I lie there, trying to return to sleep, but it’s gone.
When I was in high school and realized the same man was reappearing in my dreams time after time, it was exciting, a novelty. Some hot fantasy guy my hormone-riddled brain had conjured. I also thought it must be common, something most people experience, but when I mentioned it to my sister, Vivian, she hooted. “I wish a hot man would visit me every night in my dreams!”
“It’s not like that,” I said, embarrassed at how sexual she made it sound, even though sometimes it was exactly like that. “And it’s not every night.” And it wasn’t. It was more like every couple weeks, or months even. I’ve noticed they only become frequent during big life changes: Graduating college. Getting married. Pregnancy. The dreams have been almost nightly the past week—more than in either of my previous pregnancies, and I wonder if it’s because I’m further along. That this pregnancy is thriving. I take comfort in any signs I can get.
Anyway, after Vivian’s response, I never mentioned it again. To anyone. Not even Harrison—but still I wonder if maybe he has his own fantasy girl. Some Camila Alves look-alike that he doesn’t mention to spare my feelings. Then I think of the intensity of my interactions in my dreams, and a bud of jealousy sprouts in my stomach. On second thought, I hope Harrison doesn’t have his own.
The bedroom door opens and Harrison reappears beside me. “I gotta go in,” he whispers, leaning over to peck my cheek. I turn, so his lips land on mine, and reach up to hold his face steady, parting his lips with my tongue.
“Mmm,” he says, pulling back an inch to look at me. “What’s that for?”
I cheekily raise my eyebrows. His expression mirrors mine. “Three minutes,” he says. “That’s all I’ve got.”
“I’ll take it,” I say. He grins and pounces in one quick motion and I laugh at his teenage-like eagerness. As his body so familiarly finds mine, his beard scrapes my cheek and his lips are against my ear. “Dios Mia,” he whispers.
It’s ours, this phrase, coined after we kissed for the first time huddled underneath the too-small awning of a dry cleaner’s to escape a sudden downpour on our way from an art gallery to a dive bar. The night we met.
“Dios Mia,” he murmured when our lips finally broke apart, both of us out of breath, his nose still millimeters from mine.
I cocked an eyebrow, not willing to risk breaking the spell by moving any other part of my body. I only took high school Spanish, but I knew enough to know that the phrase Oh my god in Spanish was masculine: Dios Mío. I wondered if I’d misheard him, even as I said: “I thought it was Mío.”
“What?” he asked, his lips curling up, as they grazed mine once again. And that was when I knew I’d heard him right. And that he was teasing me.
“You said Mia,” I whispered against his mouth. “It’s supposed to be Mío.”
“And here you said you didn’t know any Spanish,” he said. And then his fingers were in my hair and his mouth was on mine and I didn’t give a whit that water was bulleting in a direct line off the awning and right onto my shoulder, down into my purse, ruining everything I owned.
Now, with his words in my ear and the muscles of his back flexing beneath my palms, a wave of love and contentment floods through me, and whatever guilt I was feeling from my ridiculous dream melts away almost as easily as the night.
Almost.
Chapter 2
“Finley has lice,” my sister, Vivian, says.
“Gross.” I pull a face, and shift my cell between my ear and shoulder so I can scrape the last of the yogurt out of its container with my spoon.
“You have no idea. I had to leave work early to get her from school, pay a ridiculous amount of money for this special comb and lice-repellent shampoo, and then when we got home, the nanny left because she doesn’t do bugs. That’s what she said, verbatim. I don’t do bugs. And now it feels like these things are crawling all over me and I basically want to burn everything in my house.”
“GRIFFIN!” she yells and I pull the phone a few inches from my ear. I stare out the big picture window over the kitchen sink and eye the branches of the droopy tomato plants climbing out of the jungle of a garden as if they’re trying to escape. Vivian is still yelling. “TOILET PAPER IS NOT FOR EATING.” Finally, her voice returns to its normal volume. “So, how are you? Have you finished unpacking yet?”
In a weak moment last week, I made the mistake of confessing to Vivian that maybe I’d been feeling a little aimless, that I wasn’t sure the move had been the right thing for me, and of course she went full therapist on me, talking about adjustment periods and life stages and how I needed to finish unpacking—that it was a symbolic step of accepting where I am or some bullshit like that. Vivian’s a psychologist at a private high school in Maryland, and sometimes she has trouble turning it off.
I consider how to respond, but before I can say anything, I feel a twinge in my stomach. I gasp, pressing a hand gently to it, but then it’s gone as quickly as it came.
“Mia? You OK?”
“Yeah—it’s nothing.” I try to remind myself of the other thing Vivian told me last week—that I’m going to be sensitive to every little ache and pain because of what I’ve been through and I can’t stress about it because pregnancy is full of aches and pains.
“FINLEY, STOP SPITTING ON YOUR BROTHER. So—unpacking?”
“I’m working on it,” I say, even though I’m not. Not really. I keep meaning to unpack. Buy the things we need, like an entry table, but the choices are so overwhelming. Or maybe it’s the house that’s overwhelming. We lived in a shoebox for so long, I don’t know what to do with all this newfound space, or how to fill it. Ironic, considering I spent nearly my entire time in Philly working in an upscale furniture store, first in sales, then as a design consultant, helping clients pick out the perfect pieces and decide where to put them.
Deep down, though, I know it’s not the space or the house that feels overwhelming, and suddenly I blurt out the one thing I’ve been terrified to admit—to myself, much less Harrison. “It doesn’t feel like this is where I’m supposed to be.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I don’t know—I can’t explain it. But I keep thinking at any second we’re going to drive back to Philly. That our apartment is still waiting for us. That we’re going to go home.”
“I think that’s normal. You guys lived there for what—seven years? And honestly, Mia,” she says, gently, “you’ve never handled change well.” I know she’s referring to Mom and Dad’s divorce. How I cried myself to sleep for months. Started wetting the bed at age eleven. And then at Christmas, convinced myself that Mom was coming back. That it was going to be our big gift that year. Needless to say, it was a disappointing holiday.