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 at the Mermaid. And while she was fond of it, it was no accident that she’d driven right past it earlier tonight—on her way here.
“No,” she said quietly. “Nowhere to be. My computer’s in my car, though. In my suitcase.”
“Okay, then.” He got to his feet and extended a hand. He helped her up, settled the quilt around her shoulders, and pointed her toward the kitchen. “You make popcorn. I’ll be back soon.”
Chapter Nineteen
Zombies are metaphorical, right?” Nora asked twenty-four hours later.
“You’re asking me?” Jake rolled over to face her as the closing credits of Dawn of the Dead rolled.
“Yeah, I’m asking you.”
“Well, you’re asking the wrong guy.”
“Come on. I mean, Dawn of the Dead—this one and the remake—are clearly about consumer culture.”
“Clearly.” He smiled lazily at her. He was making fun of her.
She rolled her eyes, but she secretly liked it. “And Plan 9 from Outer Space”—which they’d watched earlier in the day—“is clearly about nuclear fear.”
“Clearly.”
She threw a pillow at him.
“Yes. So clearly we can pick out a metaphor for individual movies—they reflect the fears of the era in which they’re made. But what I’m really asking is, is there a super-metaphor? Like, beyond the scope of any individual movie. Is it apocalypse? Or is it not that complicated—is it just fear itself? What do zombies mean?”
“I thought zombies meant overtired med students.”
Right. That was what her grandma had always said.
She swallowed hard. She’d forgotten for a moment. She was rolled up in the coziest cocoon of zombie movies—they’d watched four since last night—and sex, and she’d momentarily forgotten reality.
“Hey,” he whispered, cupping her chin. He’d only referenced her grandma’s interpretation of zombies as a joke, she knew, but thinking about her grandma was like a punch to the solar plexus.
“Hey,” he said again, rolling over so he was on top of her. They hadn’t bothered getting dressed since the last time they’d had sex—before the last movie. He was hard. Not just his penis, but all over. And even though he was propped on his forearms and holding most of his weight off her, he was heavy. Heavy in a good way. It felt like he was mooring her with his body. “You want to cry or you want…”
She smiled. First because this was how the past twenty-four hours had gone. He had let her lead. Which meant sometimes he held her while she stood at his front window and looked at the snow falling steadily over the lake and cried. And sometimes they…did other stuff.
And that was the second reason she was smiling. It seemed like her vocabulary failure of last night had infected him—speaking of zombie metaphors—too. He didn’t know what to call it anymore, either.
And maybe she also smiled a little bit because she was happy. A little bit. Mixed in with all the sadness.
A steady diet of napping, sex, zombie movies, and snacks, it turned out, made her happy.
But she also didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. She was leaning on him pretty hard right now, and she didn’t think he minded, but she didn’t want him to think she had any misconceptions about what was happening. So as a reminder—to both of them—she said, “I want you to get inside me, Jake.” He groaned—he liked that answer—and she wrapped her legs around his waist. “ASAP, actually,” she added, grinding herself on him.