Chapter Nineteen
It’s the middle of the night, and once again, I can’t sleep.
The curtains are open, letting in the view of the stars and the moonlit crowns of the swaying pines, but that’s not what’s keeping me awake.
It’s the quiet of the night when I’m used to lullabies composed of clinking bike chains, humming motors, and howling sirens.
It’s the unfamiliarity of a person next to me.
Maybe I should’ve let Lewis pick his own bedroom, but I wanted to stay close to him.
He has the exceptional quality of getting me out of my own head, except now he’s fast asleep, which means I’m back in there with all my thoughts.
The unanimous consensus seems to be that sleeping with Lewis was a very, very bad idea.
Before leaving this morning, I’d texted her about the grant, figuring it’d be easier that way. I’m glad for it now as I hit call, since it means I don’t need to find the words and feel my mouth perform the movements around them.
“Hey,” I whisper when she picks up. Several voices reply with a “Hallo,” which is when I realize that, instead of picking up herself, Karo has pulled me into the family group call.
My parents must be having breakfast, since it’s morning over there—after five years in NYC, the time difference to Berlin is practically ingrained at this point.
“Oh, Hasi, I’m so sorry,” my mother says, and I feel the pinprick of tears in my eyes at her nickname for me. “Karo told us about the grant.”
“If they don’t want you to solve amnesia…
their loss,” my father adds, voice much louder than my mother’s.
I picture him at the table, setting his butter knife aside and bending over his phone.
The urge to sit with them at the heavy and well-loved dining table hits me out of nowhere.
I’d sip Mama’s perfect latte that she makes with the coffee maker we gave her for her last birthday, watch her and Papa bicker over Sunday’s crossword and wonder how they were so lucky to find their persons and hold on to them, all through teaching for twenty years at the same high school.
“How are you holding up?” Lennart’s voice pipes up.
“I, um…” I falter, lost for words, because how do I explain that I’ve added a whole other set of worries to the ones already occupying my mind? “I’m okay?” I keep my voice low to avoid waking up Lewis. “Catching my breath upstate. I needed to get out of the city for a bit. What are you up to?”
“I was just telling them about our hike, Franzi,” Karo jumps in.
“Send us the pictures you were talking about,” Mama says. “We need to get going.”
“Want to take the boat out, it’s a beautiful day,” Papa continues. Ever since they bought a paddleboat two summers ago, they spend their weekends out on the rivers and lakes, sometimes taking camping gear to make it into an overnight trip.
We say our goodbyes, and when my parents have left the call, Karo asks, “Everything alright with you? It’s kind of late, right?”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “It’s…” I close my eyes and will the hum of the fridge to ground me. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”
There’s a pause where Lennart murmurs something, Karo sighs, and then her voice comes closer to the microphone. “I don’t think it’s your fault they didn’t give you the grant.” I hear her walk somewhere, presumably into a different room.
“I’m not talking about the grant, I…” I drag my toe over the wooden floor. “He’s a good cook. And do you know how I know? Because he made me dinner. Vegetarian dishes with dairy in them, even though he’s lactose intolerant and eats meat. How the hell am I supposed to come back from that?”
“As much as I love nonlinear storytelling, I’m going to need a little more context here. Start from the beginning,” she demands softly, “and then I’ll tell you if it’s fixable.”
From our last call she already knows that Lewis agreed to fake date me, but now I catch her up with the events of the past week, the evening outings, the first hiccups at selling our fake relationship, the action plan we came up with and how it made our act a little easier and, eventually, not like an act at all.
“Oh no.” She sighs. “I told you, Franzi. No extra credits when you’re fake dating.”
“Our act wasn’t good enough, so it needed to be done. Though maybe the kiss was overkill,” I muse.
“And this whole weekend, too. But as long as your reputation’s safe, it doesn’t seem like it was a complete mistake,” Karo notes. “And maybe Lewis isn’t so bad, either?”
“He isn’t.” I sigh.
“You sound like that’s bad news. Why?”
I hope she has an hour. There are many reasons why.
“We’re only in the same city until Friday.
He’ll go back to Germany, and you and I will go on our trip, which is great, but after that?
