The Moment You Doubt (a peter pan story)

4.5 - Hindsight

I really did fall asleep, then. That little girl might not have killed me, but she'd slammed my head into the ground hard enough to do some damage.

I dreamt of Jas. My subconscious could only construct him in the dark, I suppose, and I found myself in a small, cozy hollow with Jas pressed close to my side. As in all dreamlike things, I could tell there was some sort of situation around why we were here and what was going on outside, but I couldn't seem to put my finger on it. Some sort of danger, but we were safe in here, together.

Jas touched my leg and told me, "Don't worry. I won't let them hurt you."

Dream-me, so assertive, so confident (Why couldn't she be me when I awoke?) took his chin in her hand and brought his lips to hers. To mine. I felt the kiss with all the hazy fervor of perhaps jumping from a high cliff -- such a potent sensation, but so reckless that I could hardly associate it with myself. In my dream, his lips were soft and his face, smooth, although I remembered noting the real Jas' stubbly cheeks and chapped lips. I kissed him again and wanted more, swinging myself up onto him. He put his hands around the backs of my thighs, thumbs tickling at the hem of my nightgown.

I woke from my dream gently, realizing that the hand on my thigh was that of the little girl, hanging onto me as two of the bigger girls carried me between them like a chicken on a spit. One girl had her arms under my armpits, hands clasped at the bottom of my rib cage, the other carrying me by the ankles. It felt like being ripped into thirds. I let out a squeal of pain and the girls were so startled that they nearly dropped me. They stopped and laid me on the ground, stepping back as though I might explode.

Morning had begun to leak into the Neverwood in rays of gentle yellow sun that snuck through the thick, leafy ceiling. My head ached with it, but I couldn't bring myself to close my eyes again. In the light, however sparse, the Neverwood no longer seemed to be a landscape of nightmares, but a lovely collage of gnarled trees, emerald leaves and gentle creatures darting across the ground. I noticed a strange looking gecko as it flashed over my hand and into the illuminated woods. A strip of sunlight warmed my left arm, leaving the rest of my body to feel its own chill even more powerfully.

Then, like an angel, Odysseus emerged from the little crowd of girls behind us. Her eyes met mine with a gaze so sharp that I flinched. The muddy depths of her irises pierced me, searching. I smiled at her, but she did not return my friendliness. From my angle on the ground, she could have been a giant, huge enough to crush me easily underfoot, and my heart sped with fear as she stepped toward me.

But she didn't crush me, and neither did she walk straight past as I had feared she might. Rather, she stopped beside me with her toes grazing the tips of my fingers. Then she extended a hand to me.

Her knuckles were deeply pronounced, the skin of her hand leathern as that of her face. A nerve jumped above her thumb, seeming to rail angrily against me. I lifted my hand to meet hers and nearly broke into sobs. It felt wonderful to touch her again, the same relief as opening the door to my apartment after a long, disastrous day out in the world. I slid my fingers around the silky skin of her thin wrist and let myself be pulled upwards.

"Whoa!" I pitched forward into her.

Odysseus, unruffled, placed a hand on my back and looked me up and down. "You're very pale," she told me.

"I know. I feel awful."

"You were nearly dead," said the girl with a nod. "I can carry you the rest of the way, if you'd like."

"Just you? But you're so --" Before I knew it, my feet were swept away from the ground again. My stomach settled into the weightlessness of my stance as I muttered, "Whoa there." Odysseus didn't respond, nor did she look at me before trekking on before the other girls, her bony thigh bumping my spine with each step. She carried me like she had in the sky, her muscled shoulder blocking me from the rest of the world. I sighed and resigned myself to the bizarreness of it all. Who cared if this little girl was going to carry me through this forest? It didn't matter.

When we bought our first apartment, Walker strode in ahead of me, leaving me to linger in the doorway for a minute, tossing my hair from shoulder to shoulder. What are you waiting for, he'd asked me. Oh, nothing. Nothing. Go on. And Walker, fool that he was, shrugged and waltzed back on into the apartment. I remember wiping my eyes on the collar of my shirt and following him in, resolving not to talk to him for the rest of the day.

Looking back, maybe I should have just told him that I wanted him to carry me across the threshold. I could have even just mentioned earlier that I liked the tradition, and maybe he would have done it, but what I know about what happened later tells me he probably wouldn't have. He would have made some dumb joke about my height (I was an inch taller than he) or my shoulders, my awful, hulking man shoulders, and how he couldn't possibly stomach my weight even across the threshold of the apartment.

What did I ever enjoy about him? Well, his face, he did have a nice face, and a stable job and he could be funny when the mood struck him. That's not enough to marry someone on, I guess, but you know what they say. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

So I slept on Odysseus' shoulder and decided that it didn't matter, really, if she had my eyes or not -- either way, I couldn't stop myself from loving her terribly.