why can't I forget the past, start loving someone new
instead of having sweet dreams about you
Natalie sat up in bed, not bothering to adjust her eyes to the darkness. It's not as if she wasn't used to the dreams. They'd plagued her for years. Oh, they'd disappeared for a while once she felt she'd adjusted to Nick's commitment to Maura Logue. His life with her. His love for her. But since that last night in the loft, that night that almost, almost, gave him what he wanted and what she wanted even more... well they'd come back with a vengeance.
They weren't nightmares, nothing to make her scream or gasp upon waking. But she did cry. Because they were dreams about what had been, and worse still, what she felt in her heart should be.
The 'had been' dreams were Natalie and Nick, in the lab working on cases, at the department functions where they danced and laughed, at the loft watching movies on the sofa. On the sofa where they were close, but not intimate, and where she knew Nick and Maura had been, and still were, both.
The 'should be' dreams were what had never happened. Nick and Natalie making out and making love in the loft, in her apartment, in the Cadillac that begged for that kind of misbehavior. Nick achieving mortality, expressing his undying gratitude to her, his love for her, his proposal. Their wedding, their children, their life together.
Tonight Nick had made himself unmistakably clear. He'd never love her... not the way she wanted him to, the way she loved him. He'd never devote himself to becoming mortal, which would give him the one connection to her that nobody could break. He'd never leave the life, the woman, the eternity he loved, for her. Or for anyone else. Heaving a bitter, small sigh Natalie thought well... that is something. If I can't have him nobody else... except Maura... will have him.
She'd never cared for country western music. It was all hard times and broken hearts, something she foolishly used to believe would never be part of her life. But something told her that when that Patsy Cline song randomly appeared on the radio she'd played tonight as she'd worked, it would leave its mark.
She lay down again, and hoped for more sweet dreams.
