I awoke to the sound of Michelle crying softly next to me, her sobs shaking the bed just enough to stir me. It had been a marathon fuck before bedtime and I had been sleeping the sleep of the mostly dead. Reflexively I checked the clock (1:42 AM) and reached over to make sure my .45 was still in place on the nightstand. It was. And the pre-Wilson, Nashville-era Scattergun Technologies "Border Patrol" model shotgun in the corner, and- ah, never mind. This was about her pathologies, not mine.
"Michelle? What's wrong?"
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry I woke you up. I was just having a bad dream, and I woke up, and I've been laying here thinking."
I hugged her. "Come on, what's wrong?"
"Go back to sleep, Master. I'm okay. You're the one with an early class tomorrow."
"Michelle, this is important. Come on. No titles or that bullshit. I want to know what's bothering you." Early was relative. I didn't have to be to "Special Topics in History", a pre-grad school seminar, until ten.
"Well, the dream was about living in a shitty apartment in LA and fucking guys on camera for heroin. Not a good dream. I mean fucked up sex dreams can be fun, but that was not what I wanted at all. And I've never even tried heroin."
"The dreams haven't happened much lately anyway."
Weird dreams and nightmares are often a symptom of cocaine withdrawal, and for a while I'd actually been writing down descriptions of Michelle's dreams with some idea of using them to try helping wean her off. They'd basically fallen to nothing, at least that she could remember or would admit to. Besides, normally if she got freaked out on account of a dream she'd do something sexual to take her mind off it. She had woke me up to fuck a few times. Laying there crying was not her usual style.
"I was dreaming about how bad I wanted the needle the guy had, even more than I wanted to cum, and then I woke up and started crying."
"Aw, hell, I'm sorry." We hugged. You know, like normal people.
"Anyway, I've been thinking. You, me, us, how good things have been. It's been serious moment of clarity stuff. And with the way the last almost-month has gone, I've figured my problem out. I am two girls in one body. Not in a bipolar psycho way like Joan. She just goes zero to bitch in two seconds. I just have two completely different sets of goals and needs.
"Goal one. I am an intelligent, educated woman who plans to work hard, make a lot of fucking money, retire young, and enjoy myself. I already have a marketing job lined up back home in Dallas with an ad agency one of Dad's friends owns. In five years I'll have my own department."
"All right, admirable goal so long as you don't go pushing yourself to eighty or ninety hours a week and go back to the Bolivian marching powder the way the Wall Street types do."
She smiled weakly. "That ties into goal two. I'm a complete fucking slut who doesn't even want to put her clothes on to leave the house. If I'm not getting fucked or slapped, I better at least cock have a cock in my mouth. With what I have learned about myself over the last month, and looking back at my life of the last three years, unless I get the right sort of entertainment, I will go looking for it, and I have shitty self control. That means I'll end up a stripper or a hooker. Maybe, if I was lucky, I'd be a porn actress if I relocated to Southern California. Either way, my education is out the window, I know I'd be doing drugs again, and I probably catch something and am dead in five years."
I was somewhat taken aback at all this. "Damn. How long have you been laying awake thinking about this? We only went to bed a little over three hours ago."
"I haven't just been thinking about this tonight, dummy. This goes way back, even before our little romantic interlude in the hot tub a couple nights ago."
"Yeah, the rape roleplay. Real romantic. Even I know better than that."
"Not the roleplay, which you will remember was my idea, the second fuck after that. You should have seen the look on your face when I dropped the hint about 'our' next place."
"I was meaning to ask you about that-"
"Wait, let me finish this part first. These two goals are completely incompatible, and dying a junkie is what I moved in with you to avoid. So I need someone in my life with enough responsibility to make me put my clothes on and go to work, but enough of a vicious asshole to treat me the way I like when it's playtime. I've only ever gotten that treatment one place, here with you. So the solution is to keep you around in my life, and if that means I have to make this more of a lifetime deal, that's it then."
Wow. That was a lot to digest on short notice. And maybe I didn't pick my next words with quite the delicacy the situation required. I'm into equal rights. I'll talk to women the same way I'll talk to anyone else. That means I can be remarkably insensitive to what women think they need to hear, and I'm a little too brutally honest when emotional tact is needed. There was a reason I spent a lot of time single.