There’s a knock on the door, and we quickly turn our heads to find Sam’s big frame filling the doorway.
“Hey,” she says, not moving her arms from around me, and somehow I feel guilty. But unfortunately, a hospital bed is only so big, and if I move, I’ll topple off onto the tile floor.
“Right,” Sam says, looking between the two of us and clearing his throat. “Okay. Good. I’m gonna…”
His voice trails off and he turns on his heel, heading back down the hallway. We watch him go, his footsteps fading into the distance.
I think of the tulips.
“What’s up with him?” she asks, confused.
“You… should go after him,” I say, studying her face.
She looks over at me. “Why?”
“I think you know why.” So much has felt off since I woke up, but this part of the dream world and the real world feels the same.
I push myself up, running a hand over my face, the dynamic between the three of us feeling clearer since I woke up from whatever world I was in, since I spent an entire year forced to grapple with a life without her. And I don’t want to lose her again. Not like that. But I also can’t hold her back.
Not anymore.
If Sam is her Marley, he’s real and he’s here. He understands her when she’s angry and sad. He’s the person she can be completely herself with.
“Do you think people should settle?” I ask her. “Even if it’s not what they want?”
She lets out a long sigh and throws her legs over the bed, standing up to pace the room. I watch as she pulls her hair into a messy bun, ready to resume our fight. “I never said I was settling. I’m sorry about the night of the accident—”
“I’m not,” I say, cutting her off.
She stops and looks at me.
“When I thought you were dead, all I had left were the last words you said to me. I replayed those words over and over.”
“Kyle, listen. I—”
“Let me finish. I need to say this, okay?”
She nods and reaches behind her to find the chair, slowly sitting down.
“That night, I wasn’t ready to hear you because… I was afraid you were right.” I glance up to see her eyes are wide with surprise. She was definitely not expecting this. But I’m not the same Kyle I was. “To turn around and not see you there… I thought that was the worst nightmare imaginable. But… to turn around and know that there was no you anymore, anywhere?” I let out a ragged breath, remembering that pain. That year I spent thinking she was dead. “Fuck, Kim. That blew up my whole world.”
She doesn’t say anything, her hands tightly gripping the wooden arms of the chair.
“But I still had your words. I finally listened to them. And I learned to stand on my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be,” I say, thinking of Marley. The internship. Journalism classes. “I learned who I am. Without you.”
She’s stunned into silence. That never happens. I keep going, finally saying the words I needed to say but was never able to find.
“We settled, Kim. You and me. And we weren’t happy.”
She opens her mouth. Once. Twice. Struggling to find words. Finally they come. “Who are you, and what have you done with Kyle Lafferty?”
“Oh, that guy?” I give her a small smile. “He was a selfish kid, so I left his ass in the dust. Then I grew up. Or—I’m growing up,” I say as she wipes tears from her cheeks. “Well, I’m trying to,” I admit.
She stands and gives me a long, uncertain look, unsure of where we go from here.
I reach out. “Come here.” She hurries into my arms, and I hold her close, her tears falling onto my shirt. “You’re my best friend, Kim. I want you to be so happy,” I tell her. “At Berkeley. Go find what you love. Find someone you love. Find that person you can’t live without. He’s out there.”
The person I can’t live without. I think of Marley. How it felt to hold my entire world in my arms. How it feels to have it ripped away from me.
“Yeah, right,” Kim says with a tearful laugh as she pulls away. She quickly grabs a tissue and blows her nose.
“Hell, go on a date with Sam—”
The words are barely out of my mouth before she slugs me with her sling-free arm.
“You’re stupid,” she says, acting like I’ve just said the craziest thing.
I grab on to the bed rail, smiling at her as I catch myself. I see it, though. In her eyes. That thought. That glimmer of a possibility.
“Don’t settle again, okay?” I say after I right myself. “Ever. And I won’t either.”
She nods, agreeing, and we shake on it. “Deal.”
I take a deep, determined breath as her hand slides out of mine.
For the first time since I woke up, I feel a little closer to peace. Because I will not settle.
I won’t give up until I have Marley in my arms again.
32
I’m back in my house.
My house, but not. The world I live in now is leaking in more and more every time I close my eyes. It’s weird, even scary how much my dreams are changing.
“Kyle.”
I follow the sound of the voice down a hallway, the walls crumbling around me as I fight to get to her, peeling paint giving way to the pale walls of the hospital, the standard-issue TV, the big window in the corner.
I finally find her at the kitchen table. I can see her, but… barely.
I squint, straining, the colors so dull.
“Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?” she asks, her voice the same as I remember it. Sadder now.
I try with everything in me to get closer to her, to hold her again, but my feet won’t move. My legs strain, fighting to take even a single step in her direction. I look down to see my feet are enclosed in grass and mud, the cherry blossoms from the pond sprinkled around my ankles.
The second I look back up at her, I jolt back into my hospital room, my sheets twisted tightly around my body, sweat beaded across my forehead, and the loss consumes me again.
* * *