Chapter Thirty-Two
Jake
She’s asleep. Her head on my chest, her hands slack on the sheets, and her legs entwined with mine. I’m scared to move because I don’t want to wake her. And if I’m honest, I would be happy just staying in this moment forever.
Maybe having feelings is overrated. I spent ten years moping about, hating the fact I couldn’t feel, and somehow now I can feel everything, all at once, and it’s rough.
I mean, apart from the post-orgasm glow – who knew, ghosts could still come – the pain in my chest is vicious, the bubble in my stomach agony, the acid in my throat unbearable.
Just knowing this is my last evening, ever, with her.
My last night on earth before whatever comes next.
Why didn’t I listen to Gabe and do this sooner, like five years ago? It’s a question I keep landing on, because if I had, would that maybe have meant more time with her? I know the answer – I was an idiot.
After Belle had begged me to find a way, I had taken her head in my hands, placed my forehead against hers, and promised her the only thing I could.
‘Listen to me … I promise you I will always be here. I will look over you. I will do everything in my power to protect you if I can. I want you to be happy. I want you to live, for me, and for yourself. I want you to be with someone who protects you and puts you first. I want you to be with a love who holds you tight every morning and night and spoils you. Who cheers you on, who supports your dreams, who will hold your hand till you get there.’ She had wept in my arms as I said it, my voice weak. ‘But for us, this is it.’
We cried together. That was when I truly felt everything that had been lying dormant in me for ten years.
For the first time since the crash, the saturation turned up to a hundred.
And every instinct I had was screaming at me to find another solution, to find a way to keep her with me.
But I couldn’t. And I also didn’t want to.
My last living thought was of her. Overturning in my car, I thought of the smell of her hair and the specific, terrible sound she made when she thought something was funny.
I thought about what it would have felt like to have that face as the last thing I saw every night.
Whether she’d have laughed at my jokes, even though she’d heard them all before.
I thought about the way she’d look at forty, fifty, sixty.
I thought about the lavender we’d grow in our garden – there was always going to be lavender – and the way the smell would get into everything.
The sheets we’d hang in the garden. My shirts.
Her hair. I thought about all of it as the car went over. And then I lost all of it.
I don’t know what will happen next. I just know that I couldn’t let her follow me. She deserves all of that with someone else, someone who will be there with her.
I want her to live.
I wait for it to feel more complicated than it does. I know that younger me would have wanted to drag her with me, keep her for myself, agree and find a loophole that Gabe hadn’t thought of, but it doesn’t come. I don’t even want her to be devastated by the loss of me.
I want her to live.
I watch her sleep as I stroke her arm. She whimpers gently.
I start to close my eyes, my nose in her hair, ready to doze off, say goodbye to the world, but something shifts.
The dark blue of the bedsheets fades first, bleeding out until it’s the colour of cement, then the fireplace that I’d lit – the flames are still there but they’ve stopped moving, frozen mid-flicker, the light coming from them bleak and grey.
The curtain by the window is caught mid-billow and the trees outside are perfectly still, seemingly set in stone. The sea that’s been crashing all night is silent. The whole room looks like a photograph that hasn’t quite developed yet.
I clutch my chest as it tightens.
Because beneath my fingers, Belle has gone both cold and still.
Not asleep or dreaming – still. Something is wrong.
My eyes spring wide open in panic. I pull back and draw down the covers.
Her chest isn’t moving. The blush of her cheeks is now greying, the pink of her lips is gone.
Like a sketch of herself. I shake her, say her name, then call it louder than I mean to and she still doesn’t move.
She doesn’t even flinch, just stays frozen like she’s been preserved in glass.
Have I just killed her? Have we swapped places? Has she passed and now I’m the one living?
I stagger off the bed, fumbling past the bedside table and sending her glass of water tumbling over the edge, but I don’t hear it land. It’s then that I notice the clock next to it. It’s stopped. The seconds are frozen. Every hair on my body stands up and I turn slowly.
I’m frozen as I realise that in front of the creepy, old mirror stands Gabe.
‘Put your bits away, lad,’ Gabe says, his voice as gruff and deep as ever.
‘Fucking hell, Gabe!’ I say, pulling a cushion from the floor – one of the many decorative ones from the bed – and using it to cover myself. The tassels tickle my thighs.
