Chapter 2

I awoke from a night of strange, but barely remembered dreams. All I could remember were hazy details, most of which made no sense, but I was pretty sure that Madison and Sabrina had been in them. Regardless of the dreams though, I felt fantastic; I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so refreshed first thing in the morning. If the tea had caused this, I would pay a small fortune to make sure I always had some on hand for the rest of my life. It wasn’t until I sat up in bed that I noticed something was wrong, and then I very suddenly realized something was very wrong.

I had wet the bed.

I threw back the sheets and stared down at myself, visually confirming what I certainly already knew. My pajama bottoms were soaked and there was a dark, wet stain on the sheets radiating out around me. The unmistakable smell of pee wafted up to my nose.

I had wet the bed.

I sat there completely stunned for what seemed like a very long moment before suddenly leaping out of bed and stripping the sheets as quickly as I could. The mattress was, of course, wet as well, but it didn’t look like it would stain. Regardless, that was how I ended up spending the first morning of my vacation doing laundry and scrubbing a mattress.

It was not ideal.

Truth be told, it was far from the first time I had wet the bed as an adult, but it had been a long time since I had. In fact, I had struggled with bedwetting for my years of my life than I had been free from it. I had been a consistent, nightly bedwetter well into my teens until it started to abate when I was seventeen. Over the course of the following seven years, it had slowly, slowly tapered off, from five or six nights a week, to three or four, to just a couple nights a week, to a few times a month, to just random, scattered occasions, to never again.

Well, apparently not ever again, because here I was five years later, desperately scrubbing a mattress to make sure the people who owned the house, and thus the bed, never found out what I had done.

Finally, the sheets and my pajamas were in the washing machine and the mattress scrubbed with no sign of staining, thank god.

I allowed myself a sigh of relief when I was sure there would never be any evidence to let my temporary landlords know that I had peed all over their bed and wandered into the kitchen to get some breakfast. After a moment of contemplation, I made myself a pot of that tea; who wouldn’t need to relax after a crisis like that? Breakfast itself was meager as I hadn’t brought much in the way of food with me. I had planned to go grocery shopping after getting settled in, but I had spent so much time with Madison and Sabrina that I had forgotten. Madison had left me with directions into town, however, and told me that there was a locally owned grocery store that also carried all sorts of sundries, with a focus on the kinds of things one might need while vacationing on a lake. I supposed I would have to go out later in the day, preferably before lunch.

It wasn’t until I was sitting at the dining room table with my breakfast and tea that a new, rather horrible thought dawned on me: what if it happened again? I knew my history with bedwetting and while I could hope that it was just a one-off accident, maybe a result of how exhausted I had been compared to how deeply I had slept, there was certainly no guarantee. If I had wet the bed once, I was all too aware that it could happen again, and I didn’t want to spend my vacation scrubbing my mattress anymore than I wanted Madison and Sabrina to find out what I had done. Realistically, I knew I probably wouldn’t have another accident. It was probably a one-time incident, and even if it wasn’t, even if my bedwetting was returning, it was unlikely that I was returning to the every night habits of seventeen-year-old me. Still, the question was whether it was a risk I was willing to take.