From Dark Places (13 page)

She frowned deeper, but didn’t pull her hand away. “Go on.”

“I have a brain tumour. I know I’m going to die soon. That’s why I volunteered.”

She nearly dropped the glass. She didn’t know what to feel. Of all the emotions cavorting about her body, it was the depth of the grief that confused her most.

“I should have told you,” he continued. “I bet you’ve been wondering how to tell me all evening, haven’t you?” At her nod he smiled. “I’m sorry.”

“How long have you known?” She pushed the words past the lump in her throat.

“Oh, months. I’m lucky, really. It doesn’t impact on my day-to-day life much at the moment, but it’s inoperable. I’m just grateful that –”

“But it said 18 hours!” Kay blurted out.

He blinked at her. “Really? God, I thought I’d have at least another month or two.”

She gawped at his response. “And I’ve just wasted four of those 18 hours, oh God, I’m the one who should be sorry! I’ll go, right now.”

He gripped the hand his rested on. “Why?”

“Because this is the last night of your life! You don’t want to spend it with me!”

“Do you have any scientific evidence for that, Doctor?” he leant across the champagne glasses and kissed her.

A warm, tingling spread up from her toes to her chest.

This can’t really be happening? A lab heater is poisoning me with carbon monoxide and I’m in some bizarre hallucination before I slowly die.

“I want you to stay.” His voice broke her out of her thoughts. “I don’t have another soul I want to be with. Really. All my affairs are in order, when I die there’s a huge bureaucratic machine that splits my money between all the people waiting for it. So stay. Please?”

“Right till the end?”

He nodded. “If you can handle it. The only thing that scared me was dying alone.”

“We’d better call the hospital.”

He shook his head. “They can’t do anything.” He kissed her again. “I want to stay here. With you.”

Morning sunlight streamed across the pillow and woke her. She looked first at him, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, then at the clock on the table beside her. Eight o’clock. Three hours left.

“I ordered breakfast,” he said, feeling her movement. She relaxed when she saw his mouth move. “It’s on its way. There’s a patisserie round the corner, called Paul’s. Best croissants this side of the channel.”

“I can’t believe I fell asleep. I’m so sorry.”

“It was only half an hour, we’ve been up all night.” He rolled onto his side to look at her. “We still have a bit of time.”

“Maybe it was wrong. The gun’s been wrong before.”

“It’s okay,” he said, reaching out to stroke her arm. “I couldn’t have had a better fifteen hours. And we still have three left.”

“God, how can you be so calm about this?” she cried. “It’s like you’re almost happy about it.”

“Look, I knew about this months ago and believe me, I was a complete mess at first. I got drunk, I shouted at people, I went to pieces. Then I realised I had to make the most of things. I didn’t want to spend my last months alive being a miserable bastard.”

She laughed, despite herself. “So then what did you do?”

“I made the second list of all the things I wanted to do before I die.”

“Second?”

“Yeah. I made the first when I was 21 and inherited the estate. I’d done everything on that list, so I needed a new one. And I did all of those things in two months. This last month I’ve been looking at charities, projects—that dragon’s den thing. I wanted to find a worthy business to invest in.”

“So, if you weren’t already dying, we wouldn’t have met.” She shuffled closer to him, breathed in his scent and stroked the line of blond hairs reaching down his chest to his belly button. She concentrated on committing every part of him to memory, instead of torturing herself with thoughts of the end. Every time she thought of it she had to catch a breath, fight back the tears. She didn’t want his last moments marred by a silly woman blubbering all over him.

“The timing could have been better, but I’m trying to be philosophical about it. It’s better than just being so royally pissed off we lose more of what little we have.”

She propped herself up on an elbow to look into his eyes, studying the flecks of brown around the pupil, nestled in the blue of his irises. “Well I think it’s bloody unfair. I want to know a million things about you.”

“I’m not very interesting. Impending death gives me an extra allure, that’s all.”

The entrance phone buzzed cutting off any reply. She watched him walk across the room, admiring his backside, before it disappeared behind his dressing gown. She buried her face in the pillow and cried while he went down the hall to accept the delivery.

