There was only such a little space between the time the sleepers fell asleep and the time they began to dream in earnest, and it was only that space that began to the lovers. Once the dream began, the time for their pleasure was over. It was time to go to work.

After a night of fitful sleep, he set out, mounting his charger at dawn and riding down out of the hills at a good, solid clip. He reached the castle before noon. As he approached, he spotted a figure gowned in green, walking along the outer wall. Any last vestiges of a doubt he might have harbored in his heart fled when he heard the song, the beautiful clear voice wafting down from the ramparts.

He drew his horse to a halt a short distance from the base of the high wall. The singing, too, stopped.

“My lady!” he called. “Please, my lady… I beg a moment of your time!”

“Yes?” the same beautiful voice replied, a little uncertainly.

“My lady, my name is Sir Roderick of Dunhall,” the knight said. “For thrice three years, I have been haunted by a dream, a most singular dream about a most singular lady. For all that time, her face, her voice… her beauty… has danced in my sleep and afflicted my waking hours with what was at first a most pleasant distraction. As the years went on, though, I found myself increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of my dream-damsel. I sought out a soothsayer who told me that I would find her, living in a castle of white stone on the shore of a great sea. I set off at once, sharing my tale to any who would listen. I described the castle and the face of my inamorata to any who traveled far and wide, hoping that someone would know them… and at long last, after many wrong turns and false trails, I believe I have found her. If you will only show yourself to me, so that I can confirm that you are the lady of my dreams, then we can be wed this very day and I shall be the happiest man upon this earth.”

There was no reply at first. Sir Roderick held his breath. Then, he saw movement…a glimpse of golden curls as the lady peeked down at him from the high parapet. It was just a glimpse, but it left him dizzy. Her hair was the exact shade of his dream lady’s.

“My lady?” he said.

“I think you have the wrong castle,” she said.

“I am certain that I do not!” he said. “Please, lady, allow me to look on you, so that I may know that you are the one I am destined to wed.”

“I’d rather not,” she said.

“But… if you are the one who has come to me in my dreams…”

“I do not control my own dreams, Sir Roderick,” she said, “and I am certainly not responsible for any of yours.”

“My lady, I have come so far.”

“I didn’t make you do that,” the lady said.

“But I have ridden for…”

“Is your steed magic?” she asked. “Does the mere act of riding him often change people’s minds? Or shall I marry you as an act of sympathy for his saddle sores?”

“Please, if you’ll only just show me your face…”

“What will that accomplish?” she asked.

“It will prove that what I am saying is true,” he said.

“That you’ve been dreaming of me? I believe you,” she said.

“Then… will you accept my love?”

“Don’t be ridiculous… I do not know you, nor do I long to.”

“But I have dreamed of you… this is my destiny.”

“But what?” she asked. “Am I not allowed any say in this? Do your dreams and your destiny mean that I am not allowed to have my own dreams, my own destiny? If I did appear to you in your dreams, did you ever ask me what I felt? Or why I was there? Did you ask the soothsayer if I had my own beloved, or how I would feel about being asked to marry a man I’ve never met?”

“Do you have a beloved?” Sir Roderick asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I am not interested in you.”

“My lady, if you mean to test my devotion, know that I am prepared… though I have been sorely tested already.”

“Silly knight, your devotion doesn’t interest me,” she said. “How can I make that any plainer?”

“I’m ready to fight for your honor. I will duel any man, slay any dragon, bring you any tribute… only tell me what you wish for, and I shall make it so.”

“I wish to be left alone,” the lady said. “I wish to be free of men who regard me as a trophy to be won, who think that I should be overjoyed to be a mere figurant in their dreams. I wish to have my own wishes respected, when I make them clear and particularly when they touch most strongly on myself and my own disposition.”

“I see,” Sir Roderick said. “And, so… if I were respect your wishes for now, do you think that in time you may grow to return my love?”

“In what respect will you respect me, if you only do so in exchange for what you want?”

“My lady, I do not like to mention this because I do not like to brag, but I am the heir to the throne of High Dunhall,” Sir Roderick said. “I will one day be its king, and if you marry me, you will be my queen. Does that not make a difference to you?”

