He looked up into the black of her bedroom ceiling. This was big, this thing they had together, feature-length animation film big. It had summer blockbuster written all over it: dramatic, memorable, sequel worthy. He could see the TV spin-off, book tie-in, scantily clad action figurines in compromising poses.
He could see nothing.
It wasn’t the middle of the night, and it wasn’t likely her rented flat had blackout curtains. He eased upright and she didn’t stir. Swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. His watch was on the tallboy. He found it, 10am and it was dead dark in here. Last night he’d been able to make out the bedroom doorway and the dresser because of light in the hall and the bathroom, plus her candles. There was no light now, maybe the flat was sun starved. He felt his way to the doorway, moved into the hall, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again. He hadn’t gotten as far as her kitchen last night. It wasn’t a good idea to go crashing around in there now unless he wanted to wake her.
He reached for the doorway to the bathroom, danced his fingers up the wall to find the light switch. A click and nothing. There was light there last night, but it could be a blown bulb. He used the toilet, washed his face. Found that half-size plastic toothbrush with its tiny tube of paste and cleaned his teeth.
He knew the landing got sunlight because he’d felt it on his face waiting for her the day they’d bought the dress. So even if it was overcast, dismal, he should still be able to see the change in the light. This is what you got for waking up in someone else’s bed, in someone else’s home. You also got the elbow he whacked into the wall, the toe he stubbed on the leg of a hall table. At least that identified her door keys. He found them in a bowl on the table and used them to open the front door.
He only wanted the light to give him a sense of the day, the time, the place. He cracked the seal on the door expecting to feel the sun, hoping to blink against the glare.
Nothing.
He opened the door wider, and wider again until it was all the way open, folded against the wall, and he was standing on the stone step. He saw nothing. He rubbed a hand over his face. He couldn’t hear rain or wind, there were birds chirping. No people sounds. He listened carefully to check that, he heard a bus on the street, but no evidence of Georgia’s neighbours who’d rightly be shocked to meet a naked man on their landing.
He took a step out onto the tiles where he knew the sun would be. He felt its warmth immediately, but it didn’t make him squint and what he saw was nothing.
It made him stagger, his heel caught on the step, both hands went out to grip the doorjamb. Nothing. He saw nothing. He turned to look down the hallway, blackness, then back to the world outside and yeah, there was a difference, but it was shades of charcoal and midnight. He wasn’t seeing light.
He stepped back inside the flat and closed the door, leaned against it. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Could this be lack of sleep, stress, dehydration?
Of course, it could still be a blown bulb, very stormy day. Birds still chirped in bad weather. It could still be that he’d got the angles of the sun wrong and Georgia’s flat was naturally dark. This wasn’t a place he was familiar with, so it could be a lot of things. There was no need to panic. He took a breath, let it out slowly. The next in-breath filled his lungs and brought horror with it.
There was no need to lie to himself. This was it. This was Lina’s moment. The one he’d used vain hope and insane bravado to avoid, deny, but not as he’d planned, evade.
Jesus. He’d lost his light and shade; he’d lost his sense of shape and movement. His residual sight, his jigsaw memory cheat, it was gone. He bent forward, hands to his knees; he was breathing too fast, hyperventilating.
And he did not want Georgia to find him like this: naked, in a panic sweat, coming apart. He had to buck up, get it together. It wasn’t like this was unexpected. He wasn’t sick or hurt or in need of medical attention. He was just blind. Blinder than he had been a day ago. Blind in a way there was no recovery, miracle cure or coming back from, in a way that made him less able and threatened, his romantic blockbuster from becoming the enduring classic he wanted it to be.
Georgia loved and lost with Hamish. She’d been damaged by that relationship. She’d made a plan to start a new kind of life. And then the two of them had stumbled together, and against Georgia’s better judgement she’d accepted Damon entirely for who he was and how he managed the world.
But last night he’d been more capable, more able.