They ate breakfast in the garden, the city slowly waking around them. Sometimes she couldn’t speak for fear of bursting into tears, and then got so annoyed for being that way she pushed it down as far as she could. She paid for it with a thumping headache.

“After breakfast I’m going to call my solicitor,” Oliver said. “I’m going to alter the will so you get the funding you need for your work.”

“Don’t do that! That would be like paying me for spending this time with you. I’d be a prostitute!”

“Don’t be daft,” he chuckled. “I want to. It’s my money. Were you raised by Victorians or something?”

She sighed and put another fluffy strip of croissant into her mouth. “I just don’t feel comfortable with it, that’s all.”

“You’re being silly. I believe in your invention and won’t let that Puritan streak make you poor for the rest of your life. Tell me a million or so won’t make a real difference to your life and work?”

She choked on the pastry. “A million?” she spluttered. “Is that what 18 hours with me is worth?”

For a moment she wondered whether she’d insulted him, but then he threw his head back and laughed loudly. “I’ll make it two million,” he grinned, massaging his temple. “I’m going to make that call now, before you guilt me into three.”

He moved slowly into the flat, stepping down into the top landing of the apartment. She could see his head ached too.

What will it be like? The end. Sudden? Painful?

However it happened, she was certain of two things: she’d be there right till the end and she’d hold onto her tears until he was gone. Then she would cry until there was nothing left in her.

How will I face the rest of my life without him? What’s up with me? I’ve been with him less than 24 hours.

He returned and sat back down to finish his breakfast. “He wasn’t impressed, calling him before nine on a Saturday, but it’s done. He asked why it couldn’t wait for Monday.”

“What did you say?”

“I just reminded him I might drop dead any minute, then he shut up.” They smiled at each other. “Thank God for gallows humour.”

“Are you sure you want to spend this last morning with me? I won’t be offended if you –”

“Kay. Shut up. Please. I’m going to finish this croissant, then we’re going to make love and then we’re going to get in the hot tub. I’ve got it all planned out. And seeing as I’m the dying man, I get to call the shots. That okay with you?”

She grinned. “Well, when you put it like that…”

She watched him prepping the tub.

So this is where it will happen?

The water starting to bubble.

If I was going to die, is this where I’d want to be? If I died who’d look after Dyson and Bayliss. Oh God, would they be the only things in the world to notice my absence?

“I’m going to do it all differently now,” she announced, pulling herself out of her thoughts and he turned to face her. “I’m going to try and see more people. Live a little, you know. I spend all my time in the lab, but there’s a whole world out there. I want to see more of it.”

“Good,” he smiled. “Glad to hear it.” He sat heavily on a nearby chair and she rushed to him. “I’m okay,” he said, looking up at her with shining eyes. “Just hit me for a minute there. I’ll be fine.”

She wrapped her arms around his head and he cried into her stomach. She held her own tears back, wanting to be the rock for him. The burst of grief was over as quickly as it had come on.

“Let’s get in the tub. I’ve never been naked outside in London, I want to see what it feels like.”

He laughed and the tension broke. They slipped off their robes, got in and tangled their legs around each other, the sun shining down on them. Less than half an hour remained. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. The conversation faltered. Every time she went to say something, she decided against it. ‘The water’s lovely’ just seemed too shallow for what could be the last thing he heard.

Should I take another reading?

She didn’t want that to be the last thing either. It occurred to her he might die half-way through the calibration stage; it took over a minute for the sensors to gather the data before a reading could take place.

Suddenly she was back in the Dragon’s Den, recalling her demonstration. Her stomach lurched and she felt the blood drain from her cheeks.

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispered.

“What? What?” he cried, swept up into her panic with her.

She scrambled out of the tub and ran to her bag, grabbed the gun and called up the data cache on the tiny display screen. She saw the calibration she’d made in the lift before her pitch to the dragons, to check it worked. Then two readings, with two minutes between them, time stamps matching her pitch slot.

