Short Story: Only in Dreams

Luke stood in front of his girlfriend’s mom at the front door of her house.

The leaves of the Gingko trees that framed their driveway bobbed gently to the melodic chirps of mamas and their baby birds. The roses that lined the walkway to the front door were in full bloom save for the one Luke had given Kim their last Valentine’s Day together, senior year of high school.

It tried nobly to lift its head but was planted too close to the others to get much sun and consequently was outshone by the more mature American Beauty’s around it.

Even though Kim wasn’t there, she could see it all, clear as senior year.

She tried to scream, I’m almost there, wait for me.

But no words came out because it was just a dream. And the real Luke was dead. And the real her, was an adult. 27 to be exact.

“I’m sorry, but Kim’s not home right now,” Allie, Kim’s mom said. “Maybe you could come back tomorrow?” She paused for Luke’s consent. “Or you’re welcome to come in and wait for her,” she stepped aside for him to enter. Kim’s mom was nothing if not reasonable.

Kim watched as his eyes searched beyond her mom with urgency.

Finally, disappointed he turned back to Allie. “I can’t wait, but please tell Kim I was here.”

He stepped off their doorstep and onto the curb. He turned around as if remembering something, “Kimberly Kim,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I like to say her name, ‘cause it’s dope, you know?”

He smiled and began to walk away. His yellow and black windbreaker, the North Face one that Kim had felt countless times around her shoulders on chilly mornings outside first period together, rustled. The sound got further, and further away. And then he was gone.

Kim tried so hard to say something, to show up, do anything to change the dream like doing something there, might bring him back in real life – but nothing happened.

The dream was the same – always.

He showed up at her parents’ house, at school, at the treehouse in his yard – their secret hiding spot, at the clearing at the top of the trail where he’d made a heart using rocks, kicking up little puffs of dust each time he laid them back down to form the shape. But Kim was never there, and just moments away.

Most of the time she was resigned to watching the scene play like a movie she’d seen dozens of times, because she had. And she knew the ending.

But today she woke tangled in sweaty cotton sheets in an almost too-high bed, in a well-lit second floor bedroom with the light streaming in from the upper-middle class street. It was the room she’d grown up in, the one that she’d returned to after college.

She caught her breath through tears and established her coordinates in this world to the ticking Totoro alarm clock on her nightstand on the right, and the oak tree outside the window on her left.

Birds chirped. The smell of bacon from downstairs assaulted her nose. And quite involuntarily, saliva collected in the hollows of her cheeks. Her homecoming crown from a decade ago sat at a tilt, hung on one of the three panels of her mirrored vanity.

Her body was sweaty and shaking.

She blamed the shots. Join us, you never do! her co-worker had nagged. And that night she had. She knocked back 1 and then 2 pints, and topped it off with two shots. Not exactly honor roll behavior. But she was an adult now. Full-fledged. She could make those kinds of decisions for herself. She grimaced, taking a look at her bloated face in the mirror on her nightstand.

Obviously she’d have to skip breakfast and maybe lunch if she wanted to look normal when she saw her boyfriend, Daniel. Otherwise from the swell of her face, he’d know she’d been drinking. He hated that.

She wiped the sweat from her arch-less brows and looked at her phone. “Good morning, Beautiful!” Daniel had texted. She placed the phone back on her nightstand, facedown and walked to the shower repeating to herself, “train, walk, office, train, walk, office,” and so forth.

She took her time coating her skin with a thick lather of soap as the water streamed down her back. Nothing felt so safe to her as having her body covered – by Luke’s jacket in high school, her blankets even on the hottest summer nights, or soap in the shower.

Even with Daniel, it was always a surprise when she noticed she was undressed. She knew she had taken off her clothes, aggressively embraced him. But once it was over, she wriggled as quicky as she could under his blue-gray, questionably clean sheets, desperate to have something hold her down again. To feel like she belonged here on earth.

