New York, New York #19
But the horrors weren’t over. Noah had transformed his face to the point where AJ didn’t recognize him. He was making strangled gargling noises with his tongue. He was choking.
And now AJ was crying, struggling to help him get air. He fell on the floor. She tried to raise him up into a seated position, but he was deadweight. She couldn’t lift him. His tongue was wagging, writhing. He was drowning.
“Breathe,” she shouted. “You have to breathe.”
The lights blacked out.
He followed her to the dressing room after and changed out of his soiled garments while AJ threw up in the toilet. She emerged from the bathroom to find him waiting on the couch. He looked at her with a drawn, tired expression. It wasn’t disdain, but it wasn’t remorse either.
“I’m ready to go home now,” said AJ.
Noah nodded, and they brought Bud back to her apartment. AJ took the first turn in the shower and was tucked into bed by the time Noah emerged. She pretended to be asleep, listening to the sounds of his footsteps on her floor, waiting for the relief of the lamp’s off switch.
The darkness brought no rest. Every time AJ shut her eyes, she saw him as he had been onstage that night: mangled, helpless, damned. He was so fucking good at what he did, but AJ had never seen him play like that, like he was hooked up to a video in his own brain.
A video of what was coming for him.
For the first time, AJ’s resolve began to falter. Not about their relationship ending—that, they would both regret until the day they died. But how he died…
AJ so badly wanted for this not to be happening to the person she loved most that she had considered every possibility except the one staring her in the face, which was that he knew what he was talking about. That suicide actually might be his best option.
I fucking love you more than life.
AJ did not want him to suffer pain or indignity. Certainly not for her.
As she began to cry, she felt his arms engulf her.
He was crying too, unapologetically, which made AJ cry harder.
His hands closed like shackles, binding her to him, and AJ felt his energy glide against hers, immense, profound, and then they were submerging, two mated creatures flung deep into a fathomless sea.
They cried and cried until they passed into nothingness.
Two shows left.
AJ brought no fire to her final initiation.
“I’ve been going through my old papers,” she told him. “Remembering how it all began.”
From there, she took them into an F and W prequel, the story of how the two of them met at a research institution, where it was hate at first sight.
“Stay out of my lab,” he fumed.
“Stay out of my life!” she rejoined.
Thrown together for the sake of funding, they eventually did get to know each other.
“I have a disability,” she confessed over imaginary beakers. “To me, most people are just flat surfaces. They’re not…real.”
“Am I?” he asked.
She searched him. “I don’t know yet.”
For a time, they collaborated as friends. Then he received an invitation to pursue his research across the country. When she heard he would be leaving, W broke down.
“This work has meaning,” she said with difficulty. “And we are the only two people who can do it. I know things aren’t perfect, but—”
He stepped toward her. “Is this just about the work for you?”
She took an uneasy breath. “No,” she said. “No, with you I can actually feel something.”
There were tears in Noah’s eyes as he touched her cheek, then kissed her.
In the end, F managed to divert his funding to their current research. The blackout came just after they began their work on Molten Ice.
It was a sweet set; Noah was pleased. But from the moment they left the stage that night, AJ had the feeling of being caught in someone else’s scene. As they rode the elevator to her apartment, she told herself it wasn’t over yet.
One show left.
Then Noah began kissing her like that. He was taking her to the bed, and oh God.
For the first time in their entire relationship, AJ found herself watching them as though from outside herself.
He was having Last-Time Sex with her, and she did not want to be a part of it; and yet, she could not stop herself from completing the rite, from rolling under him, from moaning his name, from coming.
The feeling of being in the wrong scene continued all through the next day.
Noah left in the morning to run some errands, and AJ didn’t ask where he was headed—not because she didn’t care, but because she was afraid he would tell her it was none of her business.
Because despite her every effort, she had not gotten through to him.
He had gotten through to her.
You can’t always play the hero.
AJ couldn’t fix this.
She had no memory of walking on for their final performance. One moment they were together backstage, and the next she was under the spotlights in black, the crowd’s noise a distant drone.
Across from her, Noah appeared in white, and they began the scripted portion of the show. AJ listened to herself say her lines as if reciting a countdown.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real.
