“Are you all right?”
“Sabin?”
“Yeah. Are you guys all right?”
“It’s just me,” I say robotically. “Chris is out of town for a few days. My feet feel funny.”
“Are you all right?” he asks more insistently.
“I did not like that. Is…is there going to be another one now? How does this work?”
“I’m ten minutes away. I’ll be there soon.”
He hangs up before I can say anything else. I’m not particularly interested in getting out from under the archway, so I stay where I am and suspiciously eye the room, waiting for something else to happen.
“California sucks!” I scream out. “You are supposed to be beautiful and perfect, and this vacation kind of fucking sucks!”
Not surprisingly, California does not reply to my complaint.
I’m still holding my position when the front door flies open, causing me to jump and let out a fearful cry.
“Sorry! God, I’m sorry!” Sabin holds up his hands and stays where he is. “It’s just me. Apologizing again, it seems. Everything’s okay.”
I put my hand on my chest and try to get my breathing under control. “Everything is not fucking okay.”
The sight of him jars me back into emotion, and I am hit with how difficult it is to see him—how I have been wanting nothing more and how much I’ve been dreading it.
“Everything isnotfucking okay,” I say again more forcefully.
“I know,” he says. “I know it isn’t.”
“We need to talk, you and me.”
Sabin looks at me for a long time. “I know that also.” He steps toward me. He’s still got a good bruise on his cheekbone from the fight the other night. “Are you going to come out of that doorway?”
“Is there going to be another earthquake?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to tell. The world isn’t a stable place, is it?”
This is one of the only times I’ve seen him in a serious mood. No joking, no snappy quips, no deflecting.
Sabin takes off his leather jacket and sets it on the counter. Then, he walks calmly across the room and extends a hand. “The ground could give out beneath us at any time, but we can’t stop that. So, come on.”
I take his hand. It is the best feeling in the world to feel his familiar touch again, but I just look at my hand in his with sadness. “Everything feels broken,” I say.
“It does feel broken.”
I look him in the eyes now. He’s as destroyed as I am. I can see that.
“I’m scared to talk to you. I’m scared of how you’ve been acting. I don’t want to make things worse, but we have to have a conversation—about Chris because you’ve got some kind of huge issue there that I’m not getting. And…” I pause. “We need to talk about us, Sabin. And it has to be an honest talk because something is really fucked up.”
The nervous energy I have belongs to him also. I can feel it radiating from his body, and it burns through me.
He says nothing for a bit.
“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” he says.
“I wish we didn’t either.”