He straightened up. He had a headache: hunger, thirst. Fear. It was tight in his clenched fists and fisted in his gut. This frightened him more than it should. Other than Lina, no one else would even know it’d happened. His life was organised around his blindness, nothing changed. Once he’d lost his backlit twenty-four point, he’d had so little remaining functional sight left to lose anyway, but there was power and control in light and dark, and security in being able to see movement. He couldn’t help but find permanent blackness a crippling threat.
His threat, not Georgia’s penance.
He’d deal with it alone now that it was here; get training to use the long cane and finish that research on how to travel with a dog, put himself on a waiting list for one, work out how he could retain the independence, the life he’d prospered with.
He heard Georgia say his name, once, then louder, before he was ready to face her. He closed the door softly, made the short journey down the hall to her bedroom doorway. Her feet hit the floor and she rumbled around, he’d lay money on finding something to wear.
Her hands a shock on his chest, he couldn’t stop the flinch. “Where’d you go?” A brush of cotton, bet paid off. “Looking like that?”
He pushed his hair off his forehead. “Bathroom, used your spare toothbrush.”
“Oh.” Her arms wrapping around him. “If I use mine I could kiss you.”
He stroked her tangled hair. “I’m not the least bit fussy. You can kiss me without the requirement for a toothbrush.” Inside her kiss the darkness wouldn’t matter. He’d had coloured visions last night in her arms.
“But my teeth have fur on them.”
He tipped his head up, face towards the ceiling. “No one told me you were a were-sound engineer.”
She bit his throat and he laughed, snatching her closer. If he could still his racing thoughts, he’d be okay. He had money, resources, professional assistance. He was thousands of times better off than most blind folk without his earning capacity. He had faith in his ability to work through this new phase of darkness. He had Georgia. She was his leading lady and he wasn’t scaring her off because today he could see less than yesterday.
He captured her jaw, but she squirmed to get away and he let her. She went for the bathroom. She didn’t try the light and he didn’t catch his sigh before it was out, but she was busy splashing water about and didn’t remark on it, instead she laughingly closed the door on him, shouting through it, “I’m not weeing in front of you.”
There was the flush, the tap again, the plink of a handtowel rail against a tile, the door opening and she threw herself at him, backing him into the bedroom.
He let her push him till his calves hit the bed and then he took over, dropping back on it, dragging her down with him, taking her minty mouth and her warm skin and dissolving his truckload of dread in the luscious weight of her body and her soft sighs and murmurs.
What he could touch and taste, what he could smell, sense and hear, held no trepidation. And Georgia filled his senses to overflow.
Her t-shirt was gone and there was only the slide of skin, the stimulant of kisses. She shifted till she was braced on top of him, sitting astride his thighs.
“On top.” It came out of her in a hiss, though there were no S sounds to make it so, only the sibilance of her desire, slippery and sensate.
He forgot the vacant, aching black in the blinding flash of the moment she eased him inside; in the hot, hard gasps she made as he filled her, and the wet heat of what she was made of and gift
ed him. He rolled her hips, helped her move, tilted his own, gave her an anchor. She folded forward for kisses and connection and he only let her upright again when he knew she was set to ride, primed to let go. He lent her his hands to brace against, gave her his voice to guide her and he lost his heart entirely.
“You’re so beautiful, so, so God. So right. Georgia. Let me hear you.”
She didn’t have words, but she had nails dug in the back of his hands, thighs clenching and easing on his hips, tremors wracking through her body, moisture coating her skin. She had her head thrown back and her back arched, hair flicked across his hips and fell over his hands in turn, but her stuttered breath, her moans and sighs might be pain, until she shuddered, jerked down hard on him and shouted her ecstasy.
It released his. His head slammed back, he went rigid, but inside he was a kite or a fish, a fleet thing made of speed and sailing on air, tethered to Georgia, as the fish to the rod, as the kite to the runner. Collapsed, shuddering on his chest she cast him out and held him firm, rode the currents and soared with him.
