Chapter Twenty-One
Collin
Should I invite her to stay? That was the question. If I did, which I believed she was expecting, then I had to tell her about the nightmares. I couldn’t just ignore that, and then scare the bejesus out of her. I’d already avoided talking about why I had them, and there was only so much information I could get away with not telling her before I was being intentionally secretive.
Owen would be the only one home tonight, and that was if he wasn’t out at his hobby. Jesse and Charlotte and Luke and Amber had gone on a double date, leaving instructions for us on where to find them if something happened. Apparently, Charlotte wanted to show them a hotel in Dallas to give them an idea of what they wanted to build on the old lake, so they would be gone overnight. Logan, as usual, was on a shift and would go to his apartment rather than come back here.
Sure enough, when we made it back to the house after putting the horses away, the house was quiet and empty, with just the porch lights and the kitchen light on. It was a small signal we did for each other, keeping the kitchen light on. If one of us was home, the light was off. If the place was empty, it was on. It was developed for Jesse, so he knew when he could bring a girl back to the ranch, but we had all made use of it at one time or another.
Once we were in the kitchen, I pulled out the ingredients to make dinner and steadfastly refused to let Brandy help me. It was just a simple pasta and ragu, so it wasn’t like something complicated, and the ragu couldn’t cook all day like I normally liked it to, so it wasn’t even going to be that great. But it was fast, and still satisfying to eat, so it was my go-to.
As we sat down to eat, I could see how tired she was and chuckled to myself.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Oh nothing,” I said. “I guess I just wore you out.”
I winked, and she blushed.
“Yeah, a little,” she said. “It’s been a long couple of days. I got a text from Basil, by the way. She ran the shop without me and had to shut down because it got so busy she couldn’t keep up with the orders.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said.
“We might have to hire someone else if it keeps up like this,” she said. “Which is scary. Just a month ago, we couldn’t even pay ourselves.”
“It was that bad?” I asked.
She nodded. “I never would have agreed to go on the show had it not been. It’s a miserable experience, and I knew better. But,” she said, “now it’s over.”
“Cheers to that,” I said, lifting the glass of wine I’d poured myself. It would probably last the whole meal, but I had the whole bottle on the table in case she wanted more. She had put away most of her glass and was looking like she had designs on not waking up much in the middle of the night.
Which brought me back to the conversation we needed to have.
I avoided it as we finished eating, and afterwards, she insisted on doing the dishes, so I went and prepared a shower. Unlike our shower from the morning, this time, our primary purpose was to get clean. Not that I didn’t enjoy watching the soap bubbles travel from her shoulders down the curve of her breast and the drip as they tumbled from her nipple down to her lower stomach, where they would make the trip along her hip and to the promised land below.
As we were rinsing off, however, I decided to broach the subject before we were out, dry and too tired to change our minds if she didn’t feel comfortable.
“So,” I said as I got the shampoo out of my hair, “there’s something I need to talk to you about before bed.”
“What’s that?”
“I have… some difficulty sleeping through the night pretty often.”
“Oh. That’s pretty normal,” she said. “Basil does too. She sleeps in two four-hour shifts.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said. “I have waking nightmares. Really bad ones. Sometimes, I will sleepwalk. I’ll wake up in another room, or even outside. It’s kind of dangerous, and one of the reasons I don’t like to travel overnight. At least if I’m on the ranch, I won’t get lost if I sleepwalk. Eventually, by the time I’d wake up, I’d most likely still be on our property.”
She looked concerned but not frightened, so I shrugged.
“That’s all?”
Sighing, I stepped away from the water so she could rinse out the conditioner in her hair.
“Well, no,” I said. This was wretched. I didn’t quite know how to tell her that I didn’t know how violent I might get while I slept and that she might be in danger. “The thing is, I know I have thrown some stuff around before. I know that I have encountered other people while I was sleepwalking and interacted with them as if they were someone else. I simply don’t know what would happen if I was having one of those nightmares and someone was in the bed beside me.”
“You mean you haven’t actually slept with anyone?”
“Not since I went to Iraq.”
