“When I was 13,” she began, wiggling closer, eliciting a thick groan from him. “I used to have headaches, every day.”
She stopped wiggling, looking beyond him. “Sometimes they were so bad, I couldn’t stop crying.” Her mouth thinned. “I didn’t think anything of it. My mom would give me some medicine and I’d feel better the next day. But then I started to forget things. Like my homework, and feeding our cats. Dumb stuff.” She shrugged and gave him a small smile.
He frowned, sensing this was more than just silly stuff.
“Then one morning I woke up, and I couldn’t remember my mother’s name. My sister’s. My dad. Nothing.”
He stilled her fidgeting fingers, rubbing his thumbs along her soft wrists.
“My dad was a doctor and knew something was wrong. So they took me to the hospital.” Her eyes were haunted, far away, glittering with unshed tears. “Do you know what brain cancer is, Hatter?”
His upside down crazy world paused. He couldn’t seem to catch a breath. He grabbed her head and tucked it against the crook of his neck, running his hand over the back of her thick hair.
“Are you sick, Alice?” His voice was gruff, feeling like he might choke on the question.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. “No,” she said it so calmly that it was eerie. Was she sick? She shook her head emphatically and smiled. “No,” she said stronger, “not anymore.”
The greasy ball of fear in his gut eased up and he took a shaky breath.
Alice pulled away from him, looking at him, as if she were imprinting his face to memory. Her eyes traced the curves of his face before she spoke again.
“It was the size of a golf ball. They gave me a twenty percent chance of surviving the surgery.” She grinned, but it wasn’t a happy one. It was sad, laced with memories both bitter and hard to relive. “Only time I ever saw my mother cry. But I remember after the surgery, I was lying in bed and you came to me.”
He bit his lip.
“You grabbed my hand and whispered that I would be okay.”
A wiggle, a worm of a memory tried to work its way through the muddle of his thoughts. Ephemeral dreams, never to be remembered, such fleeting silly things.
White everywhere. The memory that had nagged at him from the moment he’d seen her began to form. Like riding through a dark tunnel and finally reaching the light... blurry images took shape and in an instant he recalled the dream with perfect clarity.
He’d been asleep, when he’d heard a voice. A sweet little voice, crying and pleading with him to please come. Please come, my Hatter.
The call had become desperate, incessant.
Please, Hatter, I need you...
And he’d had no choice but to follow. He couldn’t sleep, not with the tears, and the pleas, the way that voice had driven a spear through his heart. She’d needed him. Rarely did he visit the dreaming, rarely could he enter the consciousness of others, but he’d gone to her.
Such a little thing. Frail, skin so gray and chapped. A delicate china doll lying within a white cloud. She’d been so beautiful, silent. She’d opened her eyes and told him...
“Do you remember this at all? I’m such a freak sometimes. Of course, you don’t remember. It was only a dream.” Her laugh was self-deprecating, as if she were embarrassed to admit it. Like she expected him to mock her, so she mocked herself first.
“You asked me: was I real?”
Her face turned sharply toward his.
A black strand of hair slipped over her eye. He couldn’t help himself— he had to touch her. He wrapped the silken strand around his finger. She shivered.
His voice was raw, scratchy, but he forced himself to speak, knowing how desperately she needed to hear this. “When I said, I was, you said-”
“That you were so beautiful.” Her tender words were a benediction to his ears. “And you said?” she waited for him to continue, a challenge-- he knew-- to see if it’d impacted him the way it had her. If after all these years, he could remember.
He smiled; the words as clear to him now as they’d been that day in the strange cloud full of beeping sounds. “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
“My favorite Confucius quote.” She turned her cheek into his palm. “You saved me that day, Hatter. I always felt like it was your magic that saved me. I fell in love with you that day.”
The ice around his heart thawed. She’d called him and he’d answered. His chest ached as the sky broke open with radiance, netting them in its golden wash.
“Oh, Hatter,” she half sobbed and then started kissing his face, his cheeks, his nose. Planting hot kisses and the fire that had simmered while she’d told her story, roared back.
Gods he wanted her, more than he’d ever that other Alice. He growled, grabbed the back of her head and slammed their lips together. No gentleness in this touch, he couldn’t. It’d been too long, and he’d been so empty. He needed this, her. Now.