Our turn came. Heated leather warmed us through our cold clothes as we slid away, and I moved closer to Jay, snuggling up to him, begging his body to thaw the parts of me the hot air inside the taxi couldn’t reach. He bent his head down and we kissed, we kissed deep. In the periphery of my consciousness, I heard the taxi driver laugh a cruel little laugh.

It irritated me, pricked me through winter-blushed skin. ‘What’s so funny?’

Jay gave me a look. Shut up, Jay, let me be rude. Everyone is allowed to crack sometimes.

‘You two in love, yeah?’

‘Absolutely.’ Why was Jay so calm? Why was all the defiance here mine? ‘How far to the hotel, sir?’

‘Why were you laughing?’ Why was he laughing? What was funny here?

His accent was thick but the grammar was perfect. ‘Don’t you know that the new girl is always better?’ He turned around, pale green eyes on black skin, teeth baring white into me, square winter icicles splicing me wide open.

‘Pull over.’

‘Tara, we’re in the middle of the highway. He can’t—’

‘Jay, just make him pull the fuck over’

‘Tara, calm down—’

‘Jay—’

I had to have been screaming, but I wouldn’t know till later, when I came to, in a soft, white, warm winter hotel bed.

‘What the hell happened in there?’

‘I’m worried about you.’

‘It’s making you sick.’

‘I need you to be okay, Jay.’

We spent the days inside the hotel room, under the covers. Jay talked in his sleep, fractured sentences that never found their way to a period.

‘Dear girl, dear girl, are the great sweeps of beauty worth it, dear girl? I can’t quite seem to calculate it right. Maybe I lied to you, dearest child, why say it if I—’

A soft, warm spool of wool coming undone, melting into his madness with an acquiescence that told me there was no saving him.

‘The new girl. April was the new girl. And then she just wasn’t, anymore, at all. And you, Tara? You?’

I would never really have him, would I? No. Jay belonged only to himself. In his blue world, he was unreachable. I had been pushing away the incoming clarity, but here it was—the acute loss of his endless heart, broken into a shape only I could find beautiful.

‘I am afraid, oh dear girl, I have become afraid—’

I had spent my whole adult life leading up to Jay, and now, for the first time, I felt it a terrible burden. Up-close, he was exhausting. It was just so exhausting, this hardbound agony of being in love with an irreparable man.