Vodka Dreams

Christopher’s beard scratched Natalie’s forehead. She smiled feeling his heavy hand on her hip and his knees stacked between hers. Her sticky breath bounced off his neck and back into her face; her fingertips, splayed across his chest, felt the rhythmic beating of his heart. An entire year of waking up like this and Natalie would never grow old of feeling every sensation of their skin touching.

A turn and creak led to a small slice of light flooding into the room. Natalie rolled over and peeked through squinty eyes. In the darkness she could see a body standing in the doorway, light fighting to get into the room around a curvy shape. A feminine voice whispered a question.

“wh” she cleared the morning from her throat “what?” the heat from Christopher’s hand was fading off her body.

“are you going to class today. ” Erin, Natalie’s roommate continued to stand in the doorway. “it’s been two weeks since you’ve gone. I think you should.”

“Yea,” Natalie sighed, ugh class “will you flip on the lights for me?”

The lights pierced through the darkness and Natalie’s morning grogginess. Erin shot a ‘see ya later’ over her shoulder as she walked out of the room, bouncing her mahogany curls.

Back to the love of her life – Natalie rolled over and reached her arm across the empty pillow. Her fingertips touched the Egyptian cotton pillow case and squeezed her eyes shut. If she squeezed them tight enough maybe she could go back four months when he really was laying there. She barely remembered the happiness that had completely consumed her life.

She would go back to a Saturday. One Saturday a month Chris would sneak out of bed early and ‘run errands’ as he called them the night before. He always came back with coffee, or flowers. One time he came back with a beautiful silver bracelet. Then he would sneak back into bed and cuddle up really close. Natalie loved to pretend she had no idea he was ever gone and sleepily snuggle back into his chest. The sun would jump from one window to the next but they would just stay in bed. When they got hungry Natalie would climb over her mountain of a man and peer out the door, bending just enough to lift the bottom of his t-shirt that she wore, and give him a peep of her panties…or skin and then run to the kitchen and grab as much food as she could and run back to bed. They would never grow old of being together.

Natalie groaned into her empty room. The light made her head throb and she wanted to vomit. She felt the churning in her stomach become a burning in her throat and she shot from the bed and leaped for the door but once she was standing with her hand on the doorknob the feeling subsided. As she turned away from the door a strange reflection in the mirror made her pause. It was a girl with ratty brown hair, yellow tinted pale skin and red swollen eyes. The eyes pierced through the glass. They were trying to be brown but were too bloodshot to look like anything – sunken in and crying for help. She looked down from the mirror and noticed the empty bottles. A bottle of vodka lay on top of the dresser, the remaining relief pooled in the glass. Her shaking hands lifted the bottle to her dry cracked lips and let what was left slide down her throat.

Natalie pulled some sweatpants from the floor and onto her legs. She paused beside the bed and looked at the empty pillow. She ripped a chain with a ring on it off her neck. “Fuck you!” the chain thudded onto the empty pillow. “I wish I could let you go you lying cheating SOB.”

A knock at the door caused her to spin around. She crashed into empty, and half full cups of liquor and cans of beer. A voice called through the door “Honey are you okay?”

“Ye-es” natalies voice cracked. She picked up a glass off the headboard, sniffed it and shot it up to her face and down her throat.

“Are you going to class?” Natalie was silent, “What about work?”

“I said I was. Okay.” Natalie looked around her room; his absence filled it. Would things have been different if she had agreed to live with him?

Chris had asked her to move in with him, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for that; he argued when she said no. After all they spent every night together, kept clothes at each other’s place and shared groceries, sometimes a car and money. But her family was conservative and they’d only been dating eight months. He had helped her and Erin move into their apartment instead of his. He played the doting boyfriend that day – he put together all their furniture, used his brawn to lift anything above five pounds, and followed the girls to Target, Walmart and Hy-vee. Before the sun had even set Chris had Natalie pushed against a door, daring her to christen her new room. He carried her to bed and lay her down across the new red sheets. They felt like silk against her back, a black and white contrast to the scruffiness of his beard on her stomach.

Natalie shook her head- the alcohol speeding through her veins caused the room to spin even after she stopped shaking the memory from her mind. She snatched a flimsy backpack off the chair, spilling pens, pencils and notebooks across the floor. Fuck it she thought she was just going to sit online anyway. She slid her computer into the backpack and made her way through the jungle of dirty clothes.

