Page 32

HARLAN

It wasn’t a dream. Olivia is still asleep beside me, and this time she stayed. I roll out of the bed quietly, leaving her to lie in and make myself a cup of coffee before taking a seat on the chair facing the window. They’re fogged up from us, which also goes to show how cold it is outside.

It’s quiet, no outside noise. Olivia asked me not to read the end of her book, but as I sit here watching her sleep, I need to know. I want to know how we ended up, in her imagination, because last night as more than anything I could have made up. I don’t have my iPad with me, and I have to wait for the Kindle app to download on my phone. While I wait, I watch her TikTok videos, she’s funny when she isn’t taking herself so seriously. It’s this window into her world where no one and everyone is watching. I like the one about her new book, and then close the app to see if Kindle has finished downloading my books. It takes me to the last page I read, and I immediately slip straight back into this world she created from nothing but one night together. How does she do that? Take one moment in time and create another universe where we are so much more than a chance encounter?

She wrote this whole life after that night. Dates and monuments of intimacy that feel real even though I know they never happened. When I read about how Olivia imagined us after that, it almost feels like it’s real. That all these fake events did transpire between us. I’m angry with her, but then I love her. Fuck. I said love, even if it was in my head. I want to apologize and say I’m sorry for a fight we just had in a book, a completely made-up, non-existent fight. My coffee is cold, and the sun is high in the mid-morning sky, yet I’m still engrossed in the book. I want it to end, I want to know what happens to us — fictional us — but I also don’t want it to end because then it’s back to real us. The ending for real us isn’t quite like this, we don’t get the happy ever after. I don’t even know if we get today? Do I want that?

I read the last page of her book, put my phone down, and just think about it. If I shut my eyes and look into the future, is that the ending or beginning I want? Do I want Olivia? After reading those pages, it’s as if I know her. More intimately than the sex or the conversations through a toilet door. Is that what Olivia wants? Love, a person to make her coffee in the morning? Does the loneliness sting her the way it does me?

I haven’t considered dating, or a partner, or love, recently, the only thing having consumed my life and my time was work. Once before I fell for the rich, beautiful girl and ended up not being enough — not enough money, class, breeding, name, connections. None of it was enough for her and in the end it ended us. I couldn’t be more, now I am more and still wonder if it’s enough. I work hard to prove a point, but who am proving it to? There’s no one who cares who I am now or what I have or haven’t got anymore. I’m alone — all the time. And if I’m alone then it doesn’t matter whether I’m enough for anyone else.

The thought of letting myself fall in love again scares me, that rejection broke me in ways I won’t ever forget. Or forgive. It isn’t fair to date when I’m unwilling to give any part of myself to another person, not entirely anyway. Olivia’s book has unsettled a part of me that was settled. I’d become comfortable with the fact I would be alone, that I didn’t need anyone else. Now, I’m sitting here wondering if I want someone else. Needs aside, what if I want that life with her? I’m afraid to consider it, angry with myself for even thinking that way. No wonder women are the way they are about love and marriage — it’s books like this that give them delusions of grandeur. They delete all the hard parts out, and only show the fairy tales and sparkly bits. In real life relationships, that wears off, and then it’s hard, ugly, dirty and someone always gets hurt. Always.

There’s knock at the door, and it wakes Olivia, but I get up and open before she’s fully awake.

“Brunch, as Miss Olivia requested.” A gentleman wheels in a room service trolley with a whole array of different foods on it. This seems to be theme with her. She has trouble deciding what she wants but she also knows exactly what she wants and doesn’t want. A beautiful contradiction.

“Thank you,” she says from behind me, her hair a mess. She’s wrapped in the hotel robe, last night’s makeup smudged under her eyes, and her smile lighting up the whole space when she sees the food. That’s her, the real unfiltered version of her and it’s gorgeous. The door clicks closed and I’m still staring at her, my mind trying to put this version of her and the version of her who wrote the book together. The puzzle pieces don’t fit quite right. “You’re staring at me, and not in a way thats says let’s go back to bed and get naked. What’s wrong?” Going back to bed and getting naked sounds so much better than the questions in my head right now.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, how hungry are you?” I ask, stepping up to her. I move her messy hair from her face, and bend to give her a good morning kiss.

“For food? Or other things?’ She has that mischievous smile again, the one that got me in trouble the first time we met.

“Other things,” I kiss her again. “Definitely other things, food can wait.”

I drag her back to bed and work up her appetite, like I do mine. Her body bows, welcomes me in, and my body explores the notion of feeling at home. Because that’s what Olivia feels like. Home. Her body moves in sync with mine, and that also scares me, how easily we fall into a rhythm. I know when she’s about to come, how to draw it out, and how to catch her when then tenuous hold on her ecstasy snaps. And even more frightening is how her body becomes the place I land when my own orgasm erupts, when I’m inside her, surrounded by her. I kiss her through it because I can’t not kiss her. I brush her hair from her sweaty face, and lose myself in the depths of her eyes, and wonder if she can see my soul the way I can see hers. I think I want forever. But only if it’s with Olivia. And I can’t tell if she wants the same with me, which is why I don’t mention it. Not yet. We’re sitting in the enormous bed, eating her thousand different breakfast foods like we did with dessert that first night. “Stop looking t me like that,” she says.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to ask me something but you’re scared to.” Nail on the head. “Spit it out chicken shit.”

Okay. “The end of the book—”

“You read it! I told you not to, is that what you were doing, up at the ass crack of dawn reading it?” She seems angry about it.

“I had to. I can’t half read a book, I’m not a monster,” I defend my decision. “Is that what you want? Do you see that life for yourself? With — with me?” Her eyes are wide, and there’s a flash of tears before she rights herself, switching personas to the one I don’t like.

“I’ve learned it doesn’t matter what I want if the other person doesn’t want it as much as I do. That’s why it’s fiction, real life isn’t what we want. It’s what we get.”

“What if you get me?” I ask, my tone off because her response makes me angry.

“You want me?” Olivia sounds like I just kicked her in the ribs, her words swallowed by the fact she can’t breathe. “Why?”

“Why not? I’m not exactly Mr Personality, I like you. A whole lot. Like cannot and have not been able to get you out of my head, and it’s making me an asshole to be around. Why not try, Olivia?”

“When you try, you get hurt,” she says, moving away from me.

“Then we don’t try, we just fucking do it. I don’t want to get hurt either.”

“I’ll hurt you,” she whispers, her voice hoarse.

“I’ll probably hurt you too, but I fucking know we have something more than one night in a hotel. I read a book about it, I know we could be so much more.”

“You’re insane.”

“So I’ve been told, but let’s be honest, you’re on the crazy train, so it’s fine.” I don’t want this to end when we check out. I want her to say yes to me.

“So what, we date?” She asks like it’s something she’s allergic to.