can find you instead.”
And I wake up.
By the following day, my fever has spiked to 102, and June is threatening me with the emergency room. She looms over me in the most normal clothes I’ve ever seen her in.
“I’m fine,” I tell her from underneath my pile of blankets. “It’s just a head cold.” But, even as I say it, I know that a head cold has never felt like this. I can’t even stand up let alone walk into the ER. I lie curled up in the damp sheets and remember what it was like to be with Muslim. His icy eyes as he led me not to his hotel room, but to a graveyard.
“Why did you bring me here?” I’d asked.
Lips furled into a smile, he’d touched my neck with his cold fingertips and then my hair. I was learning that sometimes he was hot and sometimes he was cold. Both in temperament and body.
“This is where I want you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re in love with someone else, and I want those feelings to die.”
I’d let him try to kill them. He’d lifted me onto the brick wall of a mausoleum, and I’d wrapped my legs around his waist. Softly, he’d kissed me, and I had been surprised at his gentleness. Everything about him was lion-like. When you pressed your fingertips to his skin you could feel the power rippling beneath your touch. He was not a normal man.
“Talk to me, Helena,” June says. “You’re acting weird, and it’s freaking me out.”
I look at June and nod. Fine. I’ll let her take me to the doctor. I just want it to stop. She runs around the cottage, frantically gathering things, then she loads me into the front seat of her car still wrapped in blankets.
I see the worry on her face right before I fall asleep again.
“Helena? Helena, wake up.”
I slowly open my eyes. I feel like I am a thousand years old. Everything is heavy and stuck together. We are at the hospital. People are walking toward the car. They help me out and put me in a wheelchair. I fight them, try to push their hands away.
“I’m different,” I tell them. But they don’t seem to know what I’m talking about. I feel cold air on my skin, and I think of the graveyard. Muslim’s mouth sucking, his hands gripping the sides of my panties, and pulling them down. It had been so cold that night.
“Helena, we’re moving you to a bed…”
I don’t want to be on a bed. I want to be on the wall. There’s sharp pain in my arm. Is it the brick? Or a needle? It’s a needle. I moan. I don’t think I have a cold. Where is June? Where are my parents? If I’m going to die, shouldn’t they be here? He’s inside of me. He bites my shoulder as I arch in his arms. Need climbs, and then I tumble backwards. An orgasm … sleep … it’s all the same right now.
Kit is in the room when I wake up. I lift a hand to my face and groan.
“What the hell?” I say.
“Walking pneumonia,” he says. “Extreme dehydration.”
“That’s ridiculous. It’s just a cold.”
“Clearly.” He leans forward, hands clasped between his knees.
I want to ask him for a mirror, but that’s probably not what a hospitalized woman should be thinking about.
“Am I sufficiently hydrated?” I ask. God, I haven’t seen him in so long. He’s so beautiful.
“You’re getting there.”
“Why are you being so cold and stiff with me?” I ask. “You’re obviously here by choice, so you could at least be pleasant.”
He smiles. Finally. He gets up and sits on my bed.
“Why are you in Florida?” he asks. “And not in your precious Washington?” He says it in a funny way, and I laugh. My precious Washington.
“Two people I love very much are in Florida,” I tell him. “I came to…”
“To what?” Kit interrupts. “Stop my wedding?”
“That’s very presumptuous of you.” And then, “I thought about it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“But I’m reconsidering.” I don’t like the look on his face. Hopeful maybe? If he doesn’t want to marry Della, he needs to stop the wedding himself. My God, what’s changed in me to make me feel like this?
“Reconsidering me? Or what you feel for me?”
I shake my head. “How do you know I feel anything?”
“I feel it too.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’m reconsidering you. Because you’re a coward. And you’re marrying someone you don’t even like. And now I don’t know if I like you.”
He nods slowly, his eyebrows raised. He’s not smiling at me now.
“But you love me. You don’t have to like someone to love them.”
I frown. He’s right. But not liking someone is enough fuel to walk away from them. Love can only get you to the first fight.
“Ask me to leave her,” he says.