‘Well,’ Jonah said, as we watched the tail-lights of her SUV pull away.
‘Well,’ I echoed.
He kept his hand on the small of my back as we walked inside, as if he somehow sensed that without something tethering me to reality, I would disintegrate. ‘Dr and Mrs Shaw?’ the receptionist asked.
‘Close enough,’ Jonah said. ‘I’m Mrs Shaw.’
I could barely manage a laugh.
We took the lift up to our floor. The inside was mirrored, an infinite number of Sadies and Jonahs reflected in an endless line. Hopefully, some of those Sadies and Jonahs lived in that other, better world.
He had to swipe the keycard three times before it worked. ‘Here we are,’ he said, smiling encouragingly at me, the way he had smiled at his nieces. ‘Home sweet— Oh.’
There was only one bed.
We’d been promised a one-bedroom apartment, with a bedroom and a separate living room. I’d been saving the last vestiges of myenergy to overrule Jonah when he insisted on taking the pull-out couch.
What we had, though, was a studio: a single large room with an ensuite bathroom, a tiny kitchenette with a dining table and two chairs in one corner, two uncomfortable looking armchairs in another – and one king-sized bed.
I wanted to cry until I laughed.
If Chess read this in a book, she would throw it out the window of her twenty-sixth-floor office.That’s a ridiculous coincidence. And what, they couldn’t just go back to reception and get the mistake corrected? What hotel are they staying in, the inn on Jesus’s birthday?
‘I’ll go downstairs and get this sorted out,’ Jonah said.
‘No.’
‘It’s okay, Sadie, I can deal—’
‘No, I mean…’ I took my hair down from the topknot it had been in all day, shaking it loose around my shoulders so I could tie it up again. ‘I’m tired. You’re tired. Let’s just go to bed.’
He looked at me for a long moment. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m going to pass out within the next eight seconds, Fisher. I think your virtue is safe from me.’
Something in me wanted to make him blush that brilliant crimson colour, but his cheeks only went a little pink. ‘Do you want to grab a quick shower and wash the plane off?’ he asked me. ‘You can go first.’
The hot water should have finished the job that the physical and emotional fatigue had started. I fully intended – and expected – to be fast asleep by the time Jonah got out of his own shower.
But, it turns out, there are different kinds of exhaustion.
There’s the exhaustion you’ve earned. The exhaustion they write about in fantasy all the time, a sort of wholesome tiredness, whereit’s been a hard day’s march on your quest, and you’ve got another hard day’s march tomorrow, but you’ve dined simply on the bread and cheese that always sounds so delicious on the page and sunk into a deep, dreamless slumber.
Mine was the other kind. The kind that feels like a parasite, robbing you of your energy, robbing you of your will, even as it forces you to keep going.
There was a brief flash of light and burst of steam as Jonah came out of the bathroom. He was briefly illuminated – hair standing up at weird angles from being towelled dry, wearing those same pyjamas as on the night I proposed to him – before he turned the light off, plunging the room into darkness again.
He swore under his breath as he tripped on something. There was another brief flash of illumination as he sat down on his side of the bed and plugged his phone in, a soft clunk as he put his glasses on the bedside table, a rustle of covers as he lay down next to me. ‘Night, Sadie,’ he said softly.
He clearly thought I was already asleep, so I didn’t reply.
I looked over at him. In the dim light coming from the strip under the apartment door, I could just make out the outline of him.
Jonah Fisher liked to sleep on his front. His head was turned towards me, hand resting beside it on the pillow. The air-conditioning had not caught up with our presence, so he only had the covers pulled up to his waist. His back was a long, smooth line in the darkness, a straight line that was somehow also a perfect curve, a line that, in that other, better world, his other, better wife would surely be unable to resist tracing with her fingers.
‘Shaw,’ he murmured, ‘go to sleep.’
‘I am asleep.’
