It took me much longer than usual to fall asleep. Even when I did I was extremely restless. I kept finding
myself in the middle of dreams that were disturbing, depressing, or worse. Most of them involved some kind of
unpleasantness between me and Nicole. Some of them involved Nicole dying in some form. Each one of those
immediately jarred me awake.
I had one of those dreams and my eyes immediately opened. I found that I was laying on my side and looking
directly at my alarm clock. It indicated that it was 3:45. Terrific, I thought, a night with no sleep. I
was about to roll over on my other side when something felt amiss with my bed. There was extra weight on my
blankets which prevented me from shifting positions. I tried to focus my eyes as best as I could. My blurry
eyes cleared up enough to reveal Nicole sitting on the edge of my bed.
I was startled and sat up immediately. Even though she was sitting on the bed, she had her back to me, as if
she didn’t want to face me. I noticed that she was wearing a robe of some kind. Then her soft voice said,
“Joe, I…I’m sorry.”
“I haven’t been able to sleep anyway,” I mumbled. My voice was groggy and barely intelligible.
“I couldn’t either,” she said. “That’s not why I’m sorry.”
“Then what?” I asked.
She turned around and faced me. “I’m sorry for everything,” she said. “I’m sorry for lashing out at you.
I’m sorry for hating you. I’m sorry for…for…for fucking you.” Her voice cracked at the end. Again she
sniffled and wiped at her eyes. I almost made a wish for her to stop crying, but as I realized what words ran
through my thoughts, I caught myself.
“Why should you apologize?” I asked. “Did I stop you?” I wanted her to return to herself. This wasn’t like
her at all. I didn’t want her to blame herself. No matter what she might have felt, I must have felt it too.
Otherwise there was no reasonable explanation for me letting her do what she did.
“But I forced myself on you,” she said. “It’s…unforgiveable. It’s not normal, it’s not right.”
“Then why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I…I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “Every reasonable and logical part of me kept screaming ‘No!’
but I ignored it. I let my desires run away with me.”
I didn’t want to make her feel like I was interrogating her. But I just had to know what she thought and why
she did this. So I asked, “How long have you had this desire?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think until recently.”
“After Dad died?” I asked.
She nodded. “My life has felt so meaningless since then,” she explained. “The only times I’ve felt good have
been when I’m with you. We’ve been so close since we were kids and…I know we understand each other. I go on
all these dates and all I do is compare them all to you. This one isn’t as funny as Joe. This one isn’t as
sensitive. This one is just a total asshole. Everything keeps coming back to you. So it just hit me. I
love you. I need you.”
I was amazed. It seemed that she never had serious relationships for the same reason that I never did. She
compared any guy she went out with to me, just as I compared all the girls I went out with to her. That was
too big a coincidence. How could we both behave the same way unless there was something else? Was this all a
product of how we grew up together, how we depended and relied upon each other? Was this because of the jokes
and games we played?
She was waiting for me to say something to her. I felt myself beginning to sweat, even though I wasn’t
wearing a shirt and it wasn’t particularly warm in my room. I was sweating because I just had too many damned
thoughts running through my head. They pulled me in all sorts of directions but they all came to the same
endpoint.
“Nicole,” I said. “You know I never meant to hurt you. You know I never would. I tried to handle it as best
as I thought I could.”
“Joe, look, we’re past that now,” she said.
I held up my hand and she stopped. “What it did was get me to thinking,” I explained. “My only thought as I
walked home after doing that was about you. About us, really. My first thought was that I hoped you would
have a good date. But it got me to thinking about what we’ve done since Dad died. I thought about all the
dates I’ve been on and I realized why none of them went very far. None of them were you. We’ve rejected
everyone else because they aren’t who we want them to be.” I took a deep breath. “When we…well, you know…it
just felt…right. It felt natural to me, like it was supposed to happen that way. It was as if we fit
together like two halves of a whole.” I reached out and gently stroked her cheek. “I need you. I love you,”
I said.
She took my hand and kissed it softly. “You know what this means?” she asked.
“I do,” I said. “But I don’t care.”
She stood up and unfastened her robe. She slid it off her shoulders and let it fall to the ground to reveal
her naked body. I smiled at her and stood up as well. We kissed each other as I pressed my body close into
hers. She moved her hands to my hips and slipped her hands under my shorts so that she could remove them.
We got back on the bed and this time we assumed a more traditional position with me on top. We made slow
passionate love, quite different from our first encounter. It ended with both of us climaxing at the same
time. This time there was no pulling out either. If we had crossed a line in our first session, we now moved
so far past it that it ceased to exist.
After I positioned myself back on the bed we found ourselves staring into each other’s eyes with slight smiles
on our faces. Nicole proceeded to ask, “So what else can this ring of yours do?”