Her eyes went wide before she blinked and pulled her wrist away. “You’re on drugs.”
I felt my eyes getting heavy. Heavier. “You’re so beautiful, your face has its own gravitational pull. It sucks everyone aroundyou to it.” My eyes began to close, but I pushed them open with sheer force of will. “It’s why Ihadto stay away. I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t get sucked in by you.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
My eyes closed before I could answer her. Did she know the truth, that the reason I’d stayed away for so long was because I loved her. I think that was it, and I was scared. Scared of that love. I’d seen what losing that love had done to my father. The question lingered, the echo of my own voice bouncing around in the empty chamber of my skull.
Just yesterday I’d explained to Joey why the moon didn’t crash into the earth—something about balance, about gravity and distance, about the invisible push and pull that kept everything both together and apart. It felt that way with Billie, I’d always believed I could keep my feelings in a perpetual standoff, orbiting her from a safe distance. Not too close, not too far. Safe for everyone. But I’d never factored in the day when I couldn’t hold the line anymore, when gravity won. When she’d finally get too close and know, she’d know I’d loved her my entire life.
That was my last conscious thought.
When I opened my eyes again, the world was white and blinding, and the inside of my mouth felt like it was full of packing peanuts. For a terrible, disorienting second, I thought I’d woken up in a hospital, that the whole last year of my life had been a hallucination, a fever dream I’d concocted to make sense of waking up broken.
I hadn’t retired. I wasn’t a dad. I hadn’t moved back to California.
But then I recognized the sound of the stove’s igniter clicking, the faint hiss of gas, and the heavy, sweet smell of vanilla. I was home.
I tried to move. A mistake. My entire right side was on fire, as if someone had swapped out my spinal cord for a length of barbed wire.
I whimpered—actually whimpered—and immediately hated myself for it. I tried to sit up, but even that tiny, defeated motion filled my field of vision with black dots.
Billie must have heard the noise because she appeared a second later, moving with the purpose and focus of a paramedic on a stopwatch. She was in sweats—my sweats, I realized, ridiculous and huge on her frame—and a white tank top. Her hair was up in a knot, and she had that look on her face that I’d seen a thousand times, half-worried, half-annoyed.
“Don’t move,” she ordered. “If you sit up too fast, you’re going to pass out.”
“What time is it?” I managed, voice raw and alien. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I took today off.” She set a glass of water beside the couch, then vanished back into the kitchen, returning with toast and an orange bottle of prescription painkillers. “Eat and take those.”
I ignored the medicine because I wasn’t going to take it.
“Where are the girls?”
“At school,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I dropped them off. They were worried about you but I promised them you would be a good patient, just like you would want them to be.”
I blinked, trying to process this information. “You…you took them to school?”
“Yes,” she said, as if this were obvious. “Otherwise you’d have had to call an Uber and hope the driver didn’t freak out when you started having muscle spasms in the back seat. And I don’t even want to think of what would have happened to you if you had passed out cold on the sidewalk and those horny housewife moms would have found you.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the image, so I did neither. Instead, I tried to make sense of the logistics. “What are you doing here?” I asked, still fuzzy, still not quite trusting my reality.
Billie just shrugged. “I’m staying here. You have one arm, you can’t bend, lift, or get up the stairs, and you can’t be here alone in case you need help. Unless you want horny housewives dropping by with casseroles or offering their help with childcare and assistance.”
She said the whole thing so fast, so matter-of-factly that for a moment, I didn’t compute the implication. “You’re what?”
She stared right into my eyes. “I’m staying here. You need help. I can’t be in my apartment alone. It’s a win/win in a lose/lose situation.” She straightened, turned and went back to the kitchen.
I could argue with her, but she wasn’t wrong. I never asked for help from anyone, which is why I’dneveraccepted help from anyone before.
Would I be able to accept help from her? What was the alternative?
I was still pondering that when nature called. I tried to push up and winced. She was at my side, her arm around me, helping me to my feet. It seemed, at least for now, I wasn’t going to have a choice.
25
BILLIE
As badly asI wanted to cancel on my date tonight, the reason I wasn’t going to was just as strong. I’d been playing house for ten days and it was starting to get to me. Also, I’d already postponed our date once. I hadn’t felt right about leaving Adam alone three days after his slip on the stairs, so I’d put this date off for a week.
