‘I don’t know where I am.’
‘You’re not looking.’
That stings. ‘Yes, I am … ’
‘You’re not … ’
‘I am.’
‘You’renot.’He shouts it, with a sudden ferocity that silences me. ‘The only person you seem interested in finding is a dead woman.’ His eyes, fixed on mine, fill with tears that I watch him fight to hold back. I can’t bear it. Can’t bear that I’m doing this to him. ‘It’s like you’ve given up on you, and that doesn’t make me happy. It’s breaking my heart.’
I don’t know what to say.
It’s breaking my heart too.
That’s what I think.
But I still can’t find my voice.
I really can’t speak.
And I’m not holding back my tears.
They’re out, gushing from my eyes as Nick moves towards me, kneeling beside the bath. And I’m not sure what I should do – if I should turn from him, as I’m used to doing, or towards him, as I want to – but while I’m still deciding, he rests his headagainst my plastic-covered one, holding my face in his hands, and his touch feels so welcome, so right, sogood, that I stun myself by kissing him, which stuns him too – I feel that from his stillness – but then, he kisses me back.
And if, as I reach up, lacing my fingers with his, there’s a moment when I sense the touch of that other hand I felt in Tim’s lounge, in Bettys Bar, and kiss Nick harder – as him, and ashim, the lines between my now and then, this love and that love, once again blurring – it’s fleeting, gone in a gasp, and I don’t allow myself to dwell on it.
Nick kisses me more, and for the first time since before we lost our son, neither of us attempts to push the other away. We cling to each other, not for any camera, or any script, but for us, as us,in private,and it feels so precarious, so delicate and unexpected, that I can’t bring myself to ruin it by questioning whether it was entirely him I was with just now.
‘I love you,’ I say, looking into his luminous eyes,windows to his soul,and think only of how easy it suddenly is to pour my heart into those words. ‘I want to give you me.’
‘I want you to, too.’
‘I want to believe it’s enough.’
‘You’re enough … ’
‘I hope so.’
‘You are,’ he says, running his hand around my neck, down my bubble-covered back.
I’m still wearing my shower cap.
Remembering, I go to take it off.
‘No,’ he says, his eyes creasing in a smile. ‘Leave it on.’
And, through my tears, I laugh.
He laughs too.
We laugh together.
Then we kiss again.
This time, we don’t stop.
It really has been a long time.
