Falling for the Wrong Twin (22 page)

“It’s a dream,” Anna said, her voice growing stronger as she spoke. “This whole thing is a dream made up by a ghost somewhere in our bizarre minds. None of it is real.”

The Captain rocked back on his heels. “What makes you think a dream is any less real than what you experience when you’re awake?”

Mike snorted. “Because it is.” He clasped hands with Anna and together they faced the Captain. “This is pure imagination. What happens here has no bearing on our real lives.”

“You honestly think that?” the ghost challenged.

Mike dipped his head in a firm slash of a nod. But even as he did it, he felt Anna twist uncomfortably beside him. He sighed and looked to her.

“Anna--”

“Well, he’s right. After all, if it weren’t for my dreams--my imagination--I would have broken long ago. Not this stuff…” She waved at the sea and the sails. “As a kid, my pretend places were the happiest place I could be.”

“But--”

She shook her head. “No buts. I can flow with this. At least for now.” She looked to the Captain. “Okay, so you’ve created this ship that is going no where in the middle of a flat sea. We’re here. We’re listening. What’s your point?”

The man smiled at her, the expression almost fatherly. “I didn’t create this, dear Anna. You did. You both did. This is your lives, painted in metaphor in your dreams.”

Mike felt his mouth flatten. He was not a man who liked metaphors. He dealt in the here and now. But he had to admit that the idea that he split himself into different people--different roles, different identities--felt uncomfortably real. Meanwhile Anna was having a revelation of her own. She was looking at the sea, looking at the static sails, and her fingers were growing impossibly tight around his.

“So you’re saying I’m going no where. My life is a static picture of pretty but without wind. Without direction.” She turned to look back at the Captain, then gasped. It took a little longer for Mike to realize what had happened. He was so busy studying Anna’s face he’d missed the ghost’s disappearance.

Suddenly, it was just two of them standing on a silent clipper ship. Anna looked at him, and he shrugged.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.

She nodded, but slowly, reluctance in every part of her body. “Yeah,” she finally said. “But not here. I…uh, I don’t like it here anymore.”

And just like that, they both jerked awake.

Chapter 16

Anna opened her eyes. She was spooned back against Mike, but she could tell by his sudden jolt that he was awake too. But rather than acknowledge anything, she stayed completely still, doing her best to remember what had happened in the dream. It was surprisingly easy. The entire event was burned into her brain, but…wait…it was starting to fade too. If she didn’t grab hold of it now, it would disappear completely.

“Mike?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” His breath was a hot brush of air along her spine. She gasped, her body arching instinctively, which pressed her groin back against… Well, morning wood was very apparent, even though it was… She peered at the beside clock. 3:27 am. Ugh.

His hand slid along her belly, tingling heat in its wake. But if she gave in to this distraction, would she still remember the dream later? Probably not. Or at least not with as much clarity. So she grabbed his hand, twining her fingers in his, though part of her really wanted to keep going with Mike’s idea.

“Mike, were you dreaming just now?”

He stilled against her, and she waited. Eventually he spoke, his one word filled with resignation. “Yeah.”

“Me, too.”

“Clipper ship?”

She nodded. “No wind.”

“Split personality.”

“Floundering.”

He pressed a kiss to her spine, the erotic play of his lips enough to make her toes curl. Then he whispered against her skin.

“It was just a dream. We don’t have to make more of it than that.”

She nodded, knowing she could easily forget everything. But that would be like ignoring friendly advice. Perhaps she ought to listen to it. Or at least consider it.

But rather than focus on her own stalled-out life, she shifted gears. She remembered what she’d wanted to talk to him about. The question had been hovering in her mind for a while now, but she’d always let it slip away before.

“Will you tell me about Susie?” she asked.

He went statue still. She didn’t think he was still breathing. And then he shifted. Though his fingers tightened around hers, his body rolled back and away, putting distance between them. She mourned that loss, but knew he needed the space. So she waited, doing her best to keep still, fighting to keep from either pushing him to talk or filling the silence with her own noise. This was for him to decide--did he open up to her or close down?

