She walked over to him, feeling oddly ill at ease with his discomfort. “I promised you supper. You don’t need to run,” she said softly.
He didn’t move.
She watched his face. Nothing about the way he was now made sense with the image she always had of him, his face vulnerable, his movements uncertain.
He lifted his eyes finally. “All right,” he whispered, and walked into the living room, took his coat off, and picked up both of their glasses.
She rushed into the kitchen ahead of him, and spooned the thick stew onto plates, placing her setting closest to the door and leaving him the spot by the window, for some reason, still worried he’d run. She was suddenly curious about him, all the things she didn’t know, not the cartoon she always saw him as. Something about the way he was with her made her want to get him to talk to her, to spill whatever secrets he was keeping behind all the arrogance, behind the newspaper smiles. But he didn’t seem interested in talking, so they ate in silence for a long while, slowly sipping their wine. She was almost done and he hasn’t said a word. She watched as he moved chunks of meat around his plate distractedly, barely eating, and finally set his fork down onto the plate and looked at her, his mouth curling up in a small smile.
“I was in love with you once. My first year of med. I don’t know if you remember me at all. Doesn’t matter…. I wanted so desperately to talk to you then. You walked into Dixon’s class late one day, flushed, smelling like you carried all of Spring on your hair, and you were looking around the room wildly. Dixon was screaming at you, but it was as if you weren’t really there. You were so lost in your own world, you didn’t care about Dixon or anybody in that room, and I couldn’t stop staring at you. He kicked you out then, and I so desperately wanted to run after you…” he said and looked down.
She recalled that day. It cost her dearly in her grades, but she didn’t remember him at all, only it seemed wrong to tell him that now. “Why didn’t you?”
He shook his head and took a small sip of wine, not saying anything for a long time.
She waited, playing with the remnants of her food, not looking at him, not wanting to rush him.
He sighed, his fingers nervously twisting the stem of the glass. “I am dying, Sandra. I have been, for years. Waldenstrom’s. It’s a kind of blood cancer, but far too rare for us to know much about it. My father died from it, but everybody back then said it wasn’t hereditary, so I had nothing to worry about. I didn’t believe them. Anyway, that’s what got me into genetics in the first place. I didn’t go after you because I traced my whole line and per my albeit amateurish calculations at the time, there was a sixty-two percent chance that I would get sick…. I haven’t done well with people since, especially women. What you see of me in public, it’s not like that. They are from various escort services. I pay them to accompany me to functions so that the rest of the world leaves me well enough alone. It makes it easier for me.” He looked down. “You don’t have to believe that either. I rather expect you not to.”
He shook his head softly, took another sip of wine, and looked at her again. “I watched my mum mourn my father for almost two decades after he died. She had these tulips he liked, dark violet with a black fringe on them. She kept planting them year after year after he was gone, only after a few years they refused to grow right and it drove her crazy, but she kept at it. Every Spring she’d be out there in front of the house watering these rows of skinny stalks, barely large enough to hold up their limp heads, so they always hung down, as if they were ashamed, looking all the more broken for it.” He set his wine glass down with a hollow clank, empty. “I don’t know why I am telling you all this…. Forgive me. I should go. I’ll show myself out,” he said very quietly and stood up.
She thought of Cassie working in one of those escort places years ago before she found her, and she was suddenly angry at this man, angry for using those girls like that. “Did you ever sleep with them, the escorts?”
He blanched. His voice quiet, controlled after a little while. “Yes. Once. It didn’t mean anything beyond the bit of comfort, and she was sweet and kind to me. But yes, I had once slept with one of those girls… I’ve said a lot more than was prudent, Sandra. I really should go.” He looked at her apologetically, waiting for her to release him, to tell him it was okay for him to run now. But she didn’t want him to go, and she couldn’t explain it even to herself why she didn’t. It just seemed wrong to have him leave like this.
She walked over to him and not knowing what else to do wrapped her arms around him. She felt a sharp intake of breath, and she worried he was in pain, so she looked up at his face but he was looking back at her, eyes calm, if a little sad.
“How long do you have?”
His eyebrows went up slightly as if she surprised him by asking. “I don’t know. It could be a few months or a few years, maybe more. If I wasn’t such a coward, it would have happened already.” He stepped away from her, turning away. “There is something else you should know. What I found about the gene, it’s likely gotten out. One of my assistants had this habit of backing everything up every night onto these little drives we have at the lab, and the one from the day we got the tests back on the baby that was born to that woman is missing. I don’t know if he took it or someone else. He never came into work after that, and nobody seems to know where he is. If it did get out, I think you and I will have done something so catastrophic that Hitler would seem a saint by comparison, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to fix any of it. I haven’t the time left to fix it.” He put his head down for a beat and then faced her again, and she couldn’t help but feel pity for him.
