Page 204 - In Five Years

Chapter Forty-One

I must fall asleep because I wake up, and he’s here, and the reality of it, of
Bella’s loss, of the last few months, swirls around us like the impending storm.
“Hey,” Aaron says. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
He sighs. He walks over to me. “You fell asleep.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask him, because I want to know. I want him to

say it. I want to get it out, now, into the open.
“Come on,” he says, refusing. Although if it’s the refusal of the inevitable, or
the unwillingness to answer the question, I do not know.

“Do you know me?”
I want to explain to him, although I suspect he understands, that I am not this
person. That what has happened, what is happening, here, between us, is not me.

That I would never betray her. But that she’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not
know what to do with this—with everything she left in her wake.

He puts a knee on the bed. “Dannie,” he says. “Are you really asking me
that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know where I am.”
“It was a good night,” he says, gently, reminding me. “Wasn’t it?”

Of course it was. It was what she would have wanted. This gathering of what
she stood for. Spontaneity, love. A good Manhattan view.

“Yeah,” I say. It was.
I catch the TV. A storm is coming, circling it’s way closer to us. Seven inches
of snow, they’re predicting.
“Are you hungry?” he asks me. Neither of us ate tonight.