“You are next to me, reading a book. I feel you there before I see you. All this noise and downpour and rush hour and thunder and you are standing at the very edge of the curb, older than you are now, separate and quiet, just reading. There are raindrops on your glasses and in the wet they are slipping and you push them back to the bridge of your nose and you aren’t there, not really, not in this darkening street on this grimy, beautiful evening. Neither of us is there. You are no more there than I am. You are lost in that book.

“The island crowd surges forward and the surge pushes you into the road, tips you over the square edge, thoughtless, and the driver trying to beat the lights hasn’t noticed you tipping, your center of gravity shifted already, the start of your fall. Not high, that curb, but dangerous enough. Behind me, somebody sees you. Somebody gasps, and the car chases down the space between you, heads straight for you as you look up from your page and meet reality in that heartbeat, take it all in. I can move faster than any car. My arm is a turnstile, unyielding. I stop you. It’s what I am here for, to stop you. To keep you safe, in your book. It sweeps past, and I pretend that you will remember it, when I’m gone—won’t be long now—I tell myself that you will remember the strong shut gate of my arm.”

I wanted him to say something more, to keep talking, but he didn’t. He looked at me and he opened his arms and I lay against him, and in the end, we closed our eyes at the same time and our breathing fell in together and it was calm and soft and slow.

Neither of us said a word in that Now, while the universe went on expanding beyond belief all around us, because we knew that what we said next would have to be the perfect thing, or nothing at all.

TWENTY-FOUR