Caught up in the anxiety and panic of the pitch she hadn’t recalibrated between the lift and taking the reading from him. She’d used her own hand to test the sensors in the lift, meaning the gun had used the data from her body to make the calculation and give the readings in the den.

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispered again, the view of the screen distorted by the tears welling in her eyes. “I didn’t empty the cache. I wasn’t reading your death, Oliver. I was reading mine.”

A sudden pain in her right temple.

A tunnelling of vision.

The last sound Dr Kay Danvers heard was the only man she’d ever loved calling her name.

THE BELL

The bell rang and a woman slid into the chair opposite him. Thick brown hair framed features hinting at a Mediterranean background.

She smiled. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He smiled back and said, “I’ve never done this before.”

She laughed. “Neither have I!”

He didn’t believe her; all of the first-timers radiated their bewilderment like cheap perfume. All he could smell from her was Chanel No. 5 and far too much of it.

“I’m Anthony.”

She extended her hand across the little table. “Carmela.” He clasped it, soft and cool, making him painfully aware of his clammy palms.

“Pleased to meet you. So what do you do, Carmela?”

“I’m an estate agent. But I’m not evil, really!” She seemed to appreciate his chuckle. “What do you do?”

“I’m an author.”

“Wow, had anything published?”

He smiled. “The third book of my trilogy is coming out later this year.”

She leant forward, revealing her cleavage. He resisted the urge to lose himself in its depths. “That’s so exciting. I’ve always wanted to meet a novelist. Do you have an agent?”

He nodded. “Yes, he’s–”

“Oh wow, could you introduce us? I’ve written a romance called ‘The Lady’s Salvation’ set in the eighteenth century and it’s about this woman who’s left destitute when her father dies and this evil solicitor diddles her out of the will, so she has to go and live at this amazingly wealthy Lord’s house and teach his child as a Governess, but then they fall in love, and the Lord finds out about the solicitor and puts it all right. Then they get married, but not because she needs to, ‘cos by this point she’s independently wealthy , but because they love each other.”

He blinked a couple of times and wondered if her prose contained such long sentences. He took a breath to reply, but she spoke first.

“Could you introduce me to your agent? I’m not getting anywhere, and it’s all about who you know in publishing, isn’t it?”

“Well—my books are science-fiction thrillers. My agent doesn’t represent romance novels.” And thank God for that, he thought.

“Oh.” Her shoulders dropped, breasts retreating. Then she perked up. “I could so easily re-write it, so the solicitor is actually an—an alien from the–”

The bell rang.

“Next!” called the speed dating host. “People on the outside move one to the right!”

 “Good luck with the novel,” he said, adding a thin smile when she ignored his polite handshake and slid her business card across the table in stark contradiction to the rules of the evening.

He shoved the card in his pocket and took a gulp of his whisky. A blonde shuffled into Carmella’s place.

“Stephanie,” she smiled, shaking him by the hand.

He smiled back, liking her blue eyes. “Anthony.”

“So what do you do?”

“I’m a novelist.”

“Really?” Stephanie’s eyes brightened and she twisted a lock of hair. “I’m a writer too!”

He perked up. “Really? What kind of books do you write?”

“Oh, sci-fi, and just the one so far.”

He swallowed down the excitement. Maybe the evening was looking up. “I write sci-fi thrillers,” he said, leaning forwards. “My third is being released in a few months.”

“Oh my!” She said breathlessly. “I’d love to be published, but I’m not getting very far. Would you mind reading my manuscript—give me some pointers?”

He looked at her moist lips, the platinum hair and those eyes. Oh, the temptation, but he’d promised himself never again. He knew he’d regret it. “I’m sorry, but I don’t do that. I can recommend a great freelance editor.”

“Oh.” The hair twirling stopped, she crossed her legs away from him and sipped her drink.

He sighed.

The bell rang.

“Nice to meet you,” he said but her smile was already fixed on the man beside him.

Another brunette arrived, they shook hands. She had a confident air, expensive looking dress, nice figure. He wondered what was wrong with her, and immediately chastised himself. After all, he was here, and there was nothing wrong with him.