But he hadn’t done that.
He’d put on her robe. He’d put on her robe, and it was weird even though she knew it shouldn’t be. The tuxedo-growing thing was the crazy option. This was perfectly normal and perfectly reasonable, for all sorts of reasons. The robe fit him very well, for a start. She’d bought it from the men’s department because she’d liked the way it swamped her. But it didn’t swamp him.
It was perfect on him—not too tight across the shoulders or too short in the leg, everything all cozy and comfortable-looking. He’d even put his hands in the pockets, as though to underscore exactly how at ease he was. It could have been bought for him by his assistant. He could have been wearing the damn thing all his life.
And that was the problem.
He looked too much like he belonged. He looked so much like he belonged that for one heart-stopping second she could only think one completely insane and absolutely terrible thing. It forced itself into her head then flashed over and over, despite her best efforts to oust it. She had to oust it.
She couldn’t think things like that about him, after a day and a bit. Not about Holden Stark, not about a movie star, not about anyone. It was embarrassing.
Yet there it was all the same.
He looks like the husband I don’t have.
And the worst part was...he really did. In fact, the feeling was so strong she started to worry he somehow was, and she’d just forgotten him. He died during the thing that had happened, and she’d gone so mad with grief she’d blocked him out.
And now he’d returned to haunt her.
It certainly felt as if her heart were haunted, seeing him standing there like every happy movie husband she’d ever seen. Thinking of all the dreams she’d had of the life she would one day lead, full of all those wonderful clichés. Hey, honey, you got the paper, he would say, and she would pass it to him. Then they would sit at the breakfast table and eat some eggs and drink some orange juice while she read the funnies and he read the sports section. Then afterward, they might go visit a market of some kind.
That was the way it went, wasn’t it?
Or at least, that was the way it went for ordinary people. The ones who had not had all those things dismantled one by one, along with their hopes for a happy career in something normal and their plan to maybe visit other places in the world. When I’m older I will travel, she’d imagined, in that taking-it-for-granted way kids always did.
Oh, how she wished she’d never taken her future joy for granted.
“You okay, Alice?”
How could she say no? She had to say yes. He would never understand all that, and even on the off chance he might she wasn’t sure how to explain it. The whole thing sounded too insane and besides...if she spoke she knew what would happen. She could already feel that sting behind her eyes.
So she nodded. She nodded.
“I can take this off, if you want,” he said, then seemed to pause before adding, “if it belonged to someone else, that is.”
No it’s okay, she thought. He only died in my imagination.
“It doesn’t belong to anyone else.”
“You sure? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, but the shock of him echoing some of her thoughts again made her voice a little shaky. She had to turn her back and focus on other things, only these other things were just as ridiculous. She didn’t even have any plates to put her rubbish food on. Instead she had to use a colander that had been here since she moved in, and it kept leaking crumbs of crackers and cakes out of all the little holes.
Plus the sides of it were so steep everything kept falling onto everything else. By the time she got it to the table it was just a big jumble of squirty cheese and squashed baked goods, with a sprinkling of Cheetos over the top. No one in their right mind would have eaten it, or even sat down with someone as clearly unhinged as she.
Yet he did just that.
He dug in as though she’d ordered him a four-course meal from a Michelin-starred restaurant. And when he finally commented, it was only to suggest ways of combining all the terrible elements. “If you squeeze the Ring Ding between two Doritos it’s like having a sandwich,” he said, and relief flooded through her.
He wasn’t going to ask again.
He wasn’t going to ask about anything. Not about her reaction to the robe or the almost kiss or her lack of correct food and crockery. He was content to just allow things to go on as they were, as calm and easy as a summer breeze. Neither of them had to worry about their problems; their problems did not exist here.
There was only him feeding her crackers covered in buttercream, with a dozen ridiculous assurances that they would be nice. “I think the garlic really adds something,” he said, and suddenly everything else just faded away. He was good at making things fade away—though it was only after she’d made him laugh that she realized.
She was good at it too.
This was what they were doing.
They were somehow making it through.
* * * * *
It took a couple of days for her to realize she should probably find him something to wear. She couldn’t fault her lack of social graces, however. He didn’t seem to give a damn about social graces. He only cared about hanging out with her, and after a while that was all she cared about too.
The robe no longer seemed haunted. It seemed like something comforting. He wasn’t Holden Stark anymore, supreme ruler of the movie universe. He was Bernie, who wandered around her house in fluffy terrycloth. And if that terrycloth occasionally slipped a little here or there and she maybe saw too much—well, that was okay.
She could handle it.
She could sort of handle it.
She couldn’t handle it at all, but everything was so cool between them she thought she’d better try. After all, he probably hadn’t really wanted to kiss her. The whole thing was likely just her imagination, and even if it hadn’t been she’d stuffed it all up. There was a wariness about the way he reacted to her now—no suggestions that she join him in the bathroom, no requests for backrubs.
