SHE’S TRYING TO STAY PERFECTLY still as he falls asleep, listening to the pattern of his breathing. Colin hasn’t biked in days, hasn’t beaten himself up and worn himself out like he used to. Lucy is used to seeing him always moving, almost vibrating with his barely contained vitality. But now, as he approaches sleep, he seems oddly quiet. It gives her the tiniest twinge of unease, even as his arms are tight and strong and his broad chest presses to the curve of her spine.
Colin inhales and mumbles something before his body seems to deflate, growing easy and tired and even warmer somehow. She misses that release, the physical letting go of sleep.
Lucy has been back here for more than two months. Sixty-five sunsets, and tonight is the first time she feels the sensation of drifting to darkness. She assumes people who love to sleep mean that they love this part of it most: the peaceful disengagement.
As she relaxes, she feels like she’s back on the trail, but this time it’s only in her mind and it’s different somehow. She’s underwater. Bubbles rise from her lips as she exhales, and when she looks up, they turn into silvery stars in a violet sky. Reeds become branches, stretching to touch each tiny spot of light. Ahead of her is the same dusty trail, but in the darkness it is a soft brown-black. The surface seems covered in a strange mixture of the lake bottom and tree bark from the earth outside.
The trail doesn’t go on forever as trails sometimes do in dreams. It ends straight ahead, where there is no turn or hill; there is only nothing. A soft blackness. In this world, where ghost girls can walk and touch and laugh, black isn’t a terrifying chasm. It’s just the other side of white.
She keeps walking until she’s not walking anymore; she’s simply moving. Turning left, then right, then left again until she’s back at her trail, waiting. Instinctively, she feels her body curve and press back against Colin one more time just before she lets herself fall into the black.
