Perfect Strangers

26

I exhale a shaky breath. How the hell can he read my mind?

“I’m just f****d up, Olivia. It’s nothing sinister. You’re not in any danger from me. I’m just very f****d up, and I don’t know how to be normal anymore, and I hope…I mean I want…” He blows out a hard breath, then mutters, “Fuck.”

Watching him look so wretched and hearing how negatively he thinks about himself gives me a one-two combo punch of sadness and maternal instincts right in my solar plexus.

“Hey,” I whisper, taking his face in my hands. His cheeks are hot. The stubble on his jaw tickles my palms. “f****d up I get, okay? f****d up I’m good with. Me and f****d up are best friends, if you want to know the truth. So don’t feel bad about that. Please don’t feel bad about anything.

“This is completely unexpected for me, too, but I think you’re amazing. I feel amazing when I’m with you.” I pause for a moment. “Actually I feel hysterical and on the verge of a mental breakdown or a massive heart attack most of the time I’m with you, but in a good way, if that makes sense. You make me feel…”

I have to stop to think of just the right word. It comes to me accompanied by a deep sense of astonishment.

“You make me feel alive.”

In the low light, James’s eyes shine like gems. His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. Wrapped tightly around me, his arms shake. So does his voice when he says, “Same.”

One word. One syllable. Yet it conveys his true emotions more clearly than if he’d gone on and on.

I imagine a tightrope stretched out in front of me, stretched high and taut over bottomless darkness, stretched so far into the distance I can’t see the end. The air is silent and still but tense with anticipation, like a held breath. The only sound is the thundering roar of my heartbeat in my ears as I gaze in concentration at the slender length of cord awaiting my decision. Waiting to find out if I’ll turn around and climb down from the high platform I’m standing on or step forward and give it the weight of my foot.

If I’m going to stop this thing with James, I should stop now. I should tell him it’s too much, too soon, too dangerous a thing to play with. I should tell him to walk away.

Instead, I ease one bare foot off the platform of safety I’m standing on and step out onto the rope.

Part II

When you start to live outside yourself, it’s all dangerous.

Ernest Hemingway

10

I

come awake gradually,

floating up into consciousness as if on a whisper-soft cloud. When I open my eyes, I’m lying on my back in bed, nude but covered with a sheet. It’s early in the morning. Pearl gray light sifts through the curtains, brightening the edges of the room.

I’m alone.

I take a moment to simply breathe and marvel at this shiny new feeling of happiness.

James carried me to bed last night. Picked me up in his arms from the sofa and carried me into the bedroom as easily as if I were a child. He laid me down on the sheets, then curled up behind me, curving our bodies together and tightening his arm around my waist, nuzzling his nose into my hair. I fell asleep listening to the sound of his even breathing.

But now I’m awake, and there’s a book on the pillow beside me, lying open with a yellow sticky note stuck to one of the pages.

I sit up, pick up the book, and look at the note. In neat handwriting, it reads, “How can you say this is the worst fake biblical prose? This is the best fake biblical prose ever.”

The book is For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Hemingway. James must have retrieved it from Estelle’s library.

The note is stuck directly under the line I ridiculed during dinner: “Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”

My world must have tilted on its axis, because I have to admit, at the moment those words look pretty damn good.

Then I stop and wonder how long it must’ve taken James to find this particular book in Estelle’s large and disorganized library. And, upon discovering it, how long it took him to hunt down that exact quote. Or did he know what page it was on by heart?

“Oh no,” I say aloud, alarmed. “Is Hemingway his favorite writer?”

We’re going to have to have a serious discussion about this. I don’t know if I can continue to fool around with a man whose favorite author once famously said that the only real sports were mountain climbing, bull fighting, and car racing.

I mean, come on. Macho much?

Personally, I think he was overcompensating for some deep-seated feelings of inferiority, but that’s just me.

Out of nowhere, a flash of inspiration hits. Fully formed, a scene in Technicolor arrives in my mind’s eye. It’s as clear as a picture, sudden as a slap, and accompanied by a burning rush of adrenaline.

I leap from bed and run naked into the library, where I throw myself down into the chair in front of the big roll top desk, snatch the pencil up from where I abandoned it in my last attempt to write, and begin to scribble furiously on the yellow lined legal pad of paper.

I don’t stop until three hours later, when my right hand begins to cramp.

Drained and amazed, I lean back in the chair and flip back through the pages I’ve written.

It’s rare that inspiration hits me like that, in one fell swoop, the characters, dialogue, and scene so detailed. Normally, writing is a grueling process, whole manuscripts completed page by painful page as I beat my natural self-doubt and laziness into submission. But this…