Being whatever she needed.
Her hand on his cheek felt like mercy where there had been none for so long.
Like her gold filaments were winding themselves around him, knitting something around him, something that bolstered him, made it easier to bear his own weight.
Slowly she sat up, which had the effect of dislodging him from the pillow of her thigh. She pushed him onto his back and started taking off his clothes. He let himself be manipulated. He lifted his arms up so she could work his T-shirt off and his hips when she tapped them so she could slide his pajama pants down.
He stayed passive as she climbed on top of him and used one hand to guide him inside her. As she sank down, he felt the wetness on his cheeks that wasn’t supposed to be there.
He let it be.
The funny thing was that they hadn’t said anything. She had been here, what? An hour? Two? More?
To say she had lost track of time was an understatement. As they’d…come together by the fire, time had stopped, it felt like. Nora wasn’t one for flowery language. Normally she’d have said they’d had sex by the fire, but that didn’t seem like quite the right phrase. But she wasn’t going to say they’d made love. Because they weren’t in love.
But something powerful had happened to both of them, and she didn’t need to think back to her psych rotation to figure out that it had to do with grief.
And then she’d fallen asleep in his arms.
The fire was down to embers, and the cottage was cold and dark. He must have covered them with the quilt at some point, because they were both tucked under it.
However much time had passed, it had elapsed in silence. She’d tried to apologize at his door for her sudden, impulsive appearance, but that felt like a lifetime ago.
And he hadn’t said a single word after he’d chanted her name those three times.
There were different kinds of silence. Everyone else always remarked on how Jake was so quiet. How he rarely spoke. Sometimes they even used the word mute. She, on the other hand, did not experience Jake that way. He said enough. He said the right things. When he didn’t speak, it was generally because he didn’t have anything to say—and what a rare thing it was, the ability to hold one’s tongue.
But this silence from him was different. It was an active, almost reverential silence. An acknowledgment of something. She wasn’t sure exactly what, except that again, she felt like it had to do with grief. With honoring it, maybe. Making room for it. Yeah, that’s what this silence was about, making room for things.
It had been a silence so profound, she half wondered if her voice worked anymore. If his did.
But the silence couldn’t go on forever. She didn’t know if he was awake. He was spooning her from behind, and she couldn’t see his face. She shifted a little, her intent to pull away enough to turn over, but he banded his arms more tightly around her.
“Jake, I’m—”
“If you’re about to apologize again for feeling bad that your grandma died, you can just cut it out right now.” His voice, low and grumbly, was familiar, but it was also a surprise.
“I wasn’t,” she lied.
“If you have to apologize for feeling bad about your grandma, do I have to apologize for feeling bad about Jude?”
“No! That’s my point. The two things are not the same.” They weren’t. They just weren’t.
“They are the same.” He spoke sharply, and he never did that. “They are exactly the same. We had people, and now we don’t have them.”
She didn’t agree, but it felt disrespectful to keep arguing. “I should go.”
“I got a phone.”
“What?” She pulled against his embrace, and he let her go this time. She flipped over. “A cell phone?”
“Yeah. Which means I got Wi-Fi.”
“You got Wi-Fi?” Holy crap. Had she fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland?
“Yeah. Which means if you have your computer with you, we can watch a movie.”
“You want to watch a movie?” She was aware that merely repeating everything he said with the last syllable emphasized was not doing a lot for her reputation as an intelligent person.
“Yeah, let’s watch one of your zombie movies.”
“But…it’s the middle of the night.”
“You got somewhere to be?”
No. She had nowhere to be. The clinic was closed until January second. She had fled Toronto prematurely, so she had nowhere to be except her room