She reached over and ran her hand through his hair and he let her for a few small moments, and then stepped back, a spark of anger in his eyes. “Whatever you think of me, please don’t. I am okay with dying, I truly am. I’ve been okay with it for a very long time. It’s the other things… the legacy of two decades of work amounting to a bloody disaster in the end. I have a feeling we are a lot alike in that. I think that’s part of why I so desperately needed to tell you this. I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone till tonight…. Truth is, I could use a friend if you can get past this, but you can’t look at me like that again.” He said it softly, a whisper, but his eyes bore into hers with such intensity, he might as well have screamed it at her.
She refilled their glasses and handed him his, looking at his face. She clinked harder than she meant to, feeling the vibration in her wrist. “To friends then, such as they may be and for however long we may have them.”
His lips turned up in a sardonic smile, but it felt genuine. He was devastatingly good-looking and she suddenly wanted to kiss him. She took a small step closer to him and she could see the fear in his eyes.
He shook his head. “I can’t, Sandra, I am sorry.”
She nodded and took another step, bridging what little distance there was. She could hear him breathing, could smell something clean and wintry on him, perfume or soap, something that made her think of standing on the snow-covered porch of her old house as a child for the few moments just before opening the door to the warmth, the few wistful moments of imagining herself curled up on the worn pale-lavender and gold rug next to the fireplace with a tattered copy of something sentimental and sweet stolen from her mother’s bedroom. A prelude to warmth, to comfort. She reached up on her toes, so her face was directly in front of his, and put her hand on his chest.
He froze as if afraid.
She didn’t want him to be afraid. “You can’t hurt me unless I let you get close, and I don’t do that with anyone. I am going to kiss you because I want to. It’s as simple as that,” she said, and she leaned in and kissed him for a long time, softly, glass still in her hand, her free hand on his neck, pressing him close.
His eyes were closed when she pulled away, his whole body tense, and she worried that he’d run from her, that she did scare him after all. He finally looked at her, eyes serious and strangely soft,
set his glass down on the table, and put his hands on the sides of her face. He was barely touching her, his fingers cold against her cheeks. “I haven’t done this in ages. I don’t know if I remember how to.” He seemed embarrassed, and she wanted to laugh at the insanity of this, at both of them feeling so awkward.
“Me neither. I guess we’ll just have to figure it out.” She smiled at him, watching his mouth curl up a little at that.
“Okay.” A soft whisper and his lips were on her hair and her eyes, gentle kisses on her neck. They stayed like that for a long time, kissing, neither of them finding the courage to do anything else.
They sat and talked for hours after that, talked about everything but the bloody research. He liked dogs and old American comic books and winter. He disliked his father, up until he knew for sure that he was dying, and then didn’t, but only because he felt guilty for not being nicer to him. His father was a serious and demanding man who didn’t enjoy children or animals or laughter. He told her he never once saw him smile until the man knew for sure he didn’t have very long and he changed then, changed how he was with everybody. He didn’t want anyone to remember him the way he was before, only he did anyway. He told her about his mother and how she was always full of light and laughter and he couldn’t understand why she’d choose to live with someone who wasn’t like that at all, but then all the laughter went out of her when he died and he knew that loving someone didn’t have to make sense. And how he knew enough even then to never do that to someone. He was seventeen….
She fell asleep curled up on his lap on the couch fully clad, his coat covering her, his fingers playing with the unbrushed strands of her hair, and when she woke up, he was gone, a small soft pillow under her head. The dishes were clean and everything was put away, and there was a freshly boiled tea kettle on the stove.
She finally found the small note taped to the mirror in the bathroom. “Forgive me for running. If you want to find me again, I’d welcome it, but I’ll understand if you don’t. If I were a more generous man, I’d beg you not to. Thank you for last night. It meant the world to me. DH” She smiled at the note and kept on smiling as she went about making a quick breakfast. She could still see those eyes looking at her in the way that she hasn’t been looked at in years, maybe ever, so full of fear, vulnerable eyes of a man who still had everything to lose. She knew how insane this was, how utterly unpragmatic of her. Maybe it was the darkness of what they had both inadvertently done that made her feel a kinship for him that she never felt for anyone else, the knowledge that they would likely be remembered as monsters for centuries to come. In that way, nobody else ever truly understood her, could understand her, but there was something else there, too. Something about the way his long fingers trailed gently down her cheek that made her ache in ways she never had before. She would see him again, but she’d give him a bit of time, give both of them a bit of time. Friday, she decided. Four days away, if she still wanted to then.
She spent the rest of the week in the lab, deliberately not watching the news or reading the papers. And on Friday morning, she picked up her phone and dialed without thinking about what she would say.
“Huxer.” His voice was raspy, underslept.
“I would very much like to see you again, Darius. Pick me up at the lab at six?” she asked quickly and hung up, without letting him answer, giggling to herself like a little girl.
The day moved far too slowly for her. Nobody else was in the lab today. Cassie was still out of town, visiting a friend in some god-awful place whose name she couldn’t recall, and Jason was sick with a cold. She did everything she could to not think about what Darius told her that night. She reworked the formulas for old drugs her lab made years ago, anything to keep her mind away from the damn gene.
