Place: United States
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Time: January 5th, Present Day
"You've got to do something about these night terrors, Katherine!" Taylor told her as he pulled his dress pants from the hanger. He yanked away the paper that the cleaners had slipped between the legs of the pants, wadded it up, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket in Katherine's bedroom.
She turned from her vanity mirror and watched him as he pulled on his dress shirt and sat on the end of the bed to pull on his socks. Currently, he was going through a blue phase, all his clothes were shades of blue. His suit was a deep navy blue, his socks were the same color with light blue dots. He stuffed his feet into the black loafers. "I'm going through another cycle, Taylor, I can't stop it on cue. Dr. Prichard's upped my script --,"
"This has been going on for three years now, Katherine!" Taylor interrupted. He unbuttoned the blue dress shirt then jerked it off the hanger and began ramming his arms into the long sleeves. Irritably he stuffed the shirt tails in his pants and zipped the fly. "I don't know how to help you anymore. I don't think it's fair that I am expected to understand your hot and cold attitude toward me – especially in bed! Kim thinks maybe we need some space."
Katherine turned back to her mirror. Kim! Taylor was talking more and more about his office manager and what she was saying. "Maybe, Kim is right!" she snapped. Taylor froze as he was adjusting his tie and he looked at her reflection in the vanity mirror.
"Maybe we need just to end this now, Katherine. Why continue to go through the motions? I need to do what is right for me."
Katherine felt something deep in her core, fall away like shattered glass. "No need for you to go through the motions anymore, Taylor. You can pick up your things. I'll put everything in storage bins and put them on the front porch."
"Fine!" Taylor growled. "This is what you've wanted all along. You've all but pushed me out and thank God, Kim's been there for me!"
Katherine said nothing and he stormed out and slammed the front door on his way out. She sat there looking at her image in the mirror. For three years she and Taylor Ballard had been in a relationship. They had gone on vacation together, they had been sexual partners, and they had counseled together with several troubled students since they had met. It had been a seemingly natural coming together. Still, he had not ever understood her cycles of night terrors or the bouts of violent headaches that would send her to bed with an ice pack over her eyes and odd fevers that came with alarming frequency. She could not find a physician who could discover the cause and the psychiatrist she had been seeing, had her on a drug regime that had helped at first, but now it appeared the anti-anxiety and antidepressants were not helping, and the therapy only seemed to worsen her night terrors.
She finished dressing and left for her school. At least at school with her students and the normalcy of teaching and dealing with the daily classroom dramas of adolescent girls and boys, helped her cope. Katherine was eating lunch in the teacher's lounge when Taylor texted her. He was going to stay at his place for a while. Give her the needed space to let her sort out what she wants to sort. Her answer to his text was a single letter: "K"
Katherine went home and began boxing up the few things Taylor had left in the bathroom, the odd pair of sneakers and other personal items. She went through every room in her duplex apartment and extracted Taylor Ballard from her home. When she got tired, she sat in her rocker, graded papers, took a difficult piece of sheet music from one of the dozens of binders in the built-in cabinet, and practiced for a good solid hour before showering and going to bed. She took her night doses of medication and fell asleep. Like clockwork, the night terrors hit! She was crying when she sat up in bed. She turned on her bedside lamp, took the book from the nightstand, and began to read. She had several novels she was reading. There was one in the kitchen, one in the living room, the one she had renewed from the library four times – and refused to stop reading until she finished. She fell asleep after reading the same page six times! The alarm on her phone woke her and she got up and went through the same routine.
Taylor continued to text her, inquiring about her mental health, pushing her to see Dr. Prichard more often than every two weeks. He told her that he was going to be away at a conference in Florida and take a few vacation days while he was there. Did she have the name of the hotel they had stayed in last year? She felt her face grow hot, but she texted the information to him and went on to her aerobics class and then sweated in the steam room afterward. She was too tired to think about anything but trying to get a good night's sleep. She dreamed but it was not the same kind of nightmarish dreams that woke her up crying for help.