Only a couple weeks after Jake's drunkenness, Claudette caught a cold. It wasn't serious but she was obviously miserable and being parents, we took a few days off so that she could rest. We were in Vermont.
The first night we were there I woke up very suddenly in the middle of the night. I didn't sit up like in movies or anything, simply open my eyes quickly and with a bit of a jolt and sat there breathing heavily for a moment. Amber was next to me, curled up against me. It was obvious to me that I'd be having a nightmare.
I can't even remember what the dream that woke me was about, one of those things when you wake up pulsing with adrenaline and with a cold sweat and a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. You simply know that it was a nightmare, even if you don't remember it.
I've got a lot of experience with nightmares. And in all the years of my life, for every restless dream, whether it's just horrors of fire, paranoid irrational nightmares, or one that I can't remember, I remember none worse than this…perhaps because in all the time that I'd been with Amber I'd only had terrible dreams once or twice, and that was before we'd gotten married. They were just weird paranoid dreams about our wedding going wrong and her leaving me and a million other ridiculous things that were nothing but paranoia. And even the nightmares of fire and burning had ceased to exist then. They just stopped and learned to leave me alone.
That's what I hate about this. I couldn't even know what it was about, but woke up feeling strangely and irrationally terrified.
It felt like the walls were closing in.
All the air filling the room weighed heavily on my head. The blankets were suffocating, I could feel all the strands of my hair on my shoulders and chest, torturing me. Even the body heat between Amber and I was maddening. I gasped for breath, knowing that the air was going in and out of my lungs but unable to feel it and get the comfort from it.
I pushed the blankets off me, Amber sleeping the whole time, and blindly stumbled out of the room, nearly falling as I staggered through the house and into the kitchen to the back door. My hands, covered in sweat, fumbled with the lock, taking my muddled mind a moment to realize that it was unlocked. I threw it open and stepped out onto the back porch, taking a few steps to the rail and leaning over it. I heard the door swing shut behind me.
I gasped for breath, taking in deep gulps of the fresh air. It was cold. Brilliant to me. And I felt it cold on my bare chest, which was covered in sweat. The cold cut through me, and I loved it. The air was so relieving as I breathed that I felt tears rising in my eyes.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I inhaled, calming myself gradually. After a few minutes I pushed my hair out of my face and walked out to some middle point of my field-like back yard and collapsed, laying on my back on the grass, staring up at the stars. They burned my eyes…well me "eye" really…whatever…
I couldn't get Amber out of my head. Her image flashed in my vision and faded into the stars. Like a cinematic apparition she spun around in circles, dancing, her eyes bright and hair flowing around her. And she was laughing. She was so pretty in these visions, dancing with the stars. And the strange part was that I had no recollection of this image. I must've created it in my own head.
People sat that marriage sucks; that it dulls a relationship…I didn't, and don't, think that at all. If two people are meant to be together, if some fate or force can bring them together as it brought Amber and I together, and its not just a commitment of obligation or uncertainty, then they belong together. And time just makes their relationship all the more beautiful.
Amber and I were meant for each other. We were meant to be, and I knew it, and felt it running through my veins, as I stared up at her in the sky. Perhaps I was being delirious, or maybe that nightmare had taken a toll on my mind…or for all I know maybe Mark or Raven played some prank and slipped something into my coffee that morning at breakfast…all I know is that I could feel this. And it was real to me. I was lying in my backyard with no shirt and flannel pajama pants, staring at my wife, my lover, dancing in the stars. And there were no clouds. And the sky was a beautiful dark blue that accented the shine in her eyes somehow. And the red of her lips. I wanted to kiss her.
It was chilly. I shivered and held myself as I looked up at the sky, almost on the verge of shivering, feeling the hair rise on my arms…but all of this was an external cold. I could feel warmth on the inside. I loved her.
That thought of love was what eventually picked me up off the ground, unwillingly prying my eyes from the stars, and Amber, so that I could walk back up to the house. I was walking up onto the front porch when the in the window of the door appeared Amber. And she was holding herself, wearing one of my sweatshirts which seemed like a tent on her. Her face was worried, hair tangled. She didn't look happy as she did in the sky. My heart nearly stopped to see her that way.
"Oh god…what's wrong???" I asked her, and rushed to the door, opening it and pulling her into a hug. She placed a warm hand on my chest, nuzzling me and cuddling against me. I pulled her into the kitchen a little and closed the door. Slowly we walked together back into the house. We sat down on the couch in the living room. "Amber what's wrong? Why do you look so sad?"
She sighed and wrapped her arms around me possessively, as if I were hers, and hers alone. Like she wanted me all to herself. "Nothing…I just…I woke up and you were gone."
"Aww hun…" I kissed the top of her head. "I'm sorry…I didn't mean to frighten you."
"I'm sorry too…I trust you too much to think you'd ever like…leave…for all I know you could've been taking a piss…I just…I dunno it was strange."
We were silent for a few minutes until I asked her if she wanted to go back to bed, so together we did just that. As we were settling down, she said in a small voice, not like her at all: "Kane I never want to wake up without you again."