I smiled in spite of my … well ... my spite. “Yeah, I can do that.” Hesitating, I blurted, “Thank you, seriously. You take really good care of me, better than you’re paid for, certainly.”
“Hey,” I could hear his concern, which made me feel both better, and needy. “You know that I care about you, right? Not just as a client, but a good person. A talented writer. A-”
“I get it!” I laughed. “Thank you. Have a good night.”
“Don’t forget my paragraphs!” he shouted as I hung up.
My sleep was fragmented again. I'd stubbornly stayed up until nearly the dawn, a night owl now, just like Steve Rogers, Handyman, Sex God, and Kind of a Dick. The dreams were vivid….
I was sitting next to the fire pit in front of my cabin, settled into one of the big, comfortable chairs, and enjoying the flames.
“What’s in the letters?” Steve was across from me, lounging in a chair like he belonged there, holding a beer. His gaze held mine as he took a sip from the bottle.
“What- how do you know about them?” I cringed, feeling exposed all over again.
The Fragile Author.
The Nervous Breakdown.
His eyes were glowing again, like the color of the lake reflecting off the moonlight and all I could do was watch them, fascinated. A clear, perfect blue. “Tell me,” Steve said, his bearded face softening just slightly.
Why couldn’t I tell him to go to hell? To go fix something? To get out of my fire pit and stop drinking my beer?
“There’s a man. He wants to kill me,” I said finally. Reluctant to make someone else look at me like I was a victim.
I watched a muscle tick under his beautiful cheekbone, but his expression stayed calm. “Go on, honey,” Steve’s tone was oddly kind, something I hadn’t heard from him before.
I was holding a glass of wine in the dream and I took a gulp. Wow, I could taste the tannins and the sweet bite of blackberries. This was a vivid dream. “The letters started about a year ago, last May, actually. The first one was just the standard fan mail, ‘I love your books,’ blah, blah, blah.” I took another swallow of wine to give myself time. “But the thing with the letter? He writes, ‘You’re just as pretty as a picture.’ Except…” I drank deeply from my wine glass. “Except he’s attached a picture. A real one.”
Steve’s still watching me, unblinking. God, his eyes really are unnaturally blue. “Go on, Aura.”
“The picture is of me. From the day before, sitting in a cafe where I used to write a lot. They’d keep my mug full of coffee- it was so big they used to joke and call it the ‘toilet bowl,’ but anyway…. So that’s scary. I mean, people do know what I look like which makes me regret ever letting James use my picture on the book cover. But I figured he was just a local, you know? He’d seen me around? I was just happy he wrote a letter instead of coming up to me. I’ve never gotten used to that and it’s always awkward and I’m pretty sure they’re always disappointed, and…”
I vividly see all the letters and all the pictures that came after that one. “In the next one, it’s a picture of me at home. I have a place by the water. My desk is by the window and I like to look out while I’m working. In the picture, there’s a glass of wine next to me. He wrote, ‘Your wine glass is so big that I could drown you in it, but I won’t. I’m going to cut you up like a sow and bleed you out like one.”
I didn’t even see him move, but suddenly I was straddling Steve’s legs and his long arms were wrapped around me, rocking me slightly against his chest as he crooned to me. He would kiss my cheek, or an eyelid, then rock me some more. And he never let go, that tight, comforting embrace.
“My poor girl,” he soothed, the sweet words sounding oddly shaped from his stern mouth. “I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anyone hurt you, I promise.”
Despite the fact that this was a dream and really, why was I trying to clarify this to a dream guy, I said, “No, I won’t- Look. I trained in self-defense and handling guns for this reason. I don’t want anyone getting hurt because of me.”
He was running his fingers over the sweep of my shoulder, which was bare, I noticed. The rough pads of his fingertips were those of a man who worked with his hands. They felt oddly good, rasping over my skin.
“Is this why you stay up all night?” Steve whispered, leaning in to run his tongue along the tight, anxious tendon in my neck that always gave me headaches, his tongue was wonderfully cool and soothing.
“Yes,” I groaned as the sweep of his tongue ended in a little nip, right where my jawline met my neck.
“Oh! God, that’s so good…” His hands were moving, one cupping my hip and the other gently stroking a line over my collarbones, almost metronomic. Back and forth, back and forth as he sweetly kissed my mouth. “I st- stay up so I can see him coming. He’ll sneak up on me in the dark, you know. For a while… oh….”
“Why do you think that?” Steve leaned back, studying my expression.
I scrunched my nose, “He quotes passages from one of my books. About a serial killer who murders at night. The character terrorizes his victims for weeks, always at night. Strange sounds, things moved around inside their locked homes. And pictures to show he always knows where they are. That they can’t hide from him. I guess you could say I wrote my own death.”
The giant holding me as gently as a doll was running the tip of his chilly tongue up the long line of my throat. “F- for a while I didn’t sleep at all. I kept drinking coffee and staying awake and then I didn’t even take catnaps anymore. I didn’t sleep for like a couple of weeks and I guess I was screaming a lot because my neighbors called the police and I woke up in the Ha-Ha Hotel.”
“The what?”
His hand was gently squeezing my ass and the other slid down to join it, but in the front, dipping into my underwear, which was apparently all my Dream Self had chosen to don for this engagement.
