Watch movies for the rest of their lives? Maybe at some point he’d manage to inch her out onto the sand, but she couldn’t see herself going beyond that. What kind of life would that be for him, living with a girlfriend who couldn’t go beyond a beach? He was used to flying at a moment’s notice to fancy restaurants in Paris, and she would never, ever be able to do that.
Not ever. God, no. No, not that.
So really it wasn’t a surprise when she answered, “I want to say yes, but I think it’s better if I say no. I think it’s better if you go—at least to sort yourself out.”
She immediately wanted to take that last part back. It sounded like such a cop-out, like such a lame excuse for something she wanted rather than anything that might benefit him. And she could see he knew it too. For the first time, he looked at her with something other than affection or desire. He looked at her with disappointment.
Like I let him down when he needed me most, she thought, and wanted to poke out both her own eyes. Without them she wouldn’t be able to see this—though alas she could still hear it. His voice sounded just a touch dull, when he answered her.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. “My agent is pretty much beside himself—not to mention the preproduction meetings I’m supposed to be turning up to on Tuesday. I guess it just makes sense to get back to reality.”
“It definitely does. If you’ve got contracts and obligations...”
“I do. I have a lot of them. A lot of people relying on me.”
“And so many fans out there must be worried.”
“They probably are. And I hate disappointing my fans,” he said, and she came very close to offering him another sensible platitude. She came so close in fact that she actually spoke the first word aloud, before realizing how poisonous it sounded. How gross and unhelpful and most of all untrue. He hadn’t missed anything. He wouldn’t be glad to get back into it.
That was the whole fucking point of this.
So instead, she said what she should have done from the first.
“I know you don’t really mean any of that. I know how much your life is killing you. I saw it killing you on my living room floor. And if you don’t want to go back to it, then for God’s sake don’t, please don’t. I would die if you were hurt because I couldn’t say how I truly feel.”
“And what do you truly feel?”
She looked away at something else, anything else.
She had to just to get the words out.
“Like I can never really be what you deserve. You know I...I’ll never be able to go on a date with you. I won’t be able to go grocery shopping or antiquing or any of the other things normal couples do.”
“You think I want to go antiquing? I thought you knew me inside and out, Al. That’s scarily off base for someone who understood I liked having my ass licked before I even knew about the fucking thing.”
“It’s not...you know what I mean.”
“I don’t. Try explaining a little more clearly.”
“I’m not enough. I will never be enough.”
“Shouldn’t I get to decide that?”
“You can. You can decide it while you’re away,” she said, but it was clear both of them knew what that really meant. He wasn’t going to decide at all. He was going to see the only possible way things could be, because he was able to walk out the front door and she wasn’t. He would go on with life—maybe as a movie star, maybe not.
And she couldn’t.
“I don’t have to. I don’t have to go anywhere to know how I feel about you. To know that it doesn’t matter to me whether we go on dates or not. I’ve been on a lot of dates, honey. None of them have ever made me think, yeah, I could live in this woman’s basement for the rest of my life.”
God, her heart was beating so fast—probably because it had two reasons to.
The first was how wonderful and romantic and loving he was.
The second was terror, oh Christ, it was incredible fucking terror.
“Eventually you’re going to want more than my basement.”
“And what if I do? Yesterday you walked out onto your deck—and I’m guessing it’s been a long time since you did that. You really think you’ll never be able to do more? Never be able to let me help you do more? I’m here for you, okay? I’m here,” he said, and that pretty much sealed it. The romantic part of this fought a hearty battle, but in the end terror won. He was going to be here for her, for God’s sake.
He thought she could really take him being here for her.
“You know what my favorite part of this movie is?” she asked. “In the beginning, when she’s in her little cabin drinking her wine, watching those home movies of her once-happy life and grieving over her dead husband. You know why?”
“I’m afraid of the answer, but want you to tell me it anyway.”
“Because she’s so desperately sad, and yet I know what’s coming. That’s the thing about movies, the beauty of movies—you just wait a little while and everything will be okay again. You know he’s coming for her. In a little while a man will fall from the sky and make her okay again. Do you know how many times I’ve wished for a man to fall from the goddamn sky?”
“I feel as though you’re trying to make some kind of point.”
“The point is the same for every movie I love. No one is really coming to rescue Jenny Hayden—not in reality. In reality there is no magic, no alien or angel or superhero to save you. In reality, Jenny sits on the rug and watches the movies forever and drinks her wine and that’s it. That’s the real ending, you know that’s the real ending. No one comes across time for Sarah Connor, and Hawkeye doesn’t return for Cora, and Captain Amazing doesn’t catch Amy Anderson as she falls from the sky.”
She wished she hadn’t added that last one. She hadn’t meant to add the last one, but it was there now and oh it was stinging behind her eyes. She could hardly get the last word out—her voice caught right on the end syllable.
And she knew he could hear and see it.
