by Ruth Ware
I was so tired that even if a burglar did come, I’d probably sleep right through it.
At 10:47, I realized I was wrong.
At 11:23, I started to cry, weakly and stupidly.
Was this it, then? Was I never going to sleep again?
I had to sleep. I had to. I’d had . . . I counted on my fingers, unable to do the maths in my head. What . . . less than four hours of sleep in the last three days.
I could taste sleep. I could feel it, just out of my reach. I had to sleep. I had to. I was going to go crazy if I didn’t sleep.
The tears were coming again—I didn’t even know what they were. Tears of frustration? Rage, at myself, at the burglar? Or just exhaustion?
I only knew that I couldn’t sleep—that it was dangling like an unkept promise just inches away from me. I felt like I was running towards a mirage that kept receding, slipping away faster and faster the more desperately I ran. Or that it was like a fish in water, something I had to catch and hold, that kept slipping through my fingers.
Oh God, I want to sleep. . . .
Delilah turned her head towards me, startled. Had I really said it aloud? I couldn’t even tell anymore. Christ, I was losing it.
A flash of a face—gleaming liquid eyes in the darkness.
I sat up, my heart pounding so hard that I could feel it in the back of my skull.
I had to get away from here.
I got up, stumbling, trancelike with exhaustion, and pushed my feet into my shoes, and my sleeves into my coat, over the top of my pajamas. Then I picked up my bag. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d walk. Somewhere. Anywhere. I’d try to exhaust myself into sleeping.
If sleep wouldn’t come to me, then I’d damn well hunt it down myself.
- CHAPTER 3 -
The streets at midnight weren’t empty, but they weren’t the same ones I trod every day on my way to work, either.
Between the sulfur-yellow pools of streetlight, they were gray and shadowed, and a cold wind blew discarded papers against my legs, leaves and rubbish gusting in the gutters. I should have felt afraid—a thirty-two-year-old woman, clearly wearing pajamas, wandering the streets in the small hours. But I felt safer out here than I did in my flat. Out here, someone would hear you cry.
I had no plan, no route beyond walking the streets until I was too tired to stand. Somewhere around Highbury and Islington I realized that it had begun to rain, that it must have started some time back because I was wet through. I stood in my soggy shoes, my exhausted punch-drunk brain trying to formulate a plan, and almost by themselves my feet began to walk again, not homewards, but south, towards Angel.
I didn’t realize where I was going until I was there. Until I was standing beneath the porch of his building, frowning dazedly at the bell panel, where his name was written in his own small, neat handwriting. LEWIS.
He wasn’t here. He was away in Ukraine, not due back until tomorrow. But I had his spare keys in my coat pocket, and I couldn’t face the walk back to my flat. You could get a cab, carped the small, snide voice in the back of my head. It’s not the walk you can’t face. Coward.
I shook my head, sending raindrops spattering across the stainless-steel bell panel, and I sorted through the bunch of keys until I found the one for the outside door and slipped inside, into the oppressive warmth of the communal hallway.
Up on the second floor, I let myself cautiously into the flat.
It was completely dark. All the doors were closed, and the entrance hall had no windows.
“Judah?” I called. I was certain he wasn’t home, but it wasn’t impossible that he’d let a mate crash there, and I didn’t want to give anyone a middle-of-the-night heart attack. I knew, all too well, what that felt like. “Jude, it’s just me, Lo.”
But there was no answer. The flat was silent—completely and utterly silent. I opened the door to the left of me, the door to the eat-in kitchen, and tiptoed inside. I didn’t switch on the light. I just peeled off my wet clothes—coat, pajamas, and all—and dumped them in the sink.
Then I walked, naked, through to the bedroom, where Judah’s wide double bed lay empty in a shaft of moonlight, the gray sheets tumbled as if he’d just that moment got up. I crawled on my hands and knees into the middle of the bed, feeling the lived-in softness of the sheets, and smelling the scent of him, of sweat and aftershave and just—him.
I shut my eyes.
One. Two. . . .
Sleep crashed over me, claiming me like a wave.
I woke to the sound of a woman screaming, and the feeling of someone on top of me, holding me down, someone grappling with my hands even as I fought.
A hand grabbed at my wrist, the grip far stronger than mine. Blind, mad with panic, I groped in the pitch black with my free hand, searching for something, anything, to use as a weapon, and my hand closed over the bedside lamp.
The man’s hand was over my mouth now, smothering me, the weight of him choking me, and with all my strength, I lifted up the heavy lamp and brought it crashing down.
There was a shout of pain, and through the fog of terror I heard a voice, the words slurred and broken.
“Lo, it’s me. It’s me for Christ’s sake, stop!”
What?
Oh God.
My hands were shaking so much that when I tried to find the light, all I did was knock something over.
From beside me I could hear Judah, gasping, alongside a bubbling sound that terrified me. Where the hell was the lamp? Then I realized—the lamp was gone. I’d smashed it into Judah’s face.
I stumbled out of bed, my legs shaking, and found the switch by the door, and the room was instantly flooded with the unforgivingly bright glare of a dozen halogen spots, each illuminating every detail of the horror show in front of me.