Finally, the clock on her wall stickily moved past six, and she heard a light knock on the door. Darius, looking paler than he did that night walked in, locked the door behind him, and faced her. He was holding a newspaper in his hand, Manchester Med Journal, she knew from just a glance. He walked over to her messy desk and slowly spread the paper on it, not saying a word.
“Huxer Genetics Finds Cure for Defective Reproductive Gene” She skimmed the small piece. There were no details in it, only a mention that some private foreign financing was involved. There was a photo of a youngish man in a lab coat, grinning at the camera. She didn’t have to ask to know that it was the missing assistant.
Darius watched her, his whole body tense. “I shouldn’t have stayed over that night. It would make this infinitely easier for me if I hadn’t. I can’t fight this—the research has my name all over it—but I can’t be around to watch it happen, either. I came to say goodbye, Sandra.”
She felt her eyes well up and fought it. “No. You can’t, Darius…. But you’re right, you can’t stay here now. I’ll shut down the lab for a while, and we’ll go to the country, a place I grew up near. There is a little shack of a house that belongs to a friend of mine, someone who died a few years back. It’s on the coast, a few hours’ drive from here. I am asking you to give this a bit of time. A week maybe. If you still feel you need to after that—”
He shook his head. “I can’t let you do that, Sandra. You’ve been there before, remember? I had to take the back stairs to come here to avoid the bloody reporters already, and it’s just the beginning. I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left outrunning this. It would be silly in the extreme for me to do that.”
She walked over to the desk and picked up the paper, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash. He didn’t move, eyes on her, watchful.
“I didn’t get a chance to look it up yet, so I am going to just ask. This thing you have, do you need medical care to make it manageable? Are you in pain?”
“No. I get tired easier than most, but no, I am not in any kind of pain yet. And I’ve been running all my blood tests myself for years now, so I’ll know before it gets to that point.” He said it calmly, very much the scientist, and she wondered if he ever told anyone else that he was sick, but didn’t want to ask just yet.
“The newspaper hacks will be after me soon enough. It may take a few days, but they’ll come. They always do, and I don’t want to be here for that. I don’t want Jason and my sister to have to deal with any of it, either, so I am closing down this lab for now. Jason can take over afterward if he wants to, but I am done. I gave this twenty years. Twenty years spent in the company of Bonobos and rats and bloody formulas. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that wasn’t medical or had a conversation with another human being that wasn’t about this. I am asking you to come with me, for a week, if you can manage that. You can decide what you want to do after that. I want a bit more time with you. I can’t explain it beyond that.”
He looked uncomfortable, his fingers nervously tapping the edge of the desk. “All right. We’ll go. I’ll stay the week unless you ask me to leave earlier. I can’t promise that I’ll be good company, but I am a decent cook, and I am pretty sure I still remember how to make a fire. I haven’t the slightest clue about much else.” He seemed sad when he said it.
She walked over to him and wrapped her hands around his neck, looking up at his eyes. “I haven’t a clue either, Darius. No promises of a great holiday or anything. I won’t hold you to anything but this bit of time.” She planted a soft kiss on his lips, and moved away, not wanting to scare him.
His face was flushed, but he didn’t move toward her. He nodded his head after a while and walked to the door. “I’ll pick you up at your place in an hour then,” he said simply, quietly, and he was gone.
A week seemed like a lifetime, and she hoped she could will the days to move slowly enough for both of them, however many of them they had left.
15
Rogue
Amelia, June 11, 2236, Crylo
Riley wasn’t in the room when she went looking for him, wasn’t anywhere he should have been, and nobody seemed to know where he went. She checked every space on their floor an
d then ran to the bathroom the boys used. It’s the only room she’d never been in before. She heard the water running from the outside and pulled the door open just a crack to make sure it was Riley and not someone else she was intruding on. It was, only she’d never seen him like this before. He was wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, small drops of water making glittery tracks down his skin. He was standing in front of the mirror, running the blade of a knife over his face in slow downward strokes, but not drawing any blood, and his face was too calm for someone who was hurting themselves.
“What the hell, Riley? What are you doing with that knife?”
He smiled at her, a full-on smile as if what she just asked was the funniest thing in the world. “It’s called shaving, Ams. At a certain age, we kind of have to do that or we get all these hairs, you know, and it makes touching us and kissing us decidedly uncomfortable.” He laughed, making her blush.
She walked over to him and took the knife from his hand, suddenly wanting to do it for him. “Tilt your head back. I got the rest of it.”
He did, face serious, all the laughter gone from him. He froze when she touched the blade to his neck, just under his chin, eyes on her, and looking very much afraid.
“Please, tell me you trust me not to kill you, Riley.”
He didn’t move, letting her scrape at the stubble, his hands wrapped tightly around the counter, chest moving much too fast for how still he was standing.
She set the knife down after a little while, and put her hands on his, looking up at him, concerned. “What is it?” But he just shook his head at her. Something was wrong, she could feel it.
She wrapped her arms around him, his hands on her back now. “You know, this might be the last moment of privacy we have together, Riley, and here we are—shaving.” She giggled softly, couldn’t help it.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 46