He always heard and saw it—even when she didn’t let it show.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, so gentle, so gentle.
But that only made it worse. It only made it harder to tell him.
“It will be,” she said. “You’ll see.”
* * * * *
She tried not to think about him. That was her best bet—to just put the whole thing out of her mind as though it had never happened. That method had worked well for her in the past. It would work just as well here, she was sure it would. She fell back on her old routines—watching films and shows obsessively, reading well past four in the morning, keeping herself busy with mundane house tasks when her eyes started to bleed—and for a while that seemed to succeed.
Until she found herself crouched by the skirting boards in the hallway, a piece of sandpaper worn to smoothness clenched in her fist, knuckles bleeding because she’d been doing it so long and so badly, sweat coating her body in a thick, greasy film. She didn’t know when she’d started this crazy crusade or what time it now was, but she understood one thing very clearly.
She was on the verge of passing out.
She’d pushed herself to the point of passing out.
And he still hadn’t removed himself from her mind. It was as if he had died—though she supposed he had in a weird way. Bernie was gone and Holden would carry on from here, gleaming and glorious and able to forget. That guy she’d known no longer existed, or perhaps never really had.
Captain Amazing is not going to catch me as I fall from the sky, she scolded herself, only this time she did cry. She cried not because she wished that he would, but for the idea that he could have. If things were like they were in the movies, he could have done just that, that very thing, and oh the thought was unbearable.
It haunted her dreams. It kept her awake.
She came close to calling him in the middle of the night just to take it back. Please just tell me I was wrong, please tell me I was
, she wanted to say, and then she’d wake in the clear light of dawn and be mean with herself for it. He can’t tell you that you’re wrong, this new, cruel her would say. Any more than you can ask the Goblin King to take you away from all of this right now, or dive into a river and find yourself in Oz, or somehow read a book and be Atreyu. The very idea of everything turning out wonderfully is as mythical as all of those, and you know that now. Don’t you, Alice?
She did. She knew it so hard and so thoroughly that she didn’t realize the package was from him. She opened it, sure she had ordered something then just forgotten, and even after she’d found the disc inside she didn’t think anything of it. It’ll be a movie from that website that burns old unavailable crap for idiots, she thought, and continued to do so all the way up to the point of pressing Play.
It was Last of the Mohicans—though not all of it. It didn’t start at the beginning. It started at the part with the waterfall, and the moment it did she knew. She knew what it was. She tried to deny it but it was impossible to. There was Daniel Day Lewis, and he was saying the only thing that was on the disc. The only part that had been captured—“You be strong, you survive...you stay alive, no matter what occurs. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you,” he said.
I will find you.
* * * * *
The next day there was another, and this one was somehow even better and more heart-wrenching and less bearable than the first. He’d picked something from one of her favorite movies—not just a line that made sense for their situation. This one kind of didn’t in context, yet the effect was staggeringly good. She held her breath all the way through hearing it, thinking of how he must have worked out exactly which ones she loved above all others. He must have found her shelf of best movies, and he even knew why they were the best. He knew what she liked about them.
“You are my sun, my moon, my starlight sky,” Mad Martigan said. “Without you—dwell in darkness. I love you.”
And then her heart attempted to consume her whole body. She had to sit down, but the couch was three feet away. It might as well have been three miles for all the good it did her. She just had to kind of crouch a little to take the strain off, though it hardly helped at all. Nothing would have helped her.
He was doing this to prove her wrong. To tell her that life could be like a movie, if she wanted it to be. It was obvious he was. It had been obvious the day before, though that message hadn’t seemed so direct to her. That one could have just meant don’t worry, don’t do anything stupid, I’ll come back to you—which was lovely, but maybe just meant as a fun way to tell her something.
This on the other hand...this was different.
This was someone declaring love.
Every message from then on was someone declaring love, in one way or another. He sent her Johanna reading Beethoven’s letter at the window. Kyle Reese telling Sarah Connor that he’d come across time for her. There was Driver kissing Irene, and James asking “if there was a place not in silence and not in sound” and the Dread Pirate Roberts saying “As you wish.” Some meant more than simple love and some meant less—she heard “don’t let this chance pass” in the scene from Immortal Beloved and “however you need it to be” in The Princess Bride—but all of them amounted to the same thing.
And even if they hadn’t, even if by some miracle she hadn’t begun to believe that she’d been wrong, so wrong...there was the last one. The last one was not a clip from a movie at all—though that wasn’t a disappointment. How could it possibly be? It was what she’d been waiting for, hoping for, without even knowing it.
Here was reality finally being what all of those films promised.
These are my words, he wrote, not as beautiful as Beethoven’s or as incredible as coming across time for someone. But know that I would, if I had the chance. I would be the survivor of a harrowing future war, just so I could come for you and have you understand beyond any doubt that I love you. I want the movie to be real too, because if it was I know you wouldn’t be afraid of what won’t happen next. Don’t be afraid, my love. Don’t think the ending has to be you sitting on the floor, alone in your grief. I’m with you.