“So the nightmares… they are because of your injury?”
“Yes. And what caused it. The whole event around it.”
“I see,” she said. “And you are worried you might hurt me in one of your dream states.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. And I wouldn’t even know it.”
“Okay,” she said, clearly processing things but seeming to make a pretty quick decision. “All right. Well, we will see. Right?”
“We will?”
“Unless you’re not comfortable. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? You don’t want me to stay?”
“Oh, God, no, it’s not that,” I said. “I would love to have you here with me tonight and to wake up next to you. I just couldn’t subject you to that risk without telling you. And I wanted you to be able to make the decision of whether or not you could handle it. I understand if you can’t. I can drive you home.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “Thank you for telling me, but no. I don’t want to go home. I want to be here with you, as long as that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
“Then it’s settled. I’ll keep an ear out for you. If you dream and start to sleepwalk, I’ll take precautions to protect myself.”
We got out of the shower and dried off, neither of us bothering to put on anything. We were comfortable enough around each other naked at this point that it actually felt silly to put on pajamas. Sliding into bed beside her, it was the most natural thing in the world for her skin to be touching mine, and she settled into my arm, her head on my chest, as we both tried to relax.
That night, there were no dreams.
I woke up to the sound of the normal morning alarm, pulling my phone to me to turn it off. She made a soft mumbling sound, shifting over to turn away from me, and I slid my arm out from below her. I wanted to stay there forever, but I had things to do. Plus, I was so damn excited about not having a nightmare while I was curled up with her, I wanted to celebrate.
Still, it was hard to leave her there, naked and curled up in the comfortable blankets.
Hopefully, I would have many more chances to decide to go back to bed for a little while with her.
I grabbed a pair of boxers and some sweatpants and a T-shirt, slipping them on before putting on my slippers and heading downstairs. It was still a little before dawn, so I didn’t want to make a lot of noise. I got my boots on, went and fed the chickens and the pigs and the other livestock that needed their food ready at dawn, and then headed back to the house just as the sun began to rise.
Immediately, I went into the kitchen and pulled out a couple of pans and other various accoutrements. The cake batter she’d made yesterday was still in the refrigerator, so I needed a different mixing bowl to make the pancakes. Along with that, I made bacon, a couple of the T-bone steaks, and a whole mess of eggs. It was a bounty.
Owen came in during the beginning portion of the breakfast-cavalcade and was annoyed that I told him we would wait for Brandy to eat. It wasn’t like it was some big sacrifice, since he normally didn’t eat until he’d done his morning work, but he was annoyed nonetheless. When he finally got back to the house, and the sun was well and truly up, I had plates of food all arranged on the dining room table and two jugs of orange juice from the cooler out as well.
“How late does this girl sleep?” Owen asked as he watched me arrange the plates with starving eyes.
“She’s a normal person, so not four in the morning,” I said. “But we hit the sack around ten, so I’ll give her until seven. How does that sound?”
“Another fifteen minutes sounds fine,” he said. “But if she’s still asleep in twenty, I’m done waiting on the eggs at least.”
“Deal.”
“I forgot to ask, how did you sleep?”
“It was fine,” I said. “No dreams. Maybe I’m cured.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Owen said. “I looked up those things, and it’s not something you can predict. Sometimes there are triggers, but sometimes there aren’t. The brain’s weird. It could not happen for months then happen every night for a month.”
“I know,” I said. “I live it.”
“Right, but it doesn’t seem to have any correlation to your life outside of stress being a trigger. And no one knows how much stress is too much.”
“Well, I’ll avoid doing a bar exam then,” I laughed.
“Ha, ha,” Owen said sarcastically. “Seriously, I don’t want you to think it’s cured and then be disappointed. I’m just looking out for you.”
“And I appreciate it,” I said. “I talked it over with her. She knows it happens sometimes.”
“Oh, good, then it’s all good then.”
“Exactly. Hey, did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“I think I heard… yes, I did. The bathroom door upstairs just shut. She’s awake.”
“Hallelujah,” Owen said. “Start pouring the coffee.”