(This story started here.)
It took me a while to fall asleep that night. It was an unfamiliar bed, of course — that was probably part of it.
So I lay there on my back, hands clasped behind my head, staring at the ceiling.
The house itself was comfortable, but shabby and very old. When we’d got there, Sharon had introduced me to her brothers and to Mr. Bostwick, and then she’d showed me around the house.
It had two stories. The downstairs contained the kitchen, where Craig was cooking dinner, the living room, where Mr. Bostwick was listening to a news program on the radio, and Mr. Bostwick’s bedroom.
Sharon took my hand as we climbed the creaky stairs to the second floor. The staircase was so narrow that I had to walk a little behind her, and the stairs tilted to one side, but we made it in one piece.
“This is the bedroom,” she said, suddenly looking awkward as I glanced in to see a very large bed, neatly made up, with three pillows in a row, and three bureaus lined up across the opposite wall.
She tugged lightly on my hand. “Come on. My brother Will made up another room for us, for you and me.” A little farther down the hallway was another door, and she pushed it open to reveal a very small room, with a twin bed and no other furniture.
Like everything else in the house, no matter how ancient and worn, it was spotlessly clean.
I looked at the bed, which was about as narrow as mine, and then I looked at Sharon.
“It’s just our size,” I said.
She looked like she was suppressing a grin or a laugh. This was surprising enough, but then she leaned over and whispered, “I thought of that.”
She sometimes seemed embarrassed at how she always slept all wrapped around me, and I had tried to reassure her that it was fine with me. But for her to even think about making a joke, about our sleeping habits or anything else, that was unprecedented.
Dinner had been wonderful. Craig’s baked fish had been worth the wait, and I had decided not to even think about how Sharon had known he had been late getting off work.
Will and Craig were very pleasant, and almost eerily similar to Sharon (and to each other, though at least Craig had a beard and Will didn’t, so it was possible to tell them apart). The three of them had the same build, the same way of moving, and, most unnerving, exactly the same voice.
Mr. Bostwick had been friendly, although I had noticed him looking at me intently a few times. He didn’t talk much during dinner, but a couple of times when Sharon or one of her brothers said or did something really odd, he gave me kind of a bemused smile, as though well aware of how peculiar the three of them were.
The kitchen table was a folding card table, which was obviously comfortable for the four of them. Adding a fifth person — me — made it crowded, and they offered to set up something in the living room instead, but I said the kitchen was fine.
The stated reason was that I didn’t want to be a bother, but the real reason was that I didn’t want to make “a visit from Sharon’s boyfriend, Michael” into a special occasion, requiring a lot of extra preparation. I was hoping those visits would become a pretty regular occurrence. Just another member of the family.
Conversation at dinner had been very formal. Not that we addressed each other as mister and miss, but we talked about U-town, college, classes, art, and other subjects like that. There were no questions about my family, my history, or my home town. Which was fine with me, but I did wonder if this was because Sharon had warned them in advance that certain topics were to be avoided, or because they didn’t want me to ask any personal questions about them.
In the dim light from the window, I could see the painting on the wall at the foot of the bed. There were three in the living room and another in the downstairs hall — all obviously by the same artist. I’m no expert on art, but they looked very disturbing to me. There were strange, jagged shapes that almost looked human or animal, but not quite. The colors were odd also, as though the pallette went into parts of the spectrum that human eyes couldn’t perceive.
They certainly didn’t seem like anything Mr. Bostwick would have liked, so it must have been Sharon and her brothers. Maybe the ominous image staring at me was another reason I was having trouble getting to sleep.
I felt the mattress shift, and Sharon’s arm slid slowly across my stomach.
Her breathing had been steady for a while, and now she was moving into her usual sleeping position, gradually wrapping herself around me. Considering how we slept, a wider bed would have been wasted on us anyway.
The surprising thing — not that I’d ever had any other bed partners to compare this to — was that it was never uncomfortable to sleep this way. I never woke up with a stiff neck or with my foot asleep.
Okay, I told myself, it’s time to stop avoiding the truth. Your girlfriend — the one who can communicate with her brothers over long distances, the one who has trouble understanding movies, the one whose skin is a color that no human skin has ever been, the one who presumably finds these monstrous paintings beautiful, the one who learned your real name by magic — that girlfriend is an alien.
I had trouble accepting this, of course, but then I told myself that I wasn’t exactly a prize either. And obviously none of that mattered to her, including in bed.
She shifted slightly and made a noise that sounded like assent to my unspoken thought.
The next thing I knew, it was morning, the sun was pouring into the partly open window, and I was not wrapped up in Sharon.
I stretched, figuring that she might have got up, or…
She was lying next to me, on her back, looking up at the ceiling. I poked her nose. “Hey,” I said.
She didn’t react. “Are you okay?” I asked.
No reaction.
Okay, this was alarming. I had the urge to take her pulse, but I wasn’t really sure how to do that. Then I watched her for a moment, and she was clearly breathing. Was she asleep? Her eyes were open. Was she having some sort of seizure or something?
I stroked and squeezed her arm and said her name again. She turned her head toward me, very slowly, her expression bleak. I asked her what was wrong, but she obviously couldn’t answer me.