And even though she was mostly immune to Daniel’s looks, manners, devotion, when he encircled her with his arms and anchored her to the moment, she felt deep gratitude which she guessed was just as good as love.

“Train, walk, office,” she repeated. But she had forgotten. Tonight it would be “train, walk, office, dinner.”

Daniel wanted to meet, which was strange because it was only a Tuesday.

She dressed quickly after exiting the shower in a steamy fog that would have been romantic if she hadn’t been running so late. If she was younger, she might imagine herself a Korean Guinevere emerging through the mists to see Camelot for the first time.

But instead, intuiting the cold that would lash her cheeks stepping out of the house, she dressed in layers – three of them. It was hardly heroine attire. But she didn’t believe in fairytales anymore. Not after Luke died.

“Kim,” her mom knocked on her open door. “There’s breakfast for you on the table, wrap it up, you’re going to be late!”

Kim smiled and thanked her. Mom was always telling her things she knew (“you’re going to be late,” “you’re going to be cold,” “that dress isn’t the most flattering,”) and so forth. Things that, said out loud only amplified her anxiety. But Kim almost never held it against her mom. Not even when she suggested that she should break up with Luke.

She’d said it so mildly, as if it was inevitable for a girl going off to college to leave her less academically inclined boyfriend. She didn’t even resent her mom after he died because she had merely suggested they break up.

But Kim was the one who drove the dagger in. And twisted it. “Why?” he had asked, holding her hands. It was more a pleading than a question. “Because,” she started. “You and I are going in different directions.” She didn’t need to elaborate. He had searched her eyes for some semblance of humanity but was met with steely determination.

Kim cleared her throat, bringing her back to the sunlit room and the present. “I know, I know,” Kim said. “I’m going! Oh yea, I’ll be back late tonight too. Daniel wants to get dinner.”

“That’s right! The place inside the Empire State Building? I’ve always wanted to go there,” her mom admitted, almost wistfully.

Kim stood up a little straighter, pulling at the straps of her backpack. “How did you know?”

“Oh - I think you mentioned it to me last night?” she said.

Kim nodded thoughtfully. She most certainly hadn’t mentioned it. Getting home late with an early onset hangover, she’d gone straight to bed last night.

“Honey,” her mom gestured for Kim to come closer and removed an eyelash that had been sitting innocently on her upper cheek. “There, I don’t want you going blind on the way to the train station,” she said.

“Thanks Mom,” Kim hugged her tightly. Each goodbye could last forever. You just never knew.

She ran downstairs, packed the sandwich that sat steaming on the counter. And placed it neatly on top of all the other things in her impractically stiff and heavy leather backpack. Her parents had gotten her a much fancier one. But the decade-old bookbag was another reminder that she was here, had been here, and would be here tomorrow. It was another anchor to this reality. The one where she was an upwardly mobile twenty-something with her whole life ahead of her.

Kim sucked in air with her first step outside, tightening the wool scarf around her neck. She pulled it up to cover her mouth.

“Hey Gorgeous!” a man called from the street corner.

He didn’t look dangerous, but last week she returned the smile of a man sitting on a bus stop bench. And then he exposed himself to her and had the nerve to tell her to “have a good day.”

On her first date with Luke, an unshaven man in a beanie and a flannel shirt that was stiff with bodily fluids and dirt, had told Luke he was lucky, pointing at Kim. And Luke had returned the man’s high five, giving him a bag of assorted Cheesecake Factory leftovers.

To honor his memory, whenever she was confronted with some one she would otherwise avoid (most people, but especially unwashed men on street corners) she tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. And was usually reminded why she shouldn’t.

Her watched buzzed. Another text from Daniel. She frowned, shaking her wrist to “dismiss” the message.

The train was crowded. She readied her elbows, crossing her arms as another barrier to physical contact. And when she exited Penn Station, turning right on Seventh Ave., she exhaled, feeling like she could finally breathe again.

