Fullepub 
Chapter 47
47
My procession of visitors continues a couple of hours later with Jan. When she shows up, I’m crying again, because that’s now all I am able to do.
Mostly I’m crying for Cooper. Because as each day goes by that he doesn’t wake up, the more likely it seems that he won’t wake up at all. And when Amy told me that Cooper was in love with me, I didn’t really stop to think about how I felt about him.
Yes, I knew I fancied him. I knew he made me laugh in a way that felt like freedom. I knew that behind the surliness was a tender and generous heart. I knew that he had shown me how to use my body as an instrument for joy instead of fear. But I assumed that was just lust. Now I’m facing the prospect of not getting to see what comes after lust.
I wanted to know him. Really know him in a way that takes longer than ten days. To listen to him brushing his teeth, to hear what he thought of the TV shows we watched, to find out his favourite colour, breakfast cereal, poet, side of the bed, toe. To sit up all night again, like the night after the gala. Talking about everything and nothing—all of the inconsequential things that add up to mean that you almost know what the person’s going to say before they say it.
What if I never again get to feel that fizz in my stomach, the one that tickled and sparked with pride when I made him laugh or come or shake his head like he couldn’t believe I was real?
“I made a batch,” Jan says, handing me two tuna sandwiches wrapped in cling film, along with a bottle of Lucozade and a bunch of green grapes.
“Thanks so much.” I already know that I will not eat the sandwiches based on Leanne’s earlier tale. I grab a fresh tissue from the box on my bedside cabinet and blow my nose before dropping the used tissue onto the large disgusting pile of snotty ones I’ve been constructing like some pathetic game of Jenga. “Sorry, Jan. I never used to cry at all, you know. Was hard as steel.”
Jan tuts. “Well, that’s nothing to be proud of.”
I think of my mum always telling me that only wimps cried, that Bookhams are made of sterner stuff.
“Crying means you’re feeling,” Jan muses. “That you’re living. That you’re loving.”
“That you’re laughing?”
She ignores me. “It means that you care.”
“It sucks, though. Now there are all these people around. And I like them. And I miss them. And I can’t stop crying. That objectively sucks.”
Jan laughs. “No! No, it doesn’t. Well, it does, but god, wouldn’t it be a dull old life if you never had anything to cry about?”
I think about the last twelve years of my life. How I absolutely ensured that I had nothing to cry about.
“Were you aware that emotional tears have a higher protein concentration than tears that come from irritation?” Jan asks, as if this is something that the everyday person would know. “I read online that the higher protein content makes them fall down your cheeks more slowly—increasing the chance they’ll be seen by people and attract help. Your body is literally built for community. Tears literally attract people. So cry away!”
“That’s beautiful,” I say despite myself.
“I think so too.”
“I never wanted people, though. They make everything messy.”
“That’s a good thing, love. The thing about people is you have to let them drag you to places you don’t want to go. Let them tell you things you don’t want to hear. Let them break you and put you back together. Like my beloved Stephen Sondheim wrote—Somebody hold me too close, somebody hurt me too deep. That’s what being alive is.”
“I don’t know what to do, Jan.”
Jan grabs my hand. “What you do is you focus on getting better. You get back to life as best you can. And you keep hoping. You keep hoping that life will turn out the way it’s supposed to.”
The kindness in her eyes, the genuine care, makes me feel like I’m going to burst into sobs all over again. I steady myself.
“Did you kiss Deli Dan?” I ask, remembering the way they were flirting at the party.
Jan raises an eyebrow and gives an unusually throaty laugh. “We did more than kiss, Delphie love. I’ve had a crush on that fella for years. Never thought he’d look twice at someone like me. But that’s what I’m saying. Fate has a way of giving you exactly what you need, when you need it.”
I look out of the window, out into the distance, to wherever Merritt and Cooper may be right now.
I sigh, long and low. “I really hope you’re right.”
It’s something Aled says on one of his visits that gets my brain cogs whirring. He asks me how on earth Cooper and I got to dating after living in the same building for so long with nothing more than the odd snipe between us. When I tell him about Cooper needing me to pretend to be his girlfriend so that his parents wouldn’t set him up with their next-door neighbour, Aled cries, “Fake dating! My favourite of all the romance tropes. You were destined to fall in love.”
