Light Up the Dark

by Suki Fleet

“They can’t. You can’t,” Nicky said and looked away. He got up. Sue had found him some boots to wear. They were miles too big. He couldn’t have looked more lost. “What about Sophie?”

  The ambulance was faced away from the fire and the sky was full of sparks. A million shooting stars. Cai didn’t have that many wishes. A handful perhaps. Maybe just one or two.

  “She’s got Loz. And she’s got you.”

  “Me?” Nicky spun around. All ice and fire and disbelief… and something else. Something softer. His gaze searched Cai’s. It was as though he was trying to understand something.

  “I’m not asking you to look after her or anything, just… be in her life. I expect she’ll be taken into foster care. I’ll get, I don’t know, a few weeks. Probably. You can come visit.” He tried to keep his voice light. He needed Nicky to understand. This was the only way things could be right now. He didn’t want a life where he was hiding or running away. He needed Nicky to hold on. To believe in himself. Nicky had saved their lives. He could survive away from this place. But maybe he was asking too much.

  “I don’t want to fucking visit you!” Nicky spat the words.

  His face screwed up with frustration and he hit the side of the van with his palm.

  Officer Carl stepped into view, arms folded.

  After a heartbeat Nicky jumped out the ambulance and crunched across the gravel to stand on the edge of the darkness.

  Cai lay back and covered his eyes. If Sue asked, he’d tell her his head was hurting. It wasn’t a lie.

  But sometimes bruised hearts hurt far more than head wounds.

  A million other hurts/It wasn’t supposed to be like this

  There was too much noise and it was making Nicky agitated. He’d wanted to climb onto Cai’s stretcher, close his eyes and be soothed by nothing more than Cai’s ridiculously strong heartbeat. He’d wanted to hold and be held, to protect and to feel safe.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  But he couldn’t swallow his anger. Cai was being so fucking accepting that he was going back to prison. And Nicky couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. For anyone. He stormed around the edge of the driveway, his thoughts as furious and fragmented as the wind.

  The second ambulance wasn’t doing anything. Nicky glanced at the paramedics as he passed. They looked like they were getting ready for something. Someone. If they brought Cyril out alive, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He paused in the shadow of a fire engine to listen to the firemen talk, needing to find out what was going on. But there were too many of them and his ears were ringing with sounds. He started circling everything again.

  “Were you in the fire?” a woman asked. She’d started walking next to him. He glanced at her shiny heels and long coat. If she was police, she was a detective or something, not a constable or whatever they were called. Nicky hated the police right then. He walked faster.

  She caught his arm. Nicky tried to wrestle free but his skin was still sore and blistered near the tops of his arms, and he fell to his knees, gasping in pain.

  “If you’re injured, you should be in an ambulance. Come on, I’ll—”

  Nicky looked up, wondering why she’d stopped so suddenly.

  “Oh my fucking god,” she said, dropping his arm and putting her hand over her mouth.

  As soon as Nicky saw her hair, he mirrored her shock and scrambled backwards, the sharp stones cutting into his palms. Vivian. The club. That night. Blood roared in his ears. He struggled for breath, fury and panic twisting inside him.

  A hand touched his back and Cai’s voice asked quietly, “You okay?”

  Nicky’s jaw clenched at the same time as something in his chest gave way and he relaxed into Cai’s touch. “No,” he said softly.

  He wasn’t okay, yet at the same time, somehow, he knew he was going to be.

  Vivian backed off to lean against her car a few metres away. Another detective dipped his shaved head and whispered something to her, but he might as well not have spoken for all she responded. Nicky could feel her eyes on him, and see the tension in her stance.

  Seconds passes. A minute. Cai knelt on the stones with him, his hand pressed hard against Nicky’s back. Nicky focussed on it. On the weight of Cai’s palm and each of his fingers. Heavy, rough and gentle as fuck.

  Cai, who’d snuck up on him and stolen his heart.

  He turned, knowing Cai would put a heavy arm around his shoulder and hug him.

  Fuck, he needed it.

  Officer Carl stood nearby, watching them. Narrowing his eyes, Nicky glowered at him.