“You surprise me when you’re quiet,” he said softly. “I hadn’t thought you could do that.”

She frowned. “Because I’m a flake?”

“Because you’re female. I know that sounds insulting, but I don’t mean it to be. The women in my life are all rather--”

“Chatty? Busy? Meddling?”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. “Fair enough, but you’ve got to know that all women aren’t like that.”

“I know,” he said. Then he squeezed her. “But you’re not. I mean, you gab it up with my mother like you two are long lost friends.”

She smiled, not in the least bit insulted. “I know how to talk to people. That’s a good thing. And that includes knowing when to just listen.”

“Ummm. Well, I wanted you to know that I appreciate it. That…that you surprise me with how amazing you are sometimes.”

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

When he didn’t keep talking, she forced herself to pull out of his arms. She wanted to see his face. She turned the bedside lamp on low, then rolled over so they were looking eye to eye on their respective pillows. Wow, he was gorgeous, all bed rumpled and naked. She probably ought to turn the light off if she really wanted to talk. She didn’t move.

It was maybe another two minutes before she spoke. “You’re avoiding the question.”

“I was hoping you’d forget.”

“Nope.” Then she finally gave voice to the thoughts that were bumping around her head. “Do you think she’s related to your split personality thing?”

He shot her an irritated look. To be fair, she doubted it was meant for her. His expression was more annoyance with the entire bizarre situation. “I’m not going to put too much stock in a shared dream. It’s just too weird.”

“Agreed, but the question is still relevant.” She sighed and realized she’d have to pony up first. “Just like it’s important for me to admit that I do feel stuck. I’ve got a successful business, friends I hang out with, but there’s an annoying emptiness to my life.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I talk to people, I throw parties, and I can charm a room in about ten seconds, but…” Her voice trailed away as she thought about her own future. If it was simply more of the same, the coming years felt very bleak.

“But?” he prompted.

“But I want a family.”

He lifted his head to look closer at her. “Really? You haven’t seemed like the settle-down type.”

She smiled. “I didn’t mean right this second, but yeah, I want a family. I just didn’t want to risk a lot to get it.”

“I don’t follow.”

Not a surprise since she was struggling to find her own words. “I think I became a party planner because I could glom onto other people’s lives without risking too much of myself. I get to share in the big events, become a part of their lives, but only under my control. That’s not really being part of the family. I’m a hired employee.”

“So you want more?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes. I want a lot more.”

He nodded as if he understood. “But you can’t have that with a vacation fling, can you? “

She smiled as she stroked across his broad shoulder. “Depends on if the fling wants more too. And Mr. Control-the-Sex-Dom, you’re risking even less than I am.”

He winced at her words, but he didn’t deny it. “I just know what I like--”

“What you like,” she said at the same moment. “But is that a way of segmenting off that part of your sexuality? Making sure that no pesky emotions bleed into your regular life?”

“I really hate pop psychology, you know that?”

“Everybody hates pop psychology when it’s aimed at them.”

He smiled, acknowledging the hit. “Okay, Susie Whalen was a sports groupie. Football, soccer, tennis, whatever nearness to popularity she could manage, she was there. She really wanted to be with my brother, but I would do. And as my brother and I had a long history of making out with easy girls, she was just another one in a very long list.”

Anna winced, hating the way he described himself and the girl. There was a flatness in his tone that implied self-disgust. He’d been a jerk in high school and he knew it. And in case she had any doubts, he acknowledged his fault in his next words.

“We were such idiots. We knew better than to treat girls that way, but…”

“But there are a lot of Susie Whalens in the world, especially in high school.”

“I, um, we spent a night together after a football game. Then she got all weepy and clingy. I didn’t understand half of what she was talking about, but what I did get was that she was damaged. As in seriously hurt by shit that happened when she was a kid and was still going on now.”

“Oh hell.”