Then Noah initiated his own F and W prequel by divulging a secret.
“I’m an alien,” he confessed. “I was sent to Earth years ago to find a cure for the disease that killed my mother. Unfortunately, I have failed, and soon my own symptoms will begin. The effects are dangerous to humans, and so I am leaving shortly. It’s for your own protection.”
It was a gorgeous set. The flight path was bright tonight, a neon jet stream, the audience’s attention omnipresent as clear, uncharted space. With every move, AJ could feel the Cosmic Consciousness at work. They weren’t playing with each other. It was playing with them.
They began with the arrival of the alien many years before, a curious creature who assumed the form of a human male in high school.
“I fit in well,” Noah reported to his supreme leader. “All high schoolers are like little aliens.”
He fell quickly for a human girl, F. She was auditioning for the school drama, so the alien auditioned, too. When they cut to their performance, Noah jumped down into the orchestra, and now AJ and Noah were back in the first scene they’d ever played.
“I have forgot why I did call thee back,” said AJ, smiling shyly.
Noah stepped forward, eyes ablaze. “Let me stand here till thou remember it.”
For a moment, all AJ could do was look at him.
“I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,” she said. “Remembering how I love thy company.”
Noah swallowed. “And I’ll still stay, to have thee still forget, forgetting any other home but this.”
A red light flashed at the back of the house.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
They were halfway through the set.
This isn’t real, AJ thought as Noah climbed back onstage.
Not when she still had to tell him about the weird odor in her lobby, and Libby’s most recent insane text, and how he’d fucked up her toilet seat again. That stuff wasn’t just going to disappear in the next twenty-nine minutes.
But he was.
Now the alien was graduating with honors. He gained entry to a high-level research institution, where he posed as a grad student and combed the facilities for the cure to his illness. One day, he chanced upon F in a physics lab, now a scientist herself, and they decided to combine research.
As their characters reconnected onstage, AJ could feel the minutes slipping past them, but the flight path could not be altered. She was bound to it by the laws of their bond. It had been done long ago, and she was powerless to undo it.
F and W were taking a walk now, maybe fifteen minutes from the blackout. Fifteen minutes was nothing. A frozen dinner. A loading zone. A rosary.
This isn’t real.
AJ wanted to tell Noah he was forbidden to leave. Instead, she said, “You are so wet.”
There it was, the smile she loved so well. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said, pulling her out of the imaginary downpour under an imaginary awning.
AJ looked up at him, silently mapping every freckle on his face. “The first book you ever lent me, the one I said that I forgot?” she said. “I lied. I still know every word you wrote in it. I used to sleep with it at night.”
Noah’s breath caught.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” said AJ.
Noah cleared his throat. “The first scene we ever did, the one that made you run away?” he said, his eyes shining. “I wasn’t acting at all. I really was that in love with you. I still am.”
Then he kissed her.
They lived happily for a time, their research prospering thanks to W’s otherworldly technology. When F got sick, he defied fate and used their findings to save her.
But he could not save himself. The same symptoms that had plagued his mother were beginning, and he had been so preoccupied with saving F that his own clock had run out.
“I have to go now,” said Noah. He advanced, and AJ realized he was about to kiss her goodbye.
She shook her head, stepping back. “I cannot believe you are doing this.”
Noah’s jaw clenched. He took another step toward her. “Age,” he breathed.
AJ was still shaking her head, but she could not pull away as he drew near. He cupped her cheeks in both his hands and nudged her nose with his. She was already crying when their lips met. As they clutched at each other, she tasted salt and metal.
Noah’s emotions were a coastal storm, the audience’s a riptide. They were standing in a hurricane, and this was the eye. He was squeezing her so tight she couldn’t breathe. Yes, thought AJ. Just let it end here.
Then he broke the kiss. He took a breath. His dark eyes swept hers. “I will always love you.”
Then he let her go.
AJ’s face contorted as he took a step back. “Do not. Do. This.”
For an instant he paused. “I have to,” he said, his voice breaking.
AJ shook her head. “Do not.”
He was crying now, his chest spasming. “I have to.”
AJ’s lips parted, but no sound came out.
This isn’t real.
He was backing away now, his hands balled at his sides. “I love you.”