Chapter Thirty-Six
‘I’m a Mike Hannigan?’ River asks later as we complete the ‘Which Friends Character Are You?’ quiz in between episodes of Friends, biscuits and a forty-minute break in which River makes me see stars using only his tongue. ‘Who is Mike Hannigan?’
‘He’s not actually in the show until the final season. He marries Phoebe.’
‘Would you say it’s an accurate result?’ He adjusts the pillow beneath his head and pulls my legs up onto his lap.
I screw up my face. ‘I think so. He was always my favourite.’ I tap the laptop. ‘It says I’m a Phoebe here, but I’d actually say I’m more of a Monica. I’m not entirely sure this quiz can be trusted anyway.’
‘Oh, I reckon you’re a Rachel,’ River muses, which, let’s be honest, is all anyone really wants to hear about themselves.
I close the laptop, turn onto my side to face River and prop my head up on my hand. ‘I was wondering. What do you miss most about home? Like, what are you most looking forward to doing when you get back?’
River scrunches his nose, thinking about it.
‘Oddly, not as much as I thought I might. I do miss my horses. I miss their company, I miss taking them out, roaming the landscape whenever I get chance. I do not miss the daily work, let me tell you. I was run ragged before I got here. Hadn’t realised how much, actually. ’
I sit up. ‘So, say you didn’t work at the ranch, what would you do instead?’
‘I’d teach horseback riding,’ he replies immediately, face relaxing into an open smile as he idly twists a lock of my hair around his fingers. ‘That’s what my mother did. She taught people to ride horses. She taught me to ride horses.’
‘That’s very cool.’
River grins and props his head into his hand.
‘Mom was an excellent instructor, best in the county, at least until … You know she actually managed to hold it together for about a year after Dad had his affair? But when she found out that his mistress was pregnant? That’s when she started drinking. And then she never taught again.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I take his hand and give it a long squeeze. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you’d make a great horse-riding instructor.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Absolutely. You’re bossy enough. And while Operation Windbag didn’t work out, you were an excellent teacher.’
River’s eyes crinkle. ‘Aww, you said Operation Windbag!’
‘If the mission name fits, I guess. Hey.’ I sit up. ‘Maybe when you get home you could try to find a way to, you know, switch things up a little. Not take so much on at Oakley Ranch when—’
He tenses beneath my hand. ‘Not an option.’
I frown. ‘Just like that? You won’t even consider it? What about Cassidy? She could help with the load. You know, I think if you just talked to her, found some common ground, you two could—’
‘I don’t think so.’
I huff. ‘So what? You’ll just never get to do the thing you truly want to do?
You’ll never teach people to ride horses?
You’ll head up the ranch for ever when you don’t actually seem to enjoy it?
Why? Because you made a promise to someone who it seems didn’t treat you or your mother very well at all?
Because you think you only matter when you’re running the show?
Because you’re as … as stubborn as a constipated mule? ’
‘All of the above.’ His eyes meet mine. ‘I don’t know, Gertie. It’s complicated.’ He sighs long and low. ‘Maybe in another life …’
‘Yeah …’ I lay my head back down onto the pillow. ‘Maybe in another life.’
*
After a dinner break in which we try and fail to eat cheese toasties while not kissing and feeling each other up every thirty seconds, I tell River that I finally understand what a ‘let’s-fuck-on-the-side-of-the-road’ phase must feel like.
Back in bed, River pulls out the fresh selection of books he got from the library, while I continue to tap away on my laptop, Cassidy’s story now unfolding so rapidly my fingers can barely keep up.
For the next few hours we read and write in companiable silence, occasionally stopping to kiss, or laugh, or grab a snack or just look at each other as if we can’t quite believe what’s happening.
‘Hmmm,’ River muses, reading from a thick hardback called The Fabric of Reality.
‘This one says that trees, caves, stones and waterfalls can all be possible interdimensional portals. Which is chafin’ my chaps because the other book –’ he picks up another hardback, this one called Quantum Mechanics and the Cosmos – ‘says that black holes are the only possible pathway between parallel universes. It’s all so confusing.
Every single one of these has a different theory. ’
I close the lid of my laptop. ‘Even if we read every single book on earth, we’d never really know for sure what’s happening, how any of it works.
All we’ve got is the best evidence in our world, right now.
The books, yeah, but also the stories on the forums, what Bridget told us about her client.
I promise you I’m going to try so hard to finish this book and get you home.
If it’s happened before, it can happen again. ’
‘I know,’ River murmurs, fluffing the pillow up behind him.
‘I just wish the pressure wasn’t all heaped onto you.
I wish I had some control over any of it …
Hey, listen to this bit. “Every quantum transition taking place in every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on Earth into myriad copies of itself.”’
‘Myriad?’ I say. ‘Jeez. So there could be more versions of us out there? Oh God, what if there’s an author in another universe writing about us?
Channelling us? What if there’s a universe in which my hair doesn’t frizz the minute it senses water in the vicinity?
Or a universe where I know exactly how to say no to people without feeling like my insides are going to rot with the guilt of expressing a single boundary? ’
River chuckles. ‘I like it.’ He scratches his chin.
