“To bed with you,” I instructed, finding a glass on his dresser and filling it with water from his sink.
“No.” His headshake was vigorous. “No bed. Shower. Let’s take a shower. Take a shower with me. Please? Please, please, please?”
His pleading would have been much more persuasive if he hadn’t already crawled onto his bed and started fluffing one of his pillows. “It’s so fluffy. How have I never noticed how fluffy my pillows are?”
Walking around his bed to place the back of my hand over his forehead, I said, “You’re hot.”
“You’re the one who’s hot,” he replied, reaching for my waist, gazing dreamily up at me. “And gorgeous. And beautiful. And why does my mouth feel like I’ve been chewing on sand?”
“Here.” I handed him the glass of water while he smacked his lips. “This will help.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re right. You’re so smart.” After releasing me to spin the glass of water in his hand for a moment, he guzzled it down.
I walked to his sink to fill the glass a second time, and when I turned back around, I squeezed it close to my chest. He’d already passed out, sprawled on his bed with his face smooshed into one of his fluffy pillows. With a contented sigh, I set the water down on his nightstand. Then I slipped off his shoes, his socks, his jacket, and while I undid his tie, he mumbled something into his pillow.
“What’s that, darling?”
“I love you,” he said softly, hugging his pillow tightly, his little pinky with its bitten-off tip pressing into the foam. “I love you so much.”
I knelt beside his bed, because that’s what a being did when their knees gave out, when their lungs stopped expanding, when their heart stopped beating.
With trembling fingers, I traced the arch of his eyebrow,the crooked line of his nose, the bow and curve of his full lips. I’d done this to him once before, when he’d fallen asleep during our night together on the CAK. I’d wanted to commit him to memory then, to make him real for as long as possible before we left each other forever. And now, against astounding odds, he was here. I didn’t need to remember him. I didn’t need to make him real. He was real. He was real and he was here and he loved me. Impossibly, he loved me.
And what was that deep ache in my chest? What was deep, contented sweetness wrapping itself around me, making my eyes sting? Was that love? Did I love him too?
The answer was right there, the words hovering on the tip of my tongue. I only had to say them. He wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t remember. I could say them now, believe them now,meanthem now, and I’d still be safe in the morning. It could be like practice. A chance to see what might crack inside me if I did say them, or maybe what wouldn’t. Because what if I told him, and I was still whole afterward? What if, because of him, I was healing?
Gathering whatever courage I had left, my heart pounding, my pulse thrumming in my ears, my breathing shallow and ragged, I opened my mouth and?—
“Serena,” he whispered into the darkness. “Serena, I love you.”
25
In the spacebetween where I knelt frozen in place on his carpet to where Freddie slept peacefully in his bed, the universe expanded, stretched, pushing itself outward until it might as well have been a light-year separating us. He hadn’t been thinking about me. He hadn’t been talking about me. He didn’t love me.
He’d asked me once if I’d had someone else, but I’d never thought to ask him the same thing. And since that day, all I’d done was push him away, keeping him firmly at arm’s length, forcing him to pretend to be someone else entirely just to get close to me. Who did that? What kind of being did that to someone they claimed to care about?
Of course he’d found another lover. Or maybe he’d had one all along. We weren’t exclusive. We weren’t in love with each other. We weren’t even real. None of this was real. How could I have been so stupid?
My eyes stung and my nose burned. The sensation was so foreign to me—the prickling pain, the mist clouding my vision—that I didn’t recognize it at first. But when I wipedthe single tear slipping down my cheek away, something worse than pain slammed into me, worse than disappointment or misery or even heartbreak. It was disgust. Staring at the wetness on my fingers, I was disgusted with myself.
Because I didn’t cry. I’d wanted to, desperately, but I never did. Not once in the last five years. When Jonathan was taken from me, when I’d gotten the call that he was gone, at his service, I hadn’t been able to shed a single tear for him. There were so many nights I didn’t sleep, sitting up in my bed, trying to make the tears come, knowing that if they did, maybe I’d feel less guilty, less numb, less empty. But they never came. Never. And now, this was how it happened? This was what I cried over? Not my son, but a man?
Fury ignited inside me, sudden and tremendous. It wasn’t Freddie or my son or even the cold, uncaring universe that had taken him from me that made my hands clench into fists, made my fists press into my eyes. It was me. I was the one who’d let myself believe I could move on, make a new life, be happy again. I was the one who’d let myself get so vulnerable. I was the one who’d let this thing between us go too far. I was the one who’d forgotten the truth. The truth that Chan knew. That any being who’d suffered so much loss knew. There was no moving on.
I had to get out of here. I couldn’t do this anymore, stare at his sleepy smile, his arms holding his pillow close, his heart full of love for someone who wasn’t me.
Pushing myself to my feet, I staggered to his door and stumbled numbly back to my pod. Once I was safely inside, I stripped down and contemplated throwing my little black dress into the flash incinerator because it was obviously cursed. Then I stood under a shower so scalding my skinwas red and tender when I emerged twenty minutes later, still not feeling clean.
I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I knew I was in shock. I knew that even though I was numb now, the pain would find me in the morning. So I sat cross-legged in the middle of my bed, flipped on my TV, and stared at the screen until my eyes burned.
Even though my alarm had trilled through my VC twenty minutes ago, I hadn’t moved from my spot in the middle of my bed. I’d been waiting for him, knowing he’d comm me when he woke up. But I still wasn’t prepared for the way his voice grabbed the jagged pieces of my shattered heart and squeezed until they pierced one another.
This came out harsher than I’d intended. I’d been aiming for nonchalant but landed onand you told me that you loved another woman in your sleepby accident.