Natalie painstakingly sat in class. Her roommate sat two desks behind her and Natalie could almost feel Erin’s eyes sympathetically staring at her. I don’t want her sympathy, I don’t want anything at all. Her fingers slid across the keys of her laptop as she tried to avoid pictures of Chris and his new girlfriend that were plastered all over Facebook. She had to keep busy on the computer otherwise her screensaver would pop up. It was just her pictures on a slideshow but Natalie never had the heart to delete all the pictures of her and Chris and almost always they were kissing on the first slide. She paused from her agile key-clacking to take a drink from a water bottle – only there hadn’t been water in the bottle since Chris left. Instead it was always vodka and orange juice. At least, she thought, it was kinda a breakfast thing – orange juice.

Her pants shook a little, as vibrations spread from her pocket. Natalie reluctantly set down her breakfast and took out her phone. She stared at the front cover dreading what it would say. At first when they broke up they didn’t talk, then he would get drunk and call her. She always held her calm until she got off the phone but then she would cry herself to sleep. They’d quit talking for a while again, then they start again. Soon they were sleeping together. Now he text her every morning --

Whats up

HANSEN

Natalie muddled over this mornings reply. Would it be one of the days where she replied and he never did or one of the days where they talked all day and by nightfall he’d lay in bed and tell her all the things he missed about her – she drank much more those nights.

Nothing. You?

Natalie turned her phone onto silent and sat it on her keyboard, but then put it back into her pocket – the man in the front had quit talking and everyone else around her was packing their backpacks. She ducked her head down to desk level in order to put her computer back into its home – a set of drumming fingers made her look up. From where she sat all she could see were the fingers tapping the table, one at a time. There was a silver solid wedding band making love to his ring finger. She was suddenly conscientious of her own loveless finger, she stroked the bare skin with her thumb.

When Natalie told Chris that she wouldn’t move in with him he was away for work – a construction job that took him all over the Midwest. They talked online for hours every night and he was so upset by her decline that he had called her. Everything he said that call haunted her now. She had been incandescently happy then.

“Hey babe” she said.

“So you really won’t move in with me? We’ll get you a job and you know I’ll take care of you forever. I can’t have you move back home for the summer, I need you here.”

“Chris, I really can’t.’

“I want to take things to the next level. Let me buy you a ring.”

“if you’re asking me to marry you I’m going to drive all the way over to you just to kick your shins.’

He chuckled. “No, well not yet. I meant like a promise ring.”

Natalie had never thought of a promise ring. Why did she need one? There was dating and then engagements. What was the point of a pre-engagement? “Well what are you promising?” She had the phone cradled against her shoulder as she pointed her nails.

“Baby, I’m promising you the world. We’re not ready to be married but I’m promising that we will be. And I know I’ve been a jerk and done some really stupid stuff but I promise to change, and I promise that things will be so much better. I promise to love you ever day for the rest of my life.”

“I don’t know what to say….me without words.” She stopped painting her nails to stare at her radiant smile in the mirror in front of her.

“Say you’ll wear it if I buy it. I’ve been looking and I’ve got one picked out and I’ll buy it for you as soon as I’m back. Please just tell me you’ll wear my ring.”

“I’ll wear it. I’ll wear it until you put a new one there.” Tears slid from natelie’s eyes, “I love you.”

“Love you too babe, I can’t wait to see you.”

A throat cleared snapping Natalie’s gaze at the ring. She looked up – it was her professor. Crap crap crap she thought.

“Nice to see you today.” He peered into her eyes. His nose twitched.

“Yea” she took a big gulp of her orange juice, “I’ve been pretty sick.”

“I appreciate that you’ve been turning in your homework still but I really need you to be in class.”

“Okay. I’m sorry” She swung her backpack on to her arm and turned away.

“Natalie” the voice tugged on her back, she paused on a heel – toes in the air, “if there is something else going on maybe you should go speak with the school therapist.”

She spun around, “I’m fine.” Natalie’s voice fell out considerably curter than she had meant but therapy? She was fine.

Her professor’s lips tightened over his teeth. “Okay. You know yourself best, but I do expect you to be in class from here on out.” He turned and walked away.

