Page 176 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me

“Don’t worry. I’d never leave you behind. I’ll carry you over the finish line.”

She laughed again and buried her face in my neck. “You’re crazy.”

“For you, baby.”

After round two, I let out a contented sigh as my hand settled on her hip. “I could die happy right here and now.”

“I don’t want you to die. I want you tolivehappy.” She pulled away. “I read your notebook. The one you wrote in when you were in the desert. And I know I shouldn't have…I know I had no right to read it but…I found it on your bookshelves and I couldn’t seem to help myself. But Gabriel. You wanted to die?” Her voice cracked on the words.

Fuck. Had I left it in the bookshelves? Now I was cursing myself for not hiding it better. I’d said a lot of shit in that notebook. All true at the time but not something I would ever have wanted Cleo to read.

I leaned over and grabbed the pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the nightstand. “Want one?”

“I shouldn’t…” With a sigh, she took the lit cigarette out of my hand. I lit another one for myself and took a deep drag, sucking nicotine into my blood system.

We sat side by side, smoking our postcoital cigarettes with our backs leaning against the oak headboard.

“I’m quitting at the end of the month,” I said, referring to the cigarettes, not her. I couldn’t quit her if I tried.

“Good,” she said. “You smoke too much.”

I watched her from the corner of my eye. She’d pulled the sheets up, so they covered her breasts, but her shoulders were bare, and her hair was wild. Sex hair. In the moonlight, her skin glowed alabaster.

Her full lips were kiss-bruised and swollen, the bottom one trapped between her teeth.

“Gabriel,” she whispered.

I blew the smoke out of the corner of my mouth. It lifted on the breeze and curled out the open window.

I took another drag, squinting into the distance, and listened to the music playing in my head. Mazzy Star’s “Flowers in December.” It was the song playing in the art gallery when I turned and looked at Cleo.

But I’d heard it before that night. Cleo loved Hope Sandoval’s dreamy, ethereal voice.

My eyes closed. The lyrics floated through my head. A flash of memory prodded the edges of my mind. I tried to grasp it.

“I love your voice so much,” she said. “And I love that song.”

I hadn’t even realized I was singing. “I know. Summer of ’96. I headlined a music festival in Scotland.”

“You climbed the scaffolding like a wild man, but the crowd loved you,” she said, filling in the gaps. “I stood in the wings and watched you blow everyone away with your voice.”

“Mazzy Star was in the lineup. Radiohead…” I kept my eyes closed, trying to see it. “It was cloudy and gray. You were wearing wellies and a short skirt and a cropped T-shirt with my flannel shirt tied around your waist…”

“You were busking in the campsite,” she laughed. “You put me on your shoulders so I could see the stage better.”

“We drank whisky in a pub in Glasgow and made out in the alley.”

“Yeah, you had your hand up my skirt…” Cleo cut herself off and sighed.

I wanted to hear more, but she was done tripping down memory lane.

I put out my cigarette and then put out hers too in the glass ashtray. I lit another cigarette, even though I shouldn’t have, but I knew where this conversation was heading.

She wanted to talk about the things I’d written in that notebook, not about a festival four years ago.

But when I thought about it now, it felt like another lifetime. I felt so removed from it.

Glasgow. The notebook. All of it.