Judah was crouched on the bed, holding his face, with blood soaking his beard and his chest.
“Oh my God, Jude!” I scrambled across to him, my hands still trembling, and began to grab tissues from the box by the bed. He pressed them to his face. “Oh God, what happened? Who was screaming?”
“You!” he groaned. The paper was already sodden and red.
“What?” I was still flooded with adrenaline. I looked confusedly around the room for the woman and the attacker. “What do you mean?”
“I came home,” he said painfully, his Brooklyn accent blurred through the paper. “You started screaming, half-asleep. So I tried to wake you up and—this.”
“Oh, fuck.” I put my hands to my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
That screaming—it had been so real. Was it really just me?
He took his hands cautiously away from his mouth. There was something in the wad of scarlet paper, something small and white. It was only when I looked at his face that I realized—one of his teeth was missing.
“Oh Jesus.”
He looked at me, blood still dripping slowly from his mouth and his nose.
“What a welcome home,” was all he said.
“I’m sorry.” I felt tears prick at the back of my throat but I refused to cry in front of the taxi driver. Instead, I swallowed against the hard ache. “Judah?”
Judah said nothing; he just looked out of the window at the gray dawn that was starting to break over London. It had taken two hours at UCH accident and emergency, and then all they’d done was stitch Judah’s lip and refer him to an emergency dentist who shoved the tooth back in place and told him, more or less, to cross his fingers. Apparently the tooth might be saved if it reimplanted. If not, it would be either a bridge or a dental implant. He shut his eyes wearily, and I felt my gut twist with remorse.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, more desperately this time. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said wearily. The word came out as shorry, like a drunken Sean Connery impression, the local anesthetic in his lip
making it hard to talk.
“You? What are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know. Fucking up. Not being there for you.”
“The burglar, you mean?”
He nodded.
“That. But any time, really. I wish I wasn’t away so much.”
I leaned across and he put his arm around me. I rested my head on his shoulder and listened to the slow, steady thud of his heart, reassuringly unhurried in comparison to my own panicky drumming pulse. Beneath his jacket he was wearing a blood-spattered T-shirt, the fabric soft and worn beneath my cheek. When I breathed in, a long, shaky breath, it smelled of his sweat, and I felt my pulse slow in time with his.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” I said into his chest. He shook his head.
“I still should have been there.”
It was growing light as we paid off the taxi driver and climbed wearily up the two flights of stairs to his flat, and when I looked at my watch I saw that it was nearly six. Shit. I had to be on a train to Hull in a few hours.
Inside, Judah stripped off his clothes and we fell into bed, skin against skin. He pulled me against him, inhaling the scent of my hair as he closed his eyes. I was so tired I could hardly think straight, but instead of lying back and letting sleep claim me, I found myself climbing on top of him, kissing his throat, his belly, the dark stripe of hair that arrowed to his groin.
“Lo . . .” He groaned, and he tried to pull me up towards him, to kiss me, but I shook my head.
“Don’t, your mouth. Just lie back.”
He let his head fall back, his throat arching in the pale strip of dawn that penetrated the curtains.
It was eight days since I’d last seen him. Now it would be another week until I saw him again. If we didn’t do this now . . .
Afterwards, I lay in his arms, waiting for my breathing and heart to steady, and I felt his cheek against mine crinkle in a smile.
“That’s more like it,” he said.
“More like what?”
“More like the homecoming I was expecting.”
I flinched and he touched my face.
“Lo, honey, it was a joke.”
“I know.”
We were both quiet for a long time. I thought he was slipping into sleep, and I shut my own eyes and let the tiredness wash over me, but then I felt his chest lift, and the muscles in his arm tense as he took a deep breath.
“Lo, I’m not going to ask again, but . . .”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. I could feel what he wanted to say. It was what he’d said on New Year’s Eve—he wanted us to move forward. Move in together.
“Let me think about it,” I said at last, in a voice that didn’t seem to be mine, a voice that was unusually subdued.
“That’s what you said months ago.”
“I’m still thinking.”
“Well, I’ve made up my mind.” He touched my chin, pulling my face gently towards his. What I saw there made my heart flip-flop. I reached out for him, but he caught my hand and held it. “Lo, stop trying to make this go away. I’ve been really patient, you know I have, but I’m starting to feel like we’re not on the same page.”
I felt my insides flutter with a familiar panic—something between hope and terror.
“Not on the same page?” My smile felt forced. “Have you been watching Oprah again?”
He let go of my hand at that, and something in his face had closed off as he turned away. I bit my lip.
“Jude—”
“No,” he said. “Just—no. I wanted to talk about this but you clearly don’t, so— Look, I’m tired. It’s nearly morning. Let’s go to sleep.”
“Jude,” I said again, pleadingly this time, hating myself for being such a bitch, hating him for pushing me into this.
“I said no,” he said wearily, into the pillow. I thought he was talking about our conversation, but then he continued. “To a job. Back in New York. I turned it down. For you.”
Fuck.
