So there I was, stuck in the middle of the night, wondering about my old fling for no good damn reason. I didn’t want her back, but if she wanted me, all she had to do was call. I still had all the same numbers.

“What’s wrong?” Danni asked me out of the blue.

When she touched me lightly on the back, I jerked away from her as if she was a cold-fingered ghost.

“Shit.” I wasn’t expecting her to be up.

She looked at me and was confused. She asked me again, “What’s wrong with you? Do I repel you or something? You never acted like that before.”

She looked offended.

I shook my head and said, “Nah, nah, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. I just…I just had a bad dream, that’s all.”

I only told her that because I didn’t want her to feel offended. I didn’t mean to pull away from her like that. She had simply caught me off-guard.

“A bad dream about what?”

That was a question I didn’t want to answer. Danni even sat up in bed next to me to hear my response. But I wasn’t planning on giving her one.

“I don’t feel like talking about it. It wasn’t pleasant, that’s all.”

“Was I in it?”

I didn’t expect her to ask me that, but I guess it would have been a normal question after she had just gone to bed with me.

“No, you weren’t in it.” Then I thought I may have answered her too fast and too coldly. What would she ask me next? I could feel it coming.

“Was it about another woman?”

I had to stop her questions, so I did what every man has learned to do with women. I lied.

“I dreamt that I had gotten into a motorcycle accident and had ruined my whole face and body to the point where I couldn’t model anymore. I mean, I was messed up real good and in the hospital. The doctors had bandaged up my entire head. I had hair missing and everything. It was just crazy.”

To my surprise, Danni began to laugh at me. I didn’t consider the story funny myself, whether I was lying to her or not. What if I was telling the truth? Is that how she would have responded to me? Or did she know that I was only bullshitting her.

I said, “That shit ain’t funny, man.” What was her angle?

She said, “I thought only us girls thought about stuff like that.”

“I didn’t think about it, I dreamt it,” I told her.

“Same difference. If you’re dreaming about it, that means you’re trying to suppress it.”

“Okay. So what? So you’re saying that an athlete wouldn’t think about getting injuries where he couldn’t play his sport anymore? That’s just not a girl thing. Everybody has those fears.”

It sounded like I was fighting for my manhood. I had been doing that for years as a model, and I was still doing it on occasions like this one. Everybody had bad dreams every once in a while, didn’t they?