4
Dottie woke up scared. The flashing of lights outside the window wasn't what woke her up, it was the boom. She'd forgotten about the storm, even while watching that old Disney cartoon movie with Fergal. When the movie had ended they had gone to their separate beds but the storm was still going on in the middle of the night.
After another flash, which was followed by a rather big boom, Dottie threw off her covers and padded over to Fergal's bed.
Fergal was lying on his right side, facing away from her as she pulled back the covers and slipped into the bed. Just as she was closing her eyes she heard him move.
"Dottie, what's wrong?" He asked, his Irish accent thicker than she'd ever heard it before.
"Scared." She tried to close her eyes but the flashing from outside was bothering her even if the curtains were closed.
"You don't have to be, not when I'm around."
Dottie looked over at him. Fergal was lying on his back but his eyes were closed. He'd moved his head closer to her and she did the same, just to be closer to him.
He was right. She wasn't scared, not with having Fergal so close to her. She was able to fall back to sleep as she listened to him breathing.
She only woke up again when she heard his phone going off. When Dottie opened her eyes again she was closer to Fergal's bare chest, her arm was over it and the blinking of his phone as it continued to make the high pitched screeching alarm sound. Sitting up, she reached over Fergal and grabbed his phone.
His arm wrapped around her hip. "Lovely? What's going on?"
She waved his phone. "Your alarm is going off. Make it stop."
Fergal took it from her. He swiped his thumb over the screen and dropped the phone on the bed next to him.
"It's good to hear you talk, Dottie."
"Yeah, I guess."
"You guess?"
She was looking down at him, looking at the messy hair he had. His pink lips were set in a line as he looked up at her. He was a beautiful man.
"Because I was stupid yesterday. I couldn't stop being stupid."
"No," Fergal took her hand and rubbed her hand. "You're not stupid. You just care. And we'll work on your problems, together."
She always would have those problems. She was sure that there was going to be something of a problem everywhere she turned, something would set her off. Dottie looked down at Fergal's chest, memorizing the lines of his skin, the way his chest rose and fell with each inhale and exhale. He may have been holding her right hand but her left hand was still free.
Biting her lower lip, she reached out and touched his stomach. Was it too much? Was she doing something wrong. Fergal didn't say anything, his eyes were locked on her as her fingers counted six raised abs just under his skin. She made it to his belly button before moving back up again. Six wasn't a bad number, it just wasn't the number she preferred. Four was a rounder number, it appealed to her better but six was just as good.
"Dottie? What's going on in your mind?" Fergal asked.
"I don't know." She answered.
One, two, three and four, his thumb rubbed the back of her knuckles. She liked it, that was for sure. Maybe she could try something, like in Sleeping Beauty. Fergal had nice lips, slightly pouty as he looked at her. His hair was a little messed up but that was expected after sleeping.
Dottie leaned forward, fully intent on kissing him. His eyes moved around, looking at her as she leaned forward more, pressing a hand at the side of his head to keep balance. That's what the prince did when he kissed Sleeping Beauty.
Fergal turned his head away, which meant she managed to kiss his cheek instead.
"No, Dorothy." He moved away, dropping her hand and then sitting up. "No, that's not what I wanted."
She turned away, head down. Her heart beat so hard in her chest, it even sounded in her ears.
"It's bad enough I woke up holding you. That wasn't my intention."
Hot tears prickled at the corners of her eyes as she rocked.
"Dottie, you have to understand, you're my friend." He said.
Friend, it was a five letter word. She liked him, she liked him a lot. Dottie wished from deep in her heart that he had just let her see if there was something there.
Fergal came around to stand in front of her. "Dottie, look at me."
She shook her head and then pressed the heels of her hands to her temples, applying pressure to the already intense pressure there. Her fingers curled over the top of her head as she forced back the sob that got caught in her throat.
"Dorothy O'Connor, you better look at me." He actually sounded mad, something she had only heard as him as Finn Balor when he was in an angle.
She looked up at him. He stood with his arms crossed, his once pretty face marred with a scowl, his lips pulling down at the edges. He was looking at her like her mother usually did if something bad happened.
"My only intention was to be your friend. You need more than just your sister. You need friends."
"I want more than that." She turned her head away again. "I want to be normal. I want to be like my sister."
"Normal? You want to be normal? I'm sorry, Dorothy, but no one is normal. Not even me."
He stood there, she assumed just looking at her.
"And I already have a girlfriend, Dottie." He said. "Cathy, her name is Cathy and she works for the company."
That just made her sick. Her stomach curtled like milk lined with metal weights. She swallowed, only to feel the need to gag, but thankfully she didn't. She stayed quiet in the knowledge of what she just heard from the man she liked too much, from her obsession.
Fergal sighed. "Come on, Dottie, stop being like that. There was never going to be anything between you and me. I just wanted to be nice."
He was nice, at one point in time.
"We need to get ready to go." She heard herself say. "I don't want to be late for work."
She got up and went to the nearby bathroom, hoping to leave him behind at least for a minute.
Fergal had gotten dressed in the time she had been in the bathroom. Dottie had changed into the clothes she had worn the day before, knowing full well her overnight bag was still in the car.
"Are you ready, Dottie?" Fergal asked.
She nodded as she dropped his clothes in his hands. She stood and stared at the door, waiting for him to get everything ready to go. Dottie didn't want to look at him, she didn't want to fall into the obsession again.
"You can't behave like that." Fergal said as he opened the door.
She refused to talk to him. She refused to talk to him on the trip down to check out of the hotel and again in the car ride out to SmackDown. She didn't talk for about two hours that it took to get to the SmackDown Live venue.
