Tess blinked, stretched, and snuggled deeper into the cozy comfort of her bed. She could hear Gallagher bustling about as he hummed to himself in the small kitchen. She breathed in deeply, savoring the aroma of the percolating coffee before throwing off her blankets and swinging her feet over the side of the bed into the waiting slippers. She sluffed her way out to the main room as she pulled a bathrobe over her shoulders.
"M'ahwnin' Gallagher," she yawned.
"Good morning, madame," he responded cheerfully. "How did you sleep?"
"Like hell," she replied as she greedily reached out for the mug of coffee he held up for her.
"Are you hungry this morning, madame?"
"Toast is fine," she said as she sipped at the coffee. "Mmmm, this is good! You're the best, Gallagher. Am I paying you enough?"
"You gave me another salary increase just yesterday, madame," Gallagher returned with a broad grin.
"That's right, I did," Tess said. She smiled in return and then wandered over to the window seat to peer at the moon. "I had a weird dream," she murmured, "That guy was in it"
"Your AC?" Gallagher queried.
"No," Tess replied as she shuffled back toward the table to take a seat. "That other guy. Leprosy Man. I was thinking about what we'd been talking about last night. I was thinking about love before I went to sleep. I remembered that Leprosy Man said he loved me too -- except that wasn't love, Gallagher -- or if it was, it was the very worst kind."
"In the dream," she continued, "he'd captured me. Me and a bunch of other women. He'd taken us to some dilapidated old high-rise in some city. He said he had our children too, in the basement, but I don't know if he was just saying that to scare us. He liked to scare people like that. Then, after you'd been scared, you'd discover that he'd been lying. Anyway, I certainly didn't remember him taking my children and there weren't any children there, so I think he was just trying to scare us. Meanwhile, I'd managed to grab all the knives from my kitchen and hide them under my shirt before he took me away and I knew he didn't know that I had them."
Tess sighed. "So there we were: me, those other women, and those knives, way up high in that building. Some of us had gotten together and made a plan to escape. We were using the knives to cut through the wall so we could get into the attic and from there, down to the basement where our children might be. We were sawing frantically, every single one of us terrified. I was especially frightened because I knew it was me he wanted and we could hear him coming. Then, there was no more time and only one of us could fit through the hole we'd cut. I had been right at the top so the other women pushed me through and I ran. I felt bad for leaving the others behind. I was worried about them. And then," Tess sighed heavily and sipped at her coffee. "He found me anyways."
"He took me into a room by myself then, but I could still see the other women. I was very frightened then, Gallagher. I thought he'd kill me for sure, but he didn't. Instead, he placed a colorful Hawaiian lei around my neck -- several of them, in fact. He was very gentle about that. In the dream, I remembered that he said he loved me and I'd rejected him, and suddenly I wasn't quite so frightened. And I thought to myself, 'Oh, so this is what that's about.'
"After that, he took me downstairs to a parkade and he got into a big shiny bus -- the kind that rock stars have when they go on their tours. It was burgundy colored. He told me there was a surprise in the basement and I shouldn't worry. I got the feeling that everyone else was going to be okay. Then he drove off in that bus, round and round and round, down the center of the building. Except as he drove, he kept crashing into parked vehicles. Cars were flying all around the parkade and I had to keep leaping out of their way so I wouldn't be crushed. Then ... I woke up.
"So the dream was bad, then not-so-bad, and then bad again. Ha!" Tess said. "Not-so-bad sandwiched between badness. Kind of like Leprosy Man. Anyway, what do you make of all that?"
"I don't know, madame," Gallagher said with a grimace as he placed her breakfast before her. "I'm just the toast guy."
