Good at Being Alive(32)

I normally wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this sweatshirt, but…it was unusually sweet of Theo. And I’m really freaking cold.

At long last, the boat leaves the dock, heading down the wide canal of Keizersgracht toward Prinsengracht.

Theo waves a hand in my direction. “I suppose you have a thousand bizarre facts in your head about Amsterdam that you’re dying to share.”

I scowl at him. I did have facts, but I’m not going to tell him now. I’m going to keep them all for myself.

He laughs. “Tell me your facts, Rebecca. It was a joke.”

I give in only because he got me the sweatshirt.

“These were all warehouses,” I tell him, pointing at the houses up and down the canal.

There are a million periods of time I’d love to travel to if I could, and this is one of them. The Dutch East India Company was terrible and ruthless and did awful things to people in many countries, but I’d love to just see Amsterdam back then, with its barges delivering precious goods from faraway lands. “At one point, Amsterdam’s houses held six million pounds of pepper.”

He raises a brow. “So no one lived in them?”

I shake my head. “They did, just on the upper floors.” I point across the street to a hook swinging from a gable roof. “That’s how they’d move furniture in. A pulley system. They still use them. Amsterdam was like central storage for everything in the fucking world.” I point across the street to a plaque above one of the doors. “A lot of the homes still have a drawing that kind of tells you what they stored.”

“Is that a fox?” he asks, squinting at the plaque.

It looks like it. I still want to time travel to Amsterdam in the 1600s, but I think I’d avoid the houses packed to the gills with foxes.

Following the canal ride, we wander through the shops and stalls in the Nine Streets section. Theo’s gaze lingers a moment too long on the window of a jewelry store. Is he hunting for a gift to bring his complication? I’m not sure why that annoys me.

The shops get slightly cheaper. K-beauty I don’t need and jewelry shops where I’d buy something wildly unnecessary just because I can afford it.

I’ve got to come back with Bron—

I catch the thought midstream and stop myself with a wince. When will it stop feeling like a punch to the gut? When will I stop needing to remind myself she’s gone? It takes seven years for your body to regenerate new cells. I’m scared it’s going to take seven years until I stop picking up the phone to text her.

I’m lost in these thoughts, struggling not to cry, when Theo’s hand slides to the small of my back, pulling me to the other side of him so that I’m not hurt by some boys shoving each other in the street.

I’ve noticed that he does this, and that he stays close when we’re in a crowd, as if I’m actually his wife and he doesn’t want to lose me.

It’s the sort of nice I could get used to, could grow to like, if I allowed myself to do so…which I won’t.

“You don’t want to buy something for your complication here?” I ask, lifting a small package of edibles aloft. “Is this something she’d like?”

He tenses and his eyes fall closed for a moment, as if it’s his way of keeping me from a room he lets no one enter. “You’re making too big a deal of that.”

“You were going away with her for the holidays, right? You don’t generally take a woman to Puerto Rico for a week if it’s not a big deal.”

“I’m not discussing this while wearing a microphone,” he says. “And actually, I’m not discussing it with you at all.”

I swallow. Maybe it is serious with her. Maybe it’s so serious he can’t stand to sully it by sharing a single detail with me. It’s strange, the way my stomach drops. The way it suddenly feels like the words he’s not saying could matter one day.

That night, we have an early dinner, made unpleasant by the food we’re served—raw herring in its natural form, followed by sausage and mashed potatoes mixed with sauerkraut—and made awkward and dull by the presence of cameras and the fact that I haven’t slept since yesterday.

“This is ridiculous,” Theo finally says, halfway through our meal, watching me push the sausage around on my plate. He pulls off his mic. “Lars, she can barely keep her eyes open. You need to wrap it up.”

Lars frowns at Theo but reluctantly concedes the point, and suddenly it’s just me and Theo in the restaurant alone, waiting for the bill.

“I don’t do it on purpose, you know,” I tell him, too exhausted to hide my defensiveness. “I’d like to be able to sleep on a plane. I just can’t relax. I don’t feel safe enough.”

He glances up from the bill and studies me for a moment. “Bex, I didn’t call attention to it because I blame you. I know how hard you try to get this right, and if you’re so tired that you can’t, you need to be in bed.”

Tears spring to my eyes. I stare at the table so he won’t see them. But it’s perhaps the first time in my entire life when someone has looked at me and assumed the best rather than the worst. I’m not sure why it sort of hurts.

We walk back to the hotel, Theo large and warm beside me, his hand near the small of my back anytime someone passes us, as if he’s worried I might get snatched away. It’s wildly unnecessary. I’ve been watching out for myself for a very long time. But it’s also…sweet.