Sometimes she dreamed of a place where no one knew her.

She could never quite see where it was. There were mountains in the distance, trees close enough to make the world feel hidden, and a balcony overlooking something beautiful she never managed to remember when she woke. It always rained there. Not the kind of rain that made people rush indoors, but the heavy, steady kind that gave permission to stay exactly where they were.

There was always a fire burning.

And there was always someone with her.

She could never quite see his face.

Maybe that was because the dream wasn’t really about him.

It was about waking slowly beside someone without immediately wondering what time it was. About coffee poured into mismatched mugs and carried onto the balcony while the rain fell beyond the roof. About conversations that wandered nowhere because there was nowhere else either of them needed to be.

Mostly, she dreamed about time.

She had spent so much of her life measuring it. Watching clocks. Counting hours. Learning how much of herself could fit inside the spaces other people had available for her. She knew how to make something meaningful from fragments. She knew how to treasure an afternoon because it would end, how to memorize a touch because she didn’t know when another would come, how to say goodbye while some part of her was still reaching backward.

In this place, she wouldn’t have to be good at that anymore.

There would be time to waste.

That thought felt almost decadent.

Coffee could grow cold because they had forgotten about it. A conversation could drift into silence without either of them rushing to fill it. She could fall asleep on the sofa with her feet in his lap and wake hours later to find him still there.

And because this was her dream, it was never entirely innocent.

There was a balcony where he could bend her over the railing while rain hammered against the roof and the mountains disappeared behind sheets of water. There were hands that knew when to be gentle and when gentleness was the last thing she wanted. There were mornings when she would find yesterday’s fingerprints still written faintly across her skin and have absolutely no reason to hide them.

But even that wasn’t what made her ache when she woke.

It was afterward.

The imagined weight of his hand resting on her thigh while they watched the rain. Her head against his shoulder. The fire slowly dying behind them because neither had bothered to add another log.

No urgency.

No countdown.

No wondering when she would see him again.

Just someone who stayed.

She didn’t know who he was.

Perhaps she wasn’t supposed to.

Maybe somewhere inside her, she simply needed to believe there could be a person whose presence wasn’t measured in borrowed hours. Someone she wouldn’t have to miss before he had even left. Someone who had nowhere else he was supposed to be when morning came.

She never dreamed about forever. Forever had always seemed too large a promise for something as fragile as human beings.

She dreamed about ordinary things instead.

Rain.

Coffee.

A fire.

A balcony.

A man’s hand reaching absentmindedly for hers because he could.

And time.

So much time that eventually she might stop being afraid of losing it.

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