The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(68)

It was a lovely arrangement. It would have been lovelier had Daisy and Erik actually been having sex.

Her hands were warm and encouraging in the night and his body responded. Yet his mind was elsewhere. Detached and idly watching from a corner of the room. “It’s hard to explain,” he said, although he knew he didn’t have to. Under his touch, Daisy’s body was open, but ambivalent. She could take it or leave it.

“I guess it’s a post-trauma thing,” Daisy said, her eyebrows wrinkling. “I don’t feel much like it. I like touching you. And holding you. But I just feel so tired.”

“Tired’s one thing but I just feel unwired,” Erik said. “I don’t feel like me.”

She put her face against his chest. “It’ll be all right. Sex is probably first out and last back in. We’ll just keep throwing time at it.”

Time was kind and plentiful for them. All the weekends through July and August, when Daisy’s pain levels became more manageable and she gradually gained some mobility back, they lay naked in bed together, as comfortably twined as they could get. They kissed. They never tired of kissing. They talked the hours away. They laughed. They stared—they could still lock eyes and go into their private universe, and they went there frequently.

But they weren’t making love.

Not much, anyway.

Some nights she woke up screaming, and he soothed her. Unlike his Technicolor night terrors, her dreams were without imagery. “It’s pitch black,” she said. “And huge. There’s nothing to see but I can sense it goes out for hundreds of feet and up for hundreds of feet.”

“Is it a room? Or a cave?”

“I don’t know. It’s just the biggest darkest space I’ve ever known and it’s terrifying. I’m trapped there. No one else is in the dream. No story. No circumstance or context. It’s just vast black space and I can’t get out. It’s right behind my own eyelids and I can’t open them.” She moved further into the circle of his arms, shivering with unspeakable revulsion. “It doesn’t sound like anything but God, I just feel sick when I wake up…”

“It’s real,” he whispered. “It’s real and it’s something. I know, Dais. Believe me, I know.”

Erik’s dreams were on him again, too. He’d wake up yelling into the dark and Daisy would bring him back into the light. She curled up against his back, her hand flat against his pounding chest, her head on his head, murmuring him back into rest.

But rarely back into her body.



*



Daisy’s team of trainers and therapists was more than pleased with the rate of her leg’s progress. Both calf and thigh were getting stronger by the day. Oddly, the most challenging injury to overcome and the most chronically troublesome all her life was the ligament damage in her ankle.

“Come on, Marge, that’s like being shot in the ass and going blind,” David said in mock disgust. “Can’t you do anything right?”

Once, not long ago, Daisy would have rolled her eyes, clucked her tongue or outright ignored David’s teasing. Now she laid her temple against his upper arm and laughed. David was allowed to call her Marge now. Daisy allowed him anything. He had proved himself Erik’s true and trusted friend, and Daisy herself was too singularly and fanatically focused on her goals to be bothered by his ribbing. Nothing bothered her.

Or so it seemed. The brave face she put on in the daylight was nothing indicative of what transpired in the dark.

Only Erik knew what came in the night.

He watched Daisy work. Nobody worked harder, fought tougher. He could see, almost taste the frustration, and he knew the unending aggravation from her leg’s unwillingness to cooperate was nearly unbearable. It was offensive to her. For Daisy was so used to her body doing what she told it to do. Every dancer was.

“Dancers are narcissistic as hell about their bodies,” she said. “We love the mirror.”

They were lying in bed, up in the carriage house. The last full moon of August hung in a corner of the window.

“You have a fierce vain streak if you’re a ballet dancer,” Daisy said, “and you feel no shame about it. You’re entitled to it because you’ve been working your body to death for years. You hate the mirror. The mirror tells the truth. Ballet is so cruel because it allows one right way to do a step or pose, and fifty wrong ways. And on those good days, when you look in the mirror and you see it, you see your reflection looking just the way you want it to? Then God, you love the mirror. It’s our drug. It’s every dancer’s little, twisted addiction.”

He could take it as a cue to launch into a pep talk, assure her she would find the fix again. But Erik understood her at a much more elemental level. She didn’t need him telling her what she already knew. He let her be, and let her work it out.

“It’s so hard,” Daisy said. She was sitting up now, looking out the window, out over her mother’s rose gardens bathed in silver moonlight. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve had one vision all these years, being a principal dancer in a ballet company.” She looked back at him. “I don’t know if it’s going to happen now. I’m fighting like hell, but at the same time… I feel like I need to start thinking like you, and having some other irons in the fire. What’s my Plan B?”