Page 226 of Carousel

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I tell him.

His eyes, and the room itself, seem to dim. “Why?”

The word needles me. Is he that clueless about my emotions right now?

“Because I’m sad,” I stress. “And you are, too.” I smooth my hair, which he’s messed up. “And I think that’s why you’re doing this. Like this.”

“I just want you.”

“You want oblivion. And sex means more to me than that.”

He looks irritated. “Ara⁠—”

“Just lie with me,” I suggest. “And talk to me. Like we did on the beach.”

“I don’t want to grieve with you, Ara!” He’s practically growling. Like he’s a different person entirely. His words fill every corner of this tiny room.

Silence.

Until I say, “You already are.”

“I’m not,” he insists.

I hug him around his middle. “It’s okay,” I say, from his chest. He smells like the cold wind outside and starch and leather and metal and home.

He doesn’t react for a second.

Then he squeezes me tightly, tucking my head under his chin.

“Cosmos. I’m fucked. I’m⁠—”

“It’s okay,” I repeat.

Then I lead him over to his bed.

Once he’s lying down, his boots off, I take off mine and curl up into him. The light goes off, and the dark and the silence are comforting, and we are alive and we shouldn’t be because others aren’t and things could have been done differently, and we’re grieving but we don’t need to talk about it and neither of us are crying – but if we started to, at any point, ever, it would be okay.

For now, we just listen to each other’s breaths.

It’s enough.

In the bed – later, much later – he presents me with my ribbon. He’d secured it around his belt, which he must have taken back from Meg’s cabin before he got locked out. I sit up, and he kneels behind me to tie my hair with it, fixing it into its usual ponytail over my shoulder.

“I have something else for you,” he says at my ear. “I was waiting for a good time for us to share them.”

Intrigued, I watch him as he clambers off the bed, feels under his mattress, and slots his fingers into a loose seam he locates under it.

I’m tutting. “Is that contraband? That’s going to be one strike...”

“I get hungry.”

And I know it’s a joke, but it stings me. Because I know exactly how hungry he was getting, for me.

He shows me what he’s just pulled out from inside the mattress. A small tin can.

“These are tinned peaches. Have you ever had them?”

I shake my head. “I haven’t even had a normal peach.”