I have loved this man from the moment I laid eyes on him for the first time. Our love will survive any storm life throws at us. Not even death could destroy it. It consumes me; it transcends time, mortality, and dimension. It fills my heart to overflowing, seeping from my very pores.
Gazing into his dark eyes, shining bright with his inner light, I see my love reflected there, echoing from his heart to mine. I can feel that love in the touch of his lips on mine and the smoothness of his skin against my skin. My fingers rake through the silky strands of his thick black hair, flowing wild and free down to his shoulders.
He is mine, and I am his, and that is all that I know. It is all I'll ever know and all that I want to know. I won't allow anything to tear us apart ever again!
"Belle," he whispers hoarsely against my neck in that once beautiful voice, broken by the injuries he sustained while he fought for his freedom from those who sought to convict him of treason wrongfully. His warm breath teases goosebumps across my skin, and I close my eyes, relishing the feel of his hands tracing my contours, exploring every hill and valley, setting fire to my blood, flooding my veins with liquid heat.
"Belle," he says again, and now his voice is filled with healthy youth, the roughness smoothed out of it, the sound vibrating in my heart, healed by our love. "Belle!"
I open my eyes into the black pools of his eyes, noticing for the first time ever the thin green bands around the dilated pupils. The love and passion I saw and felt a moment ago are still there, but his eyes are different now. He is beautiful, but he is not the same; strange, yet familiar. I draw away from him to see him more clearly, and my confusion is mirrored on his face, slowly slipping away to change into concern.
"Who are you?" I breathe, running my eyes over his dark hair, no longer flowing loosely around his face and shoulders. It is cropped short from the tops of his ears downward. I should be afraid, but I am not. My eyes trace the outline of his straight nose and gentle lips, finding the vein pulsing in his neck and the strength of his well-defined collarbones. The path of my eyes ends at my hands pressed against the warm skin of his bare chest.
These are not my hands.
I can feel his heart beating very fast, and as the smoky tendrils of the dream slip away, and his face once again comes into sharp focus, recognition starts to creep in, clearing away the fog. The familiar gradually becomes strange, and what is strange gradually becomes familiar.
"David?"
"Yeah," he sighs, sounding relieved while his eyes, boring into mine, are looking more and more anxious. The dream slowly dissipates, and now I'm just lying in bed with my limbs tangled with those of a man I barely know.
"David?!"
We both let go at the same time, scurrying to opposite sides of the bed, and I gasp when I realise that David is not the only one missing his shirt. Where is mine? I can see his shirt lying on the floor on my side of the bed, and leaning over, I grab the long-sleeved grey t-shirt and pull it on to cover myself.
"I was dreaming..." I say at the exact same moment when he says: "I'm sorry..."
"What?" we chorus, and then we just fall into an awkward, strained silence. I stare at my fingers clutching the duvet covering the lower half of my body and look up when David finally speaks.
"I don't think anything irreversible happened," he mutters and shows me that he is still wearing his sweatpants. I haven't even thought that far. I'm still struggling to clear my heart and my mind of emotions that couldn't possibly be mine but are nevertheless closing up my throat and causing my pulse to race.
Gingerly lifting the duvet, I take a peak, and then I throw it open to reveal the small alarm clocks against their green backdrop, happily ringing all over my legs.
Well, that's something, at least, I guess.
"What happened?" I ask the question I know he probably won't be able to answer either.
"I woke up," he says, and as strange as that answer appears to be, it is exactly what I experienced as well.
I remember lying in the dark chatting with David about my studies, my mother, Craig, and my plans for the future. Unclear plans, if I have to be very honest. He told me about his father and their stormy relationship and about his mother running a popular tourist bar in Spain, exchanging lovers once a week. We talked about how he is using what he'd learned at university, in combination with lived experience working part-time on successful farms, to bring his own orchard back to life.
We both worried about the kind of damage this horrible storm must be doing to the already unhealthy orchard and the trees that have started to show some signs of recovery. According to David, the orchard and house are located on a section of the farm that receives some protection from the towering cliffs surrounding it. The woodlands at the front of the house and the fields to the west, sometimes used for other crops, are more at risk. Still, as far as David knows, a storm like this one hasn't hit the area in decades.
When exhaustion eventually caused him to drift to sleep, I found myself lying awake next to a virtual stranger, listing to the comforting sounds of his even breathing. I finally felt my eyelids growing heavy, and then I must've fallen asleep because suddenly, I wasn't myself any longer.
I had an extremely vivid dream, like the one where I saw the wounded man coming from the sea, but it's slowly disappearing now, and all I can clearly remember is the overwhelming love that filled my heart to a point where I was sure that it was going to burst right open. The room was bright with that love, and it still is.
I can see David clearly, and he is beautiful with his tousled hair and golden-tanned skin and those impossibly perceptive eyes gazing into mine. He seems to be feeling as lost as I do.
