She felt Carmen’s cool hand – cool like a whisper, cool like a spring day, cool like a petal, cool like water – brushing the nape of her neck, her fingers playing slightly with her hair, drying up the sweat, and then going down, caressing her back, slipping under the tank top and massaging her burning hot skin.

Shane realized that her eyes were teary. She had been crying in her sleep and she hadn’t even noticed it. So she took a sniff and, blindly, grabbed Carmen’s hand and kissed it. She kissed the palm, the back of her hand, and then her fingers, one by one, and started breathing more regularly.

“Could you please look at me, Shane?”, Carmen whispered, gently.

Shane opened her eyes and turned her head. She focused on Carmen’s beautiful face – her long hair in a mess, her eyes sleepy, and even without the make up she was stunning – and tried hard to smile.

“You’re sweating, you’re pale… What’s happened?”, Carmen asked under her breath. Her tone was concerned, sweetly painful and Shane swallowed.

When she opened her mouth to reply, her voice came out smoky and throaty.

“I was… I…”, she shook her head again and chuckled silently, bitterly, “…Huh… I guess I was having…”.

It was so simple. It was just a world, after all. Nothing really difficult. It was a word that Shane knew so well. And yet she couldn’t pronounce it.

“…A nightmare?”, Carmen suggested, half-smiling sadly, and Shane felt grateful to be just like an open book, to her.

“Yeah… Quite so, a nightmare”, she echoed, nodding firmly.

Carmen stroked Shane’s cheek and ducked her head to a side. Her dark eyes narrowed as if she was trying to read her even deeper, and Shane pulled her into her arms immediately. She buried her face into the crook of Carmen’s neck, inhaled the familiar scent of her skin – a mixture of washing powder on her t-shirt, of moisturizer, of soap, of Carmen, of home -, kissed the exposed part of her shoulder and dried her eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?”, Carmen asked, smoothing her hair. Shane focused on the pleasurable feeling of her lover’s fingers through her sweated hair.