“You were automatically my girlfriend from the very beginning and so was she. She called her mom from Whataburger and told her that she wasn’t coming home that night and not to wait up for her. Just like you and me, we shared a bed the very first day that we met. For the first six months that we were together, she slept with me most Friday and Saturday nights and stayed with her parents Sunday through Thursday. I couldn’t believe how liberal minded her parents were, but when I met them they still reserved their judgement about me, good or bad, until we had spent a full day together. But they warmed up to me fairly quickly after that.
“I had started working at the same place that Chelsea worked during my Senior year and that was how we met. The owner of the company and her father are close friends together, just the same like the owner and my own father are. Then Graduation Day came and I wasn’t in High School any longer. Over that summer, Chelsea and I still saw each other every day at work, but something had changed between us. You would have to ask her what it was all about because she was the one who decided to stop spending weekends with me at my parents house and we kind of drifted apart. We probably made love less than ten times that summer after making love a dozen times a month or more while we were a couple.
“We still hung out together a lot. But I felt like that she had shifted me into the ‘friends zone’. We were down at the Ice House shooting pool together one night when she noticed me watching another girl across the room from us. After about an hour or so, she excused herself and approached this girl. The two of them chatted for about 15 minutes while I sat at the bar getting drunk on Kahlúa and Coke.
Chelsea brought this chick over to me and introduced us. The three of us hung out until midnight when I decided that it was about time to go home. I asked this girl for her phone number and she leaned over to whisper in my ear that she would give it to me back at my place.
“Chelsea left in her car and the girl came home with me for the weekend. That more or less became the new normal for us. Chelsea would be my wing man and make sure that any girls that caught my eye would end their evening by going home with me and sleeping in my bed. Over the past six months or so, Chelsea and I had kind of gotten caught up in our own lives and we haven’t been hanging out like we normally would. But that all changed today when I got my promotion.
“I think that it suddenly dawned on Chelsea that she would be seeing me a lot more up at the job than she has in the past. With my promotion, we’ll be working the same hours and we’ll both be crossing paths frequently since I am with her in the office now and not out on the shop floor anymore. I’m afraid that she got her expectations up thinking that we could just pick up again right where we had previously left off. She would have been correct too, except that you came into my life recently and changed everything.”
“Do you still love her, Skip?”
“I can’t lie to you, Hannah. I still have very strong feelings for her that run pretty deep. In the conversations that we had today, she revealed that she is still very much in love with me too.”
“Do you want to break up with me and go back to her?”
“Oh God no! How could you even ask me that! I could never break your heart, Hannah. I have to confess that I have been kissing Chelsea today just like we used to do back when we were together. But I will put a stop to it as soon as I get her past this initial phase of falling for me all over again. I realize that it is totally unrealistic, but I still have to try and save my friendship with Chelsea while still being faithful to you.”
“Skip,” Hannah paused to take a deep breath before forging ahead. “Did it not strike you as strange that I didn’t freak out when I walked into your house tonight?”
“Kind of…for a few seconds at least. Then I watched you calm Haley back down and I heard you say the word ‘milestone’ to her. I have been assuming that your dream told you that Chelsea would be here tonight.”
“I recognized her from the dream as soon as I saw her, but I wasn’t expecting to run into her specifically tonight. As I have said before, the dream shifts and changes showing me possibilities. But it isn’t always written in stone. Which brings me to our situation with Haley. I know that since we met, I have thrown some really bat-shit crazy stuff your way. Any other sane and rational man would have probably run far, far away by now. But…you do trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course, babe! Always!”
“Get a good grip on yourself, okay? Please don’t freak out on me.”
“Okay, but with a preamble like that, this one has got to be a doozy!”
“Yeah, it is…kind of. I’m going to be sleeping in the second bedroom tonight and Haley is going to sleep in your bed with you. Just the two of you alone. She has already gone to your room and is waiting for you to come to bed.”
Silence descended on my living room as I looked Hannah straight in the eye with disbelief clouding my mind.
“Wait a minute. I think that I had too much wine tonight. Say that again?”