“Does anything I say make a difference to you?”

“My lady, I think that perhaps you are not thinking things through.”

“I am going to count to five and then I am going to call for archers,” the lady said. “One…”

“Indeed, my lady, that’s quite enough!” Sir Roderick said, wheeling his horse around. “You’ve made yourself clear! I shall away with me, and bother you no more. There is no need to lower yourself to such base threats.”

“Apparently there was,” she called. “You would not shift yourself for any words I could conjure alone.”

“Have you nothing else to say, knowing that I have dreamt of you every night for nigh unto a decade, knowing how far I have come and knowing that I am heir to a great kingdom?”

“Yes,” she said. “Two…”

“I’m going, I’m going!”

The whole long scene replayed itself in his head for the rest of the day, and for much of the week beyond that… the awful crushing inevitability of it all losing none of its grip on him to the power of either time or distance. It would continue to well up within him from time to time, throughout that week and the next month and all the long years after that. Even much later, when he was happily married and comfortably established in his career and in all other regards far removed from the boy he’d been in high school, it still came back to him at odd moments, threatening to overwhelm him with disappointment or frustration or embarrassment.

There are those who say that we always regret most the things that we do not do, the risks that we do not take. These are people who have never been haunted by the ghost of a chance.

I looked around at the apartment that had never felt like home, at the things I had never wanted in the place of things I’d never thought I could have… I looked at the all things I had never truly owned and that no longer owned me. I looked back on the years that had no so much passed as piled up on top of each other, an unruly, untidy mess of time that I had told myself I would definitely get around to cleaning up, you know… one of these days.

“Because I was never really here,” I said.

If it was hard for her to hear it, it was just as hard to say it.

“Janet?” I said.

“There’s something on your mind, isn’t there, Brian?” she replied. She put her hand on the side of my face, her fingers idly playing with a few strands of my hair. “It’s been weighing on you for some time. Why don’t you just say it?”

“Alright, Janet,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I’m under a lot of strain right now, with work and your family and mine and all, and there’s just a lot of pressure for me to look good, to impress, and… I worry sometimes that I might be losing it.”

Her hand stopped moving. She smiled and took a few steps back. Her hand remained where it was on my cheek, detaching neatly from the wrist. The stump bled shiny black beetles that immediately buried themselves deep in the shag carpeting. With her other hand, she reached up and ripped the skin away from her face, revealing a gaping black hole of nothingness behind it… nothingness that contained a horribly fanged maw and two flickering flames for eyes.

“But, Brian,” she said in a voice old and dead, “how can you lose what you never had in the first place?”

“Er, I was actually talking about my hair,” I said.

“What? Oh,” she said, smoothing her face back in place. She ruffled my thinning hair with her one hand while rejoining her wrist-stump to the other. “You look fine, dear. You look respectable. Dignified. My father was bald as an egg when he was your age, you know. Speaking of… we should finish getting ready. They’ll be here soon.”

I nodded, and we didn’t say another word about it. It was just one of those things. Privately, though, I found the whole thing very worrying… especially as my therapist had responded much the same way a few days before.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

“Well,” I said. “It was nice while it lasted.”

“I could keep loving you a little longer, you know,” he said. “I don’t have to stop.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “A deal is a deal.”

I’d gone for the annual flower show, though it wasn’t the flowers that interested me so much as the arrangements they formed with the stone and colored glass and light around them. Really, the flowers were the smallest part of it… an accent, like a boutonnière on the lapel of the old church.

It was raining that day, though, and the light that streamed in through the stained glass was meager and cold and gray. I didn’t stay long. I’ve never been one to handle disappointment well.

When I stepped outside, she was standing there on the stone steps, her face tilted up to the sky. Her skin was dark and beaded with water. Her hair was thick and lively. She had the most beatific smile I’d seen in a long time, and considering where I’d just come from that was saying something.

