Dare Me

Oz laughed hard when I hung up. “She’s not one for subtlety. I’m sure you’ll have her bent over a barrel on the first day.” When I didn’t give him much of a response, he grinned. “Unless, of course, you’ve got a special thing going on with the River girl.”

“Lake.”

“Is it official? Am I gonna be fighting Logan for best man duties?”

“Doubtful.”

“What? Trouble in paradise already?”

The phrase made me snort. My paradise with Lake was defined by trouble. It thrived on it. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?”

“Nothing.” Lake and I were unexplainable. There was a universe of context behind every move we made and every word we spoke. It was pointless to try to get any outside party to understand whatever entity we were on our own. “No trouble in paradise. We’ve been having a good time together,” I said to shut Oz up.

It wasn’t a lie. I’d been enjoying myself with Lake. I forced myself to forget the shitty dreams that had been plaguing me since she left. I made myself bury the dark thoughts. They still lingered in my head and told me she refused to reveal where she went because she had plans to go back. But I stifled them by just being with her, watching her, taking a million notes in my head about the new things she liked. The little habits she’d either developed while she was gone or I’d never gotten the chance to know. They reminded me that she was real, present and right there with me. They brought me closer to her again, connected me back in a way that made me confident that I’d feel it in the air next time – feel it in her body if she was thinking about disappearing.

I watched her sleep the way I used to. The sound of her breathing was still exactly the same. But in the night, she always found her way to the very edge of the bed, till she was almost falling off. She’d stay asleep but sigh with relief when I pulled her back and bury herself straight into my chest. In the morning, she wandered aimlessly all over the house while brushing her teeth. A new habit. She sometimes started the coffee machine or flipped through a magazine with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. I told her to stop because I loathed the idea of toothpaste existing outside the bathroom but I eventually started following her, mostly because I was curious to see where the hell she was going, what she was even up to. Only she could be so fucking annoying and cute in one shot.

They were small things that shouldn’t have been a story but I’d been without Lake for long enough to recognize that simply watching her was a privilege. Her every move around the house was something I took in with pure fascination.

I loved it. But in our fashion, of course, it all came with a downside.

Whenever I asked where the new habits came from, Lake gave a strained smile and some generic answer that I knew was a cover-up. A complete lie. I tried not to let that ruin it for me because for all the thrills and success that I’d achieved in recent years from building a business from just about the ground up, I was somehow finding the most satisfaction in living with Lake. Just existing with her again. I looked at her and knew I didn’t want anyone else. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever see in my life and the best feeling I could ever wish for. There was only one thing left to want with her but obviously, it was an important one – the security of knowing that she was here to stay.

*

I tossed hard in bed. I felt it yet I didn’t stir or wake and with that, with the first chords of the song, I knew what was coming.

I’d been having the dreams of Lake for so long that even in my sleep, I knew where I was – at home, in bed, simply enduring the bullshit my sick brain still insisted on putting me through. It started the same every time, with an achingly accurate flashback to the day she left. The memories were still vivid. It was a Sunday and rainy. I was twenty-one, Lake some months from the same age. She lived in a dorm and I had my own apartment but we spent a couple weeks out of every summer living with my mom at the townhouse because it made her happy. She needed the company.

In my dream, I always carried the context of the night before. We’d been having dinner when my mother had asked Lake if they could do brunch the way they used to when she first moved in – big and theatric, a dazzling event complete with Ella Fitzgerald blaring on the speakers and cheek-to-cheek tangos down the hall. Lake cringed at the childish memory but said yes – as long as my mother made Liège waffles. “Deal. And don’t you back out on it, girly, because I have a surprise for you.”

I rolled my eyes. I knew what it was. I was there when my mother came home laughing to herself because she’d seen and randomly bought a full-on tango dress complete with a flower hairpiece and dramatic ruffles at the bottom. “Remember when Lake and I used to dance down the hall to the kitchen? Wouldn’t it be funny if I wore this to wake her up one day?”

“If she was five.”

“Oh – you,” she huffed. She wagged an accusing finger at

me. “You, Callum Pike, are never any fun at all.” But then she came to the couch, grabbed my head and planted a kiss on it because she was unflappable in her Lake-inspired moods.

The next morning, I woke up before anyone else. My internal clock hadn’t kicked the early bird habit from high school, when I had an hour of wrestling practice before class even started. I was having my first breakfast when my mother came downstairs to ask me how she looked in her ridiculous dress. I told her she looked like an extra in a low-budget movie. She knew it wasn’t a compliment but she decided to take it as one and that made me laugh enough to follow her and go witness the stupid dance.

The dream started every time with a flurry of red – my mother’s dress as she rushed to the hall after the speakers finished the first song. She always let a different one play out first – a way of guaranteeing that Lake had already stirred enough to realize that there was music and music meant she should get up and get ready to dance. Her end of it generally started with groaning and calling out from behind her door. “No! Please! I don’t want to do this anymore!” Pretty much every time, she wailed something to the like but it never actually stopped her from laughing her ass off when my mother burst into her room with some deliberately shitty interpretation of a Latin dance move. It made no sense considering the Fifties jazz on the speakers but it didn’t have to because it had them both cackling like it was the funniest thing in the world.

“Heaven… I’m in Heaven…”

Their song wafted in my ears. I saw the red ruffles moving, heard my mother’s laugh as she delighted herself down the hall. “You better be awake by now, Sleeping Beauty,” she called when we didn’t hear Lake’s usual protesting. I shouted something about her hurrying up because I was hungry. The food always smelled too good to wait for but everything we did in that house hung on her approval, so I stood there, vaguely entertained but still thoroughly annoyed. I was planted square at the end of the hall when my mom burst into Lake’s room with a laugh and a “ha!” and a big cha-cha move. Her arms were high in the air, reaching straight for the sky.

I remembered the sound when they fell straight to her sides.

“And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…”

I remembered the twisting in my stomach because while I didn’t have a view of her face, I knew from the way she stood that something was wrong. I was a prideful, eye-rolling kid. But urgency paced my every step down the hall that morning because my mom was standing there as if the world had just ended and for some reason, my heart knew that for once, she wasn’t being dramatic. I could feel the moment was real without even seeing her eyes. The air had decidedly shifted. Joyous just before, it filled suddenly with shadowy gloom and now their gleeful song was grating on me.

“And I seem to find the happiness I seek…”

It echoed loud, flared with distortion in my ear. I memorized the tune with those famous lines sandwiching my mother’s piercing cry.