Challenges of Sobriety in a Weekend of Confines

Monday

I don't really remember if I dreamed, the sleep was too peaceful to recall much else. The whole weekend had seemed like something of a dream, anyway. A cool summer's evening spent in a warm embrace; it was strange to me, but so divine. Wrapped in her soporific spell, I was adrift from my bygone responsibilities, those which had so often driven my action. Early, my departure intended, had long since abandoned me here. I had almost forgotten with whom I had fallen into this peaceful slumber, but she was not the type to go unnoticed for long.

"Good morning, Annalise!" her musing voice roused me in a start, and I covered my eyes as she turned the light on and nearly blinded me. I heard her kick the bedroom door wide open, and I had not even realized she left until she stormed right back in. "Rise and shine, beautiful! It's looking like a wonderful day out!"

"Robin?" I grumbled groggily as I noticed the faint salmon and quartz light emanating from her bedroom window. I wiped my eyes as I watched her rushing over to me and climbing back onto the bed. "What time is it?"

"No idea, pretty early I think. Here, have some breakfast," she said.

Robin shoved an uninvited plate full of warm food into my hands, and I squinted to see it clearly. A glass of orange juice appeared in my hand as I blinked, and I was overwhelmed with the deliciously homey scent. I didn't know she could cook—or that there was anything left to cook, at that.

"Why are you up, then? You're never up early," I asked her suspiciously as I cleared my throat, trying to sit upright against her headboard and crooked pillows.

"I don't usually have a reason." She climbed right over me and sat there between my outstretched legs, which were still under the blankets. Her expression was hopefully ecstatic, and she grinned at me as I placed the plate on my lap.

"Well, then thank you," I agreed as I took a sip of the orange juice, which surprised me with its cool and flavourful nature. As I swished it in my mouth, I noticed something particularly interesting about it, "Hey, this is just orange juice."

"Well duh, what were you expecting, coffee? It's orange, hence the orange flavour." She laughed as she made herself comfortable there between my knees, resting her hands on me.

"I mean that there's no vodka in it," I clarified, and she seemed proud to agree.

"Of course not silly. Like you said, it's early," Robin reminded me.

She gestured a nod to the window and kept her eyes on mine, earnestly watching me, and it was like the comforting glow of the sun on my face. The sun itself, it wasn't quite up yet. But she was enough to wake me up. More than enough.

"Are you feeling all right?" I found myself asking skeptically, noticing the arrangement of food she had laid out on my plate. It was adorable.

"Never better, A.J.," Robin confirmed as her fingers strummed over my legs absently, like they were sending some Morse code I couldn't quite decipher. "I know that the weekend is over, and you're going to walk back out that door into the real world again. I just wanted to spend the morning with you. Is that so bad?"

"Not bad. Surprising? Yeah maybe, considering how resistant you were to this whole idea to begin with," I admitted as I touched the crust of the toast, and she watched me lift it between us without a hint of her own appetite. "Have you eaten already?"

"Yeah, too much actually. I had like four of those." She bashfully grinned, rubbing the back of her head like she used to if she had a chemical burn from bleaching the roots. "I had to eat all the ones that I burned when I was trying to get it right."

"That's a lot of work to put into something like breakfast," I suggested, but she waved the comment away, for once, modestly.

"It was nothing," Robin said as she shimmied out from between my knees. Instead of hanging around nosily to research my eating habits, she got up off the bed and started towards the bedroom door from whence she came. "When you're finished, come on downstairs, okay? But, like, no rush or anything."