* * * *
“I’m not going to be able to stay up,” I whine, collapsing back onto the blanket we’ve laid out on the cooling sand. We’ve been on the beach for a few hours now, coming here after the four-hour drive and a check-in at the small, careworn bed-and-breakfast Alex booked here on Turner’s Point. Even though it’s peak season, this place is sleepy, a little run down, a few miles north of the strip of barrier island towns that each offer their own brand of tourist appeal to East Coast travelers. My own family has vacationed four towns over for years, at least during the times I was in good enough shape to travel, but I don’t tell Alex that, at least not yet. I want him to feel like every part of this is new to me, because everypart of it is.
“Want something else to eat?” he asks, nudging the cooler he’d packed my way. He must’ve stayed up late, planning this, preparing it—the reservation, the rental car, the food, the blanket, the LED lanterns he’s tucked partway into the sand. He even brought a small speaker for his phone, which right now pipes out some kind of Spanish guitar music that gives me acute pants feelings. If the words he said on my doorstep—words that had lit me up from the inside, a million shooting stars of good luck in my joints, up and down the column of my spine—were intended to prove something to me, then the trip itself has been designed to break me of any sensible caution I’ve been applying to this situation. One look at the convertible he’d parked in my driveway for this trip—a convertible! My mother would have a heart attack—and I’d quit lying to myself: I am absolutely inlove with him.
Not that he needs toknow about it.
“No. I don’t want to get crampsin the water.”
He snorts, looks down at his watch, the hands of it glowing ice blue in the dark. “We’re not going swimming, sweetheart. Just a little splash. Anyways you’ve got twenty minutes.”
I make another groan of fatigue. “Up so early today,” I complain, but it feelsgoodto complain. It feels honest, and true. It feels like he won’t hold it against me. I snuggle myself closer to where he reclines, elbow bent and head resting on his hand, his smile indulgent as he leans down to kiss me.
“I’d like to see you do one of those bike classes,” he says when he pulls away. “Bet you get all sweaty.”
“You’re gross.” He laughs, but when he quiets, there’s something heavy to it, a trail-off that feels acute. “What?” I say, knowing already where this is going.“You can ask.”
He clears his throat, lifts his free hand, and traces his index finger along my hairline, a delicious tickle I feel right between my legs. Too much of this plus the guitar music and I’ll probably embarrass myself. “The physical stuff,” he begins, and I guess the cycling classes are going to be a handy smokescreen here. “It doesn’t bother you?”
I shrug my shoulders against the soft blanket. “Not so much. The second surgery—it changed my life. Before it, sometimes even laughing would give me a headache like you wouldn’t believe. Or coughing, my God.” I wince at the memory of getting bronchitis in between the first and second surgery. “I still get headaches sometimes, tension and soreness in my back and neck from some misalignment, damage to my musculature. I do exercises to help.”
“I’d like to see those too,” he says, but when I look up to chide him about how his weird sweat kink doesn’t apply to isometric exercises where I basically push my head around using my palms, I realize he’s not kidding. He’s got a look on his face like he needs to know this information for future reference.
“Stick around,” I say teasingly, trying to get that seriousness out of his eyes. “I don’t get much longer than a weekwithout them.”
“Yeah,” he says, but—oh, of course. “Stick around” is a pretty awkward thing to say, given the situation. I try to think of a way to change the subject, but he’s still touching me, his fingertips trailing down my cheek, the side of my neck. He pauses at my sternum, a gentle touch that I recognize—I often set my own fingertips there whenI’m lying down.
It feels better when he does it.
“What was it like?” he asks, after a minute of my simply breathing, my chest rising and falling under the measured weight of his hand. “To be sick like that?”
I look up past him, at the midnight-blue sky, unevenly dotted with pinpricks of starlight. There’s a bank of clouds rolling in, dulling the moonlight, but the ocean whirs calmly, evenly in the air. Part of me doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t want to do more of this with him. Fragile, delicate, weak—it’s not what I want to be to him. But didn’t I want Alex to know my secret self? Didn’t I want to know his?
I spread one of my arms out, let it reach past the edge of the blanket so I can dig my fingers into the sand. “It was a little like this.” I keep my body deliberately still. “It was me, looking up at a ceiling, or at a wall, or out a window. It was a lot of waiting. For the pain to pass or subside.”
He leans down, kisses my lips again, the line of my jaw, my cheek, and then my forehead. It’s as though he means to mark me in every place he can, to leave a trace of his bodyall over mine.
“I mean,” he says, feathering his lips along that spot of my hairline he’d touched before, “what was it like in here?”Inside you.
When he pulls back to look down at me, I feel a gentle smile curve my mouth, my little secret self, and he leans down and kisses me again, taking what he can get of that privacy. When I make a small humming noise, the fingertips he’s rested on my sternum twitch slightly, gentling into a stroke. I feel like he’s drawing my heart rightout of my body.
“It was sad,” I say, after a few seconds. “Sad and boring and frustrating. Crazy making, some days, which is probably why I have the weird, elaborate imagination I have.” I shift my eyes from the sky back to him, smiling as I think of every imaginary scenario I’ve put him in. I could never have imagined this one. On a wave of relief or gratitude or crazy-making love, I say something else. “It was the loneliest thing, to be in pain like that.”
“Greer,” he breathes out, the sound of it focused, purposeful. My namelike a mantra.
“I think maybe it changed me, made me different. Remember what you said, about me being separate?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I think I am, a little. In my job, when we’re talking to patients about facilities they might go to, they’re just coming around to that idea, that loneliness. The realization that no matter how much family you’ve got, no matter whether you’ve got a spouse or a kid who comes three times a week, or even just a really good caretaker on your ward—when your body’s failing you, you’re alone. No one can do it with you. No one can feel the pain with you, feel it right alongside you. I realized that early. We’re all a little alone. A little separate.”
His face looks so stricken that I feel a pang of regret or guilt or maybe—maybe, like Zoe suggested—some shame. I roll toward him, tucking my face into his chest. His T-shirt smells like spice and sea air, Alex far away and Alex right next to me.
If he’s put off he doesn’t show it physically; he wraps an arm around me and gathers me closer, the move forceful in a way that soothes me, makes me feel strong. For long minutes we’re quiet, drawing ever closer to this good luck ritual he’s only doing for my sake. When he speaks again, his voice islow and rough.
“I always thought I liked being alone. Times in my life, I would’ve given anything to be alone, just for a while.” I know he’s thinking of Kit, of his dad. The pressure he must’ve felt, all the time, being present for them. I shove one of my legs between his, tangling us up more. “The worst panic attacks I have—they’re when I think other people will see. All I can think about is getting to a place where I’m alone again. Where no one can see it.”
I saw it,I think.Iknewit.Talk about something to be ashamed of, feeling proprietary over someone’s private struggles. I stroke his back, a silent apology for something he doesn’t know I’ve done wrong.