‘Hello to you too, Jake.’
I’d forgotten how huge he was. He takes up far too much space in this room.
Both his feet and shins would dangle over the bed if he tried to lie down in it.
The grey, the stillness seems to radiate off him, like he’s brought the in-between with him, hidden in his waistcoat.
The flat nothingness I’ve been living in for a decade.
For a few hours I’d forgotten what it looked like.
I steal a glance at Belle in the bed, still in the same position, curled as if I was under her. Her brow is furrowed. I reach out and pull the duvet over her chest to hide her modesty and keep her warm, which is a stupid thing to do, given that time is frozen.
If he’s here, though, this must be the end.
His voice booms, gruff, as if he hasn’t properly spoken for a while. ‘So, how was it? Fun?’
‘You could have warned me.’
‘Warned you ’bout what?’
‘All of it. The exes … Mainly the exes, but also the fact I’d have to watch her – next to her – with others, all while my feelings came back …’ I stop. ‘You didn’t mention that.’
‘Would you have gone if I had?’
‘Hm,’ is all I can muster, because I know he’s right.
‘So a terrible experience, then?’
‘No, no …’ I look to my feet. How do I sum up how this past day has been? A whirlwind? An emotional rollercoaster? She was angry and then robotic and then sad, helpless, and then the laughter, the touching …
I sigh, move in front of the bed and perch on the edge. Cushion still to my crotch.
‘Parts of it were great. I could feel things … They were small at first, but then more … I could see colours. Her dress …’ I look at the silky gown I’d pulled off over her thighs, crumpled on the floor.
‘Then surprising things. I’d forgotten her laugh and how it made me feel …
alive. At first, I thought it was too late, that she’d changed too much, but—’ The taste of her still on my tongue. ‘She’s still there …’
Gabe nods, once. ‘Go on …’ He strokes his beard.
‘I missed so much. But in a weird way things were still the same between us. The tension. The passion. We still fit perfectly, you know?’
‘I know.’
I’m sure I catch a flash of sadness on his face. Or what I think is sadness under those heavy brows of his.
‘You do?’ I do a double take, not expecting that response.
He clicks his neck to the side, the edge of his lip quivering. He looks around, then pulls out the tiny stool from under the dressing table, which is still laden with Belle’s products. The stool legs almost buckle under the weight of him, knees up to his chest. The carpet and floorboards groan.
‘His name was Dorian. I called him Dot.’
Oh. He’s done this himself? Of course he has.
‘What happened?’ I’d always wondered but had never asked.
‘I was like you once,’ Gabe says. ‘Selfish. Controlling.’
‘Thanks for pointing that out, mate.’
He ignores me. ‘I made him feel like he had to choose between himself and me. I didn’t feel good enough to compete with his ambition or his freedom. I treated all of it like a threat. I thought if he grew, he’d grow away from me …’ He sighs. ‘I wanted him all to myself.’
He turns his rings, or what I think are rings, around his enormous fingers, slowly. This is the most I’ve ever heard Gabe speak. I can tell by the way he is slow with his words that he’s either trying not to give too much away, or he’s trying not to tear up.
‘I didn’t realise that loving someone means letting them become whoever they’re going to be and getting to be there for all of it.’ He pauses. The rings stop turning.
I go quiet thinking back to what happened with Belle.
Her bedroom. Younger me, my feet planted on the floor, my eyes narrowed.
She was saying her truths but I didn’t listen because I’d already decided how the conversation was going to go.
I hadn’t clocked at the time that I could grow with her, that there was space for me too.
‘I think we are more similar than you think, Jake.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I’m getting that. So what happened?’
‘I died. Messier than you, mind. Georgian England wasn’t an easy time. But still, I got my own psychopomp – Percy. She told me the same things you were told: put right what you did wrong. And I … Dot was … I should have made it right.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘I found him. That wasn’t the problem.’ Gabe’s voice drops.
‘I followed him everywhere. You could say haunted him, even. I watched him grieve me, pick himself back up, then build a life without me in it. I was there when he fell in love again. I was there when he slept. I was there on the nights he was alone and thinking about me, because the look on his face …’ Gabe talks to the moon outside the window, then to his hands, then to the floor.