Page 74 of Second Alarm
"Okay."
"But I'll tell him."
"Okay."
"Ty?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't leave the bed."
"Okay."
He doesn't.
I fall asleep in his bed with the lamp on and the ceiling duck watching and the basil plant on the windowsill of a man who's been waiting for me his whole adult life, and I sleep for hours without moving.
Chapter 14
Ty
Iwake up at with Hanna Larsen asleep on her side next to me, her hair stuck to the pillowcase in a pattern that looks like a small weather system, and the first thing I think is that if we were going to be discreet about this we shouldn't have scheduled it for the day of the annual Station 7 fundraiser barbecue. The second thing I think is that I'm no longer in any position to say the worddiscreetabout anything.
I make coffee quietly and bring her one.
She opens one eye.
"You don't have cream?"
"I have cream."
"I don't want cream."
"Okay."
"I'm testing whether you panic."
"I don't." She sits up. The sheet is around her waist. Her collarbone has a small mark from my mouth that I notice at exactly the same second she notices it in the mirror across the room, and she looks at it, and she looks at me, and we both decide, silently, that it's going to be a turtleneck day. Today is the barbecue.
I had forgotten about the barbecue.
I hadn't forgotten about the barbecue.
"Today’s is the barbecue."
"Today is the barbecue," Hanna says.
"We'll be fine."
"Ty?"
"We'll be fine."
"We won't be fine."
"Define fine."
"Fine is a word meaning the state in which Cal doesn't, at a public fundraiser in front of eighty community determine that his best friend and his sister have, in the last twenty-four hours — "
