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“Why did I fight you?” I whisper.
He mulls on this for a moment. I think that’s what he’s doing; I can’t see his face. After a while, he says, “You were always so determined to be independent. Strong. Fierce. Like you didn’t need me to make you feel safe. You didn’t want me to think that you were weak. But after a while, you’d relent and give in, and I’d stroke your hair and hum whatever I’d been working on to you, and you’d fall asleep.”
A shockwave of unidentifiable emotion courses through my veins, warm and sad and beautiful. Yet again, I’m hit with the sneaking suspicion that even though my brain can’t draw on memories of the events that Theo’s talking about, my body somehow remembers and deeply longs for those days, when life was as simple as climbing into his arms and passing out to the sound of him humming.
“Will you do that tonight?” I’m a little scared of his response. He hasn’t slept in the same room as me since the night he told me about the accident. A part of me is terrified that, somehow, after all the shit he’s tolerated, he’s finally had enough.
“I can’t.”
Oh, shit, hehashad enough. “Why not?”
“I have nothing to hum for you. I haven’t…written anything new since…”
“Since?”
He clears his throat, kisses my temple, and then rests his cheek against my forehead. He doesn’t answer the question for a while. I get the impression he’s revisiting memories that aren’t particularly pleasant. “I haven’t written anything new since the piece I played in the auditorium,” he finally confesses. “It was a requiem.Yourrequiem.”
My heart skips a little, my nerves getting the better of me. “And what, exactly, is a requiem?”
He exhales steadily. Absently, he slides a hand up the back of my shirt and starts drawing circles over my side. The action is familiar and proprietary. It makes me feel a little less anxious about whatever he’s going to say next. “It’s a piece of music written for masses for the dead. For…funerals,” he whispers. “When you went into that coma after the last big surgery, they said there was no way you were waking up. Categorically no way. I spent a lot of time in the chapel at the hospital. I don’t believe in any of that shit. It was quiet. Peaceful. The only place I could hear myself think. There was this priest there most days. Father Simmons. I used to bring the cello to the hospital with me. I hoped the sound of it’d wake you up, so he already knew I played. He said it would be cathartic to write you a piece of music, like…like a way to say goodbye,” he says awkwardly. “I had no plans on saying goodbye, but I wrote the piece anyway. It saved me. Occupied me while I was sitting there with you in that room, waiting for you to wake up. Once I’d finished, I played it for you over and over again. And then one day, while I was playing…your hand twitched.”
I close my eyes against the mental picture that he’s painting, hating every second of it. The pain in his voice is raw. Real. He sat by my bedside in that hospital every day for weeks, being told that I was going to die. I can’t even imagine...
“After that, you seemed to respond whenever I played that specific piece of music,” he murmurs into my hair. “So I kept fucking playing it. I didn’t stop. About a week later, against all the odds, you woke up.”
He stayed. For me. Here at Toussaint, even after he graduated. He stayed at the hospital with me. He didn’t give up hope that I’d make it back to him, against all the odds. He wrote a piece of music for me that was supposed to help me pass and instead he used it to bring me back to life. I knew that music before I came back here with Gaynor. I’ve known it for months and months. It has been a constant melody, playing in the back of my mind, haunting and soothing me for as long as I can remember. He wrote me the song of my soul.
“I could hum something else to you if you like?” he offers. “Something I didn’t write.”
“Don’t you dare,” I whisper. “I want my requiem. I never want to hear anything else.”
“You don’t think it’s morbid?”
I shake my head. “I think it’s beautiful.”
He’s quiet for a while, thinking. “I played it for you again. That night in the auditorium. I thought maybe…it would bring you back a second time. Wake you up again, in a way. When you ran out of there, I hoped…”
That I’d remembered him. That the music had brought me back to myself properly at last. This boy is determined to make me cry. I won’t be able to help myself if he carries on like this.
“I knew it meant something to me,” I say. “I knew…it was important. And watching you play up there on that stage…you were the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I felt like I was losing my mind. I had this strong, inexplicable feeling that…” I shake my head. “None of it made any sense.”
“Do…you still have those feelings?” Theo whispers.
“Yes,” I admit, whispering back.
He kisses me on the temple again, pressing his lips to my skin for a long second. I can tell that he’s relieved. “Do they make more sense to you now?” he asks.
I go very still while I consider this question. “Not much of anything makes sense at the moment. But how I feel about you? I know that it feels…right.”
He laughs gently.
“What?”
“Does that mean I don’t have to sleep with one eye open anymore? There’s nothing weirder than waiting for your amnesiac girlfriend to burst in and slit your throat in the middle of the night because she can’t remember she’s in love with you and she thinks you murdered her imaginary best friend.”
“No, those feelings are gone now. I don’t hate you anymore.”
“That’s a relief.” He snorts, but the way he pulls me tighter to him, holding onto me like he’s afraid I’m going to slip through his fingers, lets me know that this whole thing has been no joking matter to him. It’s been hard. It’s been fucking brutal.
