"Don't be angry. Don't be sad. Don't sit quiet over good times you had. There's a girl right next to you, and she's just waiting for something to do…If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."
Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Dreaming of her is a constant…not every night, not even every week anymore, but always a few times each month, her face or her laughter or her voice creeps into his dreams to rouse him from peaceful slumber and remind him of what he's lost. Her power over him fades in between these dreams, but each time returns full force with the recollection to overtake him completely. He cries some nights, drinks others, and some he just waits for the void that has suddenly gripped him with icy-cold fingers to wane.
This night he is woken by her tears, begging to leave Vukovar. The tears are the most poignant. They drench him with guilt and regret. He prefers these to come when he is alone, but this time he isn't. A petite nymph of a brunette sleeps next to him, bare save for a sheet covering not much more than one pale calf, the moonlight glowing against her skin. He hates himself for having these dreams when he is with her, and hates himself for being with her when he has these dreams. He closes his eyes to conjure Danijela's face as he needs to at these moments, smiling as tears roll down flushed cheeks, making that promise when the war started that he never wanted to agree to. If anything happens to me, promise me you will keep living. She'd agreed on his behalf, no formal consent from him. Now he rolls to watch the promise he didn't make in the flesh, chest rising and falling as she sleeps. He cannot say the words out of fear for betraying his dead wife, but he loves her. It is the ultimate sin for him to admit it to himself, that he kept Danijela's word. He does not know how to love Abby separately from Danijela. To him, to love one is to abandon the other.
The living love shifts in her sleep, throwing off the last bit of cover. He props himself on one elbow as his eyes follow the lines of her face, tip of her rounded nose sinking to the pouting rosebud lips to the graceful neck, down to the slope of her breasts to the dip of her stomach to the slender legs to small feet that he'd have sworn belonged to a dancer if not for her complete lack of coordination. Instead, what she makes up for in kinesthetic grace, she compensates for in personality; kind, unselfish, eloquent, comforting when he needs it, playful when he doesn't. What he loves in her he loved in his departed. They are as different as night and day and yet all of the good is there in each. She shifts again, hand brushing his without intending, but he grasps it nonetheless to bring to his lips, kissing each delicate fingertip. He brings himself to hover over her, lowering a kiss to her shoulder. When he looks at her, the corners of her mouth have turned up in her sleep. He lowers another kiss to her breast, over her navel, just above her hip, the crook of her elbow, and when he looks again her lips have curled into a smile, eyes still closed, breathing still slow and steady as she dreams of his kisses. He doesn't intend the tears but the come, splattering her silken skin with salt. He cannot stop it this time as the admission climbs from his depths and into the still air.
"I love you."