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Nightmare lingering around the fringes, I toss back the covers. I’m halfway to the door before I fully recall that I’m in a dated singlewide with people I don’t know at all.
I yank open the bedroom door. Blue light flickers in the dark living room as I make a beeline for the kitchen where a weak bulb burns over the stovetop.
“Annalise?” Marco rises from the sofa
I keep walking, my parched throat leading me. “N-need a drink.”
“Exactly how I feel after tonight.”
I hear the humor but don’t respond to it. The inability to swallow is unnerving. “Water,” I croak.
“I’ll get it.”
In a flash, Marco is ahead of me, opening a cupboard, filling a cup. I tear it from his hand and gulp desperately.
“You alright?”
Swallowing the last of it, I nod. “My throat was so dry. I was dreaming, and…” Memory cracks open a door. “I was screaming…or trying to, and then…”
Like a racehorse, my heart is off again, my chest tight. Again, I’m drowning, but this time I’m wide awake and on dry land.
“Annalise?”
His voice is closer than before.
“Lise…”
I feel Marco’s securing hand on my shoulder, my back, then both arms wrapping my waist. He pulls me to his chest, same as last time. It’s happening again.
“Shhh.” His hand draws circles on my back. “Breathe. Just breathe.” As with little Lulu, his soft coos and gentle words wash over and wrap around, and right as pure panic about gains the upper hand, air and oxygen refill my lungs.
I start to cry. Not soft, weepy little sniffles, but all-out, wracking, heaving sobs, silent but ugly.
I am pathetic. Pathetic, weak, and a disgraceful blight on womanhood.
Marco is a rock, a solid, earthen dam, holding back the flood of my panic.
Marco
We end up on Mom’s atrociously ugly couch, my bed for the night, me sinking the middle cushion and Annalise wedged into my side, her legs curled beside her. I hate her pain, but I’m rat enough to enjoy the way she feels in my arms. Not gonna lie, I think I have an inordinate need to be needed. It’s a lifelong thing with me that I attribute to growing up the only male in a household teeming with women.
Annalise is different, however, than my sisters. Different in ways I’d be unwise to contemplate in this setting, at this hour.
The replay of Monday night’s football game, my insomnia coping technique, flickers on the television, the sound muted. I didn’t dare turn up the volume for fear of waking her, sleeping mere feet away, but she woke up anyhow and now here she is. She mentioned a dream, but I’m thinking more of a nightmare.
The sobs quieted some time after she buried her face in my shoulder. I give her ponytail a small tug. “You want to talk about it?” Sometimes exposing yuck to the light breaks its hold.
Face practically affixed to my shirt, she shakes her head.
I pat a couple of times. She’s welcome to stay right here for as long as she wants, but I wonder where this night—heck, this whole weird interlude with Annalise Walker—is going to lead.
I take that back. I don’t wonder. I know: Nowhere.
No.
Where.
But I’m not going to lie to myself and say I don’t wish it would. Could. That itself is a tectonic shift for Marco Gonzalez, freewheeling confirmed bachelor, because I’m not talking about just a night.
