As Joan walked out into the hallway, tears stung her eyes. She was amazed once again by her own unfailing ability to screw everything up. She was sure that if she'd kept talking, Adam would've ended up feeling even worse than he did while being pinned against his car the previous night. The tears spilled over as she rode the elevator down to the first floor, and she wiped at her face as she walked into the cafeteria.

The large room was pretty empty, but there was a short line at the counter, two people ahead of her as she stepped up. The man directly in front of her was heavy-set and had a giant white brace wrapped around his upper body that looked like a corset. She wondered how he could breathe in that thing. He turned around and caught her staring at him. She smiled awkwardly and looked at the ground.

"Hello, Joan," he said.

Joan looked back up at him, wanting to yell, wanting to cry, wanting to spew vitriol and launch into yet another diatribe about how unfair this all was. But instead she just looked at his brace and asked sardonically, "What happened to you?"

"I pulled my back trying to lift this really heavy rock," God explained.

"Really?"

"No, not really. But it begs an interesting question…"

"I'm not in the mood."

"That I can see. What are you doing here?"

"You know what I'm doing here."

"Then allow me to rephrase. Why are you buying food for Adam when he's supposed to eat the Jello?" It was now God's turn in line, and he turned to the woman behind the counter and said, "Two cups of coffee, please. Light and sweet."

"He doesn't want the Jello," said Joan.

"It's your job to make him eat the Jello."

"Is that what it is? Swallow the bitter pill, because that's life, that's all there is, and it's never going to be any different for him? I thought everything was supposed to work out for the best!"

"Lots of things in life don't work out for the best. But the things I ask you to do, those things do work out for the best. You've learned that by now."

"I thought I did. I thought this whole date thing would have a happy ending. I thought Adam could sue the police department and get rich and quit the stupid hotel job and focus on school and his art and be able to go to college and live happily ever after. I looked at the dark cloud and saw the silver lining, and you know what I got? Rained on!"

God nodded. "I know it must seem that way. But the big picture I told you about? It's so much bigger than you can imagine."

The counterwoman set down two cups of coffee and said, "That'll be three-fifty."

"Thanks." God handed her four dollars from his wallet. She handed him back fifty cents, and he dropped it in the tip jar. He picked up the cups of coffee and turned back to Joan. "Let's go sit down."

The cafeteria was mostly empty, but God led Joan all the way over to a small table by a window. They both sat, and God set down a cup of coffee in front of her. She picked it up, eyed it suspiciously, and sipped. It was perfect.

They sat quietly for several moments, sipping coffee. Finally, God asked, "What time did Adam go into surgery last night?"

"I don't know. I was asleep… or something." She took another sip of her coffee, lost in the memory. She looked up and God and said, "Thank you for that."

"You're welcome. And to fill you in on the timeline, it was 9:45."

"OK."

"So the next question is, where would you and Adam have been at 9:45 last night if you hadn't wandered onto Archer Parkway?"

Confused, Joan looked up at him and shrugged. "I don't know."

"It's called 'the Socratic method,' Joan. I'm trying to engage you in a logical progression."

"So you mean, if we took the highway home?"

"Yeah, let's start there."

"I don't know. The way Adam was driving, we probably would've got in a wreck."

"So that was a good choice."

Joan looked down at her coffee. "I would have rather been in a car accident than see what I saw last night."

"You mean the police officer? But he was the one who took Adam to the hospital."

"Yeah, after practically cracking his skull open on the sidewalk."

"But if you hadn't been on Archer Parkway, and no cop stopped you to look for drugs, where would you have ended up?"

"Back at my house, I guess. I wouldn't have let him drive home from there."

"No, you wouldn't have. And Adam would still have been at your house at 9:45, and not in an operating room. Likewise if you'd gone to a restaurant closer to home."

"What are you saying?"

"If you hadn't gone out with Adam last night, he would have gone to bed thinking he had a stomach flu. He wouldn't tell his father because he wouldn't want him to worry, and his appendix would burst while he was alone in his bed. And that would have been devastating to his system."

Joan felt a chill run down her spine and into the dark pit that had settled in her stomach. "Are you trying to tell me that there's some parallel universe in which Adam… died last night?"

"There are a thousand different possibilities, Joan, none of them written in stone. A thousand parallel threads, like the threads that make up a string. Ask Luke about string theory."

"I don't want to know about strings! I want to know if Adam would have died."

