“I mean it,” I said. “Do you think you deserve to be happy?”
“Ah,” he said, and I could hear a thousand answers in that one syllable. He’d say what did it mean to evendeservesomething, when it came down to it nobody deserved anything in this world. He’d say what did it even mean to behappy, that the word itself was so mutable and changing, impossible to pin down. But I could hear him swallowing, and he didn’t end up saying any of that.
“You take care of cars the way you want to take care of people,” I said. “I think you should let yourself do it. And I think you should get a dog.”
I turned over in his arms, snuggling against him, and he hugged me close, pressing a kiss to the back of my head. “I don’t deserveyou,” he said gruffly. “I know that much.”
“Well, too late,” I said. “If this were real, I’d be halfway in love with you already.”
His arms tightened around me. “If this were real.”
“Mm-hmm.” It was difficult to keep my eyes open, as badly as I wanted to. Sleep was settling over me like a fog, and any thought I’d had to try to resist it seemed futile. It felt so good to give in, to let myself float.
“I know it’s not real,” he said from behind me, his voice low and comforting even as I vaguely registered that there was something a little keyed up and desperate under the words. It was like one part of my brain could register what he was saying, and the other part had already checked out. “I know it can’t be real. And unfortunately it occurred to me that tomorrow’s a holiday, the embassy will be closed again. You’ll have to stay with me another day, and then I’ll drive you to the embassy. All right? I promise.”
A holiday. I felt like I should know something about this already, but my thoughts were wisps, I couldn’t hold on to them. “Tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow we’ll wake up, and sunlight’s going to be coming through that window right about”—he squeezed my hip, then splayed his hand out over my thigh—“here. And I’ll make you some tea, we can get breakfast. Jess, I’ll take you to the fucking parade if you want to go. We’ll figure it all out. We still have time.”
Time. He thought a lot about time. I remembered that about him.
“Jess?”
That sounds nice, I thought but couldn’t say, as I sank all the way down into sleep.
Thirty-Five
“Jess?”
There was a pounding in my head, and something wasn’t right. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like something was choking me, and when I went to push it away I couldn’t move my hands. They were strapped down or restrained somehow, and I thrashed my head, trying to get away from whatever it was. A nightmare. This had to be another nightmare, like the one I’d had in the car. I heard Mari’s voice, just like I had in that one.
“Jess?” she said. “Oh, honey. Oh my god. She’s awake! She’s waking up. Somebody come get—”
There were hands on me, touching me, and whatever she said, Iwasn’tawake. I desperately wanted to be, wanted to open my eyes and see Eamonn still asleep beside me, see that patch of sun he’d talked about coming through the skylight. There were pinpricks of light behind my eyelids now, and I tried to open them but they felt sandpaper dry, impossible, until—
“Calm down,” another voice said, this one brusque but warm. Another woman’s voice. Not Eamonn’s—where was he? “You’re all right. Take it easy.”
Jess, he’d said to me in that soft voice.It’s okay. You’re safe.I wanted him to tell me that now.
I tried to speak, but thatthingwas still suffocating me. I managed to crack my eyes open a sliver, just enough to see a blurry Mari standing over me, her hands on her cheeks, before I closed them again. There was a twinge of pain and more voices, none of them the one I wanted, and then the glow of light behind my eyelids dimmed until I was drifting back under.
When I finally woke backup again an indeterminate number of hours later, somehow I already knew I was in a hospital. I opened my eyes to see a whiteboard chart on the wall, my name written at the top of it, the names of my doctor and my nurse and my tech. A television in the corner had been turned on to some home-improvement show. And there was Mari, sitting on a chair beside my bed.
“Oh my god,” she said, springing up when she saw I was awake. “Oh my god, Jess.”
She squeezed me in as tight a hug as she could manage, with me still reclined on the hospital bed, tubes and wires connecting me to various equipment. I could move my hands now, I realized, and I automatically reached one up to weakly pat her back.
“Mari,” I said. My voice came out a croak, my throat raw and painful.
“Bitch, I thought you were going to die on me,” she said,that same wisecracking best friend I remembered, but then she spoiled the effect by breaking into very un-Mari-like tears, cradling my head closer against her chest.
“Mari,” I said again. “I—that hurts.”
“Oh my god,” she said, springing back to wipe the tears from her eyes. “Of course it does. I’m so sorry. Your head—how are you feeling?”
I’d been better. I didn’t even know how to answer the question. It was so jarring, to have fallen asleep cozy in a bed, my body healthy and whole, a man’s arm around me. And then to be here now.
“What happened?” I asked, because that seemed as good a place to start as any, and I still didn’t feel up to saying more than a few words.
