Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“Ibrought food, drugs, and so many romance novels, you’ll have to replace the batteries in your vibrators,” Aunt Joan announces as she pushes her way into Mom’s hospital room with two bulging bags slung over each shoulder.
At barely five feet tall, she looks ready to topple over from the extra weight.
Rose steps in with her and goes straight to check Mom’s IV. She’s been Mom’s nurse again for the past two days, and I appreciate how on top of things she is. Some of the nurses take forever to administer meds, but Rose always has just what Mom needs ready to go.
Mom scoots up in bed and smirks at her best friend. “I knew there was something else I needed from home.”
“I’m not bringing you a vibrator,” I retort as I take the bags from Aunt Joan and set them down on the floor near the wall and out of the way. I don’t need anything else to trip over.
“I gotta get you one of these tiny ones.” Aunt Joan digs around in her purse. “Ah, dolls balls, I can’t find it. But I know it’s in here somewhere. I never leave home without it.”
I roll my eyes. Aunt Joan, ladies and gentlemen. Irreverent, crass, and annoying as hell. And this is her at her tamest. She has no filter, no control, and doesn’t give a shit what people think about her. Sometimes I’m jealous of that. Most of the time it just embarrasses me.
“Not in my hospital.” Rose jams a syringe of fresh meds into Mom’s IV before shaking her finger at Aunt Joan. “That’s something you do on your own time, in the privacy of your own home.”
Aunt Joan smirks, pulls a worn paperback from one of her bags, and holds it out for Rose. “On the house.”
Rose narrows her eyes, but her lips have a slight mischievous tilt. “I’ll leave it in the break room. For someone who likes that sort of thing.”
“Sure you will.” Aunt Joan winks at Rose as she leaves with the book tucked under her arm. Then Mom’s oldest friend starts rooting around in the bags, pulling things out one at a time, like she’s moving in and setting up house.
First, she plugs in one of those room fresheners that go into an outlet.
It smells like a chemical version of a florist’s shop.
I promptly unplug it. I can’t stand strong smells, and Aunt Joan knows it.
She protests, but I win on account of the fact that I’m the one sleeping here with Mom.
Next, she pulls out a Tupperware container of brownies.
I get excited and reach for them—brownies are my favorite—but the wink she gives me stops me in my tracks.
“What’s in them?” I ask suspiciously.
“Something for your mom’s pain.” She looks me up and down. “And something to help you chill out.”
“I don’t need to chill out, Joan. This is serious.”
“Exactly.”
I put my hands on my hips and square off with her. The only way to deal with Aunt Joan is to set strong boundaries and hope to outlast her. “You’re a forty-something year old mom of high school kids. Aren’t you a little old to be making pot brownies?”
Aunt Joan sobers and crosses her arms, meeting my challenge. “Not when my best friend has cancer.”
I bite my lip and set the brownies next to Mom’s bed. She can win this round, but I plan to toss whatever is left when I get back from class. “I should get going.”
“You have to see what I made first.” Aunt Joan rummages through the biggest bag and pulls out a massive quilt.
It’s thin, but large enough to wrap around me twice.
Each square has something written on it in permanent ink.
It takes me a few minutes to realize the whole thing is covered in things she and Mom always say, their inside jokes, and personal colloquialisms. Like ‘dolls balls,’ which started when Aunt Joan took up doll making.
After she made me the nightmare doll for Christmas, she tried to make my mom an anatomically correct miniature male about the size of a Ken doll. It was a disaster, but the result was hours of laughter and a new curse word only the two of them use.
My heart squeezes in my chest. “This is really cool, Aunt Joan.”
Tears glisten in Mom’s eyes, but soon she’s laughing—full on laughing, like I haven’t heard in days. A smile splits my cheeks, even as the ache deepens in my chest.
No one would make something like this for me. No one knows me the way Aunt Joan knows Mom. The only person I have anything close to this kind of history with is Mom. And she’s…
“I really should go.” I grab my computer off the couch and stuff it in my bag. Neither Mom nor Aunt Joan pays attention.
“Remember this one...” Aunt Joan points to a square, and the two of them laugh while they reminisce.
I sneak out of the room unnoticed.
Rose is at the nurse’s station, reading. I can’t tell for sure, because she has the cover well hidden, but it looks like the book Aunt Joan gave her, which makes me want to laugh. Instead, I smile and give her a quick wave before ducking down the hall to the elevators.
When the elevator opens, I contemplate telling them I’ll take the next one, since it’s so crowded, but then I spot Cosmos. His dimpled smile when he sees me makes my toes curl. It makes me feel like my sunrise invitation for hope has finally arrived. Which is a ridiculous thought.
Despite his assertion that we should practice this ability, I haven’t seen him in days.
“We can make room,” he says, easing to the side as the other passengers pack themselves deeper into the elevator.
I give a tight smile and step into the elevator. Cosmos and I are only a few inches apart. I can feel the warmth radiating from him. It’s like the sun after a long night, and I want to lean into it, curl up in it like a cat.
“Sorry, everyone,” he offers with a half laugh. “The employee elevator in the back is broken, so things might be more crowded for a while.”
I can almost feel him willing me to look at him, to stop time, but I keep my gaze glued on the buttons. I’m still not sure what I think about this whole stopping-time thing. It’s too strange. Too impossible. Part of me fears it won’t happen again. Part of me fears it will.
He shifts positions, and his arm brushes against mine. Reflexively, I look up. Our eyes catch. Everything goes quiet. The movement of the elevator stills. Just like before, time stops.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hey,” I reply, awkwardly fiddling with the strap of my bag.
“Should we try our first official experiment?” He smiles and leans in, reaching forward, while maintaining eye contact. Is he going to touch me? Hug me? My breath hitches, and every nerve in my body sings with anticipation.
His arm skirts around me, carefully avoiding touching any part of me, and there’s a soft clack as he presses the buttons for each floor while carefully maintaining eye contact. The black center of his eyes expands, swallowing the rich brown, and my breath stutters in my chest.
This isn’t what it seems. He’s not interested in me. We’re just two people in a strange situation, able to do something we don’t understand, unexpectedly smashed in an elevator together. That’s all.
“Maybe it affects machines more than apples?” he muses.
“Huh?” I sound breathless, like I’ve been running a marathon. I can’t think past the heat pulsing between us and the sensations tingling across my skin.
“The experiment,” he says. “I tried affecting something natural—an apple. Now, we’ll try a machine.” He looks away, and everything goes back to how it was before. The elevator moves down, down, down to the lobby, without stopping on the other floors, and my heart sinks with it.
He’s clearly not as affected by me as I am by him. All he cares about is the experiment. He wasn’t fighting the urge to close the space between us the way I was. He just wanted to see if we could change something. That’s all this is, all I am. A research partner.
I spring out of the elevator as soon as the doors open, bumping into people in my haste.
I expect Cosmos to stop and look at me again, say something about how the experiment failed, but he immediately falls into step with his colleagues and disappears around the corner, leaving me standing alone, still trying to tamp down the feelings I have no right to feel and thinking way too much about how his breath felt on my neck.