“Good morning, Ms. Kim!” a voice called from a consolidation of cardboard outside her high rise. It sounded more formal than it was, because her name was in fact, Kimberly Kim.

“Good morning Hector!” Kim said, pulling the wool that covered the lower part of her face down to her neck. She swung her backpack around one side and onto her knee, managing to balance it on one raised thigh as she opened it and took out breakfast.

“Here!” she handed him the bag. “Bacon, egg and cheese on an onion roll. Straight from Mom’s kitchen.”

“I love Moms, thank you Ms. Kim!” Hector took the Ziploc from her. “You have yourself a good day now.”

That was usually the extent of their conversations, but today, just as she was about to step into the revolving door and into an unpleasant and crowded security line, Hector called out to her.

“Tonight’s gonna be a sumthin’ crazy. You take care, because no way,” he shook his head. “No way nothin’ gonna be the same,” he paused as if tapping into the ether of universal knowledge. “But you’ll be alrigh’ just follow this,” he tapped on his chest.

Hector kept track of the phases of the moon and Kim suspected he was a little psychic. The day her grandpa passed away, before she even knew, he told her he was sorry.

“Sorry for what?” she’d asked. “Sorry for sumthin’,” he’d said, cryptically, shaking his head.

And then the day she met Daniel he’d told her, “that man gun love that perfume, girl!” she would meet him that night, and true to his prediction, Daniel would compliment the new vanilla-scented bodywash she had used that morning.

· · ·

The sun hadn’t set when Kim walked past security, and through the revolving door that evening. But it may as well have. The high rise buildings jealously guarded the sidewalks from anything natural, including the sun’s light.

She looked for Hector, but he was gone.

Through sheer will and about five cups of tea Kim had managed to skip lunch. And she felt better stretching her legs as she strode up Fifth Ave with the rush hour traffic. At least she wasn’t hung over anymore.

Hector’s words circled the back of her mind like a gnat — fast, furious, and inconsequential to most, but for her constant anxiety that she was on the precipice of disaster that could come at any moment. She brought her hand to her pendant. Her therapist had told her she had a “tendency to over-analyze, catastrophize even.”

The rhythm of her un-buttoned coat flapping and her jeans rubbing together at the thighs and her arms sweeping across her sides, helped her keep an even pace. She side-stepped a man throwing his arms up furiously and yelling obscenities to unsuspecting tourists. And she stepped over damp trash, cups and food, left on the sidewalk, barely slowing down.

In a retail window across the street, three headless mannequins dressed in spring suits sipped tea around a giant mushroom that doubled for a table. Without stopping, Kim giggled to herself at the sheer whimsy of it all, in the midst of the most un-whimsical city she knew.

She checked her reflection in the backlight glass of the adjacent Starbucks Reserve when she got to the Empire State building. The slight hollows of her cheeks were again visible, and she no longer looked like a small-eyed, suspicious rabbit.

“Hello Kim,” said a deep, tight voice from somewhere to her left. It was Daniel in a black wool overcoat and Burberry scarf tucked neatly into the collar. He looked out of place on this block of tourists wearing denim and nylon.

She reached her arms out for a hug. “What are you doing here? I was just about to come inside.” She hated being caught in a moment of vanity, but it didn’t stop her from taking a last look at her reflection and smoothing down a petulant lock of hair.

He smiled indulgently and wrapped his arms around her, just the way she liked. She let her body melt into his chest, dismissing Hector’s warning as the ramblings of a kind but crazy homeless man.

“Come on,” Daniel said, pulling away to take her hand. “Our reservation is for 7pm.”

He pulled her along the few feet to the door, continuing to hold her hand. They had a “good table” — for Kim that always meant one by the window. Daniel helped her out of her coat before taking his own off and placing them, hers on top of his on one of the two unoccupied chairs at their table.

Menus were handed to them. Water poured. And then Daniel looked up at Kim. “If you’re alright with it, I put our orders in already.” He smiled at her and closed the menu.

