Sleeping Awake

by Noelle, Gamali

  I rolled my eyes. “So I’m a hopeless cause then?”

  Bryn turned me so that I was facing him. “You’re not a hopeless cause. You are just your own worst enemy. If and when someone falls in love with you, you will be the reason why you refuse to just be happy and love him back.”

  “But do I even deserve to be loved?”

  “My mother told me to never hit a woman, but I swear to God, Noira, today might be the day that I break her heart. Of course you deserved to be loved!”

  I leaned into him. “I feel like if I let someone in, he’s going to hurt me. Or I’ll hurt him in anticipation of him hurting me… And to be quite honest, I don’t even know if I’m capable of loving someone. I don’t even know if I love myself…”

  Bryn pulled me up and turned me towards him. “Stop doing this to yourself, Noira.”

  “I’m not doing a—”

  “Yes you are,” Bryn insisted. “Noira, I’ve spent the majority of our friendship watching you build walls around yourself. You’re going to end up sealing yourself in if you continue to think like this. I’m not saying that you need a man to save you, but you’re going to end up alone and miserable. I don’t think that you want that.”

  “I don’t,” I admitted.

  “So take a chance with whomever this fellow is.”

  I sat up slightly. “Who said that there’s a man in the picture?”

  “Noira,” Bryn replied looking me in the eye, “I know you better than you’d like to imagine. There’s a man in your life. The question is: For how long do you want him to be in it? You can’t keep thinking that every man is like your father.”

  “Who says that this is because of my father?”

  Bryn just stared at me.

  I reached for my martini and downed it in one gulp.

  *~*

  Nicolaas arrived a few days later bearing gifts of baked goods and tea. Our eyes met in the mirror as he sat on my bed watching me getting ready. I could sense that he was trying his hardest to figure me out. I broke our eye contact and reached for my brush.

  “Your phone has gone to voice mail for over a week,” he eventually said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Why?”

  I looked at him in the mirror. He didn’t look upset or annoyed as he stared back at me; he just looked confused. It was a look that I had seen before on people, and I knew what he was thinking. He thought that he was getting somewhere with me, and then my wall shot up and threw him off his perfect balance.

  “I was busy,” I finally said.

  “You were busy.”

  Though I knew that it was rhetorical, I nodded. “Busy.”

  His face contorted into an unreadable expression. “Why are you doing this, Noira?”

  With six words, I realised something: he was beginning to be able to read me. From choosing to play along with my games of hide-and-go-seek, to knowing when I had not eaten and exactly how I liked my tea, Nicolaas was slowly learning to read me as he had his first book. I felt like breaking something. How had we gotten there? Nicolaas had pushed us past casual sex, and I had been too busy bleeding my pain to notice.

  “Stop it.” He rose from the bed after his command.

  “No you stop it.” I spun around, hairbrush pointed at him.

  He looked down at my brush, then back at me, and a tiny smile pushed its way into the corners of his lips.

  “Why are you so scared?” he demanded, taking a step closer.

  I hated everything about him from the thoughtful look that he bore while sleeping to the way that he appeared, like snow in the middle of June, in my thoughts. I used to think that I was aching for his touch, cool from the burns that he’d left upon me. I knew that I was wrong. I hadn’t been missing the thunder; I’d been missing him. I hated him.

  He pulled me into a tight embrace.

  I also hated the way that I felt as he wrapped his arms around me: warm and content.

  “This has to stop.” I said. I tried my hardest to pull away from his grip. It was to no avail; he just latched on even tighter, like a leech.

  His cologne was making me feel pleasant thoughts that I didn’t need to have. I had a right to my anger. Still, I breathed in more deeply.

  “Let me go!” I demanded, struggling to break away from his trance.

  “No.”

  “Va te faire foutre!” I hissed.

  “I’d rather that you fucked me,” he replied. “You know I like it when you’re on top.”

  I stomped my foot and howled. I hated his confidence.

  “What are you so scared of?” he looked down at me.

  I refused to look into his mossy eyes. I chose instead to look down at the ground, keeping my mouth firmly shut.

  “I know what you’re trying to do Noira. It’s not working.” He let me go and took a step backwards.

  I hated the fact that he was right.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I like you, and I know that this can work.” He tilted my face towards him. “And despite your act, you know this as well.”

  I had a sudden urge to kiss him. Damn his alluring eyes.

  “I want you to leave,” I said. It took all of my inner strength to not immediately take back my statement.

  “No.”

  “Fine!” I hissed.

  Spinning on my heel, I grabbed the leather-bound sketchbook that was on the side of my armoire. I could feel him watching me as I threw myself onto my old rocking chair. The pages of the book turned before I could sit properly. My Grandpa Bill; my pony Belda, who I’d had to leave behind in France; my favourite tree in our current garden; my mother and my sisters lounging on the beach—my entire life went whirling by like a tornado until I found a blank page. Snatching up a charcoal pencil, I hastily began.

