Benji:Don’t forget the cream on the nightstand! Take it with you.
Mickey:Already packed it. First thing in the bag.
I take a breath. He packed my cream first.
“Benji.” Dante’s hand is firm on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay. We need to keep moving and finish the timeline. I’m here.”
I put the phone in my pocket and force my lungs to work. “Okay,” I say. “I can do this. Where were we?”
We finish the timeline. We walk the aisle until the path is burned into my brain. The afternoon is a haze of white fabric and glass cylinders. At three o’clock, I’m tying white ribbon around the arch and my phone buzzes.
Mickey:In the transport. Heading east on I-10. The driver is playing country music and I can’t change the station. Help!
I laugh and press my forehead against the rough bamboo. I show Dante the screen. “Country music is an assault on everything I believe in,” he says. “Tell him I’m praying for him.”
Benji:Country music for four hours? That’s cruel and unusual punishment. Dante is praying for you and I’m contacting your attorney.
Mickey:I don’t have an attorney. I have a wedding planner who moonlights as a skin care specialist and a stalker. Close enough.
Benji:When you get settled, text me. I don’t care what time it is. Text me. I’ll be thinking about you.
Mickey:I will.
I finish the ribbon and don’t look up until the arch is perfect. This is the job, and I’ll do it well even if it kills me.
Chapter 21: Mickey
The transport doors open and the heat hits me. Florida heat, thick, humid, and alive. I’ve been breathing conditioned air for weeks and the first breath of fresh air fills my lungs like a drink of water after a drought. My body, the top half of it anyway, responds with relief.
The hands of the two EMTs move fast around me. They’ve probably done this transfer a hundred times, and their coordination is clean and impersonal. I watch my body being moved the way you watch luggage being loaded onto a conveyor belt.
“Alright, Mickey, we’re going to take you inside.”
The stretcher locks and rolls. Automatic doors slide open and the building doesn’t feel like a hospital. It’s brighter and quieter.
They wheel me down a hallway. Through an open gym door, I watch a man take slow, uneven steps between parallel bars. Two therapists brace him on either side and his legs shake like they don’t belong to him, trembling with the effort of holding weight they’ve forgotten how to hold. His face is tight with concentration and his hands are white-knuckled on the bars. He takes one step and then another.
Up ahead is Room 201. There’s a bed, a nightstand, a bigger chair by the window, and a second chair for visitors. I spot a bathroom with rails on every surface. Everything isdesigned around the assumption that the person living here needs help with the things that used to be automatic.
They transfer me to the bed. It takes two of them, coordinated and smooth, and I hate how easy it looks from the outside and how helpless it feels from the inside.
A nurse comes in. She looks to be in her late thirties, appearing calm and direct. “I’m Erin. I’ll be your nurse this afternoon.” She runs through vitals, meds, and the schedule. “You’ll meet your therapy team in the morning. We ease you in, but it’s a full program. Expect a few hours of therapy a day.”
That’s good to hear. I’ve been lying in a bed for two weeks doing nothing and the nothing has been eating me alive.
She leaves and the room goes quiet in a way I wasn’t expecting. There are no monitors beeping, or carts rattling past. There is only the air conditioner humming.
I put my phone on the nightstand, and Benji’s cream. Those are the two things I brought that matter the most. The room doesn’t smell like Benji, though. I hate that it’s one of the first things I notice. In Tallahassee, by the end of every visit, the room smelled like whatever soap Benji used that day, or the cream, or the food he brought. The smell would hang around for an hour after he left and I’d lie there breathing it in.
This room smells like floor wax and nothing else. And I’m lying here, missing the scent of a man I haven’t even kissed yet.
My arms are dry from the transport. The recycled air in the ambulance stripped whatever moisture was left and my skin feels tight across my forearms, cracked at the elbows. Benji would lose his mind if he saw the state of them. Hetold me to use the cream on my arms between visits, and I’d nodded the way I do when I’m watching his mouth move instead of processing the words.
I reach for the bottle on the nightstand and uncap it. The scent hits me, and suddenly I’m back in Tallahassee.
It’s not a strong smell. It smells like Benji’s hands. That’s all my brain gives me. Not the brand. Not the ingredients. Just his hands. It belongs in a room at eight o’clock at night when visiting hours are ending and he’s kneeling at the end of my bed, working cream into my feet while both of us pretend it isn’t intimate.
I hold the bottle under my nose and breathe in. For three seconds, he’s here. His thumbs pressing slow circles into my arches. His head bent in concentration. Then I pull the bottle back from my nose and he’s gone.