Kim was about to get upset the way a petulant, over-tired child might. And though she tried her best to keep a complaint that sounded ungrateful from escaping her lips, she couldn’t.

“But how do you know you know what I want?” she whined.

He shrugged. “I think we’re ready,” he winked at the lifetime server whose receding but dignified hairline hearkened to speakeasies and backrooms that was before any of their times.

When they were alone again, Daniel reached his hands across the table in a bid for Kim’s.

“Mmm, the vanilla body wash?” Daniel said, closing his eyes. “I love that on you. You just smell like some amazing French pastry,” he reached into his pocket. “If we have daughters, I’ll tell them this is how their mom won me over – vanilla.”

Of course he loves vanilla – it’s the same as everything else about him. It’s plain, Kim thought unkindly, taking a drink of her water. She realized that she was probably unworthy of such a suitor in the minds of most women. He had money, and he was tall. He also had a surplus of thick, black hair.

But for Kim, love had proven itself to be cyclical, abundant and easily available. Once, Hector had said, “just cause you lucky, that don’ mean it’s easy for everyone.” She had wanted to correct him. But instead, she threw change into his coffee cup.

Daniel slid a red leather box across the table. He watched Kim carefully, leaning back in his over-stuffed leather chair. He waited to see what she did next. She was fascinating to him. The other girls, he could bed and forget, because they were a dime a dozen in their obvious charms and equally apparent inadequacies. But he had never known anyone else who held her hand so close to the vest, even after a year, as Kim.

She could literally be naked in your arms and you wouldn’t have a clue what was going on in that head. She kept him on his best behavior.

Kim stared at the box. Her arms were folded across her lap and she stood perfectly erect. She blinked twice and then raised her eyes to meet Daniel’s.

“What is it?” she asked.

He laughed and shook his head. Then he thrust his chin forward. “Well go on,” he said. “Open it.”

Daniel was used to stoicism from Kim but he would be lying if her lack of enthusiasm didn’t cause his confidence to falter. Just a bit. But he regrouped. There was no apparent deficiency he could land on that might be the cause of doubt.

Kim opened the box slowly with one of her eyes closed, like she was almost frightened to see what was inside.

It was an engagement ring. Solitaire. Classic round. Big.

“Kim,” Daniel said, getting up from his chair and kneeling before her. “I’ve never known anyone like you and with your mix of perfect qualities for me, and mine for you, I know we’ll have a very special life together.” He took the ring from it’s box which was back on the table, and held it up to her.

There was a smattering of premature claps and gasps that came from the other diners, but most were respectfully quiet.

Kim looked at the ring, then at Daniel, back at the ring, then at the table and the champagne that had been placed – also prematurely, on their table.

“Kim, make me the luckiest man in Manhattan,” Daniel said. “Marry me.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes,” Kim said softly, allowing him to slip the enormous rock onto her slight finger.

“What was that, Sweetheart?” came a Jersey accent, from the bar area. “A little louder for the old timers in the back!”

Daniel stood up, kissing Kim on the lips before abandoning her to the room, cupping his hands around his mouth to yell. “She said yes!” He then helped her up and raised her left arm like a referee presenting the winner by knockout.

If Kim was capable of it, she would have been embarrassed. Instead, she suddenly felt every sensation that she suspected life with Daniel would bring. There would be security, safety, the satisfying feeling of waking up in a beautiful, spacious well-lit home in Connecticut. This knowing made her smile a little. Mom would be proud.

Maybe this was what Hector had meant when he said something would happen tonight. She exhaled and turned her attention to their pre-ordered meals which had been placed in front of them quite quickly. Kim and Daniel ate with their fingers interlocked impractically as they brought the fork to their mouths with their free hands. Of course, this required that they cut up their steak in bitty pieces beforehand.

For dessert, there was a butter cake with “Congratulations!” written in chocolate syrup script, across the top. Daniel cut off a piece with the edge of his fork and leaned across the table to feed her. Kim indulged. Afterall you only get engaged once.

