Slowly, I roll over to face him. The sight of his eyes so close, open and looking back at me, turns my stomach inside out and my bones to jelly.
Max doesn’t say anything. He just watches me intently, his eyes a little sleepy. I wonder if I didn’t just dream about the slides and the yurt—maybe I dreamed it all. The whole thing with Max last night. Maybe I started earlier in this room. Maybe nothing even happened. It’s all so unclear these days.
Then Max swallows, and as if it’s the most casual thing in the world, he uses both arms to pull me to him, kissing me as my whole body melts into his.
I don’t know if we’re kissing, or just breathing each other in, but the point is that I cannot get enough Max.
“I was afraid you would swim away.” I pull away just long enough to tell him.
“What?” he mutters between kisses.
“I was afraid you would swim away like the fuzzy fish.”
“Less talking, more kissing,” Max demands, and I giggle and oblige. Until I catch sight of something over the top of his shoulder. Outside the window giant fluffy snowflakes are falling.
“Snow?” I jump out of bed and run to the glass. But outside there’s no snow at all. Of course there isn’t.
“Could you come back here, please?” Max calls. “Lying here was much more enjoyable about thirty seconds ago.”
“I swear I just saw snowflakes out the window, but when I looked, there was nothing there . . .” I explain as I climb back in beside Max and tuck my back into his chest. Soon enough Max’s arms are fully wrapped around my body again and my head is in the crook of his neck.
“You have cocooned me,” I declare.
Max’s voice comes out in his Invasion of the Body Snatchers voice again, deep and robotic. “She-has-been-cocooned,” he says. And after a brief moment of silence, I start giggling hysterically.
“God, you are weird,” I say. But I keep laughing.
That’s when Oliver bursts in and cries, “Sophie and I are getting married!”
“Excuse me?” I say, sitting up. Max just buries his head under a pillow.
“You heard me,” Oliver says. “Sophie and I are getting married, and you are all invited.”
Sophie saunters in behind Max, wearing big sunglasses and looking a little worse for wear. “Actually, we made out when I was drunk,” she mutters. “And also, we found Margaret Yang.”
31
Teddy Bears
I GUESS IF I’m being truly honest, I had pictured Margaret Yang as looking like she walked out of a Marvel action movie, wearing some slick suit and a pair of five-inch stiletto heels. She’d pop open a briefcase and punch in a bunch of numbers, then zap us between the eyes with a minuscule metal stun gun, and we’d be all fixed and ready to roll.
Instead, the Margaret Yang we find seated at the Blue Cow diner on the corner of Main and Milk Streets, just off the Wells campus, is clad in a thick gray cable-knit sweater and Crocs with wool socks, her hair pinned in a loose bun at the back of her head.
“Professor Yang?” I say quietly as I stand over her booth, on top of which she has spread out about six different newspapers, coffee, waffles, eggs, and bacon. So much food for such a small woman. She’s clearly been here for hours, because she was here earlier when Sophie and Oliver came to get coffee and overheard her talking to a student.
In response, Margaret Yang silently holds her left hand up to my face, while her right hand skims the last lines of an article she is reading. I am tempted to order a coffee while we wait, and Max is definitely eyeing her bacon like he hasn’t eaten in days.
“Done,” she says, still not looking up, and instead pausing to take a sip of coffee. “You may sit.”
Carefully, Max and I take a seat across the booth from her.
“You may present your topic,” Margaret starts to say as she pours some more cream in her mug. But then she looks at us for the first time. “Oh,” is all she says.
“Hi,” I say, with a small hand wave.
“You aren’t in my Neuro 260 class,” she observes.
Max and I shake our heads.
“So you are not here to present your research topics for next semester,” she says.
We shake our heads again.
Margaret Yang stares at us as she slowly stirs her coffee. “So, tell me, then,” she says as she looks down to set her spoon on her plate, her face breaking into a warm smile. “How is Jerry the dog?”
“So, let me make sure I’ve got this right,” Margaret says, now on her third cup. I am gratefully clutching my own mug and have nearly matched her in refills, while Max is chowing down on a fruit-covered waffle. We’ve told her everything. About the dreams, and finding each other again. About our work with Petermann and his arrest and the road trip. “You are seeing odd things pop up in your reality that you know shouldn’t be.”
“Yesterday I saw my dog drive by on a motorcycle,” is all I can think to say in response.
“And Petermann told you he believes it’s dream bleeding,” Margaret says.