Here we go.
Into the nightstand of a stranger.
She starts with the one closer to the window. She wouldn’t want to sleep on that side of the bed herself, because it might feel like she was going to roll out of bed and down nineteen stories. She prefers to imagine a sturdy body between herself and the window. She tries to picture Nolan there, but in her mind he’s lying flat on his back, hands at his side, his skin a sickly gray. Nope. No sleeping next to what is functionally a corpse, no thank you.
Although, of course, then her brain unhelpfully puts Van there instead. Alive, vibrant, looking over at Alice and grinning in a way Alice has never seen, something predatory andhungry, like she’s going to reach over, pull Alice into herself, and absolutely ravish her.
“Nope,” Alice says out loud, trying to force that vision out of her mind. “Absolutely not.”
“What?” Marie calls from the bathroom.
“Nothing,” Alice says quickly.Fucking get it together!
She opens the top drawer, and it’s…weird. A couple chargers for different kinds of phones, four kinds of ChapStick, some travel-sized lotions, sets of hair ties and bobby pins in different sizes and colors. Face wipes, gum, a box of tissues. It’s all weirdly generic, like it doesn’t belong to the same person. It’s almost like…
Alice slams the drawer quickly, shutting her eyes and breathing rapidly through her nose. It’s okay. He’s not really her boyfriend. None of this is real, so it doesn’t matter that he has an entire pharmacy available for the random girls he sleeps with on the regular, with a variety of ChapSticks and hair ties for them to choose from.
She’s not sure if the drawer is the most considerate or most skeezy thing she’s ever seen in her life.
She doesn’t bother to open the drawer below it. This is clearly not the side he sleeps on.
She walks around the bed, careful not to touch it for some reason she’s deciding not to interrogate at this particular moment, and aha. This top drawer is clearly his. A notebook and some pens, a few expensive-looking watches, the remote for the TV, mints, what Alice is pretty sure is a wireless charge pad for his phone, a small flashlight, rewards cards for Starbucks and Whole Foods, a bottle opener shaped like a naked lady, a biography of some old white man CEO who is smiling up at Alice from the cover with dead eyes and a prominentlyreceding hairline. She pulls out the notebook, a watch, and the creepy book, setting them on the bed. She can bring this successful plunder back to Babs.
She closes that drawer and moves to the bottom one, letting out a big breath before she opens it.
It’s—yep. Okay. It’s the sex drawer. It’s not that she wants to look at it—she’s all for sex and stuff, butewwat wading through a stranger’s sex drawer—but she needs to know if there’s something she needs to know. Luckily, it seems pretty vanilla, all things considered. Condoms—lots of condoms—lube, tissues. A little vibrator and what Alice is pretty sure is a butt plug, a set of leather handcuffs. Nothing weird. Nothing Alice would have to do a lot of research to figure out anyway.
Great.
Honestly, best-case scenario.
And anyway, it’s not like she needs to bring any of that to the hospital.
She walks away from the bed, hugely relieved, and finds Marie in the closet, staring dumbly at all of his clothes.
“Overwhelmed?” Alice asks, and Marie nods, her jaw still slack. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how big this is,” Alice says honestly, and Marie laughs.
“Me neither. Maybe let’s aim for, like, pajamas and a bathrobe? I don’t think he’s going to be needing work stuff right away.”
Alice considers saying something. Considers taking Marie’s hand in hers and softly saying, “Sweetheart, you need to start preparing for what happens if he doesn’t wake up,” but she doesn’t.
Van wants Marie to still be a kid, to grow up slowly. To keep sleeping with that blanket her mama made her, to stayinnocent for as long as she can. So if she thinks her brother is going to need pajamas and a bathrobe because he’s about to wake up, well. That’s okay.
Alice can try to find some pajamas.
Twelve
Alice is so busy trying to use her powers of mind control to keep Aunt Sheila from crashing the car that it takes her way longer than it should to realize they aren’t driving back to the hospital. It isn’t until they’re on the Broadway Bridge, fully halfway across the river, that Alice looks over at Van. “Wait, where are we going?”
“Oh right,” Van says, smiling. “I forgot you haven’t been to the house.”
“The…house?”
“Our house,” Babs says from the front seat.
Oh. Shiitake.
Okay. This is probably fine. Right? Going to Babs’s house, seeing where Van and Nolan grew up, being surrounded by their knickknacks and evidence of the really nice life they had until a week ago, spending more time with Van outside of the sterile, extremely unsexy vibes of the hospital? It’s harder than it should be not to flirt with her over her brother’s grayingbody, but in a dim, cozy living room? Or, god forbid, in a bedroom?