“It was too much for me. I was so young. So I…” He sighed. “I ran. I avoided her, didn’t want to talk to her, cut her out of the group whenever I could.” He flopped onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “I was all over the place in high school. No focus except sports and girls. Did enough work to get by. No concept of tomorrow except for when I could score my next beer and chick. Her problems were just…too big.”

“What happened?”

“Just what I said before. She started saying weird stuff. That we’d seen a great movie together when we hadn’t. That I’d done things with her that never happened. That we’d made plans to run away together when all I wanted was to run away from her.”

“Oh Mike, that must have been awful.”

He nodded. “I finally let her down easy. That night, she took a bunch of pills. I found out the next day from her brother, but…” He sighed. “She’d stuffed her suicide note into my locker. I didn’t even find it until much later.”

Anna straightened up, her chest squeezing tight. She touched his arm, but he didn’t respond. His entire body was rigid. “Mike?”

“Look, we’ve already talked about this. She didn’t kill herself. Or rather, she didn’t succeed. She got into therapy and happily ever after now.”

She tried to focus not as much on his words as the way he said them. It was all a recitation of facts with no clue as to how it must have destroyed his childhood. After all, a girl had tried to kill herself based on something he did. The guilt must have been overwhelming. “So you gave up everything to help her. Your car money, your time.” What else had he given this hurt girl?

He nodded. “helped her get into therapy. And I…well, I got my friends together and we beat the shit out of her mother’s boyfriend. He skipped town soon after that, which caused its own problems. But at least the asshole was out of Susie’s life.”

Holy shit. “Crash course in growing up.”

“It was past time for it.”

Maybe. She wasn’t so sure. She knew tons of kids who hadn’t started facing the real world until well after college. “So you helped a troubled girl. That’s a good thing.”

He dropped his arm to look at her. “You don’t understand. It was too much for me to deal with. I was completely unprepared for the magnitude of her problems, and she kept coming to me. We spent hours with her just sobbing into my arms. Night after night, through the rest of high school and even into my last summer before college. I thought it would be over when I left, but she kept calling. She was just…” He shook his head. “It was too much for me. I had to find a way to splinter it off or I’d go insane. Rick had soccer, you know. He could always lose himself in that, and he was always in training. I had football for a while, but it was never the release for me that soccer is for Rick.”

She was beginning to see where this was going. “What did you do to cope?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer. After all, she’d done much the same thing when her mother had died.

“I just…sectioned myself off. I told her what hours she could call me and wouldn’t answer the phone if it wasn’t one of her times. That worked so well, that I sectioned off the rest of my life too. I picked the times I studied, the times when I hung out and drank beer. Everything neat and tidy, and no deviation from it. Exam the next day, didn’t matter. If it was time to drink beer, I drank beer. Hot girl wants to get together for coffee during study time, I said no. That was when I studied. No fuss, no muss.”

She doubted it was as easy as he made it sound, but clearly it had worked for him. “It was a good compromise. And probably the only way to keep from having Susie take over your entire life.”

He nodded, but she could tell there was more. And that’s when it all fell into place. “Susie got the nurturing you, the one who takes care of your sister’s taxes and manages your mother’s finances. But she was exhausting, so that part of your life got completely cut off from everything else. You developed sexual Dom you, but under your clear control. No letting those emotions in.”

“There’s work me, too. The guy who keeps the factory running.”

“And you kept walls around each compartment long after Susie left your life.”

He nodded, his arm finally sliding away so he could look directly at her. “But lately, I’ve been feeling like it’s too hard. With Dad gone, I’ve been doing what I can for Mom and Chrissy, there’s pressure at work and I’ve got a new job offer. Then there’s Rick’s crazy life, and I can see the stress in him. It’s all too much.”

She’d heard these words before. From herself. But at least in her case, it wasn’t that her life was getting too hard to control, it was that the walls were tumbling down. “You want to help your family, but you can’t just take care of them all the time. Or at least not by yourself. You want a woman who is more than just submissive to you in bed. You want her to be a friend too?” That last was said as a question because, well because maybe he wanted everything back in its neat little place and not bleeding over.