Dark Matter(21)

“The same way one drink turns into two, which turns into three, and on it goes. I feel terrible.”

His lips on the back of her neck put a delicate shiver down her spine.

She says, “You’re not getting out of this.”

Now he kisses the side of her neck. It’s been a while since he touched her like this.

His hands glide into the water.

He interlaces their fingers.

“You should eat something,” she says. “I’ll warm up your plate.”

She tries to step past him on her way to the fridge, but he blocks her path.

Facing him now, she stares up into his eyes, and maybe it’s because they’ve both been drinking, but there’s an intensity in the air between them, as if every molecule has been charged.

He says, “My God, I’ve missed you.”

“Exactly how much did you drink to—?”

He kisses her out of nowhere, backing her up against the cabinets, the counter digging into her back as he runs his hands over her hips and pulls her shirt out of her jeans, his hands on her skin now, as hot as an oven range.

She pushes him back toward the island.

“Jesus, Jason.”

Now she studies him in the low light of the kitchen, trying to figure out this energy he’s swaggered back into their home with.

“Something happened while you were out,” she says.

“Nothing happened, other than I lost track of time.”

“So you didn’t chat up some young thing at Ryan’s party who made you feel twenty-five again? And now you’re back here with a hard-on, pretending—”

He laughs. Beautifully.

“What?” she says.

“That’s what you think is going on here?” He takes a step toward her. “When I left the bar, my mind was elsewhere. I wasn’t thinking. I stepped out into traffic and this cab nearly splattered me all over the pavement. Scared the hell out of me. I don’t know how to explain it, but ever since that moment—in the grocery store, walking home, standing here in our kitchen—I have felt so alive. Like I see my life with force and clarity for once. All the things I have to be grateful for. You. Charlie.”

She feels her anger toward him beginning to melt.

He says, “It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country. I’m rambling now.”

Daniela goes to him and cups his face in her hands and kisses him.

Then she takes his hand and leads him upstairs.

The hallway is dark, and she can’t think of the last time her husband did something to make her heart pound like this.

At Charlie’s room, she stops for a moment and leans her ear against the closed door, logs the muffled noise of music blaring through headphones.

“All clear,” she whispers.

They move down the creaky hallway as softly as they can.

In their bedroom, Daniela locks the door and opens the top drawer of her dresser, searching for a candle to light, but Jason has no time for it.

He pulls her over to the bed and drags her down onto the mattress, and then he’s on top of her, kissing her, his hands moving under her clothes, roaming her body.

She feels wetness on her cheek, her lips.

Tears.

His.

Holding his face between her hands, she asks, “Why are you crying?”

“I felt like I’d lost you.”

“You have me, Jason,” she says. “I’m right here, baby. You have me.”

As he undresses her in the darkness of their bedroom, she has never wanted anyone so desperately. The anger is gone. The wine-sleepiness has vanished. He has taken her back to the first time they made love, in her Bucktown loft with the downtown glowing through the giant windows that she’d cracked open so the crisp October air could trickle in, carrying with it the late-night noise of people stumbling home from bars and distant sirens and the engine of the massive city at rest—not completely shut down, never off, just a comforting, baseline idle.

As she comes, she fights not to cry out in their bedroom, but she can’t contain it, and neither can Jason.

Not tonight.

Because something is different; something is better.

They haven’t been unhappy these last few years, quite the opposite. But it’s been a long, long time since she felt that sense of giddy love that effervesces in the pit of your stomach and spectacularly upends the world.





“Mr. Dessen?”

I jerk awake.

“Hi. Sorry to startle you.”

A doctor is staring down at me—a short, green-eyed redhead in a white lab coat holding a cup of coffee in one hand, a tablet in the other.

I sit up.

It’s day outside the window next to my bed, and for five seconds, I have absolutely no idea where I am.

Through the glass: low clouds blanket the city, cutting off the skyline above one thousand feet. From this vantage point, I can see the lake and two miles of Chicago neighborhoods filling the space in between, everything muted under a somber, midwestern gray.

“Mr. Dessen, do you know where you are?”

“Mercy Hospital.”

“That’s right. You walked into the ER last night, pretty disoriented. One of my colleagues, Dr. Randolph, admitted you, and when he left this morning, he handed your chart over to me. I’m Julianne Springer.”