  “Don’t be mad with me.” Cai dropped his forehead against Nicky’s shoulder. His warm breath tickled down the side of Nicky’s neck.

  Nicky fisted Cai’s top and drew him closer. “I’m always fucking mad at you. Or maybe I’m just mad for you,” he added. “You’ll have to work out the difference.”

  Cai laughed, the sound soft and deep. Then he coughed. “Who’s the woman staring at you?”

  “Vivian.” Nicky turned. “She worked at the club I used to dance at. Looks like she was undercover police. Guess she thought I was dead.”

  The police had done nothing to help him. They’d not found him. They’d not saved him. They’d probably all but forgotten about him. Vivian must have known what was going to happen that night, and she’d done nothing. If he let it, the anger would burst inside him, sharp and blistering as the pain in his arms.

  As Cai helped him to his feet, he called out, “You knew he was coming for me and you did fucking nothing.” He couldn’t help it.

  “Nicky—”

  She tried to speak but Nicky cut her off.

  “You want to do something for me now? You want to get something right for fucking once? Then make sure he—” Nicky pointed at Cai, then at Officer Carl. “—doesn’t go to prison for something he didn’t fucking do.”

  Cai turned to walk back to the ambulance, but Nicky didn’t follow. Not yet. He needed to know. “Did you find his body?”

  “Whose?” Vivian asked, stepping forwards. The other detective pressed close to her side. She looked as though she wanted to elbow him away.

  “The Duke’s. Cyril’s. I pushed him out of the window. He was trying to slit my throat at the time.”

  “Cyril?”

  “Cyril Du Vey.”

  Vivian spoke quickly into her radio. A voice crackled in reply. When Nicky looked around he saw the other ambulance was still empty.

  “So far they’ve found two fatalities. They’ll need forensic identification,” Vivian said after a moment.

  “Show me and I’ll tell you if it’s him or not right now.”

  “I can’t do that, Nicky.”

  “Where were the bodies found?”

  “Inside the house.”

  Nicky’s heart stuttered. He spun around and stared at the burning ruin. The roof had gone and the upper floors were blackened. Cyril hadn’t been inside the house.

  But what if he survived?

  What if he was still out there?

  “What is it?” Cai asked.

  Nicky shook his head.

  “I’ll need to talk to you, Nicky,” Vivian said.

  “Whatever,” Nicky said with forced nonchalance. He had no intention of making it easy on them.

  They walked back to the ambulance in silence. Nicky could hardly pick his feet up. He stumbled and Cai caught him by the elbow.

  “You’re hurt,” Cai said.

  “I’m tired,” he lied.

  Cai sighed. “You’re not on your own any more, you know.”

  “I have nowhere to live. No money. I don’t have friends and I don’t like being with people. I’m pretty much fucked.” Cai opened his mouth, but Nicky carried on. “And in case you forgot, your flat burned down so you can’t help.” And the guy who’s tried to kill me twice is possibly still at large.

  Cai’s shoulders slumped and he shoved his hands deep into the pocket of his soot-stained jeans.
<
br />   Sue was waiting by the ambulance. “In you get, you two. Officer Carl is going to be racing us in his charger.” She waggled an eyebrow.

  Officer Carl gave her a tight smile.

  Sue climbed in the back of the van with them and helped Cai lie back on the stretcher.

  “I’m sorry.” Nicky touched Cai’s arm. “I didn’t mean that. Not like it sounded anyway.”

  Cai shrugged, then took Nicky’s hand in his and stared at their joined fingers. “I’ve got pretty thick skin. And besides, you’re half right. You need somewhere to live. We need somewhere to live,” Cai added tentatively. “I mean, if… if that’s what you want?”

  Beside them, Sue seemed to be doing some sort of inventory on a near-empty box of supplies and looked surprisingly engrossed in the task.

  Nicky chewed his lip, then brought Cai’s hand up to his mouth and gently kissed his sore-looking knuckles. Fuck, this whole affection thing was really starting to grow on him.

  Cai looked up in surprise. His smile did weird melty things to Nicky’s insides.

