Page 63 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

We really were. I’d never felt like this with anyone before. Like I’d known him forever. A best friend and a lover all rolledinto one. And yet there was still so much I didn’t know about Gabriel. I wanted to know every little thing there was to know about my new lover.

“Hey,” he said a little while later while I was tracing my finger over his eyebrows and his nose and his lips. It felt so surreal that he was really here in my bed that I couldn’t stop touching him. “So where’s my notebook?”

That damn notebook. How did I keep forgetting about it? I’d been sleeping on it for three years.

I rolled onto my stomach and shoved my hand under the mattress.

When I tossed the notebook into his lap, he tipped his chin and looked down at it but didn’t pick it up.

“Wow. It looks like it’s been through a war.” He handed it back to me without even flipping through the pages. “Keep it. It’s yours. I have hundreds where that came from.” He tucked his hand under his head. “I was just curious to see if you kept it.”

“I keep everything.”

“No kidding.” His gaze wandered to my shelves heaving with books and crates filled with color-coded found objects and treasures. Sketchbooks and textiles and art projects. A sewing machine, mood boards, and canvases rolled into tubes.

It was a spacious bedroom by New York standards but every nook and cranny was filled.

“You should spread out,” he said. “Convert the spare bedroom into your design studio.”

“I can’t.” I shoved the notebook back under the mattress. “I need to find a new roommate.”

I dreaded the thought of living with a stranger, so I kept procrastinating, but it needed to be done soon. I couldn’t afford to pay the rent on my own, not when I’d vowed to put every cent back into my business. And after all my bills were paid, there weren’t a lot of cents left over.

Gabriel wrapped his arm around me and pulled me against him, curling up around me. I couldn’t help thinking how perfectly we fit together.

“You know,” he said, “my lease is up at the end of May.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It seemed insane,but it felt so right that I didn’t really have to think too hard.

Ever since our first night together, Gabriel and I had been spending all our free time together. Whenever we ran into one of his friends, of which he had many, he’d introduce me as his girlfriend.

Just the other night, we went to CBGB’s to watch a metal band from Northern Ireland, and he said, “You know…I havenever in my lifewanted to spend every waking minute with a person until you. Now I just want to be with you all the time.”

It was exactly the same for me. And even though it had only been four weeks, I couldn’t imagine that changing anytime soon.

But I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake I’d made with Annika so on Sunday morning when Gabriel ran out to buy bagels and a newspaper, I punched in the million digits for the international calling card followed by her equally long phone number and paced the living room, waiting for her to pick up.

It was four in the afternoon in Paris. She was probably out buying baguettes or drinking French wine on a sunny terrace.

The call went to her answering machine. Her roommate spouted off a message in such rapid-fire French that my fouryears of high school French might as well have been Greek for how little I understood.

After the beep, I left a message, in English, obviously. Then I dropped onto the sofa and stared at the phone in my hand. When it rang, I startled and threw the phone across the room like it was a ticking bomb.

“Hello?” I said when I’d retrieved the phone.

“Why do you sound so weird?”

“I just had a near-death experience with my phone.”

“Wow. I’m glad you came out the other side.”

“It was touch and go there for a minute,” I said, wandering into the kitchen and rearranging the fridge magnets while Annika told me about a rave she went to on Friday night in an old theatre.

A magnetic bottle opener held Gabriel’s To-Do List: