Oranges & Roses

Alone In This Bed

Unedited.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Sleep was evading me.

The house was quiet, the crickets outside were going full tilt, and the ceiling fan was my only entertainment. So far I’d watched it rotate a couple hundred times and I’d memorized the pattern of swirls on the ceiling around it. I knew why I couldn’t get to sleep, the reason wasn’t hard to figure out. My mind was continuously running, going over everything I’d learned again and again. I was definitely getting the fresh perspective he said I would but I wasn’t so certain it was a good thing.

Rey did come up to the room and he did take a shower. We did talk for a few minutes but it didn’t last long. Vince was fine; he was in with general population at the moment. That was all Rey would really tell me before we got into a little argument about why he wouldn’t say more.

Of course we used whispered yelling so no one would overhear us, or at least I did since I was actually the one who yelled. For most of it, Rey just looked at me the way he used to, like I was irritating the stuffings out of him. He ended up agreeing at the end that it would be best for him to sleep downstairs on the couch instead of up here with me. He was lucky I respected Lan enough not to try and murder her brother in her house otherwise I would’ve broken open that lockbox and shot him in the ass as he walked out of the room.

But now I couldn’t sleep, with my thoughts left on repeat in my head, and there was no sign of it stopping. Finally I got tired of laying there and got up to get something to drink. Thankfully I wouldn’t have to go downstairs in order to do that. There were little paper cups in the bathroom that I could use. Granted they were supposed to be used for rinsing your mouth after you brushed your teeth and had little cartoon fish on them but I didn’t think anyone would mind if I used it as a water cup instead.

Just as I climbed back into bed, the door opened quietly and Rey’s bulky form shuffled in.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked when he spotted me sitting up, awake.

I could just imagine the smirk on his face and tried not to get annoyed as I laid back on my pillow and pulled the blanket over my head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I only just woke up to use the bathroom.”

“Liar. I could hear you rolling around in bed for the past three hours.”

A burst of air followed by the sound of his pillow landing next my head, alerting me to what he was about to do. Not that I really cared at this point. I would take what I could get even if it was company I could do without until the sun came up again.

Anything was better than thinking.

However, he was much easier to predict when I could see his face and I almost turned on the bedside lamp in order to get a look at him. Then I remembered he slept naked and decided the light staying off would be in my best interest. Remaining in the dark equaled me being able to control my own actions better.

“Whether I’m lying or not shouldn’t matter,” I commented as his weight made the bed dip when he got into bed and settled. “What will the neighbors think?” I joked.

“About me crawling into my own bed? Or you lying?”

“The first one. You were so concerned about them seeing you naked…”

“Wow. You’ve already taken on the suburbian mindset. I wasn’t concerned. They can see me naked all they want but I’d rather spare Lan from getting the multiple phone calls the husbands would make upon finding their wives ogling.”