Bad Dream.. Julia

James is just home from work, and he joins me in a bedroom where I was sitting on the bed waiting. He is on his knees on the bed, hovering over me, and we are talking and laughing. I reach up to slide a hand up his shorts, and before he can stop me, I can tell he had no underwear on underneath his shorts. He gets quiet and sits down on the bed. I know that he had underwear on when he left, since I had been in the bedroom when he was dressing for work. So, I ask him, what happened to your underwear. He is quiet, but squirming and looking away, so I continue to ask him.. playfully, trying to get a hand up his shorts again and tickling him consciously. Finally he says to me, I can’t tell you because it is embarrassing.

I take pause, running through my mind what on earth might have happened to him that could be embarrassing. Then I try to ask him if it is anything I’ve thought of, in a much more tender way, without the tickling, thinking he is hurt or sick in some way. He refuses to tell and gets quiet again. Finally I ask flat out are your hurt or sick? And he says no, color rising to his face until he is beaming with embarrassment. After all this, I am dying to know, the matter cannot be dropped, so I am insisting he tell me, yelling at him practically. I tell him to be honest with me…

The next is hazy. He sighs and resolves himself, pulls out his wallet, then from it begins to pull out brightly colored game cards, each with some strange sexual scene or position drawn on them and some directions written at the bottom. He starts explaining about this interesting game he’s been playing in secret with some friends. He says he might be addicted to it, then he tries to explain how it works. He lays down the first one and says, “see, first I drew this one, and it was okay. easy enough to do, but then Julia drew the next one,” he lays down another card.. “and she did it but it was rough on me and we ruined my underwear in the process…” I am starting to get the picture.. it’s a sexual game. Who can insert what where.. who can get into this position, etc etc.

My mind latches onto the name.. Julia… For the whole rest of the dream I am unable to talk in a normal voice, I am screaming at the top of my voice everything I say. “Who is Julia?” He is not replying or replying in so low a voice I cannot hear it. He needs to yell too to overcome the ringing in my ears. My head is exploding from rage. The temperature has gone up, the room is not livable so I get up and head to leave it, but I keep turning around screaming questions at him… “Why? Where? When? Who? How could you?” Through the haze I hear him say that Julia is a girl he decided to hook up with one night when he visited Chattanooga alone, like he does. She was having a party, and at it, they all played this sex game. He had an amazing time and acted out the cards with multiple party guests depending on turn, and that there was no other connection, just the sexual experimentation with multiple strangers facilitated by the game. Later he found out Julia had a friend who lived in Atlanta, and they sometimes had parties and played the game. It was only every few weeks or so, usually late on a weekend night, and he would leave work to join them for a while.

I am still screaming. I manage to find out where the parties usually take place, but it doesn’t calm me. He is upset, but not holding back. He is telling me that he was embarrassed to tell me about the game because he was enjoying it so, and it had some very strange freaky elements to it that he didn’t want me to know about him. He was saying that he liked the straight vanilla relationship he had with me, and thought that if I knew about the game, it would scare me off. I would judge him or something.

It is all too much to register too fast, so I finally make it out the door. When I hit the hallway I run at the top speed I can manage, and the hallway goes on forever. In my minds eye I can see the doorway receding behind me until I come upon a room with a big picture window, and outside it I see we are at the beach, right on the beach, and the ocean is calling to me. I have the strongest urge to go run along the beach and into the ocean, but something tells me not to. Instead I turn and walk slowly, silently back down the hall toward the bedroom door. It is closed now. When I reach it, I open it slowly and see he is on the bed, cell phone in hand, and I immediately hear from his words that he is talking to Julia. He is laughing about how he knew the underwear would give him away. He is relieved to not have the secret life anymore, and he is telling her that he desires her and that she should come over right now and play some more.. just her, and bring the cards. He sees me and sits up, but keeps right on talking. We are staring at each other. I listen for a moment then lunge toward him screaming “tell that bitch to hang up the phone” over and over, and I am trying to grab the phone from him. He uses his other hand to reach up and cover the handset so she cannot hear, then turns to me with a raised eyebrow and asks why I am still there.

Then I halfway wake up. There is a noise, but the name “Julia” is echoing in my head, and the memory of a screaming argument and all the anger. I have to try to wake myself further because something in me is nagging that it was just a dream. I begin to be able to see the room and the bed I am in. It is not the same bedroom. I reach over, and he is not there beside me. I think, he has left me. I shouldn’t have screamed so much. I can feel the soreness in my throat from the screaming, but I am still waking up. Until at last I know I am awake and the whole thing is just flittering memories on the top of my head. I close my eyes and feel that I could sleep some more, but I am afraid to fall back into the same dream, so I turn on the radio and try to think of other things.