There are almost certainly far more than two kinds of persons in the world, but if one of those kinds were “people who go to church flower shows by themselves to quietly admire the intersection of architecture and art”, that group would almost certainly be nearly mutually exclusive with “people who say hello to pretty strangers”.

I said hello to her. She tilted her face forward and opened her eyes, blinking like she was waking up from a sleep, and said hello back.

“Here for the flowers?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m here for the rain.”

“Would you like to get coffee or something?”

“I hate coffee,” she told me. “But I’d love something.”

So we went to a little open air cafe, where we had crème brulée and she drank old-fashioned root beer from an old-fashioned glass bottle while I, feeling too much an adult for such a thing, pretended to enjoy my coffee. There were no other patrons on the patio, as a fine mist was still falling. We talked. I said more to her than I say in a week’s worth of conversations to my coworkers, even the ones I consider my friends. It was amazing. Even more amazing, she seemed to enjoy it.

The sky was still low and gray when we finished, but it was only intermittently spitting. I asked her if she might like to visit a museum, or go see the botanical gardens, or even go to a movie. She declined each suggestion, a little sadly.

“Would you like to do anything?” I asked her, trying not to sound desperate.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you. I’m only here for the rain.”

One last drop landed on her forehead as she said that. She held out her hands, palm up, as if checking for more. She smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “Goodbye.”

And then, just like that, she was gone.

I started taking walks in the rain more often after that. At first I was hoping to see her again. Eventually I realized that I wouldn’t. I didn’t stop, though. I’d come to love the rain for itself. I also started taking more chances, saying hello to strangers.

I still can’t quite bring myself to go to a cafe on a Sunday morning, order root beer and then drink it straight from the bottle.

I’m working on that.

“Yes, Morton,” the director said. “We did, and we’re very happy at the thought of working with a legend in the business, especially since you’re returning to it after such a long absence, but we have a few questions.”

“Well, did you watch the demo tape?” he asked her. “I think that should explain everything pretty well.”

“Yes, we did. We watched the tape.”

“Well… what did you think?”

“A vole, Morton?”

“Yeah, a vole. Morty the Love Vole.”

“Kids don’t know what that is.”

“Well, that’s why it’s educational,” Morton said, exasperated. “Morty the Love Vole doesn’t talk down to children. He’s not afraid to take them to new places… strange places, even scary places.”

“Scary places?”

“You know, places that make people uncomfortable at first. Places that make them squirm un,” Morton said. “Like in the song, ‘Fear of the Unknown Is Just Comfortable Familiarity Waiting To Happen’.”

“We actually thought that song was a little… unwieldy.”

“Well, I’ve got another one called ‘Have You Hugged A Stranger Today’.”

“Morton, leaving all that aside… kids don’t need to know what a vole is,” the director said. “Couldn’t you say it’s a mouse?”

“But the puppet is a vole,” Morton said.

“Kids don’t know the difference.”

“But then we’re talking down to them,” Morton said. “Anyway, he’s Morty the Love Vole because ‘love’ is ‘vole’ spelled sideways.”

“Spelled what?”

“Sideways,” Morty said. “‘Mouse’ spelled sideways is… I don’t know. Useom. Sueom. Nothing good, anyway. Look, the puppet is clearly a vole.”

“Well… I think we’d have to ask you to redesign the puppet anyway.”

“What? The puppet is perfect.”

“It’s… unsettling,” the director said. “It’s like you took a latex model of a dead rodent, blew it up, and grafted your own face onto it.”

“Yes, exactly!” Morton said. “Well, I used a computer to sort of blend my face with the vole’s. It wouldn’t look realistic, otherwise.”

“‘Realistic’ isn’t quite the word I’d use,” the programming director said. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘uncanny valley’, Morton?”

“That’s where Morty the Love Vole lives,” Morton said. “The Uncanny Valley of Happiness.”

“On a, ah, somewhat related subject… we’re kind of giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that the fact that the puppet’s, uh, anatomically complete is simply a side effect of the fact that you used a real vole as a model. That’d haved to be fixed before we could think about putting it on the air.”