He called her name and she answered with tender kisses. He was earth to her sun; seconds to her minute, coasting, gliding, rotating on visions wrought in shades of reds and blues and knowledge greater than any sight that he was incapable of being separate from this woman.
18: Freefall
Georgia thought they’d spend the day lolling around her flat. She’d hoped they’d spend it proportionally; maxing out in the bedroom, with occasional forays to the kitchen for sustenance. She could hardly believe Damon was sitting at her kitchen counter wearing nothing but a towel and a few random water droplets from the shower on his shoulders, nodding yes to more toast and chatting about the weather.
She’d nod yes, she’d shout it till her lungs burned to anything he suggested. But he’d suggested parasailing and he thought she was going to chicken out. The toast popped up. He knew a guy who could take them, only a half hour drive. It was safe and fun. She buttered the bread. She wasn’t going to wimp out, but she puzzled at the idea. More specifically at the notion of coaxing him to bed and keeping him there, and the depressing realisation he didn’t want that.
She looked at Fluffy, making O mouths from the tank on the counter. They were the perfect shape for her own disappointment.
Damon had almost made Fluffy fish finger fodder with his elbow, sending the tank skidding across the laminex counter, slopping water, before he snatched it from the edge with a shocked shout. He was making her just as seasick with his desire to tip their new intimacy on its head by inviting the whole world in.
She put the toast in front of him. She poured him more coffee from the French press. She ate her yoghurt and watched him. His hair was damp, slicked back. He’d seen some sun, a light tan over his chest and arms, but he had muddy smudges under his eyes. They hadn’t had much sleep, but his face spoke of more than one night’s worth of being short-changed and his voice was still cloudy, instead of its usual sultry heat after a storm.
And yet, parasailing instead of an afternoon horizontal.
Was he bored with her already? That put her off her yoghurt. She turned away from him, tossed the carton in the bin and threw the spoon in the sink. Maybe she was about to get dumped, too. He’d done his Pygmalion thing, turned her into a lady for the night and now it was back to the real world.
“Spoon do something to offend you?”
“What?” He could not read something from a clink in the sink.
“I do something to offend you?”
Maybe he could. She affected a laugh. “Of course not. You think you’re scaring me. If you asked me to referee a fight you’d be scaring me, parasailing—hah. I’ve been parasailing and skydiving before. It’s not cheap. I’m happy to come with you, but I’ll stay on the ground.”
He made a slow hmmm and a fast track around the counter, hand to her back, then he pinned her against the sink. His lips were on her wet hair.
“That tells me two things. The first is that I should’ve said it was my treat. I wouldn’t ask you to pay, especially on no notice. The second is that I have offended you, because you think I’d rather go adventuring at altitude than between your sheets, between your legs.”
“No, I.” Oh God, he already knew. “Yeah.”
He let go of the sink and placed his hands low, warm on her abdomen, pulling her against him. She considered resisting for less than a blink.
“I thought you might be sore.”
“Oh.”
He travelled one hand to cup her mound and she put her whole heart into groaning, her head tipping back and around to find his lips.
He played with the kiss, not letting her take it too deep, his other hand coming to rest over the length of her neck. “Did you think I was so ready to get away from you? Did you think I was lying when I said you were more than one night?” He nipped her bottom lip. “So we’re clear. You’re my new favourite food, my new favourite thing to do.” He turned her so he could play those kisses more directly, then broke off to rest his forehead on hers. “My new favourite colour.”
The crackles in his voice were pitchforks of feeling stabbed all over her body, leaving her aching from the sweetness.
“If you’re not too sore, we can go do whatever you like.” His hand under her shirt, thumb stroking along her spine.
She licked into his mouth. There was butter on his tongue, sugar in his words and they melted her anxiety. She was sore, but the kind of tender that would only last as long as it took for the adrenaline rush to take over, which was to say, hardly sore at all. She was already parasailing with no desire to ever come down.
