In Her Room...

"Are you staying with her parents?" 

"Yeah..." Peter wondered why Carl cared where they were staying.

"Are you sharing a room?" 

"I would think so. I mean we live together so I can't imagine they would expect us to sleep in separate bedrooms." Now Peter was really confused. Carl sounded almost giddy as he asked. 

"Nice." Carl nodded and smiled.

"Nice? Why nice?" Peter often responded this way when Carl declared something as Nice.

"You are going to get hot, hometown, childhood bedroom, sex." Carl nodded and smirked.

"What?"

"Have you never stayed with a girlfriend in their childhood room? They get crazy, man. I'm telling you."

"Why would they get crazy?"

"I don't know. Maybe they feel like they are being sneaky and sneaky makes it hot. Or they are living out some sort of bad girl fetish dream from when they were younger. Having a boy over when their parents were there. Whatever it is, it makes them crazy. A little role playing, you know?"

Now Peter would be lying if he hadn't thought about this conversation a few times as they flew back east toward Janet's folks. Carl might be a letch and a dog and a bit out of step with the times, but...Peter wasn't going to turn down hot sex, ever. Even if he and Janet already had perfectly fine sex. Well, more than perfectly fine. The best sex he had ever had. But to be fair he had only had sex with three different people and the first one barely counted. They had both been a bit disappointed and embarrassed after it was all over and the relationship did not make it very much longer. So really, there had been his first time, his second time and then Janet. So...

But still. The sex was really good.

Peter had no idea why he was getting defensive thinking about it. 

Maybe because he had bought in to it; to thinking that the weekend was going to be some sort of wild sex romp. Wild but really quiet because her parents were sleeping right across the hall. Which was going to make it even more wild. And...well. Carl might not be the only letch.

Instead he had walked in on Janet staring at her bedroom wall. Just standing and staring at it. Not once but three times now. Still. Quiet. Facing the wall. Staring. No wild sex. Just weird staring. 

"So...what are you doing?" He finally had to ask.

Janet jumped a little and turned toward him. She had a small, sad, smile, "I was trying to see the door."

"It's behind you?" Peter didn't mean to make it sound like a question, but it did sound like a question. 

Janet laughed a little and shook her head. "No, not that door. The other door." She gestured toward the wall again.

"There was a door there?"

"Yeah, when I was a kid. There was a door there. I was kind of hoping to be able to show you."

Peter walked over to the wall and knocked on a few places. Trying to find the hollow sound that would indicate where the old door was. "What did it lead to? Like an outside staircase? That's an interesting design choice."

Janet shook her head again, "It wasn't like that. It was..." she trailed off here. 

"It was?"

"Nothing, lets just go down to dinner."

"Come on, tell me."

Janet sighed, "Okay, so you know those like Magic Eye posters? The ones that just looked like a  repeating pattern but if you stared at them long enough a like 3-D image would kind of pop out?"

Peter looked at Janet then looked at the wallpaper on  the wall. "Oh! I get it. The wallpaper right? So you could do one of those optical illusions because of the busy pattern."

"Sort of..."

"Sort of ?"

"Sort of. I mean, yes, it was like those optical illusions, but not the same. That's just the best way I have to describe it. When I was younger when I would look at the wall I could find the door."

"And now you can't get your eyes to go blurry the right way?"

Janet smiled again and realized that he wasn't going to get it. She really couldn't blame him, it was pretty crazy to say out loud. She had only told a few people in her life about the door and they had all had this sort of reaction. They couldn't, or wouldn't, understand what she was saying. 

Because it wasn't an optical illusion. It was a door. She just couldn't always see it. She hadn't been able to see it since she came back from college. She hadn't been through it since she was in middle school. She had tried a few times in high school, when she could still see it, but it wouldn't open for her. She had hoped that showing it to Peter would reopen that world for her. That it would be something they could share together. 

Even as she thought that she realized that wasn't true. Not really. She didn't care about sharing the world with him. She just wanted to go back. To prove that she wasn't crazy. That there really had been a door there. That she really had been able to travel to a different world. To have adventures where she was brave and smart and faced real danger but always won and...

Maybe it had all been in her mind.

Maybe it was a dream. 

It just felt like a memory. It felt like it had happened. But there was no door there.  No matter how much she stared.

"Yeah, that's got to be it. My eyes just won't go blurry like that anymore. It was really cool though. Something to see." Janet looked at the wall with a small frown. Her first step in believing that it had been her imagination. Just a childhood recurring dream. That must have been it. She sighed. It really had all felt so real.

Janet and Peter went downstairs to dinner. 

Her room was so quiet you could hear the clock on the dresser ticking away the seconds. 

That and the creak of door opening that had been shut for years.