Side Effects May Vary

I’d always heard that when you truly love someone, you’re happy for them as long they’re happy. But that’s a lie. That’s higher-road bullshit. If you love someone so much, why the hell would you be happy to see them with anyone else? I didn’t want the easy kind of love. I wanted the crazy love, the kind of love that created and destroyed all at the same time.

But Harvey had moved on, and all we had was whatever was left of our spring break. Here, tonight, Harvey felt easy and right, but tomorrow the light of day would melt the simplicity of night to reveal what we really were—a complicated, confused mess.

He squeezed my hand once. “Me too,” he confessed. “It would feel wrong.”

He turned into me and did that thing that always crushed me—he kissed my cheeks and my eyelids, saving my lips for last. His mouth was salty, but it didn’t make me thirsty. My hands drifted along the waistband of his shorts and up the back of his T-shirt. My body kept moving, even as I could feel the ground slipping out from beneath me, like in the ocean. His hands did the same, sliding up the sweatshirt I wore and up the length of my back and around to the front of my chest. I exhaled in his mouth.

And then he pulled back and sighed. For a second, my lips continued to move, confused by the absence of his. The echo of his hands on my skin left a searing heat in my chest.

I laid my head against him and he wound his arm around my shoulder. “What’s going to happen to us, Harvey?”

He pressed his lips to my head and said, “It’s a surprise, I think.”

Harvey. Then.

Hello?” I called. “Al?” The house was quiet, which had become the norm now that Alice spent more time sleeping than not. I hated to think of her so still like that. Instead, I thought of how I’d taught her to drive a few weeks ago in the SaveMart parking lot and of the way that my fingers had brushed against hers as I’d helped her maneuver the steering wheel.

After locking the front door behind me, I trudged down the hallway to her bedroom. Bernie had been invited to a client dinner with her firm. It was an attempt to include her, despite her dying daughter. A Good Samaritan act.

Months ago, Bernie had cut back to half days at the office. Her five half days turned into two or three half days, and then those turned into mere hours a week. She tried to do most of her work from home, but a lot of the cases she worked on were handled by groups of attorneys, so it wasn’t an easy job to do solo. Originally, Bernie had declined the dinner invitation, but Alice had insisted that Bernie and Martin go. After much deliberation, they decided to attend only if I came over and stayed with Alice. Typically, Alice would guffaw at this, but she called me herself and explained the situation. She was completely reasonable and not at all bothered by asking me to babysit her.

She was up to something.

I knocked lightly on her door. “Alice?” No answer. “Alice?”

“You can come in now, Harvey.”

When I opened the door, Alice stood there with a small bath towel wrapped around her paper-thin body, water dripping off her and pooling at the carpet. Her legs were so much thinner than I remembered, making her kneecaps seem big and bulbous. Her body swayed a little, like she was bracing herself against a strong gust of wind that only she could feel.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you had just gotten out of the shower. I’ll be on the couch.”

“Come here.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Come here.”

She could have said “Light your car on fire,” and I would have done it. I stepped forward a few steps.

“Closer,” she said, and I spanned the last couple steps between us. “Closer, Harvey.”

The space between us was nearly nonexistent, but I filled what little there was, pressing our bodies against each other. We were in a little bubble, and outside of that bubble I could hear the entire world spinning on its axis ten times its normal speed.

Alice held her arms wrapped around her chest, keeping her towel in place. She looked up, her bottomless eyes steadying me, taking away my dizziness. Everything felt stable and solid again while she held my eyes with hers.

Then Alice dropped her arms. Her towel fell to the floor, bunched up in a heap around her ankles.

“What are you doing?” I breathed. She wrapped her arms around my waist and held herself against me, my clothing separating our bare skin.

“I want to do this, Harvey,” she whispered into my T-shirt, walking backward, with her arms still circling my waist, pulling me with her.

“You—you’re sick, Al.” She looked so fragile, like a feather could break her.

“It’s a good day, Harvey. I can’t say that very often,” she said softly. And then, in her sharp, familiar voice, “Do not ruin this.” She tilted her face to mine, and I dipped my chin to meet her.