I slowly become aware of the fact that I can see the furniture and the walls and sunlight spilling through a gap in the curtains.
"It is day!" I exclaim in surprise. It had been dark for so long that I thought we'd never see the sun again. "The storm is gone."
"Yes," David says, turning his back to me and sitting up; he lowers his feet to the ground. My heart lurches. I don't want him to leave. I can still feel the residue of that love, and it is confusing me, muddling my brain. I actively have to fight the urge to crawl over the bed and wrap my arms around him again.
As embarrassing as it is to wake up half-naked in the arms of a man I barely know, I just want him to stay here in the bed with me and hold me forever. Am I still me? The man in my dream was not David, but he called me by name. I remember that much. The man in my dream was...
There are marks on the sheets. Blue, grey and some black. I look down at the T-shirt I'm wearing and notice similar streaks on it. Was I painting again?
"David, did I leave the room last night?"
"Belle, I don't even know what my name is right now," he says and finally turns to look at me over his shoulder. "I am so sorry. I have no idea how... I was dreaming and... I swear I wasn't trying to-"
"This is paint," I mutter, hearing David's attempts at apologising for something he clearly had as much control over as I had. He might be new to having out-of-body... or rather in-body but out-of-mind experiences, but I'm fast becoming a pro at it.
Hurrying, I jump from the bed and rush over to the door. I turn the knob to unlock and open it and storm down the short hallway and up the stairs to the solarium. I can hear David following me, calling my name, but showing him will be so much more effective than trying to explain what I'm doing.
Today, I don't knock on the door; I just throw it open and barge inside.
"It was him!" I say, pointing at the painting still standing on the easel near the windows when David joins me in the large room. "That is the man I saw coming from the sea, and that is the man I was kissing in my dream."
Narrowing his eyes, David moves closer to the painting to inspect the raw beauty of the brush strokes and the powerful emotions they evoke... At least that's what I see; he is probably just trying to recognise the face. He reaches out to touch the bold letters spelling my name, and looking at his fingers; my eyes widen in surprise.
One of the other easels I'd set up has been pulled up next to the one holding the painting of the beautiful man. It is angled, so I need to step around it to see what is on the canvas it carries. David joins me when I gasp. He is standing next to me, close enough for his arm to brush mine and even through the thin material of his t-shirt, the contact sends goosebumps chasing each other over my skin. I feel him tense beside me, sucking in a sharp breath.
"I didn't know you painted," I say, and when he tilts his head to look at me, a frown drawing his brows together, I turn to him, taking his hands in mine, drawing his attention to the paint embedded around his nails and in the grooves of his knuckles.
"I can't even draw a stick figure," he mutters, glaring at his hands as if he has never seen these strange appendages before.
We both turn our eyes back to the painting, making a lie out of his words. It is stunning. The style is very similar to the one depicting the man, but there's even more passion in this one, and the colours are darker.
"She looks a little like you," David says in a strange hoarse voice, and if that is how he sees me, I will not run out and buy the guy glasses because the woman in this painting is gorgeous. She has long hair streaming around her shoulders, huge, vulnerable eyes, and lips meant to be kissed. She would've been extremely beautiful if she wasn't cloaked in overwhelming sadness.
"I was kissing her in my dream," David says, and I do believe that the man is completely traumatised. After all, he doesn't have a history of running on the beach and opening matryoshka dolls in his sleep. "But I wasn't me..."
"David," I break the silence stretching between us while we stare at the painting, and our eyes finally find the signature in the bottom right corner, both of us reacting with surprise at the one boldly written name. Belle. "Were your horny ancestors trying to use us to have their wicked way with each other last night?"
David turns to me, and I'm not sure if the sound he made was a laugh, a groan, or a snort.
No, those words burned my tongue like crude blasphemy. There was nothing base and carnal about that dream nor the actions that went with it. What I felt for the man in my dream was a love fierce enough to devour me, and all through the passion and tenderness was one strong, overwhelming thread of gut-wrenching heartache.
"You mean like hand puppets?" David asks, and now I'm the one making sounds that cannot be defined. I flick a look at the amazing painting created by the man who cannot draw stick figures, and I don't relish the idea of being some ancient ghost's ventriloquist dummy... Well, the kind you stick your hand into and then make them paint rather than talk. Most of my resistance to the idea is that even though my name is on those paintings, they are clearly not mine, and I cannot use them for my evaluation.
The biggest problem, the one that neither David nor I want to say out loud right now, is that though the dream has gone, and it wasn't David in my dream or me in his, the emotions have not gone.
I look up into David's eyes when he turns to me, and just like I did in my dream, I see my love reflected there, echoing from his heart to mine. It is at once beautiful and frightening... and impossible.
He raises a hand and touches my face, flinching and dropping it again as if the touch scalded his fingertips. He presses his lips together and closes his eyes, swallowing uncomfortably.
"I need coffee," he croaks, turning away from me and decisively marching to the door.
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