"Have we... seen this one before?" Kimiko asked, glancing around the wide expanse of the living room and its acres of plush, cream-colored carpets. It looked intensely familiar, but after three months of house-hunting with Lorelei, she had to admit that all of the interiors and exteriors were beginning to blend together. She'd tried to keep notes of her impressions at first, but after the fourth time she stared down at her little yellow pad of paper and couldn't think of a thing to write beyond 'nice', she gave up and decided to trust Lori to keep it all organized.
Lori looked like she had been born to do exactly that. The hazel-eyed Caucasian woman had on a sober black pantsuit that had creases like razor blades, and her long, wavy auburn curled down past her shoulders seemingly without a single strand out of place even in the worst weather. She carried a tablet that contained answers to every question Kimiko asked almost before she asked them, and nine times out of ten didn't even bother to look at it before replying. Like now, when she said, "Yes, we came by here a week ago when you were just beginning to think about expanding your price range. I thought I'd bring you by again now that we've run the numbers, since you liked it so much."
Kimiko blinked, looking again at the large, open room in front of her. "Did I?" she asked, in tones of vague confusion. It did look nice, she had to admit, but... did she really talk about it in such glowing terms that they needed to go back to it again? She crouched down and took her shoes off, taking a moment to run her light topaz fingers through the thick carpeting. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed with all the options, her brain so full of floor plans and bedroom counts and functional utility that she couldn't remember what her actual tastes even were anymore.
Thankfully, Lori always seemed to be on top of things. "Oh yes," she said, stepping out of her own sensible pumps and reaching down to help Kimiko up. "You really loved looking at it. You called it your 'dream house', remember?" Kimiko took the hand gratefully, stepping onto the soft carpet with an almost audible sigh of bliss. She certainly remembered enjoying her walk through the living room. The warm, plush surface felt so good against her stocking feet that it was all she could do not to lie down and make little snow angels on the floor in her blouse and skirt. It would probably be unprofessional, though. And tangle her long black hair up something fierce.
"We went through the kitchen-it's got a breakfast island, and marble countertops-and you said that it felt just like you were stepping into a wonderful dream, Kimiko. Do you remember that?" Kimiko trailed her fingers along the cool stone surface, her brow furrowing in confusion as she struggled to recall the events that Lori apparently had such vivid, sharp memories of. But the constant parade of features and jargon and long, boring drives from one house to another to another blurred together in Kimiko's mind until it almost became a blank to her. For all she knew, Lori could have just been driving her back to the same house, again and again, and telling her it was someplace different each time.
Kimiko realized she'd just been standing there, holding Lori's hand loosely, lips parted vacantly as she stared into the middle distance and lost herself woolgathering. "I, um, yes. Yes, of course. My dream house. Yes." She didn't remember any of it, not really, but she couldn't exactly admit to Lori that she'd been wasting most of the professional realtor's time these last few months. It seemed rude-certainly the middle-aged woman had better things to do than drive a complete stranger around every afternoon and show her houses that faded out of her brain the second she left them, especially when Kimiko had a perfectly good apartment she was in no danger of losing. She was probably costing Lori money.
But the gorgeous, perfectly composed redhead seemed anything but upset by Lori's indecisiveness. If anything, she seemed positively thrilled to spend time in Kimiko's company. "That's exactly it!" she beamed, giving Kimiko's hand a gentle squeeze. "That's exactly what I wanted to hear. You're in your dream house." She led Kimiko through the kitchen to the smaller foyer near the back door, then up the broad staircase that led up to the second level. "You're in your dream house right now, Kimi, and you know what that means, don't you?"
Kimiko's eyes crossed for a moment as she tried to figure out not just the answer, but the meaning of the question itself. Lori sounded so perfectly confident that Kimiko would know just what it meant to be in her dream house that it almost seemed to bewilder the young woman further. It was like they were sharing a private joke just between the two of them that Kimiko somehow managed to not be in on, which seemed downright impossible. It only fed deeper into her sense of disorientation, as though the expected response had somehow vanished into the same void of endless, repetitive sameness as all of the trips to all of the houses they kept going to. Her brain had simply been numbed to it all. She was fully reliant on Lori to do the thinking for her.
It took almost until they were at the top of the stairs for Kimiko to realize that while her mind had been lost in pondering the question, her lips had answered for her. "It means I'm dreaming," she heard herself responding in a dazed, vacant monotone, the words almost entirely filtered out by her consciousness if not for a tiny nagging sense of familiarity to them that made Kimiko think twice about what she was saying. Or in this case, just the once. Because she hadn't been thinking about them at all when she said them.
