Page 56 of Waking Olivia

“You had a job, Will, a good job. And by the sound of it, a job you were good at. That’s a hell of a lot more grown up than a whole lot of people.”

“I had a duty to my family,” he counters. “I should have been pulling my weight around here, and instead, I let my dad take it all on by himself. No wonder he had a stroke.”

“You don’t know that his stroke was related to any of that.”

“I don’t know that it wasn’t, either,” he sighs, spreading a blanket over the couch and sitting down. “So why are you out here, anyway?”

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I tell him. “You take the bedroom. I’m gonna stay up.”

“Allnight? Olivia, you know I’ll catch you if you have a nightmare,” he says. “You haven’t made it out of the house once since the first time you stayed here.”

I shake my head. “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

I hesitate. I don’t even want to put words to it. “I don’t want to dream about him,” I finally admit.

“Your brother?” he asks. “I didn’t know he was in those dreams.”

“Sometimes.”

It’s usually at the start of the dream. My brother and I in a car or at the kitchen table. Nothing out of the ordinary except I’m terrified and I know he is too. My nightmares must be at least part fiction, but knowing how he died makes me think that the fear was real. And it’s far too easy to imagine Matthew’s last moments because I’ve lived them a thousand times.

He lays down and pats the space in front of him. “Come here,” he sighs reluctantly. Will feels guilty about so many things and I’ve become one of them.

“It’s okay,” I swallow.

“I’m tired, Olivia, and you’re tired,” he says, stretching out his arm. “So stop arguing and go the fuck to sleep.”

“What a sweet talker.” I laugh, but I lay down. He takes the quilt and tucks it around me. It’s the last thing I remember.

39

Will

As tired as I am, I don’t fall asleep. Once again, there are so many things wrong here, not least of which the fact that I’m ostensibly doing this to comfort Olivia but happen to be hard as a rock while she lies a centimeter away sleeping peacefully. I took the precaution of shoving half the quilt between us after she fell asleep tonight.Not helping.So, in essence, I’m perving on a student and cheating on my girlfriend, at least in spirit, and I don’t know of another goddamn way to deal with any of it.

But the things that make sleep impossible and my shorts profoundly uncomfortable also make me happy that I’m here: the feel of her, the smell of her shampoo, the way her shoulders rise and fall, how at this moment all of her intensity and twitchiness are gone and she’s so completely at peace. Today had to have been one of the worst days of her life, and yet it turned out to be one of the best I’ve had in years.

It wasn’t just climbing. It was sharing it with her. I should have known she would love it, that it would strip her of every thought and emotion and let her be free of it all for a while. There are times, like today, when it strikes me that we are far more alike than different. And God knows I wish that weren’t the case.

40

Olivia

The next morning, Will is already up and dressed when I wake.

“I can be ready in five minutes,” I tell him.

“You don’t have to run today. Why don’t you just take it easy? I can come back and pick you up in time for class.”

I shake my head. “I think I need to get back to it.”

“Fine,” he sighs, “but you’re staying here tonight.”

“So bossy,” I mumble, but it’s seriously hard to pretend I’m unhappy about it.

After practice in the afternoon, he picks me up in the side parking lot so no one will see. We aren’t doing anything wrong, but I feel guilty because I know the whole thing makeshimfeel guilty. And it sure as hell would look bad if anyone saw us.

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