Chapter 30: Crushed

Time had passed. Cora couldn't say how long. She'd let go of counting the days and nights, just as she let go of worrying about her position in the bed after Jamie turned off the wall sconces. She floated, relying on his steady weight to keep her from drifting too far out of place.

She floated through time as well now. A new sensation for Cora, but not unpleasant, anchored by the knowledge that her stay here on this island would only last a month. Not a moment more. One of these mornings the producers would call it a wrap. She and Jamie would bid their bungalow goodbye, never to lay eyes on it again. Any feelings that formed here would end at that boundary, ephemeral and easily forgotten, like a dream.

If the rest of her life was an ocean of time, these nights with Jamie were a warm lagoon, sheltered from the dangers of the open sea. She could strip herself naked here with no risk—no real vulnerability. No harm could come to her as long as she didn't let the currents drag her into deeper water.

Jamie stirred, pulling Cora out of her reverie. She had been drifting in the nether regions between wakefulness and sleep, but his whisper tickled against her ear. "Am I crushing you?"

He lay draped on top of her. Hip bone to hip bone. Rib cage to rib cage. Her legs tangled around his thighs from the position in which they'd finished earlier, both too boneless to move. He had his forearms tucked beneath her shoulder blades against the mattress, supporting the weight of his chest and shoulders just enough to let her breathe.

Was he crushing her?

"Yes," she said in answer. "But I like being crushed."

He let a little more of his weight press onto her frame. Cora let out a sigh, the sound of a piston depressed. "I like to feel weighed down," she said on a slowly expelled breath. "It helps me relax. I use a weighted blanket at home when I'm having trouble sleeping."

"It doesn't suffocate you?"

"Not so far." She caressed his arm, tracing the rippled shape where his bicep met his shoulder. "You're much better though."

"Better than your blanket. High praise, indeed."

"You make excellent ballast." She patted blindly at what might have been his cheek. "Your one and only talent, or so I've been told."

This elicited a throaty chuckle. She could feel it rumble as his abdomen vibrated against hers. Her eyes were open in spite of the pitch black darkness of the room, but she closed them as she soaked in the sensation. She wondered if he could see her or if his eyes were closed as well.

Jamie ducked his head to whisper in her ear. "This can't last, you know."

Cora felt a tug. Yes, she knew, although she allowed herself to forget sometimes. She was enjoying her present circumstances far too much to think about the future.

No, it wasn't a lagoon, was it? More like they were caught inside a soap bubble that would pop someday and send them tumbling back to Earth.

It would hurt. She had passed the point of keeping her feelings fully insulated. It would definitely sting when it was over. The only question was how much. "Let's not think about that now," she said with a hint of sadness in her voice.

"No, I meant this position," he clarified. "It's only a matter of time before I'll have to do something about this." He shifted his pelvis, and she felt him stir against the softness of her belly. 

"Oh, I thought you meant—" She stopped herself, biting her lip. "Nothing. Never mind."

He propped himself back up on his elbows as if to look at her. Cora changed the subject. "Do you have any idea how many days into this we are?"

He considered. "Past halfway by my guess. But I'm not really keeping track."

"We should've drawn tally marks on the wall. Like the prisoner from The Man in the Iron Mask."

"The Count of Monte Cristo," he corrected.

She patted his cheek. "See how good you are? Much more well-read than my weighted blanket at home."

Jamie lowered himself to nuzzle her ear. "No, I've just seen The Shawshank Redemption a few times."

He shifted restlessly, and Cora smiled to herself. "Go on," she whispered. "Do it. You know you want to."

It was a running joke between them, ever since the show had outed him as a PhD. At the mention of a book or movie, he would instantly whip out a quotation, or draw some uncanny parallel between the plot and the events in their real life.

The depth and breadth of his knowledge was extensive, but it was the speed of his memory retrieval that impressed Cora the most. Lightning fast, quoting things verbatim without so much as a pause for breath.

He cleared his throat and slipped into an unconvincing Southern accent, twangy and nasal.  "What's this here book? The Count..." He spoke haltingly, tracing one index finger along the line of her collarbone, as if reading words off a printed page. "The Count Of Monty Crisco."

He paused, waiting for her to supply the next line. "Was that from The Shawshank Redemption?" she asked.

His forehead clunked against her shoulder in mock despair. "The library scene! You're supposed to correct me." His voice dropped an octave lower to denote a different character. "That's Cristo, you dumb shit."

Cora laughed, but Jamie had already returned to the semi-illiterate Southerner reading off her shoulder. "The Count of Monty Crisco... by Alexandree... Dumbass."

Cora cackled. "Dumas!" she protested, emphasizing the second syllable with its silent 'S' at the end. "Alexandre Dumas!"

"Very good." Back to his own voice now. "You make an excellent librarian, as expected."

