Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [103]
She continues, “Strange but true: A woman finds herself on line with the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club …”
He brushes his mouth against her closed eyelids. “Strange but true: A man receives a prophecy from The Queen…”
She breathes into his ear. “Marcus Flutie.”
He whispers back. “Jessica Darling.”
Lips slide across cheeks rough and smooth.
Mouths meet and …
“Ow!” yelps Jessica. “You bit me! You nipped my lip!”
Marcus smiles knowingly Jessica slides lengthwise across the bed, saying nothing. Marcus waits … one second … five seconds … ten seconds … a lifetime … until he can’t wait anymore.
“Are you quiet because you’re surprised or because you’re repulsed?” Marcus asks.
“Neither,” Jessica replies. “I’m quiet because we’ve done enough talking.”
twenty-three
twenty-four
Room 2010 is cast in penumbral early-morning light. Jessica’s flight leaves in three hours. Marcus can return to campus anytime.
Jessica leans over the bathroom sink, wiping suds out of her eyes with a washcloth. The stubby end of a travel toothbrush juts out of her foamy mouth. Marcus comes up from behind, wraps his arms around her and nuzzles the nape of her neck.
“You never finished telling me about the happy stories.” His voice resonates against her skin like a finely tuned bass string.
She blinks open her eyes, takes out the toothbrush, spits. “Happy stories?”
“The significance of happy stories told from a third-person point of view.”
She taps the brush three times on the edge of the sink. “Most happy stories are fantasies that never happened. A form of wish fulfillment.”
“Surely there are some happy stories that have actually happened.”
She rests the toothbrush on the countertop. “Telling happy stories that actually happened lends a sort of fairy-tale quality to real life. They remind the teller and the listener of the magic that can be found in the mundane if you pay close attention.”
“Mission statement?” Marcus asks.
Jessica smiles at him in the mirror. “Mission statement.” She turns around and presses her lips into that patch of skin at the base of his collarbone that had been untouchable, uncontemplatable, only eighteen hours ago.
“Well, this will make a good happy story,” Marcus says. “Whenever you decide to tell it.”
At first Jessica nods in agreement, the top of her ponytail striking his chin with every head bob. But then she corrects herself with a decisive head shake. “We,” she says.
“We?”
“Whenever we tell it,” she says. “Because it’s our story.”
Jessica slips through his arms and out of the bathroom. She pulls back the blackout shades one side at a time, filling the room with an orangey-pink glow, the stunning kind of sunrise that can be seen only in a chemical skyline. She gazes out the window and down below to the hotel parking lot, which is obstructed by a barely navigable maze of plywood and scaffolding, concrete and construction cones. A patriotic red-white-and-blue banner that extends a whole city block, from one end of a temporary wall to another, reads:
EXCUSE OUR APPEARANCES
WE ARE TAKING APART YESTERDAY
TO MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW
Jessica casts a backward glance toward the bathroom. Marcus is hunched over the sink, removing her toothbrush from his mouth. She’s thinking about the toothbrush and how some couples who have been married for decades—like the middle-aged couple who gasped at them in the elevator, or her own parents—might choose to share their lives but not a toothbrush. And that’s okay. She’s thinking about Bridget and Percy and how happy she is that they are committing themselves to a lifetime of toothbrush sharing. She’s thinking about telling Sunny about the toothbrush the next time she talks to her, if only to hear the eighteen-year-old lecture—in the way that only naive know-it-alls can—on how sharing a toothbrush, even with someone you’ve slept with, even with someone who is your soul mate, crosses the