Chapter 37 #2
‘I am not sure, still. But I wonder, sometimes.’
* * *
On nights when I wasn’t performing, I was usually conked out by eleven.
But the winds – plural, a battalion of winds riding chariots over and through the city – made falling asleep impossible.
My venetian blinds clacked against the window frame, and I shuddered at the house’s every creak and groan.
Outside, something snapped and tumbled down the road.
As soon as one car alarm went quiet, another began.
I curled up smaller and smaller beneath the duvet, gathering it around me like a shell. My muscles were crying out for a chance to repair themselves after the stage call.
I lay stiffly for ages, debating with myself. Doubting. Daring.
Finally, I pushed myself out of bed, the cold settling on me like a necklace.
The anglepoise lamp in the living room was on, and I blinked in its glow.
The wall clock showed it was half past one.
Sander was reading a book – I spotted a gap on the shelf where The House of the Spirits had been.
He twisted on the sofa and looked up at me, so profoundly unbothered by the storm that I considered saying I’d only come to get a glass of water.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and I wanted his voice beside me. Wanted him beside me.
I moved words around in my head, trying to find the most concise combination to explain that I wanted him to sleep with me, but not like that; that I wanted comfort, but not that kind of comfort; that I wanted him, but not like that, but also somewhere on the way to that…
The wind scored the silence – gothic, apocalyptic.
I offered my hand.
He looked at it, at my bare arm, my eyes. Then, in one fluid motion, he rolled off the sofa, closed the book, and returned it to the shelf.
I rubbed my arms for warmth as he followed me into the bedroom. I switched on the bedside lamp so he wouldn’t bump into anything. ‘Do you want me to keep it on?’
He gently waved off the question, slipping under the duvet. I slotted back into the imprint I’d left in the mattress. As I reached to switch the lamp off again, it occurred to me, in a way that made time slow, that this was exactly what married couples did every night without a second thought.
‘Thank you,’ I said into the dark.
‘No problem.’ The outline of his finger pointed to the ceiling. ‘No fear.’
I treated it like a spell, allowed it to cover me like another blanket: No fear.
Carefully, I pulled my side of the duvet up to my chin, keeping my arms at my sides as if I were in a military bunk. The bed was warmer with both of us in it.
Something simmered in my chest, threatening to boil over: an urge to confess everything.
To tell him how, even after a morning class and five hours of rehearsals, he always smelt like a forest shot through with mist. The number of times I would have happily stopped whatever I was doing to gaze into his eyes, if they didn’t make me feel so light-headed.
That he was responsible for some of my highest and lowest spirits.
I bit down on my lip to lock the words in, like stifled laughter in a game of hide and seek.
The winds raged on and on, and our breathing relaxed into the same pattern.
I waited for sleep, but the waiting only kept it away.
I tried not to think about the risk of pulling a muscle during class, or throwing my back out like Magne had a week earlier, or whether the chimney stack would collapse and bring the whole roof down with it.
Something ricocheted off the windowpane. I balled my hands into fists.
I might have projected catastrophes through the night, if not for Sander’s knuckle gently brushing my cheekbone.
Slowly, I angled myself towards him, not daring to breathe. I could barely see him, but my hand found his, resting where our pillows met.
His whisper was another brush across my face, even softer. ‘Storms thin the walls between worlds.’
An unexpected thing to hear, and yet from Sander, there wasn’t an ounce of strangeness to it. ‘Which worlds? Heaven and earth?’
‘Earth, and other worlds. All the worlds hidden inside this one.’
‘Like the worlds inside a theatre. Or a book.’
‘Yes. Like those.’ He lined up his hand with mine. ‘And others still. Same for snow, and mist. They thin the walls, too.’
‘What happens when the walls thin?’ I felt closer to sleep than I had all night, but now I didn’t want it to come.
‘Think of the mist in Cinderella. Giselle. Beauty.’
‘The snowy forest in Nutcracker,’ I said, comprehending. ‘A peek into other worlds.’
‘Yes.’
I couldn’t read his face in the dark, but suspected he would be just as inscrutable with the lamp on. There was something in his voice, though. He wanted to tell me more.
‘What else happens?’
‘Words come more easily,’ he said. ‘Words that might not be said any other time. Any other night.’
I wondered if he could hear the thud of my heartbeat. Physically, we’d been this close many times, but always standing, always in the light.
‘What sort of words?’
The wind sliced the night, over and over, deep enough to leave a mark. I willed it on. Willed whatever words were hiding behind that invisible wall to cross over.
He lapsed into silence. So close, and I didn’t even know to what.
Then his arm rose, experimentally, from under the covers and reached across my shoulder. Curved around my back. I mirrored him, my movements blurred in the dark, everything dream-like.
‘Sander.’
‘Mm.’
I put my trust in the storm to deliver words. Any words.
‘What’s your first language?’
‘First language I spoke?’ His breath was warm on my brow. ‘I do not remember.’
‘What language do you think in?’
I almost drifted off in the pause, but caught his answer as I finally left the winds behind:
‘Dance.’