Thomas & January (Sleepless 2)

The next morning, I grabbed my duffel as well as January’s.

“Good morning,” January greeted me.

“‘Mornin’.”

“Oh! Oh, dear!” January suddenly exclaimed.

My head whipped around toward her. “What’s wrong?” I asked, dropping our bags to the floor. My hands searched her body for injuries.

“Oh, it’s just, I don’t know how to tell you this...”

“What?” I asked, my heart beating wildly in my chest.

She eyed me carefully, with pity in her eyes. “Follow me, I need to show you something.”

I picked our bags up and followed her into the room, prepared to hear her admit to everything, to hear she couldn’t take the burden of the guilt. I sat at the edge of her bed after abandoning the bags on the floor. I looked up at her when the door clicked shut.

“What did you need to show me?” I asked solemnly.

“This,” she whispered, taking my face in her hands and kissing me harshly.

And like a moth to a flame, I grabbed her and brought her to my body, bringing her on top of me as we laid back on her bed. I kissed her back like there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow, like I wouldn’t get the chance to kiss her like that again.

She stopped me and brought her face mere inches above mine. “Tom,” she said.

I closed my eyes briefly. “Yeah?”

“Whatever it is that’s bothering you. Stop it. You’ll get through it. We’ll get through it.”

She kissed me again and we made out like that for an hour. I could have done it all day with her. She did love me. She had to. It was in the way she breathed in my mouth when she kissed me, the way she grabbed my shoulders to get as close to me as possible, in the way she reassured me that we’d get through whatever was bothering me. She had no idea the magnitude of my troubles but she said "we’d get through it." There was no way she could betray me. She loved me. She loves me, I kept repeating to myself.

“I think we missed our train,” she said behind closed eyes, still inching her way up my neck.

“I don’t care,” I told her. “We’ll book another room here and go straight to the Windmill Festival tomorrow.”

We laid like that the rest of the day talking and making me forget the telephone call...sort of.

Because seeds of doubt are one of those things. They fester and burrow and feed off uncertainties until they’ve grown into one massive tree of shades and shadows that hover over all you've known confidently as the truth. The leaves rustle and whisper in your ear all the everythings you wished to God weren’t true and they are unrepentant, determined to convince you that the doubt is out to get you. And although you scream, “Enough!” Ready to chop that damn tree down, they've somehow hidden your ax. It's nowhere to be found.

So the doubt swallowed me whole.

Paris was as we had left it. Beautiful as always, but this time there was a sheen of dishonesty associated, creating a foreboding feeling to permeate my skin. The more I thought about the phone call, the more I realized I couldn’t have heard incorrectly, but maybe I had heard January being used. I thought her too honest, too naive to willingly screw me over. That was not January’s style.

“Back to the hoodie, I see,” January said, breaking me from my thoughts.

“Huh? Uh, yeah. It’s still a little chilly out.” I tugged the hood of my jacket farther over my face.

“Mmm, hmm,” she hummed under her breath.

I wasn’t taking the bait. “There’s a couple of day bands, but I’ve screened them already and I’m not interested.”

“So have I and I concur.”

“I do want to see a band called Clever. Many of the labels are going to be interested in this one, but I know someone who knows someone who got them to see me first.”

“Shut the eff up!”

“No.”