It’s fun for me, he’ll say. I like it. I like you. Sex again, this time on the couch. His mouth on my neck, my hands in his hair. We’ll go for one of our drives up the coast in the afternoon, maybe a walk on Singing Beach. In Manchester-by-the-Sea, remember? Just like the Singing Sands in Scotland. Our own Scotland right here, we said. And I won’t limp behind, and he won’t charge ahead. I won’t have to ask for us to stop, can we please stop and just sit here, here on this bench for a second and rest? I won’t sit there while he stands over me, trying not to be impatient while I try not to cry. We’ll walk the shoreline together like we used to, we used to do it all the time. He’ll hold my hand the way he did then. Later, we’ll go out for dinner, that sushi place we both love in Marblehead. I’m starving, are you? Yes. I’m starving too.
We’ll order everything, Paul says, how’s that?
Smiling at me. Squeezing my hand. He hasn’t let go of it all day.
Oh, I love that idea, I say. Yes, let’s! That’s perfect, perfect.
“What’s perfect?” he says. And just like that, his features shift, dissolve into another face. I’m not in the golden light of an afternoon in another life, I’m in a dark basement. It’s Hugo lying beside me, awake now. Hugo who looks only like himself in the soft blue morning or is it night? Looks concerned at me. Maybe even a little frightened. Did I doze off finally?
“You okay?” he asks me.
“Fine. I’m fine, why?”
“Just you were really having a fit in your sleep.”
“I was?” I laugh. “I didn’t even know I’d fallen asleep.”
“You screamed something,” he says. “A word.”
“A word?” My heart drums in my ears. “What word?”
He shakes his head slowly.
“I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like another language almost. You screamed it over and over.”
“Huh. Probably just production anxiety,” I say. “I have the weirdest anxiety dreams around this time of year. Always. Always, always. If I manage to sleep at all, that is.” I smile.
But Hugo still looks troubled. He reaches a hand out and strokes my hair.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Last night was a little…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I mean I loved it, of course, but—”
“But?”
“Nothing. Never mind. I’m hungry, are you?”
“Starving,” I say.
“How about I take you out,” Hugo says. “Might be nice for us to have a real dinner together, you know? A date. Before the craziness of production really kicks in this week. Get to know each other a little. Talk.”
“Dinner. Talk,” I say. “Sure, why not? Let’s talk.”
“Great. You pick the place,” he says.
“Okay. I’ll pick the place. I’d love to.”
* * *
“Quite a drive for sushi,” Hugo says when we finally arrive.
“I thought something light might be nice. Since it’s so late. Don’t you like sushi?”
“Sure, yeah. Just Marblehead’s a little out of the way. You must really like this place.”
“Oh, I’ve only been a couple of times,” I lie. “But I remember it being great.”
We enter the place, Paul and I. I mean Hugo and I, I’m with Hugo. He’s holding my hand. We still smell of the incense sticks he burned in his bedroom, his basement flowers. All the sex we had in the fragrant smoke. Sex on crisp white sheets with tiny red petals like little tongues—sheets I twisted and gripped while I screamed, Oh, Paul, Paul. Fuck me.
What did you say? Hugo said. And then he turned on the light.
Nothing, nothing.
And now he’s taking my hand. Paul never did that. Maybe he did in the early days. The early, early days. How long ago was that? God, don’t remember. Live here, be in the here and now with Hugo. The sushi place is lovely, isn’t it? It hasn’t changed at all since the last time I was here. Same bamboo trees still in their heavy pots. Same paintings of warrior women on the walls in black frames. Same barefaced hostess in willowy black. Balmy lips, soft smattering of freckles. Does she recognize me? Hard to say, I look so different from the miserable wretch I was when she last saw me come hobbling in. I’m glowing with life now, glowing from hours of basement sex. Wordlessly, she leads us to a table. Same tiny black tables gleaming like mirrors. On each table, the same slim-throated vases out of which a bright orchid emerges, the same orchid whose boisterous color and life used to mock my death, my grayness. And the way he sat across from me then. Looking like he’d been sentenced to something. His life was a cage, and my hunched body, my drugged face, were the bars. But not tonight.