When he leaves, I start thinking about romance tropes. Merritt is clearly obsessed with them, and the more I consider it, the more suspicious it seems that my Afterlife Therapist is the sister of my downstairs neighbour. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. And why didn’t Merritt ever mention it?
I grab my phone off my bedside table and google “romance novel tropes.”
The top website tells me that the most popular romance trope is something called enemies to lovers. I read on.
The line between love and hate is gossamer thin, and nothing gets readers going like the bristling tension between enemies who you just know would have mind-blowing sex if they would only get out of their own way. The banter! The conflict! The angst! The lust!
I bite the inside of my cheek. Weird. That sounds a lot like me and Cooper. I continue reading the list, phrases like forced proximity, sharing a bed, love triangle, fake dating, and taming the womanizer popping out at me.
I throw my phone down onto the blanket, my eyebrows squishing together. Cooper and I were forced to share a bed. And with Jonah we were in a love triangle of sorts. Hmm. Before me, Cooper had a different woman visiting his flat every night. Did I tame the womanizer?
I bite my lip, my mind turning corners, scrabbling about for the pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit together. Was this whole thing…Was this all a plan by Merritt to get me to date her brother? Is that the happy ever after she actually wanted? Surely not. Wouldn’t she have just sent me back with instructions to kiss Cooper? Why would she have me chase Jonah all over London? And why would she now keep Cooper in Evermore? What was it all for?
Wait…
Unless…
I gasp, my body straightening, my heart starting to gallop at the notion. Is…is she actively planning on sending him back?
That’s got to be it! Merritt is nuts, but she’s smart. There’s no way she’d go to all of this trouble, risk her job even, just to separate Cooper and me after we’d finally found each other. I mean why would she be that cruel to her own twin brother? She wouldn’t. Probably her plan was always to send him back here. The likelihood is she just wants to spend a little more time with him before she has to say goodbye again.
“I know you can hear me,” I cry into the air. “I know your game!”
The elderly woman in the bed next to me leans forward, peering at me through thick glasses. “Why yes, it’s gin rummy, dear. Do you have cards? Shall we play?”
“Maybe later.” I smile, leaning back onto my pillow and shaking my head, a small, relieved chuckle escaping me. I can wait. I’ve waited this long to feel anything other than rubbish. If waiting another week or two is all that I need to do to get Cooper back, then I will happily do it.
It takes another three days of treatment and monitoring before I’m given permission to return home. Now that I’m certain it’s only a matter of time until Cooper returns, my mood has lifted. Well, as much as one’s mood can lift when they’ve recently died twice and their new favourite person is in a coma.
Leanne has generously promised me that she will drive me back to the hospital every morning so that I can continue to visit Cooper, hold his hand, and keep him up to date on everything that’s been going on. I don’t know if he can hear me. I expect he’s gallivanting around Evermore with Merritt before he returns back to Earth. But I talk anyway.
I’m wheeled down to the front entrance of the hospital by a kindly porter. Outside I spot Aled and Frida and Leanne and Jan, and, weirdly, Flashy Tom from The Orchestra Pit. They’re standing in a little group arguing with each other.
Thanking the porter, I take my crutches and hop over to them.
“Hiya,” I say, noticing that even in the one week that I’ve been stuck inside the hospital, the air has cooled into a far more comfortable temperature. “Why are there so many of you?”
Aled turns to me, teeth gritted. “I said on the WhatsApp group that I was coming, but it turns out that Leanne didn’t check her notifications.”
“I’m busy!” Leanne says. “And I don’t see you scolding Frida or Flashy Tom. They’re also here because they didn’t see your WhatsApp message in time.”
“A WhatsApp group? What are you talking about?” I ask, wobbling on my crutches before Leanne takes one arm and Frida the other.
“Our Delphie group,” Jan says, as if the fact that there is a WhatsApp group named after me is entirely normal. “We’ve been using it to co-ordinate visits. But it turns out there was a mix-up this morning about who was supposed to pick you up.”
“A mix-up? Or a lack of attention?” Aled mutters, his cheeks pinkening.
Leanne snipes back at him, to which Frida calmly tells her not to speak to him that way. Jan rolls her eyes at me.
“You have too many friends,” she says, patting me on the shoulder before leading me and my crutches to her own car while the rest of them continue to bicker.
I smile, a gratifying sensation blooming in my chest and warming my whole body.
Too many friends.
