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“Settle down.” Will laughs. He refills my goblet and hands it to me. “I’m actually kind of relieved you’re drinking since you are very smart. And observant. And I’m hoping that with a little wine in you, you’ll—I don’t know, not pay such close attention?”
Will leans his back against the couch, sitting the same way I am. I can’t see his face without turning my head, so I push a pillow against the arm and turn square to him, my legs curled under me.
“Give me one of those, please.” Will grips my knee and coaxes my right leg onto his lap and turns his body toward mine. “That’s better. Nice to have something for my hands to do.” He tickles my foot, and I try to pull away, but his hand is stronger than my leg.
“Resistance is futile,” he says in a robotic voice. “The Borg.Star Trek: Next Generation.”
“Resistance is attachment to an unachievable outcome,” I counter. “Will Power. Podcast episode … 138 … or something.”
Will grimaces. “I hate it when you quote me to me. It’s weird and off-putting.”
I shrug. “Nothing from my Monty Python repertoire fits. And quoting anything fromUnsolved Crimes: Solvedwould have been too creepy, even for me.”
Will massages my foot the same way I kneaded his earlier.
“If this is how you prove to me that I’m right to not spend the night, your methods need a little work.”
“Just helping make your feet more comfortable for when you walk away, after I tell you what you need to know about me.”
“Ooh, I love a game of who’s got the scariest back story,” I joke.
Will presses his thumb into the hollow above where the bones of my big and second toes meet—the great surge pressure point. I melt into the couch and allow my leg to relax into his palm.
“You are dramatically failing at convincing me to leave.”
“How about this, then?” Will’s hands stop pulsing and he pins me with a dead serious look. “I am predestined to be dead in less than three years.”
I scoff.
He scowls.
“Sorry,” I half-laugh, “but what, you have a witch’s curse that says you’re going to die on a specific day?”
“In essence, yes.” He’s not joking. “My father and grandfather died at forty-two. My great-grandfather at forty-four. I’m forty-one. The math is easy.”
“Oh, come on, Will. That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? It’s not like they were random, different deaths, like great granddad was hit by a runaway tram or my grandfather was struck by lightning or Dad choked on a cherry pit. They all died of stress-related diseases. And frankly, the stress of being Will Power in this decade is far higher than it was for any of them since they only traveled in three times zones. I’m in ten time zones twice a year delivering the Come Into Power seminars.”
“And it’s killing you,” I state.
“Basically, yes.”
“So stop. Quit.”
“I can’t just stop, Virginia.”
I pull my foot from him and stand with my hands on my hips, looking down at him, thinking.
“So, everyone in your family—your mother, Colt, your other brothers, they allknowyou’ve only got three years left to live, and … what? What’s the plan for the seminars, then? Are you recording video to create holographs? This is crazy.”
“No, they don’t believe I’m going to die young. But …” He stands and faces me. “They also don’t know that I have parasomnia. They’re night terrors. I haven’t slept for more than an hour at a time in over two months, and I believe it is literally killing me. Please sit back down.”
Will explains that he used to have a person who would wake him just enough to stop his recurrent nightmare when it started, but after three years, the guy quit. He says there’s no point trying to find anyone else, so he’s been adapting to what he calls “waffle sleep.”
“How did he know when to wake you?” I ask.
“I have cameras in the bedroom and up there, over the fireplace. See, on either side of the television?”