"That possibility would exist only if you and Adam were not dating. If he were with Iris or any other girl, he would have cancelled his Saturday night plans and stayed home. But with you, Joan… he would always choose to be with you. Of course, even with the two of you together, there are still so many 'if's'. If your brother hadn't been paralyzed in a drunk driving accident, you might not have been so scared that you'd make Adam take the side streets. And if Adam had never started posing as a dope fiend to throw Price off his trail, that officer probably wouldn't have assumed he was on drugs and would have let you two just go on your way. Do you see the threads, Joan?"

"But as long as Adam and I are together, he lives, right? That's what you said."

"With you and Adam together, but not on Archer Parkway, Adam's appendix would still have burst, but you would have been with him when it happened, and you would have gotten him to the hospital. But at that stage, his entire body would be ravaged by toxins; his kidneys would fail; he'd be dependent on a dialysis machine while he waited for a transplant."

Joan stared at God, too horrified to even cry. And then an even more terrifying thought occurred to her. "There's a window into that world, isn't there? You could show it to me."

"I could show you anything. I'm omnipotent."

"So that means it's real," she cried, her voice shaking. "All those horrible things happened, somewhere, in some alternate reality. If you can show it to me, then it must be real."

"I could show it to you, Joan, but that doesn't make it real. It would be like showing you a movie, a representation of something, like a dramatic recreation. The only thing that's real is what happened here last night. And that's all that matters. Adam had a minor surgery, and he will recover completely. The two of you beat probability, Joan. You pulled the arm of the cosmic slot machine, and you hit the jackpot. When you made Adam go on a date with you last night, you saved his life."

"No, you saved his life. That's why you gave me the restaurant guide, right? To put us on the right thread?"

"There! Now you're starting to ask the right questions. But you're still not thinking Big Picture, Joan. You've been hanging by a thread for some time, you and Adam."

"How much bigger can the picture get?"

"The tricky thing about the universe is that many of the things with the greatest value are the very things that sheer probability would tend to prevent. What are the odds of finding the one person who is most in need of your particular gifts, the likelihood of that same person having what you need? What are the chances that you'd have the opportunity to be together, and the ability to hold on to it in a dangerous world and not let it die? You see, Joan, true love is the biggest jackpot of them all."

Staring down at her coffee, Joan nodded and tried to take this all in. The vice grip around her stomach began to relax, and the emotional see-saw she was riding slowly tipped the other way. She started to see just how precarious her place in the universe really was, and the realization both terrified and thrilled her. She began to understand what a blessing was.

"Can I ask a question?" she whispered, barely able to get the words out.

"Sure."

"How did I get so lucky?"

God nodded as if this were exactly the right question. "You've been a good servant, Joan. You do what I ask you to. You do a lot of things I don't have to ask you to. You give of yourself. You genuinely care about others, even strangers. You've learned and grown, and you've improved people's lives in the process. You deserve a little something." God tilted his coffee cup back to take the last sip, and then set down the cup and smiled at her. "This is my gift to you, Joan."

Joan found that she could not close her mouth. She sat there, stunned, staring at her Creator sitting before her in a corset brace and a plaid shirt and five o'clock shadow before noon, and for the first time she could see past the outfit, past the hair color, past the skin color, past the gender, past the corporeal mask before her…

And what she saw was Love.

He had one more thing to say: "All I ask of you, Joan, is that you don't waste that gift."

A solitary tear trickled down her cheek and dropped into her coffee cup. She stood up, swallowed, and found her voice. "Thank you," was all she said.

She turned and ran out of the cafeteria, ran down the hallway, ran past the elevator and took the stairs. When she stopped running, she was in the doorway of Adam's room.

Grace sat in the chair next to his bed. They were laughing about something.

"Hey, Joan," said Grace, spotting her in the doorway.

"Hi, Grace. Get out."

"What?!"

"Goodbye. Go." Joan leaned against the door jam, trying to catch her breath.

"What's up your butt, Girardi?"

"Leave now or I will hug you."

Grace leapt to her feet. "You don't have to start with the physical threats."

Adam, both horrified and amused, looked back and forth between his best friend and his girlfriend.

"It's nothing personal," explained Joan. "You just have to leave. I have a sudden and urgent need to be intimate with Adam."

"Whoa!" cried Grace, hands up. "Oversharing!"

Adam smiled and raised his hand in a little wave. "So long, Grace."

Grace looked daggers at him, then softened and had to smile. "Bye, Rove. Glad to see you're yourself again."

She walked past Joan in the doorway and bumped her shoulder. Hard. "Later, Girardi."

"Later, Grace." Joan ignored the bump. She could feel no pain right now. She stepped inside the room and closed the door behind her. She looked at Adam and said, "I don't suppose they have 'Do Not Disturb' signs around here."