  Nicolaas handed me an Earl Grey and a pain au chocolat. He sat on my bed drinking his coffee, watching as my pencil flew across the paper.

  I hated the fact that he had reduced me to this state. I was almost twenty-two, a grown woman. I had a hard outer shell that no amount of antipsychotics or pleas from Maman could penetrate, and yet he had me cowering behind my sketchpad as I plotted my next move.

  He was right; I was scared. Scared of getting too close to him and having him get close to me. They always left in the end. For whatever laughable explanation the gods came up with to amuse themselves, we were downright brazen with each other in Bryn’s Jacuzzi, yet the first few moments that we spent together were always filled with butterflies, shy glances and then that sweet, sweet familiarity and drowsy warmth. I didn’t want those feelings to go away, but at the same time, I was scared. Of all the emotions in the world to have taken me over, it had to be fear. Scared of the intensity of our obvious connection.

  “I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I announced.

  “I’ve never been this serious about a girl,” he replied.

  I looked up at him. “Why me?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If I allow myself to, I think that I could easily fall in love with you.”

  Love. I shivered at the very thought.

  “Love is only wonderful in fiction. I’ve never heard of a real life romance that ended happily; at best, some form of insanity ensues,” I retorted.

  Casually, Nicolaas walked over to me.

  “Wow,” he whispered. “It’s like staring into the mirror.”

  I looked down at the page. I hadn’t meant to draw him. Even in my subconscious, it always went back to him.

  “Fuck!” I hissed. “I don’t like this. I don’t like feeling like this. You consume my every thought.”

  “You consume my every thought,” Nicolaas replied, shrugging.

  “But that isn’t natural,” I declared. I began pacing. “Love does not exist. It’s just a state of mental euphoria, caused by a temporary hormonal imbalance. If we let this simmer, you’ll see that you’re not really about to fall in love with me.”

  �
�We haven’t seen each other in a week, Noira. Have your feelings for me simmered?” he leaned casually against my bedpost and took another sip of his coffee.

  If anything, they’d only grown stronger.

  “It’s barely been four weeks,” I said.

  “And your point is what exactly?” he asked. If he had yawned, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing that I was saying could get through his thick scull.

  “You can’t allow yourself to love me in only four weeks,” I said. To prevent myself from slapping his obstinate head, I gathered the remains of our breakfast and placed them into the bag that they came in.

  “Says who? The girl who’s scared to be in a relationship?” Nicolaas folded his arms.

  “I’m not—”

  Before I could say anything, he had bridged the gap between us and taken the bag out of my hands. I watched as it fell to the floor. He pulled me into his arms.

  “Don’t lie.”

  I breathed in his scent, once again feeling its calming effect.

  “Why are you holding back?” he asked.

  My eyes fluttered as he tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. My skin burned under his touch.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Noira. I just want to be with you.”

  “But you barely know me,” I replied. “How can you know that you can love me?”

  “I know enough about you to make that decision. If you’d just stop running away from me, you’d see what I meant.”

  “How?”

  “You’d start feeling the same way.”

  “After four weeks?”

  “Stop it,” he commanded, softly.

  “You’ve never been in love,” I pointed out.

  “So what? I want to fall in love with you—hell, I may already have.”

  “In four weeks?”

  He groaned. “So what if it’s been barely four weeks?”

  I felt like something had lodged itself in my windpipe. Unable to control myself, I started to shake. Before I knew it, I was once again crying a river. Nicolaas lifted me up and brought me to the bed. He didn’t say anything as I lay there in spasms; he just held me.

  I wasn’t sure if my episode had been brought on because of the withdrawal or the fact that my emotional attachment to Nicolaas was so unsettling to my nervous system. Either way, once I managed to gain control of myself, I was mortified.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Nicolaas kissed my neck. “You have nothing to apologise about.”

  “You’re just being nice,” I said, sniffling.

  “Stop beating yourself up, Noira.”

  I pulled away and sat up, burying my head in my lap. “Bryn says that this is because of my father.”

  “I would have to agree with him,” Nicolaas replied.

  I looked up. “You think that I have Daddy Issues?”

  “Every woman has Daddy Issues,” Nicolaas said. “Either they’re running away from any man who reminds them of their father, or they’re trying to find someone like him.”

  “And what about you,” I asked. “Are you running away from your mother or trying to find her?”

  “Neither,” he calmly replied. “I snorted and fucked my way through those issues during my university years.”

  I laughed. I knew that he was being serious, but I could not control myself. I laughed so hard that fresh tears ran down my face. If only I had his courage. He didn’t seem to give a damn about what anyone thought of him, his past or how he chose to live his life. He simply accepted himself, flaws and all, and chose to live instead of existing.

  “It must be fun to be you,” I said, finally calming down.

  He shrugged. “For the most part. It’s not so fun when you’ve stripped yourself emotionally in front of a woman and she leaves you hanging by a thread, waiting to see if you’ve made a fool of yourself…”

  I kissed his cheek and curled into him. “You haven’t made a fool of yourself. You just chose to enter my Mad House.”