“Actually, I was planning on fixing Morty on the air,” Morton said. “You know, to teach the kids about the importance of spaying and neutering your pets. And your Love Voles. This would be after the sex ed episode. I have another puppet made for that one.”

“You know, Morton, I’m not sure you should be working in children’s television.”

“I just have to find the right model for the face,” Morton said.

“Goodbye, Morton. I don’t think we can work together.”

“You sound like you have a nice face.”

“I’m hanging up now, Morton.”

“…I love you.”

I told him that I enjoyed moving in the same general vicinity as music. It seemed like the more honest response. Not knowing how to dance is not the the same thing as not liking it, of course… no more than asking someone if they like to dance is the same as asking them if they would like to dance.

None of this directly relates to the dance that we’ve been doing with each other, though it may yet one day all come to bear some magical night when there is music and he is there and I am there and we both feel like moving closer together.

Yes, I like to dance.

Yes, I’d like to dance.

Yes, I’d like this dance.

What a big difference a little difference can make.

On we dance.

When it was over, he was not sated so much as exhausted. She, on the other hand, seemed restless still. She rolled off of him and onto her back, where she lay atop the crumpled, sweaty blankets.

He wondered if he should say something… and what he should say, if so.

“Would you like to hear a riddle?” she asked him finally.

“Uh, okay,” he said.

“What do you have less of, the more you take?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Innocence,” she said, sitting up.

“Was that… was that your first time?” he asked, confused.

“Not exactly,” she said. She swung her legs off the side of the bed, turning her back on him in the process, and got up. “Would you like to hear about my first time? If you can call it that, I mean.”

“If you’d like to tell me,” he said.

“It was ten years ago.”

“My God,” he said. “You must have been…”

“Eleven,” she said. “Innocent.” She turned around to face him. “So innocent. Innocent and ignorant… they aren’t the same thing, but they go hand in hand so often, you know? I think that’s why the courts find people ‘not guilty’ instead of ‘innocent’. Because ignorance of the law is no defense, right?”

“I guess,” he said.

“And of course, not everybody who isn’t found guilty is innocent,” she said. She started to pace the small room as she spoke. “The man who took my innocence ended my childhood… ruined my life. I went through… well, I went through a lot of different things. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But through it all, I had an idea that one day I’d get him back for it, pay him back in kind. I couldn’t steal his innocence, of course, but I could ruin his life.” She turned to face the man. “Ruin it with sex, like he’d ruined mine.”

“I… see.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” she said. “I wasn’t much older at that point, than I had been when it happened. Do you know what it’s like to make that kind of decision at an age when some girls are still… well, actually, I don’t know what girls that age do. I never got to find out, did I?” She laughed bitterly.

“What… what did you…”

“Well, that’s just it,” she said, and she resumed pacing. “There were so many different ways to go, so many different ways a life can be ruined, so many different things I could have chosen to take in retribution for my innocence. Health? That might be a little self-destructive, but what’s one ruined life, more or less. Financial security? Family? Reputation? Peace of mind? Any or all of the above? So… many… choices. And yet, none of them would really add up to what was taken from me. None of them equal what was done to me.”

“My God… I’m so sorry…”

“Please, don’t,” she said, holding up her hand. “Don’t speak. I need you to listen now. So you’ll understand why I watched you for so long, why I waited. I had to be sure, you see. I had to know… had to know I was making the right decision.”

“And do you think you did?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad… are you coming back to bed?”

“I will in a bit,” she said. “I think I’m going to put a robe on and go sit out on the balcony and enjoy the
night air.”

“Would you mind if I joined you?”

“I’d like that, I think.”

“Do you think you’ll still think about him?” he asked. “About getting back at him?”

“I’d like to say no,” she said. “But I know that I will. Maybe less often. Maybe less… I don’t know, intensely. I can’t shut out the memory. I’ve just… chosen not to dwell within it, willingly. I hope you don’t take it personally.”

“You chose to be with me,” he said. He raised a hand to his lips and blew her a kiss from the bed. “You gave up your thoughts of revenge to give me a chance. I’ll take that as personally as I like.”

Unaccustomedly, she blushed.