Sleeping Beauty

Author's Note: *sigh* After all the time, effort and imagination I put into this story, it's a little disheartening to see it hasn't gotten that much of a response :( I see that I've gotten a few hits, but only two ratings and one review. Is anyone really reading this through its end, or is it just a faithful few reading it over and over again? *shrugs*

Anyway, if anyone really cares, here's the next installment.

Chapter 3

He couldn't see her, but he could see the rectangular ray of light emanating from the crack under the bathroom door. And he could hear her, sobbing, the toilet paper roll rattling as she pulled sheet after sheet of tissue from the double-sized roll. She sniffed, then blew her nose, then continued to cry.

It was just like that day in the shop she made that confession in his bathroom. But worse.

Apparently, she was crying because of something he'd said, not because of being forcibly sodomized by her best friend's brother.

"I'm not . . . I don't know what I did wrong," he weakly admitted. "I thought . . . I thought girls . . . I thought you might wanna hear what I thought about that. The way you look, I guess."

Mecca scoffed. "Do you think I'm stupid?" she asked. "If you didn't like the way I looked we couldn't have spent the past 45 minutes fucking like rabbits."

"You . . . timed us?" he asked.

"No . . ."

"Then that was just some arbitrary number you pulled out of your ass."

"No. I didn't time us," she reiterated. "I knew what time we left the shop, and after we were finished I just happened to look at the clock."

He wasn't sure he believed her.

"This is really stupid," she sighed.

"Yeah," he agreed. "I . . . tell you you're . . . you know . . . and you flip out on me."

"You can't even say it again," she pointed out. "If you can't say it now, you shouldn't have said it then."

"But I felt it," he argued. "I was just lying there, looking at you and . . ."

"You messed yourself?" There was no humor in her voice.

"No! Well . . . it did make me think about the dream, and the dream well . . ."

"Do you think I'm some sort of sick freak?" she asked. "Fucking guys in a cemetery because they beg me to?"

"No." He wasn't sure he could get the words out, but he was certainly going to try. "That's what made it . . . made you so . . . b--beautiful. You . . . didn't really wanna do it, but you did because I thought . . . you know . . . that you, um," He really wanted to use the word 'love' at that point, but having already been warned about its implications . . .

"You didn't really want to but . . ."

"But what!" she screamed.

He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out along with what he wanted to say. "You didn't wanna do it, but you did because you loved me, and you knew how badly I needed to be with someone like that at that moment. I was . . . all kinds of messed up, and that was the only thing you could think of that would make me feel better."

Damn! he cursed to himself. She was going to leave. She was going to burst out of the bathroom, grab all her shit, and just leave. Forget that she was ten miles from town. Forget that he'd driven her here. Forget that it was probably ten degrees outside. Anything had to be better than being around him right now.

It was quiet. Too quiet. He desperately wanted to call her name and break the silence, releasing all this pent up shit he had building inside him, but, having her here and quiet was better than not having her here at all.

"I . . . I told Allen I . . . loved him once and he . . . he didn't say it back. He just sat there looking at me like . . . some horrific accident. Like he didn't know me or what I was talking about or anything. I . . . didn't know how to recover from that. I mean, when you say something like that to somebody, you expect them to say it back. And when they don't . . . it's just . . . awful. And you start to wonder if, you know, you were involved in the same relationship all this time.

"I mean, if they . . . made you . . . love them . . . shouldn't they love you, too?"

"Unrequited," he said solemnly. "It happens. And it sucks."

"No," she said. "He talked about marrying me and getting a house. And what we'd name our kids and . . . He loved me, Daniel. He just . . . didn't want me to love him back."

He chuckled lightly. "What was he smokin'?"

"Don't make fun of him," she said evenly. "He had it rough."

"And you haven't?" he asked. "I haven't?"

"Actually," she said, "you kind of . . . remind me of him . . . in some ways. It's not always a bad thing but . . . you just made me so happy tonight and . . . I don't get to be happy." The sobbing began anew, quickly accompanied by the rattling roll.

He scooted to the edge of the bed, placing his feet flat on the floor, feeling suddenly light and giddy. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Mecca sighed. "It's like I'm cursed or something. Every guy I've ever liked: a)didn't like me back; b)had some extremely racist friends or family members; or c)just plain flakes out on me. I mean, part of the problem is other people. I mean, I like all kinds of men, you know. Not just white ones. But whenever I would end up with a white one, my life would just go all to hell."

The room, again, fell quiet. "And why's that?" he asked.

"People are just hateful and don't wanna see me happy."

"And why wouldn't they want you to be happy?"

She half-laughed, half-sighed. "C'mon, Daniel, you're a smart guy."

"Are you saying 'The Man' is trying to keep your love life down?"

"Think about it," she said. "If I don't fall in love, I don't get married. If I don't get married, I'm not gonna have kids. If I don't have kids, that's at least one less black person 'The Man' has to worry about." She forced another laugh. "And if I kill myself out of loneliness and desperation, all the better."

Daniel, sick of all this silliness, stood, approached the door, then cleared his throat. "Come outta there."

"What?"

He stiffened his spine. "You heard me. Come outta there."

"And if I don't?" she asked, half-teasing, half-serious.

He shrugged. "I'll break the door down."

Mecca laughed. "Bullshit."

He ticked off the count of three on his fingers, then crashed through the door.