The Cabin - Jasinda Wilder Page 0,76

smile. “I’d really like that.”

“Good.” He lifts the mimosa in his hand. “Maybe we plan on going after lunch, though. I’m feeling pretty good right now, don’t know about you.”

“Pretty good,” I say, smirking as I finish the last of mine. “But I think one more might go down real nicely.”

We don’t end up going for a drive.

We get to talking on the dock over one more mimosa, one more reveals that he actually bought two bottles of champagne, and then it’s noon and we’re cackling on the dock together, and I’m realizing I’m having fun. Real, actual fun. No strings, no expectations, no reminders of sad things, just conversation that goes from rabbit trail to funny story to rabbit trail to lists of favorite authors and favorite movies.

Despite having little to no formal education, I discover he’s widely read, and can discuss classics like Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn and The Three Musketeers as easily as he can the giants of science fiction and thrillers and everything in between.

At some point, he excuses himself to his cabin and returns with a giant block of Colby cheese, a package of deli salami, a jar of pickles, and a twelve-pack of beer. I excuse myself to my cabin and come back with bars of chocolate and my iPhone and a small Bluetooth speaker that Tess, for some reason, packed into my duffel bag, and we go into music lists, playing favorites from my library and then his.

Suddenly it’s sunset, and I don’t know where the hours went.

I’m sleepy.

We’ve been into discussions of classical, and I choose my favorite Bach cello suite played by Rostropovich. The music soothes and me and lulls me.

Him, too.

Conversation fades.

I feel him beside me, listening to the slow golden curving notes of the cello.

I sink into something like slumber, wherein I’m not fully asleep, but not awake either, just floating. Lilting on the cello and the alcohol and Nathan’s easeful presence and a day of sunshine and good food…

I wake up abruptly. I’m warm, covered.

My eyes open.

I’m in bed. On top of the covers, with my favorite blanket over me. I’m dressed as I was, minus my shoes.

He carried me to bed, covered me.

He was in my home.

Weird: this is home. It feels as much a home as my house back in the Atlanta suburbs.

My emotions have never felt so complicated.

They are so complicated, in fact, that it’s easier to just go back to sleep and pretend everything is fine, fine, just fine.

I can lie to myself a little bit longer…can’t I?

Kintsugi Heart

Sleep tonight is a long, long time in coming.

So long, in fact, that tonight becomes tomorrow and then it’s dawn and I’ve been lying in my bed staring at the ceiling wrestling with those pesky motherfuckers, my emotions.

I like Nadia Bell.

A lot.

I like talking to her. I like having coffee with her. Eating food with her.

For the first time since Lisa died, I feel like life is worth living. Which makes me realize fully that I didn’t really believe it to be worth living up until now. I wasn’t living. I was just subsisting. Not dying. I was an automaton cycling through my programming, a clockwork golem clothed in skin and bones.

Nadia puts fire in my belly. Or, at least, a spark in my chest.

But that’s problematic at best. Because…Lisa.

She’s in me. She’ll always be in me. She’s woven into the DNA of who I am. Missing her is like breathing. She was my true love, my one and only. I promised her till death do us part, and I fucking meant it, goddammit, I just never anticipated that particular vow would be tested. Richer or poorer, sure; I’ve been poor my whole damn life, and while I wouldn’t mind trying rich I know it ain’t gonna fix the problems inside me. In sickness and in health, yeah. Easy. I’ll sit at her bedside and bring her soup and take her temperature and I’d even wipe her ass if I had to.

I didn’t get that. We got to be a little less poor, a little more comfortable. There were flus and stomach bugs, and blowout fights over dumb shit after which we made up delightfully, sinfully, endlessly.

But then she died, and she’s gone, and I vowed till death do us part. I vowed.

Death parted us.

I know, I know, I had that dream. But it was a stupid dream, dammit. It wasn’t really her, visiting me in my sleep. This ain’t Ghost. It was my subconscious playing