The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [282]
Last night I dreamed that I made love with Roger.
He had been about to close the book, feeling a sense of guilt at his intrusion. The guilt was still there—in spades—but totally insufficient to overcome his curiosity. He glanced at the door, but the house was quiet; women were moving about in the kitchen, but no one was near the study.
Last night I dreamed that I made love with Roger.
It was great; for once I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t watching from the outside, like I always do. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of myself for a long time. There was just this . . . very wild, exciting stuff, and I was part of it and Roger was part of it, but there wasn’t any him or me, just us.
The funny thing is that it was Roger, but I didn’t think of him like that. Not by his name—not that name. It was like he had another name, a secret, real one—but I knew what it was.
(I’ve always thought everybody has that kind of name, the kind that isn’t a word. I know who I am—and whoever it is, her name isn’t “Brianna.” It’s me, that’s all. “Me” works fine as a substitute for what I mean—but how do you write down someone else’s secret name?)
I knew Roger’s real name, though, and that seemed to be why it was working. And it really was working, too; I didn’t think about it or worry about it, and I only thought toward the very end, Hey, it’s happening!
And then it did happen and everything dissolved and shook and throbbed—
Here she had blacked out the rest of the line, with a small, cross note in the margin, that said,
Well, none of the books I’ve ever read could describe it, either!
Despite his shocked fascination, Roger laughed aloud, then choked it off, glancing round hastily to see that he was still alone. There were noises in the kitchen, but no sound of footsteps in the hall, and his eyes went back to the page like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
I had my eyes closed—in the dream, that is—and I was lying there with little electric shocks still going off, and I opened my eyes and it was Stephen Bonnet inside me.
It was such a shock it woke me up. I felt like I’d been screaming—my throat was all raw—but I couldn’t have been, because Roger and the baby were sound asleep. I was hot all over, so hot I was sweating, but I was cold, too, and my heart was pounding. It took a long time before things settled down enough for me to go back to sleep; all the birds were carrying on.
That’s what finally let me go back to sleep, in fact—the birds. Da—and Daddy, too, come to think of it—told me that the jays and crows give alarm calls, but songbirds stop singing when someone comes near, so when you’re in a forest, you listen for that. With so much racket in the trees by the house, I knew it was safe—nobody was there.
There was a small blank space at the foot of the page. He turned it, feeling his palms sweat and his heartbeat heavy in his ears. The writing resumed at the top of the page. Before, the writing had been fluid, almost hasty, the letters flattened as they raced across the page. Here, they were formed with more care, rounded and upright, as though the first shock of the experience were spent, and she had returned, with a stubborn caution, to think further about it.
I tried to forget it, but that didn’t work. It kept coming back and coming back into my mind, so I finally went out by myself to work in the herb shed. Mama keeps Jemmy when I’m there because he gets in things, so I knew I could be alone. So I sat down in the middle of all the hanging bunches and closed my eyes and tried to remember every single thing about it, and think to myself about the different parts, “That’s okay,” or “That’s just a dream.” Because Stephen Bonnet scared me, and I felt sick when I thought of the end—but I really wanted to remember how. How it felt, and how I did it, so maybe I can do it again, with Roger.
But I keep having this feeling that I can’t, unless I can remember Roger