Everything stayed friendly and aboveboard, which was fine most of the time.
But then that robe would slide off the firm plane of his thigh, and he would kind of catch her eye and she would kind of catch his and then suddenly they were in some kind of staring contest. Some kind of really intense staring contest, where the world around them became all slow and heavy and she couldn’t seem to breathe. She had to gasp just to get some of this new and impossibly thick oxygen down, but there was no relief once she had.
The air settled badly inside her—like having indigestion, if indigestion was something pleasurable and exciting instead of an awful nightmare. And the longer she let these staring contests go on for, the more this feeling intensified. Sometimes it got so bad she found herself nearly leaning toward him, despite his unwillingness to lean back. He stayed right where he was and she started to sag and dear God she couldn’t have that. What if she went all the way in and he laughed?
She needed to get him into some clothes, immediately. Ones that did not make her think of dead husbands, and were not in the slightest bit sexy. Both those things were combining to make some unholy issue inside her, so dressing him seemed like a good solution. Or at least, it seemed like one until she was standing in her closet with him, surrounded by all the clothes she did not have. He picked up a lonely pair of tights from an otherwise empty shelf, and it was then that she knew what she should have understood much earlier.
She didn’t actually have any clothes for her to wear, never mind him. Her shoe rack only had two pairs of shoes in it. There was an entire rail behind him, and on it she’d hung a single pair of jeans. And she’d only done that because it seemed like something should be hung up in there.
Most people chose suits and fancy dresses though, she knew.
He probably knew too, but if he did he didn’t say.
“I think these will go great
with my ensemble,” he said instead, despite the fact that they were green, had a gigantic hole in them, and probably wouldn’t make it past his knees. Oh and also they were tights. He was willing to try on tights for her. He’d eaten colander cake concoctions on several occasions now—not to mention the terrible tea he kept drinking and the insane conversations he kept having with her about whether Superman could safely poo. Yesterday they’d actually watched a Golden Girls marathon together, and he hadn’t blinked an eye.
And now this.
Of course he was kidding, but that was okay. The effect was still the same—one of warmth and acceptance and other cool stuff. He didn’t mind that she only had green tights, or that her closet looked like something abandoned at the end of time. He just went with it anyway. She suspected he needed to go with it.
Going with it was better than the alternatives.
“Maybe we can fashion you a toga out of a bedsheet.”
“I don’t know. I’m kind of attached to these now,” he said, and then she watched in delight as he attempted to roll them over one foot. Of all the things she ever thought she’d see, Holden Stark bent over in a bathrobe with one stocking almost over his ankle was not one of them. It occurred to her that she could probably sell this image to TMZ for a million dollars, but she had to be honest.
It was worth a lot more than that to her.
Every bizarre moment with him was worth more than that to her.
“You’re really not supposed to do it like this.”
“Well where am I going wrong?”
“You can’t...you have to roll it first.”
“So I can’t just drag it on?”
“No. No. You—okay. Stop, you have to stop. I’m going to wee myself,” she said—and it was true too. She was almost bent double. Tears were starting to leak out of her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time tears leaked out of her eyes, unless you counted terrible crying over horrible things.
Happy crying seemed like something mythical that only ever happened to other people, yet here she was doing just that. And she did it harder when she realized he still had three feet of material dangling from the end of his foot. He’d managed to pull the gusset up to his knee, but the rest of the tights hadn’t followed.
Plus he just looked so baffled by them. She’d never seen someone be so earnestly baffled over hosiery. He could have been on one of those quiz shows that made you do complicated physical tasks, trying desperately to earn her a million dollars. In fact—hadn’t she seen him make that face once on something like that? Some charity game show before he became really famous?
He hadn’t been able to get out of a big Perspex box, she thought.
And that was what made her want to put him out of his misery.
“You know, I think I have some sleepwear you could probably put on—just give me a second, okay? I’ll go look while you...try to wipe this nightmare from your mind.”
“Oh thank God. I think I’m getting PTSD.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“How do women put these on?”
“I’ve done it before, but right now even I’m not sure. You’ve made it look like a harrowing tale of one man’s struggle with a deadly opponent.”
“That’s exactly how it feels. Dear God, that’s exactly it! For the love of all that’s holy please find me some ill-fitting pajamas.”
She did better than that. She searched her bedside cabinets and found an enormous t-shirt that would probably fit him. And granted, it had a picture of David Hasselhoff on the front and a hole under the left armpit, but it was definitely better than tights and the robe. Once she’d paired it with sweatpants that would probably look more like shorts on him, they were in business.
“You know, you probably could have told me about those before I started putting on the green pantyhose,” he said, as she handed them to him. But she had to be honest—he didn’t look as though he had any regrets. He was still laughing in that half-sheepish way at himself, and when he took the clothes he did a weird thing.