  “So what do we do?” Nicky asked with a sort of tentative hesitancy he hated himself for. But was there any other way of asking questions like this? Questions that were so much bigger than the few words they contained.

  The certainty in Cai’s gaze made him feel giddy. “We figure it out.”

  Wanting

  Lying in his hospital bed, all Cai wanted to do was touch Nicky’s hair. It was the early hours of the morning and the room was all green-grey shadows and smudgy darkness. At some point during the night Nicky had crept into Cai’s room and fallen asleep in the armchair next to his bed. Nicky had his own hospital bed somewhere, but Cai guessed he found some comfort sleeping in the uncomfortable-looking chair.

  At first, Cai wondered how Nicky had gotten past the police officer guarding his door. Officer Carl had long since gone home, but as Cai was a “flight risk” someone else had been posted in his place. But when Cai had looked, he saw it was the detective from earlier. The one who remembered Nicky from before. Vivian. Sitting outside his room in a hard plastic chair, filling out paperwork. She must have let Nicky past.

  Sometime before the lights had gone out, Loz and Soph had stood outside Cai’s room and waved. They hadn’t been allowed in. But at least he’d seen them.

  Turing on his side, Cai watched Nicky breathing softly. He was barely two feet away. Something had happened to his hair. The thin rope he had left was plaited and wrapped across his throat.

  It hurt to see him this way, so visibly damaged. Cai desperately wanted to hold out his hands and touch, stroke, kiss that damage away. If only such things were possible.

  Nicky’s voice surprised him. “You’re not sleeping.”

  Cai had been staring and somehow hadn’t registered that Nicky had been staring back.

  “No. I tried. Brain’s going haywire.” He held out his hand and felt Nicky trace a whorl on his palm.

  “Mine too.”

  “You okay, though? I mean, being here?”

  “Doing better than I thought I would.” Nicky dug around for something in his lap. “Here. I brought you some things. I was hungry….”

  He held out a folded-over paper plate, half a dozen biscuits inside it.

  Cai smiled. “True bastards don’t do stuff like this. Just so you know.”

  “Shhh, you’ll blow my cover.”

  “Your cover was blown weeks ago.”

  Cai shifted over as Nicky climbed onto the bed beside him. Curling on his side, he rested his head on Cai’s chest. “Weeks ago? I still hated you, weeks ago.” Nicky prodded his ribs with a bony finger, somehow managing to avoid hitting a single bruise.

  “Nah. You never hated me. And that day you stood in the garden, shielding me from the sun. That’s when I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That you were made entirely of marshmallow. You just had an extra hard crispy shell I had to break through.”

  When Nicky lifted his head, Cai could see he was trying hard not to smile. “I can guarantee that no one else I’ve ever met in my whole life has ever thought I was made of fucking marshmallow.”

  “Then you never met the right people.”

  Suddenly Nicky twisted in Cai’s arms until he was straddling Cai’s chest. All thoughts of sleep instantly vanished. There was a wild unpredictability to Nicky that Cai adored. A wildness that could never be broken or tamed. It scared Cai a little, but Nicky was so fiercely protective and loyal, Cai knew he would never doubt him.

  “My gran would have loved you.” Nicky was smiling, but for a second Cai knew he was lost in whatever memory those words triggered. “She was all I ever had, and when she went, I… I didn’t cope very well. I pushed everyone away and forgot what it was like to live… to really want to live. Until I met you.”

  “You’re the most alive person I’ve ever met.”

  With an indecipherable sound, Nicky tilted Cai’s chin and licked across his lips before kissing him hungrily.

  He pulled back after a minute, his lips still touching Cai’s, and murmured, “I always hated kissing.” Cai leaned away, confused, but Nicky was smiling. “But now I can’t fucking get enough of it.”

  Even if Nicky wasn’t always the easiest person to be around, Cai knew that his sharp edges only hid how easily his heart could be bruised. They hid Nicky’s true vulnerability so well that when it showed, Cai felt like the only person in the world invited to witness, and that made Cai feel vulnerable too. Loved. He suspected what was between them was a once in a lifetime thing for both of them.

  They kissed, and when exhaustion finally took over, they slept.

