Perfect

And you didn’t change your sheets to satin, either.

Exhausted though he was, and too wonderfully comfortable to want to move, Eric forced his eyes open, pushed them downward to the wall facing his feet, looking for haunting eyes of green…

He bolted upright in the bed.

What the…?

The painting - his painting - had vanished, but before the shock of that loss could settle in, there came the dizzying awareness that everything, everything around him had changed. The very wall he now faced was no longer grey, but the soft colour of beach sand at dawn. Oh, there was a picture hanging there, but squared in the frame was the almost mundane beauty of a gazebo standing in the dappled shade of willow trees. The beauty that had stirred there in the night - the eyes, the face - now gone. He’d barely known her, and he’d lost hold of her already. His senses numbed, he tilted his gaze to heaven, his mind twisting for a suitable curse to hurl at God. But what his eyes found gave him pause. Above, the ceiling had been transformed from a barren landscape of cracks and water stains to a smooth, frescoed surface. Beneath, the liquid softness of cobalt blue satin could be felt all along his body, as if…

A quick check of himself above and below the covers confirmed it. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. But he was certain he hadn’t changed before falling asleep. He was certain of it. What the hell had happened?

He looked to his bedroom window, as if all questions could be answered in cracked panes of glass, but still another mystery blossomed there. The window at his left had become a pair of French doors, open now to a garden patio, and outside air filled with sunlight and birdsong.

I’m dreaming. I have to be, Eric told himself, feeling the hollowness open wider inside him. It seemed so real, felt so familiar, like a moment of childhood fondly recalled. That was the odd thing of it. He did not feel a stranger in this strange place. But that was also part of the problem. As much as he felt at home here, he could feel the imminence of loss, for it was almost too perfect to be real. Almost, for it lacked his other desire. Lacked the raven hair, the private smile. Sighing, resigning himself to the transience of the mind’s illusions, he lay back down on cool satin. He closed his eyes, expecting to see her face suspended in his timeworn world again when he awoke. At least, he would see her again.

"Are you just going to lay there all day?" a gentle voice chided him from the left.

At the very moment the sound touched his ear, Eric’s every sense flared up like a woodland inferno. He prayed it was her, and knew his prayer had been answered before he dared open his eyes. It had to be her, for the essence of her face was captured in the siren cadence of that voice, in the rich and lyrical tone that spiced her words.

He turned to her, opened his eyes before he could stop himself.

He saw her first as a play of light and shadow in the arched threshold that opened to the sun, watched as the golden glow behind lit up the diaphanous fabric of her nightgown, defined in darkness the soft curves of her hips, the swell of her breasts.