‘I like the idea of other versions of me somewhere out there in the ether. Making other choices. Better ones and worse ones. Growing in different directions, but all from the same root. Like one lifetime ain’t enough for any single human to experience every single possibility, so the universe is willing to split to accommodate us.
I don’t know. It’s comforting. I like it. ’
‘I like it too,’ I say, leaning my head on his shoulder. ‘But the thought of it is giving me anemoia.’
‘What now?’
‘It’s a Greek word. It’s when you get a feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never experienced, a life you’ve never lived. Or lives, in this case.’
‘Anemoia. Huh.’
River closes the book and plants a kiss on the tip of my nose. ‘Well, if me and you exist in multiple universes, I hope we’re hanging out together in every single one of them, having as much fun as we’re having now.’
I startle at such an unexpectedly sweet sentiment from a decidedly unsentimental man. I sit up and look at him quizzically.
River blinks then, what he said seeming to echo back at him. He runs a hand over his stubble and laughs, ears turning a little pink. ‘Fucking,’ he corrects himself quickly. ‘I just meant I hope the other universe versions of us are fucking.’
‘Oh, I bet they are.’ I grin, pulling myself out from the tangle of sheets and climbing astride him. I wrap my arms around his neck and lean down to whisper in his ear. ‘And I bet they’re excellent at it there too.’
*
Over the next few days, River and I fall quite quickly into our own unlikely but delicious routine.
We start the day with sex, reasoning that because the time in which we get to enjoy each other is temporary, we should make hay while the sun shines.
Sometimes the sex is slow and deliberate, sometimes it’s verging on feral, but each time makes me feel bolder, brighter, happier than I thought sex had the power to do.
Afterwards, River makes a pot of black coffee for himself and a cup of tea for me.
The tea is always terrible and I always have to re-make it, but he’s trying hard to get it right, which makes me feel a little bit like crying for some reason.
Then, sometimes picking Squish up from next door, often on his own, and twice with Aled the Librarian, River journeys his way around the architecture, museums and galleries of London.
While he’s gone, I write. I write and I write and I write like a fiend, allowing myself to enjoy the feeling of being a conduit for a story that is happening in a world other than my own.
And then at the end of the work day, just when I think I haven’t got anything left to give, River returns from his jaunt and somehow I miraculously get a fresh surge of energy, leading me to pounce on him as soon as he appears.
Today when he returns, I cannot pounce because he’s carrying a parcel wrapped neatly in silver paper.
‘Ooh! A toy soldier? A guide to London’s bridges? Or did you get one of those cardboard King Charles masks, because I’m afraid that’s not going to work for me.’
‘A gift for you.’
‘Oh!’
I jump up from my desk and take the gift. ‘I like the silver paper,’ I say.
‘I thought you would.’
I quickly unwrap it and gasp when I see one of the most moving oil paintings I’ve ever seen.
It’s a silhouetted man and woman, desperately clinging to one another, wrapped in a dotted swirl of silver stars against sky so inky-blue it’s almost purple.
They look like they’re suspended together in another world.
‘Wow,’ I breath, pressing a hand lightly to the ornate pewter frame. ‘This is beautiful.’
‘It reminded me of us.’
I look up at him in surprise because there is no denying that the people depicted in this image are in way, way more than a temporary celestial situationship.
River, as if reading my mind, goes slightly pink in the cheeks, like he did yesterday when he said he hoped we were hanging out in all the universes.
‘Yeah. I saw it at the library, it was part of an exhibition,’ he explains, voice now a little too casual.
‘Painted by a local artist, Delphie something? And uh, yeah! It made me think of that insane manifestation ceremony you made me do!’
I break eye contact, feeling suddenly shy.
‘I love it,’ I say, propping it up on my desk next to my laptop.
He stares at me for a moment and nods once. ‘I love that you love it.’
‘I love …’
I don’t get to finish because we crash into each other once more – our bodies now more familiar to each other, but no less thrilling. As River dips me into a playful Hollywood kiss, I feel all the tension of a day hunched at the desk leaving my shoulders.
‘They should prescribe this for stress,’ I murmur, whipping off my dress as River lifts me onto the kitchen table and buries his face into my neck. ‘It’s like magic.’
‘You’re magic,’ he declares, teeth scraping my earlobe as I take off his shirt. ‘Your shoulder,’ he drops a kiss onto it, ‘is magic.’ He whispers kisses down my stomach, my whole body tightening in response. ‘Your belly button is magic.’
I reach into his jeans, taking his hard thickness into my hand. The desperate noise that comes from him in response makes me feel more powerful than I ever have. Check me out! The me of two weeks ago would never have known this was a feeling that was actually available to me. This utter … glee.
It’s going to be hard to give up.
‘Turn around,’ River commands. ‘Lean over the table. There’s a very specific viewpoint I’ve been thinking about since the day I got here.’
‘Oh River,’ I say in a faux swoon. ‘Are you saying you think my ass is magic too?’
River laughs loudly as he pulls down my underwear before standing back for a moment.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Mental picture. Actually, it’s more an album of mental pictures. A curation, if you will. For my own personal exhibition entitled: “One in a Million Ass: A Retrospective”.’
Now it’s my turn to laugh.
His hands grab firmly onto my waist and then there’s no more laughing, no more talking. There’s only the romance author and the cowboy making hay. Lots and lots of hay.