- CHAPTER 4 -
I was sleeping a deep, stupefied sleep, as if I’d been drugged, when the alarm dragged me to consciousness a few hours later.
I didn’t know how long it had been going off, but I suspected a long, long time. My head ached, and I lay for a long moment trying to orientate myself before I managed to reach out and silence the clock in case it woke Judah.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stretched, trying to work the kinks from my neck and shoulders, and then levered myself painfully up to vertical, climbed out of bed, and made my way through to Judah’s kitchen. While the coffee percolated, I took my pills, and then hunted in the bathroom for painkillers. I found ibuprofen and paracetamol, as well as something in a brown plastic bottle that I vaguely remembered Judah being prescribed when he twisted his knee in a football match. I opened the childproof lid and inspected the pills inside. They were huge, half-red and half-white, and looked impressive.
In the end I chickened out of taking them, and instead pressed two ibuprofen and a fast-acting paracetamol into my palm from the assorted blister packs on the bathroom shelf. I gulped them down with a cup of coffee—black, there was no milk in the empty fridge—and then sipped the rest of the cup more slowly as I thought about last night, about my stupid actions, about Judah’s announcement. . . .
I was surprised. No, more than surprised—I was shocked. We’d never really discussed his plans long-term, but I knew he missed his friends in the US, and his mum and younger brother—neither of whom I’d met. What he’d done . . . had he done it for himself? Or for us?
There was half a cup of coffee left in the jug, and I poured it into a second mug and carried it carefully through to the bedroom.
Judah was lying sprawled across the mattress as if he’d fallen there. People in films always look peaceful in sleep, but Judah didn’t. His battered mouth was hidden beneath his upflung arm, but with his angular nose and furrowed brow he looked like an angry hawk, shot down by a gamekeeper midflight and still pissed off about it.
I set the coffee cup very gently on his bedside table and, putting my face close on the pillow next to him, I kissed the back of his neck. It was warm, and surprisingly soft.
He stirred in his sleep, putting out one long tanned arm to loop over my shoulders, and his eyes opened, looking three shades darker than their usual hazel brown.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Hey.” He scrunched up his face and yawned, and then pulled me down beside him. For a moment I resisted, thinking of the boat and the train and the car waiting for me at Hull. Then my limbs seemed to melt like plastic and I let myself fold into him, into his warmth. We lay there staring into each other’s eyes, and I reached out and tentatively touched the Steri-Strip across his lip.
“Think it’ll re-root?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so, I’ve got to go to Moscow tomorrow, and I don’t want to be messing around with dentists while I’m out there.”
I said nothing. He closed his eyes and stretched, and I heard his joints click as he did. Then he rolled onto his side and put his cupped hand gently over my bare breast.
“Judah . . .” I said. I could hear the mix of exasperation and longing in my voice.
“What?”
“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”
“So go.”
“Don’t. Stop that.”
“Don’t, stop? Or don’t stop?” He gave a slow lopsided smile.
“Both. You know which one I mean.” I pulled myself upright and shook my head. It hurt, and I regretted the movement instantly.
“Your cheek okay?” Judah asked.
“Yeah.” I put a hand up to it. It was swollen, but not as much as before.
His face was troubled, and he put out a finger to stroke the bruise, but I flinched away in spite of myself.
“Well, you weren’t,” I said snappishly, more snappishly than I’d meant to. “You never are.”
He blinked and pulled himself up on his elbows to look at me, his face still soft with sleep, crumpled with marks from his pillow.
“What the . . . ?”
“You heard me.” I knew I was being unreasonable, but the words came tumbling out. “What’s the future, Jude? Even if I move in here—what’s the plan? Do I sit here weaving my shroud like Penelope and keeping the home fires burning while you drink Scotch in some bar in Russia with the other foreign correspondents?”
“Where’d this come from?”
I just shook my head and swung my legs out of bed. I began pulling on the pile of spare clothes I’d left on the floor after the trip to A&E.
“I’m just tired, Jude.” Tired was an understatement. I hadn’t slept longer than two hours in the last three nights. “And I can’t see where this is heading. It’s hard enough now when it’s just the two of us. I don’t want to be your wife-in-every-port stuck at home with a kid and a raging case of postnatal depression while you’re getting shot at in every hellhole this side of the equator.”
“Recent events kind of imply I’m in more danger in my own apartment,” Judah said, and then winced as he saw my face. “Sorry, that was an asshole thing to say. It was an accident, I know that.”
I swung my still-damp coat round my shoulders and picked up my bag.
“ ’Bye, Judah.”
“ ’Bye? What do you mean, ’bye?”
“Whatever you want.”
“What I want is for you to stop acting like a goddamn drama queen and move into my flat. I love you, Lo!”
The words hit me like a slap. I stopped in the doorway, feeling the weight of my tiredness like something physical around my neck, pulling me down.
Hands in pale latex, the sound of a laugh . . .
“Lo?” Judah said uncertainly.
“I can’t do this,” I said, my face to the hallway. I was not sure what I was talking about—I can’t leave; I can’t stay; I can’t have this conversation, this life, this everything. “I just— I have to go.”