Secrets

The Man told me yesterday that he might have something interesting to tell me about but he can't tell me yet because he isn't sure, so for now it's a secret.

Will he never learn? He knows what happened the last time he did this. He got a horrible surprise.

It went like this.

The Man talks in his sleep. (He also giggles, argues, shouts, and occasionally sings, but that's not relevant to this story.) Sometimes when he talks in his sleep he's quite coherent, and a few days after he'd told me he had a secret last time, he was talking quite sensibly in his sleep one night and I had a brilliant idea. I decided to interrogate him. It seemed a perfectly sensible idea at the time.

So I leaned over him and said, quietly and persuasively,

"What's the secret? Tell me what the secret is..."

His response was mumbled and not very loud. I couldn't hear him clearly, so I put my face closer to his and said it again, very, very quietly so as not to wake him up:

"Come on, tell me your secret. It's all right. You can tell me. What's it all about, eh?"

I leaned over him and stared very closely at his face, concentrating so I wouldn't miss anything. But then suddenly, shockingly, he woke up. My face was only a few centimetres from his and he stared straight into my eyes with an expression of utter terror and screamed. VERY LOUDLY. This caused me to scream, too, and the next thing we were both sitting up in bed, staring at each other and screaming and screaming and screaming. It was altogether a horrifying experience. One minute he was lying there mumbling peacefully and the next he was bellowing in my face. It was ELECTRIFYING.

Eventually we stopped screaming, and he clutched his chest and shouted,

"WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING?" and I shouted back,

"NOTHING!" which was not true at all, but I didn't want to admit that I'd been interrogating him, especially since it hadn't worked. But I couldn't think of a good excuse to be leaning over him with my face so close and staring at him, so eventually I confessed.

It took him a few days to see the funny side.

I reminded him of this today, hoping the awful memory would prompt him to tell me his secret. I mean, who wants to go through that again? It didn't work, though. I guess he must have realized that I'm just as reluctant to repeat the experience as he is.

I'll just have to wait.