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They can’t go home, Selvi- Cobel says. (Where’s home? Gemma had started to ask. Do w- do you still — but then she'd stopped herself, like maybe she didn’t actually want to know yet.) Can’t go to Devon and Ricken's, can't put Eleanor in more danger than she already is. Can’t stay in Kier at all. Not now, at least. Not tonight.
Mark is still covered in a stranger's blood when he slaps Charlotte Selvig's floral-patterned credit card onto the counter of a motel check-in desk fifteen miles outside of Kier. (Not far enough, his animal brain is nagging at him. They need to get further, leave the state — fuck, leave the country, build a spaceship and leave the world behind. He could do it. It — it fucking feels like he could do it right now. He can do anything. Build a spaceship, lift a car, walk on fucking water. Gemma’s here. She’s here. She’s here. She was dead, and now she's here.)
The teenage girl working the desk blinks at him, at the blood. She’s got these huge blue eyes, and her gaze slides between the two of them; she makes pointed eyes at Gemma like she's trying to decide whether or not she needs help. And god, Mark wants to tell her to fuck off, because she has no fucking idea, none at all, but he's trying to be patient. Even pressed up alongside him, Gemma's not nearly close enough. It’s agonizing; he’s exhibiting more restraint than he ever has in probably his entire life.
He inhales. Exhales shakily and spreads his palms out on the worn wooden counter. "Please," he says. "We've had a long day, and my wife really needs to get some rest."
(In hindsight, they probably should've changed in the car. At least he should've. As it is, the plastic supermarket bag with a change of clothes Devon brought for them swings from Mark's hand, rustling softly when it brushes against the side of the desk.)
"Yes, please. We're very, very tired," Gemma adds, "and my husband needs to clean up." Half-serious, a familiar vaguely mocking tone she'd put on when she was trying to get out of something and doing a bad job of lying; hearing it now lights up something in him that Mark didn't even realize was still there. And there's that word, husband — he'd considered himself one all these years, her ring on his finger long after he'd banished the box of her remains to the basement.
But to hear her actually say it, it’s. Fuck.
The girl at the desk looks at them a moment longer with her haunted doll eyes before letting out a long-suffering sigh. Mutters something like I don't get paid enough for this shit. Right back atcha, kid. She swipes the card — twice, because the card reader is old and worn and it doesn't take on the first swipe — and slides it back to him along with a key on a ring. Says something he doesn't quite catch, because the blood is starting to rush in his ears again. A steadily growing thrum of she's here, she's here, she's really fucking here.
Mark thanks the girl, and he and Gemma step back out into the night. He doesn't miss the way she stiffens briefly in his grip when she steps over the threshold. Cold wind whips across their faces and snags at their clothes. Mark squeezes her hand. An unspoken reassurance: I'm here, and so are you.
(When they’d both stumbled out of the emergency exit onto the asphalt, Cobel’s car idling just a dozen yards away, Gemma had looked up at the night sky and frowned a little. Turned to him and said, I’d hoped it would be sunny. Her expression turned mirthful. It still gets sunny, right?
Mark just had to kiss her again then; Cobel laid down on the horn.)
"I don’t remember the room number," he admits to her as they stumble together along the row of doors covered in ugly, cracking orange paint. They're tripping over each other's feet. "Did she even give us a room number? I wasn’t paying attention. She could've robbed us blind." He feels his face split into a grin for what feels like the hundredth time tonight. It hurts; he hasn’t smiled like this in years. He wonders if he'll ever be able to stop. He doesn't think so, no. No fucking way. He'll fall asleep smiling and wake up smiling, freak out the cashiers at the supermarket and the drivers whose rear views he shows up in because he just won't ever be able to stop fucking smiling, not even if every last one of his teeth falls out.
She's here. With every passing moment, reality solidifies itself.
Gemma tucks her chin over his shoulder. Her hands are in the pockets of his jacket. "The number's on the keyring, baby," she says, teasing, though Mark can't miss the quiver in her voice. Barely there, like she's trying to hide it from him, trying to be brave.
(Ha. Trying. She’s the bravest fucking person he’s ever known. Always has been — the kind of brave that makes him want to do impossible things, like bear an evening of charades with Ricken’s friends, or journey into the bowels of hell to bring her back to the land of the living.)
She hesitates at the threshold again, blinking at the number on the door like it doesn’t make any sense; it's breaking his fucking heart.
He's all over her again once they're safely — safe, the word doesn't feel right but it has to be true, has to, because she's right here in his arms, she's here, she's safe, he's going to fucking keep her safe — inside Room 8 with its gross polka-dot wallpaper. Presses her back against the closed door and ignores that the room reeks of smoke despite the NO SMOKING plaque and cups her face in his hands and kisses her, kisses her, kisses her, revels in the push back from her own mouth. They're doing that thing again, murmuring you're here, I'm here, you're here, I'm here like the call-and-response in the bridge of a shitty Top 40 pop song. Eventually it gets so stupid they both start laughing, teeth clacking.
"We'll be insufferable," Gemma says against his mouth, warm. Mark can feel the corners of her mouth curl. "Nobody will want to be around us."