  “And what caused you to build one?”

  “You mean what’s my Daddy Issue?”

  “Precisely.”

  “He used to be my favourite person in the world, but he abandoned me when I was twelve, and now I think that every man will be like him and leave me—The usual.”

  Nicolaas turned my face towards his. I barely felt it as his lips brushed against mine, but it was as if I had been shocked by a jolt of electricity.

  “I think that I’ve proven to you that I have no intention of going anywhere.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Mooi,” he whispered.

  I looked up at him.

  “I’m not your father.”

  “My father wasn’t always an asshole,” I replied. “People change.”

  “Stop it, Noira,” he said. “I’m trying to be very patient, but you make it very hard sometimes. You cannot spend your life assuming that everyone will leave you in the end. I have no immediate plans of abandoning either you or our potential future children. You can either take the risk and have this turn into something great, or you can sit here in your room brooding over a man who was stupid enough to leave you and cut himself from your life.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Essentially, it is simple. Make a choice and stick by it. Either allow your father to dictate the terms of your life and your happiness or take control and start living.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. A part of me was inclined to believe that Nicolaas was right. I could either start living or try to protect myself and remain unhappy. But what if it wasn’t so simple? Was Philippe controlling my life? My immediate gut response was “Yes.”

  “What are we doing, Noira?” Nicolaas asked. Based on his tone of voice, and the look of gravity on his face, I knew that my answer would either send him away forever or make him stay, roaring thunder and all.

  I thought of the look in his eyes as they met mine. How he only paid attention to me when we went out. The smile that appeared on his face whenever I walk into the room.

  “Mooi.”

  I looked at him properly for the first time since he entered the room, without the anger and the suffocating fear.

  “You make me feel safe,” I whispered. “I don’t think that I’ve ever felt this safe with anyone. I saw you in that hot tub, and it felt like I was coming home. I felt as if I’d always known you. Now that we’re so sewn together, I’m scared about what will happen to me if we break up.”

  “We’re not going to break up,” Nicolaas said. If there were a physical definition of serious, it would be him.

  “You don’t know that,” I replied.

  “Mooi,” he sighed. “What are we doing?”

  That would be the final one. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it, but I knew that I wasn’t ready to let Nicolaas go.

  If it was to be hell, I decided, then it would be hell.

  “Learning how to fall in love.”

  **~*~*~**~*~*~**

  ¯ CHAPITRE SEPT ¯

  SILENT MY SONG

  The following Sunday, my room door burst open and Cienna came running inside. I was about to give her a verbal whiplashing that would send her scampering back to wherever she came from when I saw how anxious she was.

  “Qu'est-ce que c'est?” I asked. I was trying to untangle the unruly knots in my hair.

  “Your mother is cleaning,” she announced.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “The house is clean,” Cienna continued. “The maid came yesterday, remember?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she’s bored.”

  Cienna groaned and fell backwards onto my bed. “When was the last time that you saw your mother clean the house? She never cleans.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but she was right. In the month that I’d been home, she hadn’t so much as taken out the garbage.

  I set the comb down on down on my vanity. “What do you think it might be?” I asked, joining her on the bed.r />
  She shrugged. “I don’t know… A man called a couple of days ago…”

  My eyes widened. “Un mec? You don’t think...”

  “What?”

  I shook my head furiously. “Mais non. Ce n’est pas possible…”

  “Spit it out already!” Cienna demanded. “What’s not possible?”

  “Peut-être elle a un copin?” I finally said.

  Cienna burst out laughing. “Nice try, Noira, she’ll never date again. Not after...”

  “Fuck him,” I retorted. “She can date if she wants to.”

  “Yeah, but she hasn’t,” Cienna pointed out.

  As far as we knew, Maman hadn’t so much as flirted with another man.

  “What could it be?” Cienna kicked my bedpost.

  “Hey!” I snapped.

  “Sorry,” Cienna frowned. “I just hate not knowing what’s going on!”

  The door to my room opened and Camelea walked in. Maman followed. She was as solemn as a Buddhist monk as she stood in the doorway. I glanced at Camelea for answers. She raised an eyebrow at me and sat on the edge of the bed. Cienna had been right; something was going on.

  When Maman didn’t speak right away, I started tugging on the bedspread to avoid squirming. She didn’t look sad, she didn’t look happy; she didn’t look like anything.

  Finally, she opened her mouth to speak. “We’ll be having a guest for dinner tomorrow evening.”

  *~*

  I’d be lying if I said that I was surprised when Maman announced that Philippe would be joining us for dinner. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel. There was a slight buzzing in my ears as the silence that followed bounced between us like a stray tennis ball.

  Maman seemed oblivious to the change in the atmosphere as she continued. “He’s been living in Garden City for the past year. He wants to see you girls.”

  I hadn’t thought about what it would be like when Philippe finally returned. After we left France, I didn’t imagine such a thing was possible. I wasn’t surprised when the volcano of our mixed emotions finally erupted and spewed curdled anger everywhere.