Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis

Chapter Six

It lands out of nowhere. A plummet – heart to pit of stomach. And I feel it land, like a rock in my gut, in sync with the bang of a heavy car door closing outside. Sam is two cars ahead, crouched in the open door of the woman’s car, a police officer standing over him. His smiling, pink mouth moves – chatting, but his eyes are focused, as he fixes up the wound. The woman slipped on the ice and bashed her head on the bumper of her own car. The police officer had sprinted over at the same time Sam had. He’s first-aid trained, he’d told the officer, fixes up wounds all the time at work. I’d walked over, feeling like a helpless sack of turnips, and Sam had given me a small smile, his hand at the woman’s head, and passed me the umbrella. He’d come back to the car to get a large rucksack he’d pulled from the boot and I’d told him I’d wait inside. And that’s where I am now. My sad, wet koala collapsed in the footwell of Sam’s rental car, with the crushed but still intact bottles of water I’d dropped like a sitcom fool as Sam had sprinted over. I watch him now, through the windscreen, all wise and tall and handsome and strong and familiar, his lips parted in concentration, snow still falling. And the voice in my head slides in, as if an actor on cue in a play. ‘What are you doing?’ it says, critical and no-nonsense. ‘What are you playing at, running away with the fairies like this? This isn’t a movie, Noelle, this is real life. Your life. And this can’t go anywhere. Not in any way, shape or form. Because Sam will get on a plane back to his life, and you will drive home, back to yours. To Levison Drive, back to Mum, back to your routine and work, and that will be that. Because you are strangers. And you don’t know him, and he doesn’t know you.’ I nod in the darkness of the car, like a scolded child, and pull the heavy blanket to my chin. A man from the crisis group, trussed up like a skier, had handed me two of them, plus a freezer bag full of custard creams and two bottles of orange juice a few minutes ago through the passenger door, then he’d joined the policeman and Sam, offering his own aid of Ziploc snacks.

Sam’s locked phone vibrates in the cubby again – another attempt from the universe to plonk me back into reality perhaps. A text from, I’m sure, leggy, perfect and beachy-haired Jenna again, although I can’t see what it says. And then my own phone vibrates. A reminder from the gas company, asking me to submit my metre readings. A reminder, on both accounts, that normal life is out there waiting for us both to resume, and this weird situation on the motorway, stuck in snow with custard creams, is just a tiny little stop gap. An interval.

Eventually, Sam clicks open the car door and quickly jumps in.

‘Jesus, it is cold.’ He blows into his hands and looks over at me. ‘You OK?’

I nod. ‘Fine. And is she?’

‘Yup. Good as new. Her friend’s gonna drive, so she’s in good hands.’ Sam leans a hand across to the radio, turns it up a little.

‘It’s cool that you know what to do,’ I say. ‘Brave.’

Sam chuckles. ‘Hardly. Although, I admit, I kind of like being prepared for the worst. Which sounds dark as fuck as I say that out loud, but I don’t know – you never know what’s round the corner, right?’ Then he looks at me, an eyebrow slightly cocked. ‘I can hear the cogs in your brain.’

‘What?’

‘Something my mom says – your thinking’s keeping me awake.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are you worried? About fuel, food, and – being stuck? Was it the blood?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, yes. Maybe. And I am worried. But mostly trying not to think about it. That’s my tactic most of the time.’

‘We’ll be OK. Noelle Not-Gallagher,’ he says with a smile, and I imagine what it must be like to climb a mountain with him, which is laughable considering the furthest I’ve ever climbed is the steps at Covent Garden station and halfway up, panicked, and told some poor random man with a briefcase that I was having a heart attack and to call for help (and he did not.) But I wouldn’t do that with Sam with me, I bet. He’d be all heroic, all unshakable, all ‘there are several mountain lions out there, but if everyone follows me, I’ll get us out alive. But firstly, I must remove my shirt.’

