But this towel? It’s bliss. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life.
“The best thing? Really?” He lets out a warm chuckle.
Am I talking out loud? I thought my lips were too cracked to manage that.
“What? What do you mean?” Cool fingers trace over my face, lifting my chin. “Shit. Sorry. Give me a second.”
A weight lifts off the bed. He’s gone for a while and then he’s back, dabbing something goopy on my lips. I don’t know what it is, but he’s obviously trying to help.
He returns to the towel, tracing it down each leg, and down each arm. Then he starts rubbing something on me. Probably that cream he’d mentioned earlier. All of my skin feels like it’s burning, but parts of it feel even hotter than others. And some places sting. The pad of his finger travels over a particularly bad spot, and I flinch.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. Almost done. It’s going to feel a lot better after this. I promise.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I want it to be true. But the idea of feeling better sounds a lot like a fairy tale right now. Something you tell a kid so that they have hope, even though it’s never going to happen.
“Okay,” he says some amount of time later. “We’re done. You can go back to sleep. Do you want the sheet? As a cover? Or nothing?”
“Nothing.” I can’t bear the thought of anything touching my skin.
“Okay.”
He’s quiet after that. Probably waiting for me to fall back asleep, but I want to know…
“Will you stay?” I ask. “Will you stay here?”
“Yeah. Yes. Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”
I swallow. I don’t know why that helps, why it makes my body relax further into the mattress, but it does.
His hand comes up to my forehead, and I remember this. He did it earlier. He sweeps his hand back, traveling over my hair, and I sigh. His hand was warm before, but now it’s cool. It feels so good.
I’m drifting off again. Everything’s turning that lovely kind of foggy and hazy.
“Don’t leave,” he whispers. So soft I can barely hear him. “Don’t leave me again.”
I don’t know what he means. I don’t know what he’s trying to say. But I’m out before I can ask.
—
“You know I drive by that spot all the time. It closed a few years ago, but someone else bought it and it’s a coffee shop now. I don’t ever go there so I don’t know if it’s any good, but every time I see it, I think about that time we went and got ice cream.”
I’m not sure who’s speaking. I’m not sure if I’m dreaming. I can’t fully make sense of the words I’m hearing, but something about this man’s cadence, the rhythm of the way he speaks, is comforting to me. Familiar.
“I don’t know if you ever think about that,” he continues. “But it was basically our first date. Though neither of us really called it that. I’d asked if you wanted to ‘hang out’ and get ice cream, and I’d kicked myself the whole way home. I should have planned something better. Should have been clearer that it was a date. Should have taken you someplace that would impress you. I couldn’t believe you’d said yes.
“And then, that day, I’d been so nervous. My palms were so hot and sweaty I’d worried the ice cream would melt right off the cone, but then we started talking and it was just like all those conversations we’d had in your parents’ yard. Natural and easy and fun.”
He lets out an amused huff. “You made me laugh so much that night, and every time you did it you looked so surprised. Like you didn’t realize how funny you could be, and it only made me laugh harder. You always…you always thought of yourself as so serious and focused and intense, and you were—you are—but you talked about it as if it was something to be ashamed of. As if I didn’t lovethat you were just as serious and focused about making me laugh as you were about the bar exam. That you took me just as seriously as all the other, much more important things competing for your attention. That you were just as focused and intense and careful with me.
“Maybe it was selfish of me. To want all of that for myself. That day we woke up in Vegas, I knew you were scared. I’d been scared too, but not because we’d gotten married. I’d felt like…like I’d just walked by a winning slot machine that was spitting quarters. I’d done nothing to deserve it, but I knew I needed to hold on to them for as long as I could. I didn’t know when the machine would stop, how long it would keep giving them, and I could already feel the cold metal slipping through my fingers, but I still held on, and…it wasn’t fair to do that. It wasn’t fair to you.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as a light touch travels over my cheek, the pressure growing firmer when it reaches my forehead. “I’m really sorry.”
He makes some kind of noise then, some muffled, half-choking sound, but I slip away before I can hear anything else.
—
An arm slides around my back. “Can you sit up for a second? Just a second?”