Leaving they were approached by no less than five well-wishers. And though Kim didn’t care much, Daniel seemed to enjoy it.

She couldn’t see the moon yet when they stepped outside. And suspected she wouldn’t be able to see the stars until she was home. Only half of her felt there. Half of her always felt precarious, balanced on a knife’s edge of being here and somewhere else entirely.

“What’re you thinking about?” Daniel asked, opening the passenger door of his low-sitting sportscar for her.

“I guess I’m just happy,” she said.

“Well I’m definitely happy,” he laughed. “So I’m glad to hear the same from my new fiancé.”

After starting the engine he checked the rearview mirror. “Did your mom give anything away? I asked both your parents for their blessing, but I know the one whose opinion you really care about is Allie’s, I mean your mom’s, I guess she’ll be my mom soon, too.”

Kim hated the idea of Daniel thinking of her mom as his mom. She was equal parts possessive and dependent on Allie and as an only child, it was probably worse. Kim shook her head. “No – it was all a magical surprise. Thank you, Daniel.”

She placed her hand on his, which rested on the gearshift. Her new ring scintillated under the sparse light. She made note of it, excellent polish on the stone. Must’ve been expensive. She tilted her wrist slightly to make the light on the stone, dance.

She raised her eyes from her manicured fingers, to the front windshield. “Is it windy?” she asked, noticing the occasional jerks in the movement the car.

“Little bit,” he said, his brows furrowing with concentration. “But it’s just so damned hard to see with this fog. That’s the real issue. Hold on.” He turned on the high beams but it made little difference. It might have made their range of sight worse.

This is it. Be careful Kim.

“Did you hear something?” Kim asked, turning to look at Daniel.

“Hm?” he responded. His eyes were focused on the road ahead. His mouth was fixed in a tight line.

Kim didn’t repeat her question but she removed her hand from Daniel’s, in case its presence distracted him incrementally, from the task at hand which was to get her home safely. I should have taken the train.

No sooner had the thought registered, before she heard a loud, “Fuck!” from the driver’s side, as their car began to spin. Kim screamed because she felt like it was warranted. But she wasn’t as scared as she probably should have been. He must have hit ice, she thought to herself. The last thing she felt was Daniel’s arm across her torso trying to hold her back from impact. And the last thing she remembered was the awful sound of metal crunching as the front of the car hit something immovable and unyielding. A tree maybe, she thought, before the darkness.

· · ·

Allie despised fluorescent lighting.

She narrowed her eyes at the overhead fixtures as she walked down the hallway of the hospital’s ER corridor.

Since she turned 50, it was a full on horror show whenever she caught her reflection in a mirror or window. The hollows of her cheeks, once full and lovely and the bags under her deep set eyes made her look like a crone, something from a storybook she’d never believe she’d become. It may have been the drinking. As much as she’d admonished Kim for doing the same, Allie couldn’t help but indulge. It tempered the day-after-day, endless routine and boredom of life. Breakfast, laundry, toilets, grocery shopping, and dinner. So forth and so on forever she presumed.

She knocked on Kim’s partially open door with a soft “hello?” As she shimmied through, she noticed she wasn’t as slim as she’d once been and it irked her that she noticed at all at a time like this. But she did. And something stubborn in her wouldn’t allow her to open the door any wider.

Allie walked over to Kim and smoothed back her hair. Even with the mottled skin and the bandage wrapped conspicuously across her forehead, her baby looked beautiful. She bent down and kissed the place where the bandage met with purple-crimson bruising.

Daniel was just down the hall. She’d said hello his parents on her way to Kim’s room. And stopped to see him, too. As soon as he saw her, Daniel apologized. She even caught a glint of tears in his eyes which she found reassuring. She’d always worried that Daniel’s love for her daughter was little more than surface level. That was one thing that could be said for Kim’s ex, Luke. She never questioned his devotion to her.