He kind of brushed her cheek with his knuckle. Not a big move really and certainly nothing romantic, but the effect was rather startling. Her insides seemed to drop around three feet. That ache came back to her chest, only this time there was the oddest happy quality to it. A hopeful quality to it, that didn’t seem to make any sense.
What did she have to be hopeful about?
He’d just done the equivalent of chucking her under the chin. He could have been her big brother, or her physically impossible twenty-seven-year-old father. He could have been anyone who felt any kind of affection toward her...but that was the thing though, wasn’t it? When was the last time anyone had touched her so gently?
Years, it had been years and years.
And certainly, none of those people had ever followed it with the kinds of words he did. They had always said brotherly or fatherly things. This was not brotherly or fatherly. She didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that.
“You’re so lovely when you laugh. So lovely it breaks my heart,” he said, while her insides abandoned the building altogether. Her whole body flushed hot and then hotter, and it didn’t stop when he seemed to realize he’d told her the wrong thing. If anything, the little wince that flickered across his face only made it stronger.
It’s okay, she wanted to say. I feel the same way.
But of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t now.
She’d messed everything up with the almost-kiss.
She could see she had, before he spoke and made it worse.
“So I’ll just get changed then,” he said, in this awkward I-better-change-the-subject sort of way. Then as she was leaving, she caught of a glimpse of it all raw in his expression. He didn’t think she was looking anymore, so he just let it out. He let his head go back, and cursed soundlessly at the ceiling.
It was the single most amazing moment of her life.
And very nearly the most terrifying.
Chapter Six
She knew beyond a shadow of doubt what had happened in the closet. It was so obvious a virgin monkey could have worked it out—he had romantic feelings toward her and now no longer understood how to express them. He was possibly frightened of expressing them, in case she ran away again. There was no denying it.
So why was she just sitting here at her computer, trying to pick something for dinner tonight? This was everything she’d been waiting on for the last two years. She could practically hear some unnamed deity telling her, Here, here, have this human connection to make up for all the horrible things I just put you through! Yet still she remained at her desk, afraid in that exact same way he’d described. The one she’d agreed with at the time but not fully appreciated until right now.
I’m so afraid of making the wrong choice that I just don’t make any choice at all, she thought, and suddenly it was so true it was painful. She couldn’t even go up and ask him what he wanted to eat tonight, for fuck’s sake. Something so small and it was too much—though she understood why. She could see it clearly now.
Maybe this wasn’t a reward at all, but a curse. A terrible curse filled with half-realized hopes and tentative dreams, just waiting to be smashed to pieces the moment she started believing in them. After all, the universe had never pretended to be fair. She knew it didn’t dole out gifts when you’d been good, and comfort when you had suffered. Mostly it just seemed like an indifferent lump, striped gray with mediocrity and empty of any real meaning.
And if it wasn’t...then what had she been punished so severely for? That penny sweet she’d stolen when she was seven? The lie she’d told at ten?
She didn’t know, she didn’t know.
She only knew she was deathly afraid of going upstairs and finding out the answer for certain. It took her a full forty minutes to make it to the bottom step. And once she’d gotten there, she kind of wanted to pretend she was doing something else. Maybe she’d just noticed some peeling paint on the bannister and wanted to
examine it. Or perhaps she really needed an item from the bedroom and was simply trying to remember if she’d actually left it in the living room.
She was pretty sure she could pass this off as both, if he suddenly came to the top of the stairs and asked why she was standing there.
But the problem was—he didn’t do that. He was still in her bedroom for some ungodly reason, and she was still stuck on what to do for a dinner he probably wouldn’t want. There was no other choice aside from going up and finding out, but by God it was painful to do it. She had to practically drag herself, and once she’d finally made it to the bedroom door it didn’t get any easier.
She’d planned a cheerful just wanted to check you were okay, but it died on her lips the second she saw him through the half-open door. He was standing by her bed, fully dressed in her clothes and looking pretty comfortable—aside from his expression. His expression was so far from comfortable it couldn’t have reached it with a barge pole, though it wasn’t clear why.
He was only staring at his phone.
What on earth was his phone saying to make him look like that?
His face seemed in danger of caving in. She had the urge to get out some props and a few sandbags before the damage became irreparable. And it wasn’t just the canyon-like frown and sagging sense of some terrible despair. There was also the tension across his shoulders, so clear she could see it through that awful t-shirt. She could have probably seen it through twenty sweaters and a brick wall.
And then he turned too abruptly, and suddenly it was she who was tense enough to see through a brick wall. Her spine practically snapped to attention, and she knew her eyes had gone all big. She could feel them trying to consume her face no matter how hard she worked on making them smaller—and she did work hard.
She had to, if she wanted to convince him this was an innocent non-intrusion. He was already staring at her in this accusatory way. Looking relaxed was imperative, but somehow all she could manage was a narrowing of her eyes and a weird slump. It probably made her seem more suspicious, though if it did he didn’t say.
Beyond Repair (Deeper Than Desire) Page 7
