“Of course.”
He pulled the roses from the vase so he could replace them with his own bouquet, but he winced and immediately dropped all the flowers.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Thorns,” he said, grimacing. Several blooms of blood pearled on his hand, quickly growing in size. He clenched his fist against the sting.
“I’ll get you a cloth.”
“Don’t. I’m fine.”
“Martyr.” I pulled a cloth from a drawer, then took his clenched hand in mine. “Open up.”
“Anneline, I’m fine.”
“Open.”
He did … and his hand was unscathed.
“How … what happened?” I asked.
“The bleeding stopped.”
“No,” I said, running my thumb over his open palm and fingers. “There’s nothing here. Not even a scratch.”
“I was barely even cut.”
“You were bleeding all over your hand,” I insisted. I pushed down on his palm. No red blossoms pooled into view. Nothing.
“Ow!” He laughed. “Are you trying to make me bleed?” He closed his hand over mine, and with his other hand tipped my face up until my eyes met his. “I’m fine,” he assured me. “I’m better than fine. At least, I could be …”
Still holding my hand, he sank to one knee and pulled a small box from his pocket.
No. It couldn’t be.
He opened the box to reveal a single perfect diamond on a delicate ring. He looked up at me, and I saw an eternity of love in his eyes. “Will you marry me, Anneline?”
I saw it all in that second; our entire lives sprawling out ahead of us, a whirlwind of images whizzing so fast I couldn’t grab a single one, but the feeling of them broke over me in a wave of happiness so pure it made me cry.
“Anneline?” His eyes widened in concern.
“Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!”
He didn’t say anything, but his smile glowed as he got to his feet and scooped me into his arms. I screamed and laughed and cried, and my whole world became an ecstatic blur.…
I sat up in bed, breathless and dizzy. I spun my head toward my computer, irrationally positive the man would be there, stepping out of the darkened screen.
He wasn’t, of course, but I had to see him. I rolled out of bed, but I was still too hazy from the dream to get my footing, and thumped onto the floor. Instantly there was a bang on my door.
“What happened in there?” Piri asked.
“I’m fine!” I called. “Just a bad dream.”
The door flung open.
“A bad dream?” Piri tsked with alarm. “Someone walking over your grave. Wear your clothes inside out today; turn your luck around.”
She stared at me, waiting for me to give the absurd superstition its due respect.
“Sure, I’ll do that, Piri. Thanks.”
Piri nodded, then shut the door. Before it closed all the way, I saw her gaze at Dad’s office door and cross herself. I rolled my eyes.
I got up and contemplated my computer. Only a moment ago I’d been desperate to turn it on and see the man from my dreams, but suddenly I wasn’t sure. I tried to tell myself the same thing I had the night before, that vivid fantasies about the man were my brain’s way of making him less scary and easier to deal with. I even thought about what Rayna would say: The man was mysterious and beautiful—it would be stranger if I didn’t fantasize about him. She’d tell me it was harmless, and I should just thank my imagination for a good night’s fun.
The problem was that these dreams didn’t feel fun. They felt thick and real, and they clung to me like moss, leaving me disoriented and weirdly out of control. I didn’t like it, and I had a feeling that the more time I spent looking at the pictures, the more vivid the dreams would become. I’d be better off avoiding them, maybe until after Rio. By then I imagined enough time would have passed that they might not have such a grip on me.
It seemed like a good plan … but the dreams kept coming. Every time I closed my eyes, I dove into another chapter of the love story between myself and this man.
Only I was never really me. I was Delia, or Anneline, or Catherine, or Olivia—always one of those four women, each of whom lived in a different era. And the visions felt less like dreams and more like being flung backward through time.
At first I hated it. No matter how happy I was within the dreams themselves, I woke up feeling like my brain had been hijacked by the guy in the pictures. I tried to fight against the dreams. I’d purposely fall asleep in front of the scariest or most dramatic movies, hoping they’d suck me into their stories while I slept. I’d download visualization exercises specifically made to help you shape your own dreams. I’d run on the treadmill for miles at night until I was sure I’d hit the pillow too exhausted to dream at all.
Nothing worked. Every night I was back in time again. I was Olivia in Renaissance Italy, trying to perfect my watercolor technique by painting the man I loved and his best friend Giovanni. They were terrible models; they couldn’t stay still for more than two minutes without cracking each other up. Other nights I lived a hundred years later, as Catherine in rural England, racing bareback through the countryside, the man from the pictures pushing his horse to keep up with me. Other nights Anneline swept me onto France’s finest nineteenth-century stages, or Delia whisked me to Prohibition-era Chicago.
I got so frustrated, I almost called my therapist to tell her about it, but something wouldn’t let me do it. I hated how helpless I was to fight the dreams, but I also felt weirdly protective of them. They were mine. The man was mine. I didn’t want to share them with anyone. I couldn’t explain why I felt that way, but I did.
After a full week, something even stranger happened: I stopped feeling irritated that I couldn’t control the dreams, and started looking forward to them. It didn’t happen all at once, but the more time I spent with the man, the more I started falling for him, and the less it mattered that I wasn’t in control.
He had a way about him. No matter how much I tried to protect myself and hide, he always saw through to the core of what I was truly feeling. And while he was technically performing this magic with four other women, as long as I was asleep those women were me. They looked like me (with the exception of the small gap between my teeth when I was Anneline), they sounded like me, and they had the same deep-seated, unspoken fears that we were all desperately afraid to show.
Those fears didn’t faze the man at all. In fact, he loved me for them, and for the quirks I developed to try and cover them up. It was like he was made for me. He made me feel safe and loved in a way no man ever had in real life. He was even marked as mine. At least, I liked to think of it that way. His chest was stamped with a small tattoo … a tattoo in the shape of an iris.
In the end, I didn’t care if the dreams were fantasies; they were impossible to resist. I started making excuses to go to bed earlier and earlier, and even took midday naps to satisfy the part of me that couldn’t wait to be with him. Waking up was heartbreaking. Each time I sat up in bed and realized I was alone, I felt as if part of me had been ripped away. I clung to the wisps of the dreams as long as I could, but they always faded too soon, leaving me sad and empty and wanting more. Daydreams about him didn’t have the same tactile feel of reality, but since they were all I had to try to fill the void between sleeps, they had to be enough.
“That’s it,” Rayna said, pushing my laptop closed. It was about a week before the Rio trip, and she and I were at the kitchen island working on term papers.
“Rayna!” I complained. “I could’ve lost my work!”
“Please. You hadn’t typed anything in the last hour. Consider this a one-person intervention: Who is he and why haven’t you told me about him?”
I felt the blush rise into my face. “Who is who?”
“Seriously? You’re going to play that with me? Clea, it’s obvious. You’re practically delirious; you’ve been a million miles away since we got back from—” She gasped and smacked my arm. “Oh! My! God! It’s Ben, isn’t it? I did interrupt something the night we got back from Paris. It’s Ben, and you haven’t told me because you didn’t want me to say I told you so, when I so told you so! You loser!” She hurled the epithet with a grin of such complete delight that I almost hated to tell her the truth.
“No! Rayna, it’s not Ben. It’s not anyone.”