“What about after CBS? How about dinner? I’ll cook. What do you like to eat? I’ll make whatever you want. Burgers? Steak? I can make roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. My mom taught me. I bake mean chocolate chip cookies. You like those, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I can’t tonight.”
“So when’s good? Any night this week is okay.”
His head was swimming. There was nowhere to look. At the ground were her long bare legs and red-painted toenails. If he looked up, there were her glossy smiling red lips and her Bambi eyes. And in between were her eager standout nipples. What was that easy-on, easy-off dress even held up by? There were no straps, no sleeves, barely any elastic. One deep breath, one tug and—
Julian pulled out his phone. “How about I call you.” He couldn’t look into her bright beaming face. She read off her number to him, he punched it into his phone, and she stood next to him, looking over his hand, telling him to press the call button to make sure he got all 10 digits right. Her bare arm pressed against his leather jacket. She smelled of coconut lotion, of freshly washed hair, of coffee and mint breath, of musk.
Julian didn’t call her. A few times she called him, left messages. He didn’t return them. He stopped going to Coffee Plus Food and to HomeState. For the first time in many years, he skipped the gym in the mornings and arranged with Buster to meet up later in the day instead. Maybe soon she’d get the drift and stop calling. He really hoped so. Because the next step was going to be changing gyms and getting a new number.
Nearly every night Julian thrashed through dreams from which he would wake drenched in sweat, panting, sometimes even screaming. He became afraid of closing his eyes at night.
He kept disturbing Ashton with his dementia at all hours. He dreamed of Riley shaking Ashton’s body, shrieking at him as if they were in a fight, not realizing he was already dead. Everyone was in the ditch with Ashton—ice babies, Riley, Julian. He dreamed of dragging what he thought was a man’s corpse through London streets, looking for a place to dump him, but when he threw the man in a ditch, it was Mirabelle. And sometimes, it was Ashton. And sometimes it was Julian himself. He dreamed of being choked, of being pelted with rocks and glass, sometimes with parachute mines, and sometimes with babies.
He dreamed of Normandie.
Pushing, pushing, pushing past the backs of people, like he just had to see what was there, and on the street lay a dead Ashton. And a dead Mirabelle. Unsayable things happened on Normandie, the street he had never been on before last week and which now was a boiling river of blood.
In the middle of one especially smothering night, he and Ashton climbed upstairs on the roof deck, sat in their shorts with jackets draped over their naked shoulders, sat shivering in the dark, high in the mountains, and stared at the gleaming lights of Los Angeles valley, listening for the sound of the coyotes, trying to make sense of things.
Julian hid his face from his friend. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Everything had been all right for years. Since the craniotomy and the induced coma, he had lived mostly dream free. It’s true, when he had been under the coma’s evil spell, he dreamed then, too, though he’d forgotten about what. Something unbearable. In some ways it was worse than this. At least now he could wake up. Then, he was forced to keep dreaming until the circle-jerk doctors deigned to bring him out of it. He had been at their mercy, they never gave him a choice. Had they asked him, he would’ve told them what to do with their fucking induced coma.
He had told Ashton about some of the dreams, about the embattled, endangered girl whom he had just met, whom he barely knew. He didn’t tell him about the worst of the worst—the infant boy in the fire and the heart eaters—which he simply could not put into words. But he had told him about the great burning city and the black screaming caves.
Tonight, Julian told him nothing.
He couldn’t confess to Ashton about the bloodied ice babies shattering like glass over his corpse.