I open my mouth to say it back, staring into her eyes that are suddenly brown and not blue. Amy has blue eyes. Not brown.
“I love you,” she repeats, and my voice lodges in my throat. I tell her I love her back. That’s what I did. Why can’t I say it?
Then she’s gone. Like floating mist, coating me in its sickly dew, stinking of death and blood. No. NO! I run through the room and all the lights are on. My eyes blink against the harshness as I call out her name. “Maia!”
Then my stomach plummets.
No. Amy. It’s supposed to be Amy. Not Maia.
But something inside me knows this time is different.
This time it’s Maia.
I sprint for the bathroom, only I’m hardly moving. My legs are slow, heavy, some unseen force holding me in place, and I can’t get to her. Panic tainted adrenaline coasts through my veins, making my heart race like it never has before.
I need to get to her. Not again. Please, not again. Not Maia too!
A gasp. Was that me? No. I know it wasn’t.
“Maia!” I scream, already knowing she won’t answer me. I reach the bathroom door, slamming it open against the wall with a loud smack. Smack. Smack.
What is that?
Blood. There’s so much blood. It’s everywhere. All over her bathroom sink. All over the floor. Dripping down the side of the tub. The water is red. It’s so red, and I fall to my knees, a savage wail ripping past my tormented lungs out into the night.
“Keith.”
“Not tonight. Not you.”
“Keith!” Another smack, and I bolt upright, sweat clinging to my face and body, my breathing ragged and harsh without showing any signs of slowing. Where am I? I look around, seeing nothing but a sea of white. Not red.
It was a dream.
Motherfucker, that felt so real. So. Fucking. Real.
So real that the visions of it are still stuck in my head, behind my eyes. They’re all I can see. All I can feel.
But it wasn’t Amy, I was seeing dead in that tub, it was Maia. It wasn’t Amy’s last gasp I heard; it was Maia’s. It wasn’t Amy who told me she loved me. It. Was. Maia.
“Keith. Slow your breathing. You’re hyperventilating. It was a dream. It was just a dream. You’re okay.” She presses her hands to my face, trying to calm me, and I swat them away.
I’m not okay. I am anything but okay in this moment.
“Your blood,” I rasp past my ravaged lungs. It was everywhere. Her blood. Maia’s blood. No. I can’t… I can’t breathe. Why can’t I breathe? I stagger out of bed, my eyes wild as I stare down at my hands void of blood, and then the scene around me. It’s the hotel suite in Dallas. It’s Maia standing on the opposite side of the bed, her expression distraught, her eyes, dark and wide, her body clutching the sheet over her bare chest.
She looks just as shaken as I feel.
I can practically still feel her blood on my hands.
“Keith. Are you okay?”
My body convulses. Retches. Sick. Nothing comes up.
I can’t find the light amongst this darkness. I want to laugh at that question. I’m so not okay there isn’t even an intelligible response. “I have to go.”
I can’t fucking breathe!
“Not you too! Not your blood too.”
“What?” she gasps. She doesn’t understand. “Wait. Talk to me. You were having a nightmare.”
“No. I can’t look at you. I can’t fucking look at you!” I bellow.
I can’t do it. Doesn’t she get it? I can’t fucking look at her right now because two seconds ago she was dead in a motherfucking bathtub. She was gasping out her last breath. She was covered in blood I could not stop.
And I was too late.
I’m always too late and I can never save her.
“I can’t do it anymore!” I cry. I watch as she flinches. I watch as she takes a scared step back.
What the fuck am I doing?
I don’t even know. I have no control right now. None. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I can’t be here with you right now.”
I scrub my hands up and down my face, but it does nothing to clear this. I somehow find my pants and the first shirt I come across, but I still can’t look at her. I don’t want to see the fear in her eyes. I don’t want to see the blood on her body.
I don’t want to lose you, Maia, and now that’s all I can think about.
The door slams behind me before I even realize I’ve opened it and am standing in the hallway. I glance left and right, but it’s so dark and long and desolate. I hear the latch of the door behind me start to move. I still can’t look at her right now. I can’t look into her brown eyes after what I just saw. After what I just experienced.
My phone. How am I clutching my phone?
Somehow, I am, and I dial Beth’s number. She’s a psychologist. A doctor. The doors begin to close on the elevator, and I don’t remember pressing the button or stepping on.
“Keith?” Beth answers into the phone, her voice dripping with sleep and worry. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not,” I tell her just as the doors begin to close and Maia’s face falls into my line of sight just before they seal shut. But her expression? It was stricken. It was heartbroken. I ran out on her when we promised we would never run out on each other. I have no idea what I even said to her. I sag back against the wall behind me. “I think I told her I can’t look at her.”
Shit. Her eyes. Her haunted, beautiful eyes as they met mine that last second before the doors closed.
“I’m not understanding.”
“I’m going to lose her, Beth. How do I not lose her when I’m losing myself?”
I hear her moving around in the background. I hear her telling Jacob, her husband who is on the phone. Then I hear her say, “You’re not losing yourself, Keith. You’re in the process of finding yourself. It’s an ugly thing to do. Most often, we don’t like what we find when we search.”
“I saw her tonight, Beth. I had the worst nightmare I’ve ever had. Maia was Amy and she was dead. It was her fucking blood everywhere. Her body lifeless in the tub.”
I sink down to the floor of the elevator, my heart barely beating yet not able to stop pounding in my chest.
“She’s going to leave me and I don’t blame her for it.”
“Keith, tell me about Maia in the bathtub.”
I shake my head. I shake it so hard.
“It was her. She was bleeding. I heard her gasp. I heard myself scream.”
“And when you woke up, who was there?”
My eyes cinch so tight I can’t imagine light ever finding its way back in. “She was. Maia”
“And tomorrow? Who will be there?”
“Maia.”
“Is Maia, Amy?”
“No,” I respond automatically as the elevator hits the first floor and I burst forth, taking to the streets, not caring where my path leads me. “She’s not. Why didn’t Amy have Maia’s heart? Have her strength? Why was Amy’s world so hard for her?”
“I can’t answer that and likely, Amy couldn’t either. She suffered. You both did, but her more than you. Imagine how hard and painful her world was. No one could help her. No one could reach her. But you did. You made her time so much better. You couldn’t save her, but you made what time she had the best of it. And no matter what, her taking her life was not. Your. Fault. Nothing that happened that night was your fault. You tried to save her the best you could when she was impossible to save. Tell me that.”