Cora found the nearest inch of skin, somewhere on his torso, and pinched him lightly. "I thought I was a schoolteacher."

"Actually, I believe Tim Robbins was a banker in the movie. But he becomes the prison librarian to enlighten all the poor unfortunate fellow inmates who haven't had the benefit of his higher education."

"Little does he know," she muttered darkly. "The one with the Southern accent secretly has a doctorate in comparative literature and film."

"Do you think so?" Jamie replied in a pensive voice, as if seriously considering this suggestion as a possible backstory for the movie character. "Perhaps he's just been in prison for a very long time, with nothing else to do but read every book in the place."

Cora shook her head. "Seems like a stretch."

"So it's impossible, in your estimation, for someone to be uneducated but well-read?"

"No of course not, but—"

"Maybe he doesn't even have a high school degree," Jamie went on musing. "He just likes to read and watch a lot of Netflix."

He wasn't really talking about the movie character now. Jamie had a way of ladening his words with double meanings. The chameleon was up to his old tricks, inviting her to consider this alternate backstory for Jamie himself. Cora played along, weighing all the ways it might confirm or contradict the established facts. "How many times has he read Pride & Prejudice?" she asked.

"Just the once."

"Recently?"

"A few years ago," Jamie drawled.

"Jane Eyre?"

"Same."

"And he remembers all the names and all the details of the plot. You expect me to believe that?"

"Believe anything you like."

"No." She thought a minute. "No, it's too far-fetched. He'd have to have an eidetic memory or something."

"Eidetic?"

"A photographic memory," Cora explained. "Or maybe just a—what's the term? Prodigious memory? Something like that. I'd have to ask a neuropsychologist."

Jamie was silent for a moment. Cora rolled around this change in her co-star's storyline in her head, still trying it on for size.

Unlikely, yes. But then, so was the fact that some model with perfect abs also happened to have a PhD.

Impossible? No.

All sorts of idiosyncrasies were rare but not impossible. Cora knew better than anyone how neurodiversity could take many forms. She herself was a case in point, with her sensory issues and photorealistic fantasies. Why couldn't he have some atypical memory for language, with near-perfect recall of every word he ever heard or read?

The corners of her mouth curled upward involuntarily, like a cat enjoying cream. "Honestly, that might be even hotter than the secret PhD."

"It's the truth," Jamie whispered in her ear. "If you want it to be."

Utter nonsense, of course. Cora was too much of a scientist to go along with his shifting realities, as appealing as they were. The truth, she knew very well, had been years and years of higher education. Toil and study. That's what true mastery of a subject required. If he could make his references sound casual and effortless, it was only a product of hard work, the same way an expert skier could make the toughest slope look like child's play.

"No." She shook her head. "You're already too much as it is. I can't get past the suspension of disbelief."

Jamie grunted his dissatisfaction with this answer. "I forgot. She makes her living helping people see the world more clearly, and she likes even her fantasies realistic."

Cora's forehead furrowed. She recognized this pronouncement from somewhere. He'd said it to her sometime before, but she couldn't recall exactly when.

"And how do you like your fantasies?" she asked. "Don't they need the veneer of truth at least?"

Jamie quoted again. "He makes a living impersonating men he'll never be, and he fantasizes about women with hopeless crushes on him."

This time the source clicked into place. Their conversation over cocktails, discussing Bond and Moneypenny and their possible off-camera activities. Jamie had summed her up as an incorrigible realist, and she had quipped back with the line he'd quoted to her just now.

Cora found the back of his head and tousled his hair with her fingers. "I thought the hopeless crush was mutual," she whispered.

Jamie lowered his brow, and Cora turned her cheek instinctively. But he didn't try to kiss her as she thought he might. He knew better than to cross the boundary without an invitation. "It stuck with me for some reason," he said softly. "Either that or I'm a high school dropout with a prodigious memory for flirty banter."

"Prove it," Cora said. "Quote something else."

"Would you have a hopeless crush on me if I did?"

He let his full weight rest against her then, completely unsupported. Cora gasped. She hadn't realized how much of his weight he'd been holding back. She could barely summon the strength to raise her chest and fill her lungs.

But she didn't dislike the sensation. Both the feeling of being crushed, and the sense of being hopeless.

Most people confused hopelessness with despair, but Cora knew better. Hope was the most dangerous emotion of all, in fact, with the greatest risk of loss and pain.

Hopelessness meant safety, ensconced within her soap bubble, above her warm lagoon. No future. Nothing deep. No risk of falling too far or too hard, even when the bubble popped.

Just a crush, she promised to herself, as Jamie's hips began to move against her.

Cora closed her eyes and let the sensation overtake her.

A harmless crush. Delicious while it lasted. Hopeless in the end.

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Also, here's the clip Jamie was referring to from The Shawshank Redemption, in case you haven't seen it:

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