(It had been like that in the beginning, too. Mark wants to go back and whack his younger self over the fucking head and say put the ant farm down, you idiot, and never fucking let her go.)
He moves his own mouth to her temple, presses another kiss there like it's another Saturday night and he's leaning over her while she grades papers. Breathes in the familiar-unfamiliar scent of her hair, her skin, the scent he kept trapped in their sheets in the weeks after the crash.
"Like teenagers. Or newlyweds," he agrees. "Good. They can all fuck off forever."
Gemma snorts, then takes the chance to slip out of her coat, which is really Devon’s coat that Devon had shoved onto her the second she’d crawled into the backseat of the car. "We should, um. We should clean up, maybe," she says, and then she's very decisively taking his wrist and leading him into the tiny bathroom.
She hits the switch, and the single bulb on the ceiling bathes them both in dingy yellow light.
Mark blinks. Feels himself blanche. He recognized the clothes the second he stepped through the Cold Harbor door. Seeing her in them now, though, without adrenaline turning the whole thing fuzzy and dreamlike around the edges, he's almost sick from the realization — it's what she wore the night she slipped out the door and never came home.
Gemma looks pretty wan suddenly, too, sways a little on her feet — maybe from all the blood, though he was always the squeamish one — and Mark hurries to holds her upright. "C’mere," he murmurs, "let me help, let’s get you out of those." He helps her ease the sweater over her head. He presses his face to her neck to chase the hot thrum of her pulse under her skin while he helps with her jeans and she kicks off her shoes.
Alive. She's alive. (Devon's voice, what was only a few weeks ago but feels like a lifetime: Mark, he said she's alive. How impossible it had seemed then, the most cruel joke imaginable, and he'd hated her in that moment, hated his innie, hated himself. Thought about opening his arm up with a broken liquor bottle, but only for a second before that started to feel like a pretty stupid idea. He'd survived two years without Gemma already; supposedly the worst of it was over. It was over. It had to be over.)
They start up the shower, and she helps him with his own clothes until they're lying in a bloody, stinking heap. He's like fucking John Wick or something. They both stare down at the pile on the bathroom floor, then at one another. She starts to laugh first. Mark follows. Thinks: I'll follow you anywhere for the rest of our lives. Thinks: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Under the lukewarm spray, he holds her, and that's when the tears come again, pressing sorry, sorry, I'm so fucking sorry into every patch of skin his lips find. She tastes the same, feels the same. Better than a memory. Mark's a little embarrassed, naked like this. He's so different from the last time he held her. Older. It never bothered him much before, not for any stretch of time post-Gemma, but the reality of it now kind of feels like a sucker punch. That he's gotten older; that his haircut kind of sucks; that there's a sink full of empty Split Lager bottles and a basement full of her stuff back in the unit he'd moved into after selling their home; that he works a shitty corporate job he let split his brain in two just so he could stop thinking about her for a little while. She's going to be pissed when she finds out why he got fired from Ganz.
(Not fired in so many words; “asked to resign” was more like it, the most polite fuck off they could muster for a guy whose wife’s remains were resting in a pale green urn on the living room floor.)
It's a conversation for later. There are lots of those to be had. Mark’s never been good at those. It’s always been easier to ignore everything until it rotted and crumbled away into irrelevance.
He’ll do it for her. On the drive to Lumon this morning he promised it to himself — swore up and down that if they made it out of there together, he’d do anything.)
Their fingers slot together. Two ringless ring fingers; he left his in the locker back at Lumon along with his phone and boots and coat. It doesn't bother him so much that he won't be getting them back — he can always get new shit, it's fine — but he doesn't like the idea of them going through his things. Doesn't like the idea of their fingers all over his wedding band. Doesn't like the idea of their fingers all over hers.
It's fine, he tells himself, and it is; his anger subsides just as soon as it arrived. It's just stuff.
She's here. Under his fingers, she's here. He smooths his hands down the sides of her throat, over the curves of her shoulders, along the length of her arms. Feels her pulse everywhere he touches. Gets to his knees to press kisses to her hipbones and her thighs. Pauses at a particularly nasty bruise on her left knee. Kisses that, too. Gemma shivers, tips forward to wrap around him. Holds him there like that, fingers carding through his hair while he finds the scar she got hiking at Yellowstone with her parents when she was a teenager.
The water's gone fully cold again by the time she helps him clean the blood out of his hair. There's no shampoo, so they lather up their hands with the bar soap and watch red sudsy water disappear down the drain. They're both trembling, teeth chattering with blue lips when they step back out onto the slippery tile, wrapping themselves in the shabby towels like little kids. Stupidly, he's reminded of the way he and Devon would come running up from the pool when they were younger.
Mark rifles through the bag of clothes while Gemma towel-dries her hair. They're brand-new, tags and everything, like Devon went on a shopping spree with Cobel while he was blood-soaked in the belly of the beast. (It's funny to imagine the two of them together, rifling through clearance racks, with all he knows now.) WORLD'S OKAYEST OLDER BROTHER t-shirt. Yeah, okay. Fuck you, too, little sister.