Adam shook his head, gazing at her wordlessly, wondering. As she approached him, she smiled a big, happy, genuine smile, almost laughing. She felt so much joy, awe, as if really seeing him for the first time. He smiled back, but his was a rather misshapen smile, because his mouth was hanging open.

Joan reached the foot of his bed, but she didn't walk around it to the chair. Instead, she leaned forward and climbed right up onto the bed. She crawled toward him slowly, her knees straddling his legs, until her face met his, and then she lowered herself onto his lap. Adam's brown eyes widened with anticipation, and his jaw dropped even further.

Her lips hovering just four inches from his, she laid her hands aside his face. She could hear his breath quickening. She was approaching that distance at which eyes must be closed, but she kept hers open as she said, "I love you."

Adam's eyes squeezed shut involuntarily. He sucked in a breath and bit at his bottom lip. When he regained his composure and opened his eyes, they were glistening. "I love you, too." He brought his hands up to her face, but in the mere second it took for him to do so, she had reached to her right and plucked the bowl of gelatin from the tray table. He was moving his lips to hers when he found a big spoonful of green Jello between them.

His eyes narrowed, and his head moved back. "What are you doing?" he asked, his voice low and breathless.

"You're hungry. You need to eat."

"I told you, I don't like the Jello."

"I know you don't like it. That's why I have to make you eat it." She waved the little mound of gelatin back and forth before his lips. It jiggled and caught the light from the window and sparkled like a pile of emeralds. "A bite of Jello, and then you get a kiss."

That was the end of the protest. Keeping his eyes locked to Joan's, Adam opened his mouth. She navigated the spoonful inside, and he closed his lips around it, kept them closed as she pulled out a clean spoon.

He leaned in to kiss her, and she pulled back.

"Swallow!" she commanded, pointing the spoon at him.

He rolled his eyes and swallowed, then opened his mouth to show her that it was empty.

"Good. Stay just like that," she said, setting the bowl back on the tray table.

Joan laid her hands on his face once more. She opened her own mouth and pressed it to his, her lips against his, her teeth against his, her tongue licking his Jello-sweetened tongue. It was the deepest, most full-on kiss they'd ever had. Adam grabbed at her with both hands and mouth, and it was like he was sucking her into him. Warm fingers of electricity shot through her. She had to fight the urge to press her body against his, because even in the heat of passion, she was aware of the wound in his stomach that needed to heal.

Adam himself seemed to have forgotten all about it, because he kept trying to pull her to him. Ignoring the IV tube, his arms wrapped around her back, then he relaxed his hold and dropped his hands to her waist, where they made their way underneath her shirt, his thumbs massaging her sides, then his fingers crawled around her back and slipped down over her jeans. With a firm grip on her rear, Adam pulled her deeper into his lap, and her tongue was still engulfed in his mouth when he gasped, and his teeth clenched and he had to pull away quickly to avoid biting her. Joan couldn't tell if this sudden spasm was due to arousal or pain.

"Ow!" he cried, followed by, "Dammit!" And that settled the question.

Her hands still on his face, she forced him to look at her. "Careful!" she admonished him. "Remember where you are." She scooted her hips back away from him, forcing him to remove his hands from their hold and rest them on her thighs.

Leaning back against the bed, he panted, "I'm with you, Jane. That's all I know." His face was as flushed as it had been at the height of his fever.

"You're in the hospital, Adam. And if you start blowing stitches, who are they going to blame -- the poor patient, or the girl in his lap?"

Adam nodded vigorously, taking her completely seriously. His sense of humor had abandoned him, driven out by a whole new horde of emotions. "Oh, God, Jane," he gasped, looking like he might cry, "I love you. I love you so much."

"I love you, too, Adam Rove. I love you very, very, very much." With each 'very' she wagged her head back and forth, and Adam's eyes followed her lips. He reached up to wrap a hand around the back of her neck and pull her in for a kiss, but she pulled away. "No-no-no!" she trilled.

She reached for the spoon, dipped another little mound of gelatin out of the bowl, and raised it to his lips.

"No! No more Jello," Adam begged.

"No more Jello, no more kisses," she replied. She cocked an eyebrow at him and asked, "What's it gonna be, Rove?"

"Chah! You're a cruel mistress, yo." But without another word, his mouth dove for the spoon and slurped the Jello right off of it.

"Good boy," she said. He looked at her expectantly, but instead of kissing him, she lifted her fingers up to trace his lips. His beautiful lips. He kissed her fingers, then gently sucked one into his mouth and bit it playfully. She lifted her free finger up to touch his nose, his long, articulate nose, the nose that looked like it belonged in a Renaissance painting. She hadn't even begun to contemplate the beauty of his expressive eyes when he interrupted her wonderwalk with –

"Yo! Jane! You're not holding up your end of the bargain here."