Dottie sat in the front passenger seat with her head resting up against the window, hating everything there was about what happened. She was stupid, she told herself that over and over again.
"No one would want to date you." Her mother's voice came through her jumbled thoughts.
She had told her mother that she wanted to date someone and Marg O'Connor had told her that no man would understand her, would like her enough to kiss her. She was supposed to be in the facility because she wasn't normal, she wasn't supposed to be accepted by the rest of the civilization.
Cait proved that time and again that she was good enough. Cait was so sure of herself, but Dottie didn't know how to do that.
They pulled into the venue. Just as Fergal shut off the car she saw her sister approaching. Dottie beat Fergal to unbuckling her seatbelt and then opened the car door herself.
"Dottie?" Cait asked as she looked at her sister. "What's wrong?"
"I want to do work, Cait." She said. "Where is my pass to get in?"
She handed Dottie a pass that was on a lanyard. Dottie looped it over her shoulders and turned back to the car to get her overnight bag out of the car as Fergal got out and walked around to where Cait stood. Dottie didn't dare look at him. She got her things together, knew exactly where the costume department was going to be and went inside.
The costume department was where all of the other ones were located, near the catering area. She didn't bother looking at people as she walked down the hall, she didn't want to talk to anyone, she didn't want to cry in front of anyone. Her brain was in a dark place and she didn't want to snap.
Her sewing machine wasn't set up right, so she got to work to put it up right. She put it in the back of the room where there was a table for her and a chair for her to sit in. There were things that needed to be done and she was going to do it, if just to get out of the real world and focus on the little things like sewing a seam and mending tears.
"Dottie, can I talk to you?" Cait asked. "Why are you mad at Fergal?"
"I thought he liked me." Dottie said.
"He does like you, Dot. There's just a difference between liking someone as a friend and romantically liking someone."
"I want to date someone. I thought Fergal was good enough because he doesn't make fun of me and he seemed to be nice." She sat down at her sewing machine. "So I'm not going to like him. I'm not going to think about him, or his eyes, or his smile. I won't talk to him so I don't have to hear his voice."
"Oh Dot." Cait mumbled something. "There's nothing wrong with not dating someone. There's nothing wrong with just being a friend."
"Then why do you look at Colby the same way I used to look at Fergal?"
"I hate it when you say shit like that." Cait crossed her arms. "Because you're right. I like Colby, but he's not going to like me in return. He's in a relationship, too. I don't know who she is but he's happy."
"But you're not happy."
"No, I'm not happy. But what makes me happy is knowing that he's happy. He's doing okay, he's a great guy to hang out with, to laugh with, to joke around with. Joe's a friend, and he's married. You're friends with Drew, and he's married too. There is nothing wrong with being friends with a guy who is in a relationship."
"He never told me," Dottie said through gritted teeth. "He didn't tell me he was dating someone. I thought he liked me more than a friend. He held my hand, he had his arm around my shoulder when we waited for our food last night. When I couldn't talk more than a few words, he didn't tell me that I was being stupid." She was close to crying.
"Oh Dot." Cait groaned, then rubbed her face. "You probably mistook that stuff as romance. He was just being nice, he was being a good guy."
"He was once."
"That's not fair, Dottie."
"It's not fair that I am not normal. That I will not be good enough for someone to kiss, to say I love you to."
"Being autistic isn't a death sentence, it's not a disease. It just means you don't understand social concepts."
"So I'm retarded. What else is new? The doctors said the same thing, Mom says it all the time. Even Dolph…"
"You're not retarded." The sharpness of Fergal's voice at the door was hard. "Stop thinking like that, Dottie."
She turned her shoulder to him, crossing her arms. No, she told herself. She wasn't going to think about him, his attractiveness, his voice. It hurt her in the chest, it hurt her in the head.
"So that's it? You're not going to talk to me?" He asked.
She refused to answer. Her fingers curled into her upper arms, trying to get a different hurt to enter her head instead of the one she was focused on.
"Dottie, stop that." Cait said. "You're going to hurt yourself."
It wasn't Cait that grabbed her wrists, it was Fergal. He forced her to let go of her arms, even as she tried to wrench herself from his hands, the warm hands that always made her feel safe, she didn't stop the tears.
"Dottie, stop." He said, his accent deepening as he spoke.
"I hate you!" She yelled. "I hate you, Fergal!"
She hated him. She hated that Fergal pulled her to him, she hated his nice smell, she hated that his body felt so good against hers. She hated that his hands cupped her upper back and the back of her head. Dottie really hated that he pressed the side of his face to the top of her head. She really, really hated it that he made her cry. She cried into his shoulder, but she refused to hold onto him because that would be wrong. He wasn't hers, he wasn't going to be hers and it hurt so deep it left some sort of scar on her heart.
"Don't hurt yourself because of this, Dottie." He said. "You'll have to live with being my friend. That's all we ever were, Dottie. Understand that, please."
When she felt him step back, Dottie turned away from him and stood facing the corner of the room with her hands going to cover her ears so she would stop hearing him. She didn't want to see him anymore than necessary. Her cries were all that she heard anymore, the pain in her chest hurt so bad.
She decided that the previous night out never happened.
It was the worst night out she ever had. The sooner Fergal was out of her life, out of her mind and heart, she knew she would be better.
That's the end of this little sordid tale. I hope you guys like it. I'm possibly going to do another installment but I haven't figured out what yet. Thanks for reading, guys. I hope you enjoyed it.