(He's so grateful to her he's nauseous with it, actually. He's gonna deserve every fucking barb she ever throws at him for the rest of their lives. Maybe he already did, but now especially.)
The motel sheets are scratchy and smell like smoke, too — they're gonna have to wash again in the morning. Maybe the water will stay a little warmer this time. Maybe he'll get to his knees for her again, and she'll let him, and they'll be able to talk about everything or even something without choking on the weight of two years apart.
“It’s terrible, right?” he asks about the smell, taking an exaggerated whiff of one the smoke-steeped pillows.
“Horrible,” Gemma agrees, wrinkling her nose. Eyes kind of distant, and then she just. Flops onto the bed anyway, almost defeatedly. “We’ll never be clean again.”
Mark doesn’t like the way she says it, like it’s something heavier than she thinks he can carry.
“We should both just take up smoking, maybe. Then nobody will ever know,” he offers, but the oppressive weight of the moment stubbornly refuses to lift.
There's moonlight leaking in through a tiny gap in the curtains. Gemma's beautiful like this, backlit by it, but Mark would rather her be safe; he gets up to pull them all the way shut. He can't see her at all now, but she's there in the dark, warm and alive. Hair still damp. He plays with her fingers, kisses each tip, notices a hardened callous on the middle finger of her left hand. Notices the way she twitches when his lips find it. Notices the way she tries to hide it.
He wants to ask her so many questions. He wants her to tell him everything.
(He wonders how much she even remembers. He thinks of those eight-hour work days swallowed up by the chip in his brain, then imagines that times twenty-five. He stops thinking about it, because he starts to feel like he's going puke.)
Tomorrow, he tells himself. Tomorrow, he'll get his hands on a phone for her to call her parents. Tomorrow, they'll sit cross-legged across from one another on top of the comforter and drink shitty gas station coffee, eat sugary cereal from to-go cups, watch his face flash across a news bulletin; then, they'll start on everything.
Maybe they’ll stay here in this room forever. Kind of romantic.
(Another kind of entrapment, his mind supplies unhelpfully, so he dismisses the thought, frowning to himself in the dark.)
"You're here," he prompts instead, just to make sure.
"I'm here," she answers. Pauses, like she's still in disbelief herself. "I'm here." Her lashes flutter against his cheek. Mark listens to the sound of her breathing and wants to cry again. He's never going to sleep. They'll have to force him to. He wants to stay awake forever and listen to her inhale, exhale.
It's been so long.
Inhale. Exhale.
Mark knows what her breathing sounds like once she's finally fallen asleep. It never comes. He strokes a hand down her back, thumbing over each notch of her spine.
"You're safe now," he tells her. "Gemma, you are."
Implicitly it's an admittance of failure, he knows. That he'd failed to keep her safe once, that she'd said I could stay; that while he'd been hunched over papers in the sun room, somewhere on the road home, they'd gotten her. They'd gotten her, and they hadn't let her go.
He’s trying not to hold on so tightly. She’s right here.
But that’s the thing: she’s right fucking here.
"Don't say sorry again," Gemma says as if she's read his mind. She was always the more perceptive one. More attentive. Shame unfurls in his gut. "Please, don't." Her breath hitches.
Slowly, gradually, they find more of each other's bodies in the dark. She says his name, and Mark tastes her tears when she kisses him. He smooths his fingers over her cheeks, keeps one hand there while he reaches under the covers with the other to find her where she wants him. Gemma whimpers; Mark feels himself choke on a sob. Whispers Baby, baby. My baby. He'd said it to her down on the testing floor, too, when his shaking hands found her beloved face. My baby. Her head tips forward, and her mouth finds his shoulder. Her ribcage expands against his.
"Whatever you want, honey," Mark tells her, reverent as a promise and soft as a secret, face buried in her hair. "Whatever you want."
The heating kicks on. The sound of cars roaring by on the freeway leaks through the crack under the door. Gemma shivers, sighs, thighs clenching. The clock on the bedside table reads 3:42. (Jesus Christ, how long have they been lying here?) Their old clothes are still in a pile on the bathroom floor. It’ll be light in hours he can count on one hand, and he’ll tug her outside so she can watch the sun come up.
For now: the two of them, awake and alive and together in the smoke-clogged dark.
(In the backseat of Cobel’s car, snuggled between him and Devon because fuck you, dude, she's my fucking family, too, Gemma had folded her delicate fingers into the bloodstained collar of his shirt. Had looked from the stars, where her gaze had been fixed for the better part of ten minutes — which Mark only knew, of course, because he’d spent those ten minutes with his gaze fixed on her — to his face. What exactly did you do? she’d asked. Not horrified. Just curious. Maybe sort of mesmerized.
He’d thought about saying: It wasn’t me. But what kind of fucking response was that, really? It wasn’t me, it was the other guy. Even worse to say it was an accident, kind of, actually.
Instead, he’d hauled her impossibly closer, and in the glow of the passing streetlights he’d seen fresh tears beading at the corners of her eyes. I came to find you. Kier disappearing behind them, an endless dark stretch of road ahead. I just came to find you.)