"You know," she said thoughtfully, "if you eat the whole bowl of Jello right now, I won't have to interrupt us at all."

Adam peered at her, his eyes wide and sparkling and in awe of her. "I think I've been outsmarted, yo."

Joan grinned victoriously and handed him the bowl and spoon. She lifted her hips and rolled over to sit next to him.

"Where are you going?" he asked, with real desperation in his voice.

It made her smile. "I'm not going anywhere. Eat."

Moving very carefully, Adam scooted over to give her room. Joan snuggled up against him, resting her head against his shoulder. She'd been this close to him before, but never had she felt so aware of him. She could feel the muscles in his arm. She could smell the overwashed cotton of the hospital gown, and the antiseptic scent of the bandage and medicine beneath the gown. She laid a hand gently on his stomach and rubbed softly, as if to heal him with her touch. When she felt a tremor run through him, she knew it wasn't from pain. She looked up at him, and he was gazing at her, his lips hovering right before hers, and she could tell that Jello was the furthest thing from his mind.

"Eat!" she commanded.

"Hold out your hand," he said, a mischievous glimmer in his eyes.

Suspecting what he was going to do, and liking it, Joan held out her hand. Adam spooned some gelatin into her palm and smiled lustily at her. He set the bowl down, took her hand and brought it up to his mouth. He slowly licked up all of the Jello, his tongue continuing to tickle her palm long after it was all gone.

Joan giggled, but she wasn't really laughing. Every flick of his tongue sent waves of heat through her, and soon she was far too hot for anything to be funny. She moved her hand down from his mouth, took him by the chin, and sat up to kiss him.

Now it was Adam's turn to pull away. "Jane," he teased, "I have to finish the Jello."

"Well, hurry up, will you?" she begged. She dropped her hand to his chest, where she occupied herself with tracing her fingers over the pattern in the hospital gown and imagining what was beneath it.

Having accomplished his goal, Adam left the spoon on the tray table, took the bowl in both hands, and lifted it to his mouth. He tilted his head back and slurped down all of the Jello in three big gulps.

Joan watched him in amazement. Adam saw the look on her face and almost laughed, which was problematic because he was trying to swallow. He covered his mouth, then tossed the empty bowl onto the tray table.

"Careful," she said.

Once he had successfully swallowed all of the Jello, neither of them spoke, but his eyes called her to him. Joan was leaning back against the bed with him now, their faces turned to each other, and the look on Adam's face made it hard for her to remember to be gentle. She still had one hand on his chest, and she wanted to dig into his flesh, but she consoled herself with the thought that there would be time enough for that, down the road somewhere, because Time had let her have him. And when she kissed him, their lips touching softly at first and then opening up and drawing each other in, she knew that she was kissing a miracle, and that was exactly what it felt like.

And when everything started to vibrate, Joan thought at first that it was just part of the little electric shocks running through her body. But then she heard a buzzing sound.

She pulled her lips away, and Adam was smiling, and she realized that the bed was moving, and Adam had his hand on a button.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I just want to lie down next to you," he replied.

Joan leaned back against the bed, and they rode it down until it was flat and they were lying side by side.

"That's a cool trick," she said, propping herself up on one elbow so she could look down at him.

"I can't turn on my side," Adam explained. "It hurts. So I need you to come here." He tried to pull her onto his chest.

"I'm not getting on top of you, Adam. We've already gone further than we probably should in your condition, and I'd just end up hurting you." The disappointment in his face almost broke her heart, but she continued, "Besides, your dad's probably going to be back soon."

"That's OK. He's just bringing me some books and music and stuff. He doesn't have to stay."

"Don't you want to spend some time with him?"

"Right now? Not so much."

"But at some point we're probably going to get interrupted. A nurse could walk in or something."

Adam suddenly looked at her as if a terrifying thought had occurred to him. "I don't care if a nurse comes in. I don't care if my dad comes in. Just promise me you won't leave."

Joan gasped, so passionate was his plea. "I won't leave."

"You'll stay here all day?"

"I'll stay all day. But you do need to rest, so a lot of that time we'll just be watching TV or listening to music."

"OK, I can live with that."

Joan smiled down at him. She bent and kissed his cheek, planting a row of soft little kisses along the side of his face until she reached his ear, which she bit softly and then whispered, "I'm not going anywhere, Adam. I don't want to be anywhere you aren't."

"Me neither."

Adam turned his face so that his lips met hers, and Joan knew it would be a while before they turned on the television.

THE END

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