What a concept.
When we reach my building, I’m startled by a figure in a black shirt and baseball cap facing my front door.
“Cooper?” I gasp, my breath catching with delight.
But then the person turns around and my heart wrenches.
Jonah. It’s just Jonah. I’m an idiot. Cooper is much taller and broader and comatose.
When he sees me, Jonah breaks into a wide smile, and I notice that his teeth are perhaps a little too perfect—like gleaming little Tic Tacs all in a neat row. I wonder if the dental surgery was maybe veneers?
“Delphie! You’re here. I called the hospital and they told me you’d just left.”
“I’m sorry, but now’s not the best time,” I say, eyes flicking to my crutches. I have no clue what to say to him.
Jonah’s face falls. “Oh. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Is that the lad who saved your life?” Jan hisses beside me. “Be nice.”
It is the lad who saved my life. I owe him everything.
“I have to be off, but maybe you can help her up the stairs? Save us waiting for the others to get here,” Jan says, much to my annoyance.
“Of course. Yes. I can help!” Jonah responds eagerly.
I shoot daggers at Jan while she gets back in her car. Jonah unlocks my door for me, picking up my bag and holding the door open so I can hop in.
He looks up towards the stairs. “Do you want me to carry you?”
I get an immediate memory of Cooper scooping me up in the rain not so long ago. My head bouncing against his backside while he jogged with me towards The Bee and Bonnet.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’ll scooch up on my bum. By the time we get to the top, you’ll have said what you wanted to say?”
Jonah’s mouth sets into a grim line, and I remember what Jan said about being nice.
“Sorry,” I say. “I really don’t mean to be rude. I’m…Life is tricky at the moment.”
He nods and follows me up, one excruciating step at a time, while I lift myself up by my bottom.
“So…” He looks down at his trainers for a second and then laughs. “I’ll just cut right to it. The thing is…I can’t stop thinking about you.”
I pause on the stairs, my eyes widening. “You what?”
Jonah takes off his baseball cap and runs his hand through his hair. “I mean, you scared the shit out of me at the gala. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“But then…when I…when I gave you mouth-to-mouth, I felt this feeling. This sort of thump in my stomach. Like a connection.”
I almost want to laugh at the irony.
“I thought it was the adrenaline, you know, from the panic. But then every night before I go to sleep, all I can think of is…well, you. I called it off with Lulu this morning.”
“Lulu?”
“The woman I was seeing.”
Oh yes. The dark-haired woman at the gala. He broke it off with her?
“She didn’t make me feel like…And I suppose I just came to ask if you were involved with the man you were with at the accident…It wasn’t clear because at the gala you said you felt like we had a connection. And I…I think you might be right. I feel like I know you somehow. Like we’ve met before. Before the gala of course. Why were you outside my house that night?” He crouches down on the step in front of me. His face is so close that I see the dark golden bristles of fresh stubble glittering across his perfect jawline. “It can’t have been a coincidence, that you were there, out of all the streets in London.”
“I…”
Telling the truth to Cooper got him stuck in the hospital. Maybe Merritt was right and Jonah is one of my five soulmates. But…it doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure I’m in love with someone else. I’m in love with Cooper. Even if Amy was wrong and Cooper doesn’t feel that way about me, I know that I do feel that way about him. And I’m convinced it’s only a matter of time until I’ll get to ask him in person. Could be days, could be a couple of weeks. But Merritt has this all planned. Cooper will come back.
I smile grimly. This Adonis-like man with the blue eyes and the easy smile is not for me. I want the scruffy-haired, black-eyed, despicable jazz fan in a coma. And as long as the machine is still beeping, I’ll be waiting for him.
Jonah is gazing at me like I’m the greatest woman on Earth.
I need to do him a big favour and end this right here and now, in case he ends up in a batshit obsession that can only end in disappointment. I take a deep breath.
“I’m so sorry, Jonah. You deserve someone wonderful. But that’s not me.”
“But…but I saved your life.”
I take his hand in mine. No leftover spark whatsoever. “And I’ll always be so grateful. Truly. But…nothing is going to happen between us. I know I said we had a connection. But, god, that was a whole lifetime ago.”
“It was just over a week ago.”
“I was a different person then,” I tell him. Which I know sounds ridiculous, because how much can a person really change in ten days?
As it turns out, the answer is almost completely.