Blue knit blankets hung at odd angles off of Kim’s bed. Allie bent over them to assess the competency of the care her daughter had received. One of them barely clung to the foot of the bed and if not for the guardrails at the bottom, would have tumbled down to the scratched up artificial composite flooring. Allie shook her head, muttering aggressively. Though most of what she said couldn’t be heard, she made a point of saying “sloppy,” as loudly and clearly as she could.

She had protected Kim from every unpleasant thing she could. She had never known the embarrassment or the shame of something disgraceful like divorced parents or an early pregnancy. And she had protected her from heartbreak the way she wished she had been.

And yet still, it wasn’t enough to keep her safe.

Allie staggered her way over to the chair next to her daughter’s bed, her anger dissolving into pain. And she cried as much for herself as for her daughter. This was just the latest in the series of events for Allie that confirmed to her without a doubt that nothing she did was ever enough.

She kept the house clean and her family fed. She put up the holiday decorations every year even after Kim stopped caring, always making sure she put her daughter’s handmade ornaments at eye level so they could reminisce and appreciate them together throughout the month of December. Allie made it to every recital, every tennis match, and every awards ceremony and boy were there a lot.

She entertained her husband’s colleagues as a perfect hostess. Everyone’s bellies were full, dietary restrictions considered, and glasses never empty.

And here she had kept her daughter safe from everything she might imagine could lead to disappointment, and pain. Kim had been utterly destroyed by Luke’s death a few years also– think how much worse it would have been if she had let them stay together?

The tears flowed hot and desperate down her cheeks, collecting in the lines on her nec before spilling down to her clavicle.

The beeping on the monitors were rhythmic and soft. Before she entered the room, Kim’s ER doctor had let her know that Kim was alive, and there was brain activity but that she hadn’t yet woken up. Daniel wasn’t much better off. And she had exchanged condolences on what was supposed to be a congratulatory call to his parents just an hour earlier.

But the shortest leash hadn’t kept Kim safe.

· · ·

Kim woke up not in a car, which was the last thing she remembered, or in a hospital bed which is where she rightly expected to be. But in her very own room, under her very own, very pink sheets and comforter.

“Mom!” she screamed.

When no one responded, she screamed again. “Mom?!”

“Yes Sweetheart, coming!” she heard a soft, urgent shuffle up the carpeted stairs.

Allie knocked, as was her habit even when the door was open. Kim rolled her eyes, “Mommy, I called you, you don’t have to knock.”

“You’re nearly an adult now and deserve a little privacy,” Allie said, still at the threshold to the room.

Kim didn’t bother to remind her mom that 27 wasn’t nearly anything, except close to 30. Instead she got out of bed and hugged her, pulling her close. “Mommy you never need to ask permission from me.”

“By the way, oh my God! Did you help Daniel with the ring? It’s gorgeous!” She stuck out her left hand to show Allie the enormous bling she’d been gifted with at dinner the night before.

But when she did, there was no diamond. Just a thin silver band on her center finger, one she’d bought at an art fair for $15 when she was in 10th grade.

“Daniel? Who’s Daniel?” Allie’s head spun 90 degrees to the left, and then back the 180 to the right. “Did you and Luke argue?” Allie’s hands went to her hips. “It’s never a good idea to get into a rebound situation Kim.”

Kim knew her mom was not a fan of Luke, so that was saying something. But Mom stuck to her morals always. It was the way Kim wanted to be.

Kim looked at her ring finger, wondering where her 3 ct. promise to a respectable timeline had gone. It was also a promise that some one else would make hard choices for her for the rest of their lives, as long as they both should live. That was more comforting than anything else and now that it was gone, she felt the loss.

“Mom, Luke is dead, remember?”

Allie looked at Kim like she was crazy. “Honey, if Luke’s dead who’s the guy sitting at the dining table waiting downstairs to take you out?”

Kim got dressed quickly and headed downstairs.