Natalie’s heart sank – he had always been her favorite professor but there was nothing wrong with her: she was fine. As she walked down the stairs her heart and her pulse raced faster than she could get out of the building. It had only been a few months, it was normally to be taking it so hard. She had loved him with everything she had and he used her for food, for money, for a clean house, for clean clothes and as a babysitter for his drunk ass. Therapy?! Therapy was for people who went crazy or tried to kill people not just the broken hearted.

Her hand crashed into the door as she flung it open. Fucking ass he doesn’t know her. He didn’t know them. He had no right. She flung her backpack into her car and sat her head on the steering wheel. The warm plastic stuck to her forehead as she leaned back in the seat, her hand groped for her orange juice – oh sweet relief. She chugged what was left but it wasn’t enough. Her misery dripped slowly from her heart like water torture, she needed a flood to forget it. She climbed over the seat and pulled down the backseat to find the liquid she needed. She ran her fingers over the fabric of the seat – swept away by a torrential memory.

Chris’s house was always a rotation of roommates. There would be weeks upon weeks where they never got time alone. At night Natalie would cling to him – her shoulder rested in his armpit, her neck on his should and an arm and a leg wrapped around him but still drunks would crash into the room, or his phone would ring. It was one of those nights that he had led her out of the house – barefoot, in boxers and a t-shirt and taken her car out to the gravel roads by his parent’s farmhouse. He turned the lights of and climbed out of the driver side door and opened the passenger’s. He started shoving everything in her backseat into the trunk. He went around to Natalie’s door and carried her to the back. He slipped a cd in the car radio and climbed in next to her. It was the CD she had made him for their six month anniversary – they listened to the cd three times while they talked about how stressed she was with school, how sore he was from work, and how they planned their future. They decided that night to live in a country farm house with a wrap around porch.

“I want to watch the sunset on a porch swing with you until my hair is gray and our kids our grown and our grandkids are sleeping on every surface of our beautiful house.” His voice seemed to echo from the seat as she searched for a vodka bottle that still had enough in it to finish the job her breakfast had started.

Finally she found a half full bottle of McCormicks. She pressed its neck to her lips and tipped her head back. She didn’t stop to take a breath just let the vodka slide to her stomach. Finally she took the bottle from her lips and threw it back into the trunk. She climbed back into the driver’s side. Everything was spinning – everything had been spinning since the day he told her good-bye. She turned the car on and backed out of the parking lot. She tried to stay between the lines but the faster she went the more they blurred – she felt like she was driving on a carousel. She focused on how to get to work, hoping the focus could keep her between the lines or on the road. Instead she was too focused to notice that the lines she was trying to stay between were the wrong ones or see the car coming towards before the engines intertwined like long parted lovers.

“Her blood alcohol level was out of control.”

“I know I saw her tox reports- it was 9:15 in the morning, what was she thinking?”

“Who knows, the police reports said the entire trunk of her car was full of alcohol bottles. What could be so wrong in her life. She’s not even twenty.”

Natalie’s eyes wouldn’t open but she could hear the voices around her.

“She’s lucky that everyone made it. She is pretty fucked up, though.”

“Do you remember how pretty she was when she first came to school? Look, her eyes are swollen shut, her face is bruised and she has a tube running from her ribcage. Its really not much difference than what she looked like in class. Did you see her?”

“I saw her everyday. She just kept getting worse and worse. The doctors said she’ll go through with drawl. It’s probably a good thing she’s been unconscious for two days.

Natalie finally recognized Erin’s voice but she still didn’t know the other one. Their voices kept going but were eventually cut out by the sound of their shoes.

Natalie wondered if Chris had been there. She was cold and her body ached. She wondered what the tube running from her side was. She just wanted to sleep but was in too much pain to sleep. There were tubes shoved in her mouth and her eyes were swollen shut, she was just trapped.

The physical pain she was feeling now excited her as much as it hurt her. It was worse than the broken feeling shed been drowning for months.

He wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t worth her. He most certainly wasn’t worth her life. She wanted to live. She wanted to feel but most importantly she wanted to love again.

Natalie heard movements and voices. She worked at wiggling her fingers hoping someone would see that she was awake; she was alive and she wanted everyone to know.