Your Perfect Year(13)

“Hey!” he grumbled, wrapping his arms around his chest.

“I don’t believe it!” Hannah’s voice was now shaking with anger. “Are you seriously asking me what brings me here? Have you forgotten about the opening of Little Rascals?”

Simon turned even paler. “Little Rascals? Oh, no!” He flopped back onto the pillow.

“Oh, yes!”

“I’m so sorry!” Groaning, he sat up again and ran a hand through his bedraggled, greasy hair. “I meant to just take a little rest, but I must have fallen fast asleep. I . . . I . . .” He looked at her remorsefully and tried a crooked smile, failing miserably to impress. “Honestly, I . . . I’m so sorry.”

“So am I!” Hannah couldn’t stay too angry—Simon did look pitiful. He was drenched in sweat, his top and pants clinging clammily to his body.

Her concern regaining the upper hand, Hannah covered him up again, tucked him in, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“It’s starting in half an hour, and I’ve been waiting for you since eleven.” She’d meant it as a reproach, but even to her own ears it sounded merely sad and disappointed. He looked so sick—what could she do?

“In half an hour? Is that the time?” Simon made an attempt to get up, but Hannah grasped his shoulders and pressed him gently but firmly back down.

“Stay there. I can see how lousy you’re feeling.”

“I’m afraid I am.” With a sigh and a groan, he sank down into the pillows, his eyelids fluttering. “And I’ve got a raging temperature.”

“How high is it?” Hannah peered at the thermometer on his bedside table.

“It was just under 100.8 this morning.”

“Well, well.” She couldn’t suppress a smile. “I think you’ll survive. No need to call the emergency helicopter just yet.”

“But I’m sweating like crazy.” His justification sounded rather feeble.

“I would be, too, if I were lying under three layers of covers.”

“My throat’s all swollen, look!” He placed both hands beneath his chin.

Hannah leaned forward and felt Simon’s neck. It was a little swollen. “It is,” she said, frowning. “Is it sore?”

He shook his head. “Not particularly. But I’ve taken around ten throat lozenges.”

“Was it as bad as that?”

He shook his head again. “Preventive, I guess.”

“Ah.” She wondered if it was just Simon, or merely a typically male trait, to gulp down half a bottle of pills despite an absence of real symptoms. She decided a few herbal lozenges from the box by the bed wouldn’t do him any serious harm. Then again, they probably wouldn’t help either.

“I feel totally whacked,” Simon said, continuing his lament. “I hurt all over and I feel sick. My legs gave way under me earlier . . . I only just made it to the toilet.”

“Then you’d better keep sleeping it off.” She got to her feet. She didn’t have time for any more sympathy. Simon’s alarm clock showed in glowing red figures that it was shortly after one thirty. “I’ll just grab your car keys and transfer the stuff over to my car.”

“No, wait!” He heaved himself up again, but more slowly than before. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll come with you!”

“Simon.” Hannah looked at him with a mixture of concern and severity. “For one thing, I don’t have ten minutes, and besides, you really wouldn’t be any use in that state. You said yourself that you can hardly stand up. So you’re better off staying here.”

“Are you sure?” His body sank back in slow motion as he spoke.

“Totally sure. And now I really have to go.”

“Just take my car, so you don’t have to move everything over.”

“Your car?” She couldn’t believe her ears. Simon’s old Ford Mustang was like a sacred cow to him. Well, a sacred car.

“Of course,” he replied as though it were the most normal thing in the world for him to be suggesting Hannah get behind the wheel of his prized possession. He had done it only once before. That had been a good six months ago, on his thirty-fifth birthday, when he’d spent several hours trying to drink the bar of the Hans-Albers-Eck on the Reeperbahn dry with his best friends, S?ren and Niels. They hadn’t quite managed it, but when Simon had called Hannah late that night, to beg her to pick up him and his drinking buddies because there was no way he could leave the Mustang in the red-light district, he had sounded as though they were only a small beer away from succeeding in their mission.

It had been four thirty in the morning and Hannah had been really annoyed, after having gone home alone on the subway two hours earlier. Nevertheless, she had dutifully called a taxi, dashed over to the Reeperbahn, loaded the three wasted men into Simon’s Mustang, and ferried them back to his apartment to sleep off their excesses.

When she’d reappeared at Simon’s apartment around noon the following day with a large bag of buns and three two-pint bottles of orange juice, she had rolled her eyes at their loud complaints of headaches, and she’d let Simon know in no uncertain terms that when it came to her thirtieth birthday the following year, she would expect repayment in full.

But she hadn’t really been annoyed with him; after all, in her eyes Simon hadn’t been boisterous or irresponsible often enough in recent years. It had all begun with the death of his mother and made worse by the miserable atmosphere in the editorial department. Now he tended toward caution and, unlike before, checked five times in every direction before moving, to which Hannah often reacted with an exaggerated eye roll. To think he would lose his job not three months later . . . No one could have foreseen that.