A familiar grin greeted her, as Luke turned from his seat and held up a bag of food from The Village, their favorite irrationally inexpensive bakery down the street. “Hey Cutie, ready to go?”

· · ·

Kim wasn’t sure what was going on. She wasn’t sure how she had gotten from a car wreck, back to her room apparently 10 years ago, and was now walking hand in hand with her high school boyfriend, who by the way, was dead.

It felt so weird to her, the callouses of Luke’s hands were both familiar and deeply unfamiliar now.

“You seem…pensive,” Luke said. “Is everything alright?”

“Pensive?” Kim teased. “That’s a new word for you.”

Luke smiled self-satisfied. “It was in my SAT prep book. Thought I’d give it a whirl. You seem to be the right girl to test it on Ms. 1600.”

Kim wondered if this was a dream or if she’d somehow found a slit in the time-space reality and been able to return here for real. If only, she thought sadly. They walked the rest of the way to the bleachers and ambled up to the top seats, from where they could see just about the whole town. At least that’s how it felt when they were young.

“The first time I saw you, I knew you were the girl for me.” Luke put his jacket on Kim’s shoulders.

She shook her head like he was crazy. Then she gave in to the familiar rhythm of their bodies together, and lay her head on his shoulder. She let herself be moved, like seashells on the sand, incrementally closer to the shore with each wave.

“You know,” Luke said. “You can stay here with me.”

“I am here with you,” Kim laughed. “What do you call this?”

“No, I mean you don’t have to go back. You can stay here with me. We can have the life we didn’t get, together.”

Kim was quiet. She felt the scratchy cotton of Luke’s shirt on her cheek and the breeze that blew through the trees also sent her hair across her face. It felt real but she knew then that it also wasn’t.

She pulled away and gestured for Luke to hand her the bag of pastries. “Gimme,” she said.

He laughed and handed it to her. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” he urged. “What you’re always after when you dream about me?”

She took a bite of the chocolate croissant, feeling the flakes of buttery pastry adhere to the corners of her mouth. She nodded, slowly. That was true, she was always after a do-over…

“Remember skinny-dipping last summer? Your whole body was covered in goosebumps and even though we were only in there a minute I swear it took an hour to get you warm again,” Luke laughed. “You’re such a girl.” He pulled her close, rubbing her arms.

Suddenly something clicked. Kim wiped her mouth with her palms, still not wanting to get the sleeves of Luke’s jacket oily. She laughed over the absurdity of it all. The jacket in question was in a dream. The oily croissant wasn’t real. Neither was any of the rest of it. She could wake up, she realized. Or stay in the in-between. She’d spent years feeling like she was in limbo. Like she needed some one to hold her down to reality. This was the first time she had a choice.

“Luke?” she turned to him.

“Mmm?” he said, smiling. “Will you stay with me or are you going to go back?”

She searched his eyes, from left to right trying to memorize every speck of green in the brown and the wrinkles at the corners. When she was sure she had the lay of the land, she leaned in and kissed him, eyes closed. That felt real, too.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I listened to my mom and broke your heart. I broke mine too, and I could never tell you. I never got a chance to, I mean.” The tears that fell down her cheeks felt real. They tasted real, too.

“I loved you and I betrayed us. And I’m so sorry. But I can’t stay here.”

He looked at her, sadly. But then, he smiled. “It’s ok,” he wiped the tears from each eye with his thumbs. “It’s ok, Kim.”

“Will you still visit me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, you don’t need me anymore.”

She nodded, placing her hands on her knees for support. And then she got up and handed Luke back his jacket.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” she said.

Kim’s eyes fluttered opened moments later. The unforgiving, cold hospital light didn’t feel any more real to her than the afternoon she’d just spent. But since she chose to stay, she would make the best of it.

“Mom?” she said.

“Right here Sweetheart,” Allie said, running to her bedside.

Her mom hugged her. And for the first time in forever, Kim didn’t feel like she would float away when she let go.