Sublime

SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT, COLIN feels Lucy slip into bed behind him. The mattress shifts with her weight as she burrows under the layers of quilts and electric blankets to wrap her arms around his chest. He’s not sure how, but Lucy and Jay have managed to move him from the lake to the dorm and up to their room without anyone noticing. He’s wearing a set of old flannel pajamas and is in bed beneath a pile of blankets. Jay is gone, so Colin assumes he must have had the first watch. He doesn’t remember anything after leaving Lucy’s underwater world.

“Hi,” she says, her voice muffled against his back.

“Hey.” It comes out as a croak, and he closes his eyes tight against the burn. His throat feels swollen, scorched, as if he ate a meal of solid fire. “Have you been lying here for long?”

“No. I got here a few minutes ago. I’ve been waiting for Dot to go to sleep. She’s been down in the common room stirring the same cup of coffee and staring at a blank TV for more than an hour.”

He doesn’t want Dot to see him like this, and the guilt he’s been trying to ignore flares inside his chest. “She didn’t see you, did she?”

“No,” Lucy assures him. “She never would have let me get past the stairs.”

So Dot came to his dorm to be close to him? He rubs his face, groaning quietly. “She’s worried. She feels so responsible for me.”

“Yeah.”

“I think she knows I’m doing something crazy. She knows about you.” He shivers and presses the heating pad closer to his chest.

“I thought she might.” Lucy ignores the way anxiety burrows into her skin and tucks the blankets more securely around his body. “Are you warm enough?”

“Mm-hmm. But if you want to seduce me, you might have to leave on my socks,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. He doesn’t want to think about the downside to any of this. Only wants to feel her curled behind him and remember the world underwater. A fraction of his mind registers how crazy this is, that from the outside looking in, he might even appear suicidal. And with a piercing stab to his chest, he realizes this is how his mother must have felt. Doing whatever she could do to have even one more day with her daughter. Colin has never been more positive that his mother wasn’t insane after all. She simply wanted her family back.

It’s early—hours before the sun comes up and the students flood campus—and Colin can hear one of the delivery trucks outside, dropping off supplies at the kitchen. The steady beep as it backs up echoes off the stone buildings and fills the empty quad. “Hey, how’d you two get me up here anyway?”

“That would be Jay. Turns out he’s excellent at distraction and a lot stronger than he looks.”

“How is he?”

“He’s okay,” she says, and he feels her shrug slightly. “I mean, he seems to thrive on this kind of thing. I don’t get it, but I’m glad he’s like that. What he’s doing for us is amazing.”

“I know.”

“I wonder if we’d be able to do it without him. I wonder if I could get you out of the water somehow.” She pauses, watching him. “I wonder if that’s why I’m so strong now.”

Colin is silent in response to that. He’s given this some thought. If the lake is where Lucy was before she found him and where she goes when she disappears, Colin wonders if he could simply go find her there. He’s not exactly sure how they got to the other side because his head is still a bit foggy, but he likes to think if he had to, he could find it alone.

“Tell me what happened,” he says. “It’s true, isn’t it? You got past the gate.”

“You remember that?”

He nods.

She shivers beside him. “Other than finding you, I don’t remember ever feeling so drawn to something. I saw my hand, and it looked alive, Colin. I felt like I needed to be on the other side of the gate.”

“Do you think that’s how it works? We need to get you off campus? Like, unlocking some puzzle?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I don’t think it’s that simple. It can’t be.”

“Maybe you’re overthinking it.”

She doesn’t answer, just presses her cheek into the back of his shirt, reassuring herself that he’s warm and really here.

“It’s where you were before you came back?” he asks.

“I think so. I feel like I’d been pacing inside a cage, looking out through the lake, waiting to come be with you.”

“And you think it’s where you go when you disappear?”

Her arms tighten around him when he says that. “Yeah, but I don’t plan on disappearing again.”

Maybe not, he thinks. But at least I know where to find you. Colin relaxes. This knowledge makes the prospect of the approaching spring much less terrifying.