“Over the past few weeks, Haley has fallen head over heels in love with you. She was in denial and pushing her emotions aside right up until the other night when you hugged her. That’s when she had a déjà vu episode of her own and freaked out on us. She is totally besotted with you. She has been fighting with me for the past week about it. I have been telling her that it is going to be okay, but she was in full meltdown mode because she doesn’t know how to get you out of her head. Trust me, she has been trying really hard to stop loving you like she does.
“But I already know from my dream that it doesn’t work. There were several branches that could have been taken, but she has walked down one branch in particular and hit all of the marks. I cannot reveal any more details than that without causing a paradox. But after you sleep with her tonight, she and I will share you until you draw your last breath. Neither one of us will ever love anyone else for as long as she and I both live.”
“You’re drunk, Hannah.”
Hannah crawled into my lap and kissed me then. The same lover’s kiss that we had been sharing for weeks now. I could taste the alcohol on her breath as she kissed me and I am certain that she could taste it on mine as well.
“Hannah, I am crazy about Haley. But my feelings for her are familial. I don’t love her deeply like I do you. Haley is supposed to become my new sister.”
“Well, I think that in your efforts to be totally loyal and faithful to me that you are ignoring the magic passing between you and Haley. One of the things that she confessed to me was a secret about the day that you two first met. She told me that before you walked into the bar that she immediately looked at the door just before it opened. She stared at the closed door for nearly a minute before you finally opened that door and stepped inside.
“That has been freaking her out ever since. She asked me, ‘Why the fuck would I stare at a closed ass door? It just doesn’t make any sense. And then Skip walks through it and I feel like a bar of steel being drawn across a table by a powerful magnet. I literally walked away from a good friend that I had been chatting with just to go flirt with Skip! It was like an out of body experience! I simply did not have any will power or control over myself for nearly 5 minutes!’
“You fucked her up good that afternoon, babe.” Hannah giggled. “Then it hit her all over again once you started spending time with me. But she knew all about my dreams and the supposed mystery man in them. She had convinced herself that she was supposed to have picked you up at the bar and bring you home to meet me, and then I would identify you as ‘The Guy’ after that. She never thought that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you were supposed to be for both of us because I couldn’t reveal that detail to her without causing the paradox of the dream to kick in.
“While she knows that I will be your wife, she doesn’t know that she will be your concubine for the rest of our lives. So do not tell her any of this. Just reassure her that everything between the three of us is okay. I have already convinced her that I am totally okay with this, but you need to be okay with it too. Stop blocking her out of your heart and just let nature take it’s course. Okay, babe?”
“So let me get this straight,” I paused for effect. “When you tell me that I am sleeping with Haley tonight, you’re actually telling me to be intimate with her and have sex with her?”
“The two of you will either just hold each other all night long, or you might go all the way. That is strictly for the two of you to work out. But you both need to spend tonight together and work it out in order for us to move forward as a family. This Dream is making our lives complicated, but I have seen the ending. Trust me when I tell you that when our time on this earth is done, it will have all been worth the pain and trouble that we’re working through right now. Nothing worthwhile ever comes easy. These are our ‘growing pains’ and once we hit our stride, we probably won’t remember any of the hassles that we faced in the beginning. Please, babe. Trust me, okay?”
“I do trust you, Hannah. I have from the very beginning. My own dreams have confirmed for me that I made the correct choice to believe in you. But you have to agree with me that a lot of this is just totally surreal.”
“I know. But hang in there, hun. It’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
I still had my doubts. Just put yourself in my place for a minute. The one girl on the planet that you have loved harder and deeper that any other girl in existence comes to you and begs you to make love to her own full blood sister. Wallace Shawn suddenly popped into my head and yelled, “Inconceivable!”
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Hannah and I walked down the hallway towards my bedroom. We stopped briefly to kiss goodnight by the door to the second bedroom where Hannah would be sleeping alone tonight. One small step from there brought me to my own bedroom door that was closed. I paused for just a moment, wondering if I should knock first. But then I thought to myself, ‘I am in my own fucking house. I’m not knocking on the door for someone else in my own home!’ So I opened it and cautiously stepped inside.
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