  Cai woke around dawn. For a while he lay listening to the sounds of the hospital slowly lurching into life. Nicky stirred in his arms.

  Without thinking Cai stroked his hand through Nicky’s hair. Nicky caught his fingers, and his eyes still half closed with sleep pleaded, don’t.

  “I’m sorry,” Cai whispered, dropping his head. Nicky curled in on himself and Cai longed to pull him close. But he waited and eventually Nicky shifted again, sprawling across him like a cat in a patch of sunlight.

  They didn’t speak for so long Cai almost fell asleep again, lost in Nicky’s warmth and closeness.

  “It’s guilt, you know” Nicky said softly, his breath hot against Cai’s chest. “Vivian. That’s why she’s still here.”

  Cai blinked sleepily and turned his head. Vivian was still sitting in the chair outside. “What happened?”

  “I can’t talk about it. If I think about it, I seize up. Ask her, if you want to know.”

  “Do you want me to know?”

  Nicky nodded. “I want you to know everything.”

  Guilt

  After three hours of questioning, Cai was exhausted. He’d told the detectives everything he knew, over and over. And the drone of the court-assigned lawyer repeating what Cai did and didn’t have to answer had begun to grate on his nerves.

  When the door to the tiny interview room opened barely five minutes after the last questioning session was over, Cai’s stomach twisted. Squeezing his eyes shut for a second, he pleaded to whatever higher force he didn’t believe in that this would be over soon.

  So, when Vivian stepped inside and threw a bottle of water at his chest—which he clumsily dropped in shock—he was both relieved and surprised. She perched on the desk in front of him. Her clothes were unrumpled and the lack of sleep didn’t show on her face. She was probably a robot.

  “I found somewhere for them,” she said. Cai looked at her blankly. “I can’t influence any decisions about your probation or your bail hearing, Cai. I’m sorry.” Cai frowned. He hadn’t been expecting her to. “But….” She took a deep breath. “There’s an assisted-living place in a development called Fifield, a couple of miles away. They take sixteen-and-seventeen-year-olds coming out of care. Soph is a bit young but I’ve explained her circumstances. Loz has a case with their gender identity not being accepted at home, and
they’re considering offering a place on that basis. And they’re willing to take Nicky, until he feels confident enough to be more independent. They’ll each have what is described as a bedsit in the block; there’s a communal dining area and a team will be on site at all times. They offer a range of counselling services. They’ll work with Nicky.”

  Cai stared at her, stunned. Not quite able to get his head around what she’d just told him. This was good. Wasn’t it? Yes? Would Nicky think so?

  “How does Nicky feel about it?”

  “Accepting. I think.”

  They hadn’t talked about the future last night. They’d figured nothing out. The past had been too heavy in both of them that exhaustion had won out in the end. And that morning Cai had been woken, discharged and taken straight to the police station to be questioned at seven am.

  “They’re taking me to court for my bail hearing at one. Can I see him before I go?” Cai knew if he wasn’t granted bail, there was little chance he’d see Nicky after—he’d be taken straight to whatever facility the magistrate ordered.

  Vivian nodded. “Yes. I promised Nicky he would see you.”

  “And Soph. Can I see her too?”

  Vivian shook her head. “She’s still at the hospital. I spoke with her. She liked the idea of Fifield. It’s temporary, remember. If they deny bail….”

  Suddenly it hit him. There was no if. Vivian wouldn’t have done all this if she didn’t think it was certain he was going to be held in a prison somewhere, even if it was just until his court date was set. The room spun a little. He felt light-headed. Vivian was still talking. It wasn’t as though he’d deceived himself, but it seemed the little bit of hope he’d had that they’d reprimand him and set him free had been a bit bigger than he’d thought.

  He swallowed. “Sorry, can you say that again?”

  “When you are released, the responsibility to find an appropriate place to live will again be yours. You will still be her legal guardian.”

  Cai closed his eyes. “Is Nicky still at the hospital too?”

  “No. He came into the station for questioning.”

  Cai tensed. “Is he okay?”

  “He did fine.”

  “I don’t mean how he—”