The best-case scenario would be that whatever lab I end up in is on the same continent as him.
But even then, I’ve only known him for days, so why would I want to start anything as complicated as this? ”
“I mean, if you really like him…”
I begin to pace the length of the counter. “Karo, we work together. Not in the same office, obviously, but we’re in the same field and after Jacob— I can’t.”
“But to everyone else, you’re already a couple anyway,” Karo points out.
“I know. But it’s not only my reputation I’m worried about, though of course, there’s that, too.
” I take a deep breath, feel for the words that describe best what has me so wide-awake at night.
“I lost sight of myself when I was with Jacob. As long as Lewis and I are not in it for real, at least I know that me and my work exist separately from his. Losing that certainty? That’s what I’m most worried about. ”
Karo falls quiet for a moment, then huffs out an exasperated, “Ugggh.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Frances?”
I startle and turn around to find Lewis at the bottom of the stairs, one hand wrapped around the banister, the other scratching the back of his neck.
My heart squeezes at how rumpled he looks: hair sticking up, creases on his cheek, one eye half-closed against the glare of the light.
This side of him, so sleepy and soft, is new to me.
How long has he been standing there?
“Is everything okay?” he asks gruffly and comes shuffling into the kitchen. It doesn’t seem like he overheard my conversation with Karo.
I lower the phone against my collarbone. “Give me a sec.” After I promise Karo to call her in a few days, I hang up the call. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head as he touches the small of my back. “Are you okay, though?” His hand lingers there as he opens the fridge door. The stark light illuminates his profile.
I feel his closeness, his warmth, in every nerve of my body, like my cells are rejoicing at having him close again, but that’s the problem, isn’t it?
I clear my throat. “Yeah, all good.”
Lewis studies me for a moment, then puts his hand on my head, palm on my crown and fingers reaching to my temples. “What’s going on inside that brain of yours?”
“Hah,” I laugh out. “Asked every neuroscientist, ever.”
Lewis indulges me with a smile, but it passes quickly.
After another long look, he turns to the fridge again, and I use the short break of contact to wander to the other side of the kitchen island and perch on one of the stools.
As Lewis rummages in a cupboard overhead, the stash on the counter grows: oat milk, cocoa powder, marshmallows.
“Hot chocolate?” I ask.
Lewis pulls a small saucepan out of the drying rack. “Want one?”
I nod. “This is becoming a sad tradition.”
“Having something sweet in the middle of the night and talking to you?” Lewis shrugs. “I could get used to this.”
I melt a little inside, until sensible Frances catches up with what’s happening. “About that…” I trail off. I watch him as he moves through the kitchen, pours the oat milk into the saucepan, switches on the stove, and lines up two mugs on the counter.
“Something sweet? You?” I ask in surprise.
“You’re not the only one spiraling after last night,” Lewis replies.
“Oh?” Does he regret what happened between us? I pause, giving him the space to elaborate.
“It’s…” He rifles through the silverware drawer, then straightens with a spoon in hand and says, “It’s not…” He starts over, only to falter again. A sigh moves through his chest, his whole body. He looks so lost and it makes that tenderness swell up inside me again.
I look at my fingers on the kitchen counter. “But you’ve done this before. You’ve decompressed with colleagues, right?”
His brows drag down. “Right. But this feels different.” He looks up then, finds my eyes and touches my pinkie. “With you, it feels different.”
Heartbeat thundering in my ears, I’m suddenly unsure if him regretting last night was what I was afraid of, or if the truly scary part is how monumental it felt between us, like so much more than just a flicker of attraction.
I lift my pinkie and crook it around his. “Yeah,” is all I manage to say. It makes it a little easier, knowing that he’s not completely immune to freaking out.
Lewis pulls back with a small smile and measures out two spoons of cocoa powder. He repeats the motions for the second cup, squints at me, and then adds a third spoon.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask carefully.
He’s the one who’s held my hand, listened, and told me to slow down, but seeing him this stuck in his head makes me forget about my worries.
Instead of answering, he stares down into the cups with his brow all scrunched up, like the cocoa powder at the bottom holds all the solutions to his problems.