Page 12 of Parallel

“We’ll need to call home and tell our parents today,” he says. We’ve avoided this, knowing it would meet with nothing but objections on both sides. I’d like to keep avoiding it, personally.

“They’re going to think we’re crazy.”

He pushes my hair behind my ear. “It is a little crazy. But they’ll get it once they see us together. We’ll go back to the States over break, charm everyone, and they’ll be fine.”

I sigh. “I’m not sure my mother will be as easily won over as you think. But then, I wasn’t easily won over either, and look at me now.”

“I am looking at you now,” he says. He flips me so I’m flat on my back and then looms over me, his gaze on my mouth. “And it looks like you need to be won over a little more.”

I pull him down, waiting for the delicious weight of him settling against me, but before it happens, there is this din in my head, sudden and loud.

The dull throb of a migraine, and a voice—shrill, unrelenting as an alarm. I’d give anything to silence it.

“Quinn!” a woman’s voice cries, the pitch rising. My head feels as if it’s splitting open from the inside, as if it will cleave into two perfect halves like a watermelon. I groan and push at my temples as I force my eyes open. I’m standing in the grass, beside a lake, being shaken by this panicked woman and Nick…is gone.

The memories flood my brain: the quick wedding in London, Nick and I unable to stop smiling through the whole thing, fully aware it was insane to marry someone you’d known so briefly. The honeymoon itself, spent mostly naked in our hotel room. The dread I felt at the thought of calling my mother.

My mother. It comes to me with a startled gasp—she’s the woman standing here, shaking me. My eyes open and fill with tears. Nick is not my husband. He’s not anything. How can he possibly not exist when I remember him in such detail? When I feel so much for him?

“You just completely went blank there, like you were asleep standing up!” my mother cries. “You looked like a corpse! We’re going to the hospital.”

The pain is unbearable, a pendulum of it swinging through my brain, bruising me a little more with each rotation. Before I can argue that a trip to the hospital is unnecessary, I drop to my knees and throw up in the grass.

I know it’s different this time, that it’s serious. After the longest, most arduous car ride of my life, Caroline and I arrive back in the same emergency room I sat in last week. This time I’m taken straight to neurology, where a nurse says she’s going to give me something for the pain that will put me to sleep for a while. Will I even wake up from this? I wonder, as the needle goes into my arm. Do I really care if I don’t?

“What’s going to happen?” I ask. My words are slurred, my brain sinking somewhere dark and hazy.

“You’ll be just fine,” she says with a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll make sure Dr. Reilly is there to see you as soon as you wake up.”

My eyes flutter closed before I can ask if I’ve heard her correctly.

6

NICK

I get to the cafeteria just after Meg does and slide my tray next to hers at the salad bar. She watches me make my salad and turns away. “Just once, I’d like to see you live a little.”

“In what way?” I ask, loading a second chicken breast on my plate.

“That,” she says, nodding toward my tray. “You probably burned a thousand calories swimming this morning, but it’s like the world will fall apart if you actually use dressing or cheese, or anything that would make your meal pleasant instead of merely healthy.”

I shrug. “You see people die every day. Isn’t it enough to be alive without needing everything to be fun on top of it?”

“I’m not saying everything has to be fun,” she argues. “But the minute you seem to enjoy yourself, it’s like you feel guilty about it or something. It’s okay to have a little fun.”

“Believe me, if I was in the mood for fun, it would not involve blue cheese dressing.” I grin at her, but she doesn’t smile back. There’s a shadow to her eyes I’ve seen before, a warning sign that she’s unhappy about something.

I pay and we take our seats, but she remains silent, grim. I pinch the bridge of my nose and brace myself for the relationship talk that appears to be coming. “What’s up?”

Her eyes are on the table instead of me, her palms pressed against it, trying to rein herself in. “You were talking in your sleep last night.”

Fuck.

I’m generally an open book, but there are two recurring dreams I’ve had for years that I’d prefer to keep to myself, for Meg’s sake as much as my own. There’s the one about the girl on the boat, obviously, and a similar one in which I’m dancing outside with that same girl—I know it’s her though I can never quite make out her face—and trying to summon the courage to ask her something. I’ve always wondered if it’s a metaphor for my fear of commitment, although in the dream I want that commitment as much as I want my next breath. But it’s sure as hell nothing I need Meg to hear about. “Yeah?”

She continues to avoid my eye. “Yeah. And it was like you were talking to someone you were with. You were promising her she’d be fine and then you were…” she swallows. “You were yelling at someone to get away from her.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it sounds like an accusation, which leaves me feeling both annoyed and guilty at once. I force a laugh. “Maybe I was dreaming about the EMT that kept asking you out.”