If you want me to be I’ll always be with you.
Bernie
She closed the letter then, though not because she’d finished reading. She could have gone over those words a million times and still have been no closer to a stopping point. The urge to look again was already so great she could hardly stand it—but she had to. There was someone at her door, and she knew who it was. She didn’t suspect or hope or maybe dream that one day it could be.
She knew.
It was him.
He had come to her door like the long-lost hero of every romance story ever, and now she was going to do what every romance heroine did in return. He deserved it, more than anything he deserved it. If he could give her this then she could run to him, without reservations. She didn’t stop to think that it could be the postman. She didn’t wonder how she might ever be able to offer him more.
She would find a way.
And she would start by flinging open the door, and hurling herself into his arms.
Chapter Ten
She didn’t need to think about it. Once his arms were around her and his mouth was on hers it just seemed easy—or at least, far easier than it had before. There were no extra questions or brutal doubts. She simply started shedding her clothes at the door, one gloriously relief-filled piece at a time. First her jersey, then her t-shirt, then her socks, sure each time that this would be the item that did her in.
Here she would stop. This would be the thing that took it too far. She was getting too naked; she was exposing too much. She’d never reach her jeans. Removing her jeans meant he would see her legs, and she couldn’t have that. Her legs were the worst. They were like the roots of some old tree, gnarled and knotted and rough.
She couldn’t possibly.
Yet somehow she did. She wriggled them down her legs as she led him toward the stairs, full of the oddest sort of relief she’d ever felt in her life. She didn’t even know how to identify it properly. All she could think of was a snake shedding its skin—as though she’d been carrying around extra all this time and just hadn’t known it.
She knew it now.
She knew that she hadn’t just hidden all of this from him. She’d been hiding it from herself too. Her head flooded with memories, all suddenly seen from a different angle—like the time she’d turned around the full-length mirror in that hotel room the airline had gotten for her, just so she didn’t have to see her own ravaged body. Or at the hospital, when she’d closed her eyes as she struggled out of the bath.
She’d thought it was because of the pain, but she understood now.
She hadn’t wanted to glimpse her reflection in the mirror over the sink. Who would have wanted to? Everything had been so red and raw then, so unlike the person she’d been before. But it was different now. It was okay now. She needed to start accepting that it was okay. She liked her scars, most faded to pale pinks and nearly whites. They reminded her of that future war he’d mentioned—as though she were the one who’d survived. She was the one who’d come across time.
He certainly looked at her as if she had.
He looked at her the way she’d always hoped someone would—not as a victim of something terrible, but as a warrior who’d fought her way to him. He looked with love and awe and all those good things, and then just when she was starting to feel he’d stared too long he said the best possible words she could think of.
“Why did you ever think you had to hide from me?” he asked, as though it had always been that simple. She could have told him from day one; she didn’t have to veil it all in half-truths about being inexperienced and wanting to go slow. It was obvious now, and not only because he was saying this thing and looking at her with the same warmth and desire he always seemed to feel.
There were also the words he then added, as simple as a handsha
ke.
“Did you really think I didn’t know?” he asked, and for a second she couldn’t decide what to feel. On the one hand there was this huge swell of heartbreaking relief, to know he didn’t care and probably wouldn’t ask now. If he already knew, he wouldn’t ask about it. And then on the other, there was a twinge of the most delicious embarrassment she’d ever felt in her life.
Of course he had guessed.
How would anyone not have guessed? She wasn’t a master criminal, living by her wits alone. She was a fumbling, bumbling idiot who didn’t realize simple, obvious things like, “You limp, honey. You wince without even knowing you’re doing it. Do you know how many times I’ve felt as though I accidentally hurt you, and wanted to pull away? And yet you never say. That’s the worst part. You’d rather pretend it didn’t hurt than make a sound of protest. I’ve sometimes thought I could be popping stitches I didn’t even know were there, without you telling me a single thing about it.”
“There aren’t any stitches. It happened...it happened a long time ago.”
She wished she didn’t have to lie in amongst all of this truth. But then, she was giving him so much here. She was standing in front of him in just her bra and panties, shrouded by the dim light of her bedroom but still completely visible. He could still see the rope-scar around one of her legs and the place where the metal had gone through her middle. There were the burns over her right shoulder like a piece of medieval armor, weird lines around her upper arm where something white-hot had held on.
It was a lot, a lot, a lot.
She hoped it was enough.
Thank God he let it be enough.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, and though showing him should have been the hardest part—though telling him should have seemed easy compared to this—somehow she was still relieved. She wasn’t sure why but it was there, buried at the bottom of her. But there it was—a certain pleasure to know that she still wouldn’t have to reveal the worst thing.
Beyond Repair (Deeper Than Desire) Page 14