He bundled her hair in his fist and pulled so her chin came up, and she looked in his face. His eyes were focused on hers and he knew every one of her doubts. “It’s my intention to get very naked with you again very soon and very often, but I thought you might like to come out in the sun and fly with me in a different way.”
She would fly with him without straps, without wings, without a net or a re-entry plan.
She should be worried about that, the speed of the fall because it was already upon her. She stood on her toes and raked her fingers through his wet hair, studied his face: the offset dimples, the one on his chin that was constant, the one in his cheek that was fickle, only showing up when he was amused, the scar above his eyebrow, the curve of his cheekbones, and the fan of his lashes. The eyes so steady, so bright, it was difficult to imagine them sightless.
She was falling, falling, hopelessly fallen, and it was too soon, too impossible, too present and too wonderful to escape. “I like your intentions.”
She got dimple, she got soaking kisses, lashings of tongue and hands that roved with the aim of pushing them both into new airspace, somewhere between joyous freefall and heart-rending plummet.
She got out, “Not in front of Fluffy,” and he responded with an evil laugh, and made things even dirtier, dropping his towel, lifting her leg under her knee to open her hips to his.
They might’ve ended up horizontal again, but he backed off as abruptly as he’d started up. They were going parasailing. All of them. Damon arranged it in a frenzy of phone calls. One to Angus, one to Taylor, one to Sam, one to the parasailing operator. This was not what she thought she’d be doing and she wasn’t ready to share him, especially with his gang again so soon. But she struggled to be a sour lemon in the face of his snap, crackle and pop. It was a beautiful day, why not spent it in the sun?
She tidied the kitchen and listened to him joke, persuade, and argue with Taylor. He was excited about this and resenting it was a waste of energy. She wasn’t in a competition with adventure sports for his time. Still, she was grateful he couldn’t see her sulky expression and she did no more spoon tossing or cupboard door banging to give herself away.
When he had it all arranged, the meeting place, the car-pooling, he made his way to the bedroom and got dressed. She gave him a few minutes and went in to him. He was sitting on the end of her bed, dressed
but with his shirt unbuttoned. He had his head down, eyes closed. After his energetic organising, his posture was a surprise. She backed away. It felt like the right thing to do, like he needed a moment to himself. She didn’t get far.
“Georgia.” He was behind her in the hall. “Your place or mine tonight?”
She couldn’t get her sulky pout out of the way quick enough to answer.
“I need this.” He flapped an arm at his side, his eyes closed tight. “I can’t explain why, but it’s not because I don’t want to be alone with you, so your place or mine tonight? You have to work tomorrow, so I thought I’d pack a bag and come here. Does that work for you?”
It worked in ways she was embarrassed to admit, starting with the rush of heat to her face and the need to blink away tears. He had to have guessed how she felt. He was extra affectionate, keeping her close, both hands on her as they went down to his cab. He leaned against it to kiss her, and if it wasn’t for the driver she’d have done her best to prolong the moment. As it was, she had to open the door and push him inside or no one was doing any kind of sailing.
She was on the street waiting for him within the hour. He pulled up with Sam in a truck that had Royal Flush and a picture of a tap painted on the side. The two of them were surfer boy cool in their board shorts and singlets, both of them rocking sunglasses and caps.
Damon leaned out the passenger side window. He said, “Going my way?”
From inside the truck Sam said, “Lenny Kravitz.”
Damon shook his head as he got out to let her slide in between them. “Bing Crosby.”
Sam said, “Never heard of him.”
Damon climbed in behind her, cleared his throat and sang the first line of White Christmas.
Sam turned the music up to drown him out, MKTO’s God Only Knows, one of those playboy meets the one songs with a snappy beat. Damon simply switched tunes and he and Sam rocked it out, Sam drumming on the steering wheel. She sat there grinning stupidly happy, explosively so when Damon felt for her hand.
Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3) Page 18