‘Anyway, the snow’s already slowing,’ he carries on. ‘The cop said it wouldn’t be too much longer.’

‘Oh. Well. Good.’

His brow crinkles beneath his soft, dark hair. ‘You seem disappointed.’

I look at him. ‘Ugh, I can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

Can’t tell you I never want to leave, Sam, I want to say. Can’t tell you that I hardly know you and yet I do not want to get out of this car, and I can’t even put into clear and concise, sane-sounding words why that is.

‘Nothing,’ I say instead and groan, hiding my face as I feel it heat up, like it’s coated in self-heating volcanic face mask. I hear Sam chuckle from behind my hands.

‘Seriously, what?’

I peer at him through the gaps between my fingers.

‘I’m having a really good time,’ I say, the words muffled through my hands. ‘With you. Here.’

Sam presses his lips together, as if to stop a rogue smile. ‘OK, and that’s, what – bad?’

‘No. No.’ I laugh, my face as hot as sizzling rump steak. ‘It’s just – this whole thing is so weird. And … I mean we’re fucking stranded.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And … we have no food besides these sandwiches and biscuits and I’m peeing in bushes and behind signs for the nearest bloody Burger King and you’re fixing up injuries, and blood, and you’d think that all I’d want is to be at home, where everything is normal and safe and warm but – I don’t want to go home.’ I drop my hands to my lap. ‘There. Said it.’

Sam watches me quietly, then looks out of the windscreen as if considering what I’ve said. Then he looks over at me and says, ‘Does it help if I say same?’

I smile. ‘It does. Well, look, maybe we can just stay.’

‘Build a hut in Quebec,’ adds Sam. ‘Out of sticks. Old banjos.’

‘Deal.’

Sam laughs but says nothing else.

I want to ask then, about Jenna. About a wife or a girlfriend. About what’s waiting for him at home, if he feels what I feel. This pull. This feeling of … something. But I don’t – I can’t. I don’t want anything to ruin it – because it’s perfect, this night. So unexpectedly, strangely perfect.

My eyes drift to the clock on the dash – two a.m. ‘God. I can’t believe I was meant to be at a party tonight,’ I say.

Sam yawns, gives a half-chuckle. ‘A party?’

‘Yeah.’ It isn’t a lie, not really. The reunion was meant to be a party, of sorts – beer and music and food and catching up with old friends. But if I said reunion, if I said time capsule, out loud, to Sam, I know I might feel obligated to have to give up more. And I can so easily give up more about anything else. I’m that cluttered cupboard, opened, words toppling out, filling silences. But Daisy, losing her, and almost losing myself – it’s one of those things I like to keep close to my chest. So close, I sometimes think it’s burrowed a hole in the skin, a dark little hollow it’s hidden in for fifteen years. ‘Yep, I had it all planned out,’ I carry on. ‘I was meant to bump into my ex-boyfriend, show him I was fine, you know, to prove him wrong or something. And there was also a part of me – a stupid part maybe, hoping it might spark something again. That it’s … I dunno, meant to be, that Ed would be back home, after two years. He’s a doctor. Paediatric rheumatology. He moved for work.’

Sam listens carefully.

‘But he ignored me. Looked right through me when he saw me. And then I ended up here.’

Sam looks through the windscreen – that methodical gathering of words in his head. ‘I did a climb with a bunch of medics last year,’ he says. ‘And they may be smart and noble and stuff, but in my experience – they do stupid shit on mountains. Hurt themselves, leave important stuff behind, almost die trying to get the perfect shot for Instagram. I was ready to push one of them off. Tell the cops he wore bad shoes or something.’

I laugh. A warm, belly-clenching laugh.

‘So maybe it applies to parties too,’ he says, looking over at me. ‘Ignoring you: stupid shit.’

Warmth spreads across my skin like the sun just rose.

‘Seriously. Ed the Ped sounds like a shit head,’ says Sam as if it’s a fact. ‘Not that you’re asking me.’

‘I am,’ I say.