Dave Moffatt looked up from his drink at the bar of a local twenty-something hangout. "Margie, babe, you know you don't have to ask. C'mon, you've got a key. Besides, what is this? Third grade? You're 22, I'm 26. Its my place, we're practically living together. Of course you can 'sleep over.'"
Margie hopped up on the stool to his left. "Yeah, maybe. But, we've only actually been dating for a month and I still like asking. Besides, you know that you cry in your sleep."
Dave had been lifting his drink to his lips, but took pause now. "What do you mean I cry in my sleep?"
She held her hands up. "Gosh, sorry. But, you do. I don't know if its over them, but you cry. Last week, when you went to that party in drag, you ruined my slip because you cried so much that all of your mascara ran off like a wild zebra."
He swigged down the rest of his drink and tossed a $10 bill on the bar. "C'mon. Let's go."
Once outside, Dave allowed himself to think back to that moment only months earlier when he'd come home to the apartment which he shared with his three brothers to find one dead and and two seriously wounded.
Bob was a goner straight away. His brains were scattered on the wall next to the fishtank. The formerly harmless goldfish nipping at the blood that found its way into their water sickened him then and now. Scott has been shot several times in the spine. He was now paralyzed from the neck down and lived in a hospital in New York where Dave went every other week to visit him though it pained him so much to do so. Clint had a hole through his stomach and a gun in hand when Dave had walked in the door. Instinctively, Dave grabbed his arm where he knew the scar was. He'd walked in, seen everything and then Clint had raised the gun, shot haphazardly at Dave and then turned the gun back on himself.
Dave paused in the street when he noticed the tears cascading down his face. He looked over at Margie, a girl he'd met when he went to get counseling. She was the receptionist and had come over to comfort him when he began bawling in the waiting room. Now, as he faced her, he noticed her casting a worried gaze upon him. He realized that she was not comfortable in that apartment where it had all happened, where he could still picture it all and still smell the blood in the air and feel it on his skin and still live with the same goldfish who turned to piranhas in the face of blood. As more tears began to run down his pale cheeks, he realized that he couldn't stand it either. He grabbed Margie's hand and said, "Margie, let's go look for another apartment. That ones too big for just the two of us. Eh?"
Margie embraced him and smiled. "Sure is, unless we plan on having kids in the near future."
Dave kissed her softly. "How about just the semi-near future? Let's get married next week."
Margie gasped and her eyes lit up. "Not yet. I have to make sure that I can live with you first. Ask me again in two months?"
He pulled her closer. "You bet."
He wiped his eyes, secured his arm around his possible future wife and made his way to what he now knew wasn't really home.