* * *
For a split second I froze, horror building as I took in Gus’s pale skin, white lips, and the obnoxious bruise on his temple. Fuck. He’s dead. Then his chest rose with a shuddery breath, and I came back to earth.
I scrambled forward and dropped down beside him.
“Gus. Gus. Jesus fucking Christ, wake up.”
Nothing happened. I shook him as hard as I dared, given the bruise on his head, but he fell slack against me, with no sign that he knew I was there.
“Fuck!” I fumbled for my phone. It was jammed in my pocket. I prised it out and swiped at the screen, but it didn’t seem to be working properly. The numbers on the keypad were blurred and in the wrong places, and the more I fucked with it, the less coherent it became.
I dropped it and searched for Gus’s.
It was on the floor by his foot. The battery was dead. I shouted again and tried harder to wake him up, but the more I shook him, the less he seemed to move. He was a dead weight, and my arms felt like jelly. I fell sideways and sucked in a deep breath. For a fleeting moment, it worked, and my head cleared, then a fog descended that was so profound, I couldn’t see the floor beneath me.
What the hell? The foreboding I’d carried all the way from Rushmere cut through the nausea blooming in the pit of my stomach, joining the fresh panic lancing my veins. Beyond the fact that Gus was out cold, something was really fucking wrong.
My brain felt like it was made of treacle. Thoughts entered and got stuck before they were clear enough for me to read them. My eyelids grew heavy. I fought them as they started to close, and crawled to where Gus was still lying. Get him out. You have to get him out.
I hooked my arms around him and tried to sit him up. “Gus, come on, man. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He didn’t respond. And he was a big dude. I struggled beneath him and dragged us both to the top of the stairs, as my heart beat too fast, and my hands stung with weird pins and needles.
His scarred knee hit the banister post. He didn’t make a sound, and another jolt of fear got me moving again. I couldn’t see how we’d make it down the stairs without breaking our necks, but that fate seemed better than whatever was killing us inside.
I looked down at Gus. His lips were beginning to turn blue.
“No.” I wriggled from beneath him and slapped his face. “No! Don’t fucking die on me, you stubborn fucking arsehole.”
I took hold of him again and tried to manoeuvre him down the stairs. My shoulder screamed in protest, and I latched onto the pain, amplifying it to keep me awake. We made halting progress and reached the halfway point, then my balance deserted me, and we slid the rest of the way down.
We landed in a heap. My head hit the stack of disconnected radiators in the tiny hallway. The impact made my ears ring, and I held onto that too, and staggered upright to unlock the front door.
The key was as prehistoric as the rest of the cottage. It stuck, and so did my brain. For long seconds I fought with it, until it finally turned, and the lock clicked in the right direction.
I bashed the handle with clumsy hands, retching as more nausea overwhelmed me.
The door didn’t open, and a desperate shout escaped me, echoed by a muffled moan from the bottom of the stairs.
Gus. Fuck.
I abandoned the door and crawled back to him. He was on his side, how I’d left him, limbs slack, olive skin bleached pale. “Gus. We’re nearly there. Come on. I need you to wake up.”
But he didn’t wake up.
I wobbled to my feet and returned to the door. I hit the handle over and over with new desperation. Finally, the latch caught, and the door opened. I lurched sideways, relief sweeping through me, and stumbled back to Gus.
He was heavier than ever. But the open door gave me new hope. I dragged him to the step and we tumbled down onto the gravel driveway.
Fresh air hit me. And wetness too. It had started to rain.
Gus was still out cold. The notion that I’d imagined him being otherwise took my legs from under me, and I fell onto the damp ground.
Footsteps sounded on the gravel. But I was too dizzy to look up. Was Gus dead?
As my eyes closed for good, I had no fucking idea.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Billy
Gus wasn’t dead. A dude with red hair and a dreamy Irish accent woke me up and told me so.
“My name’s Rupert,” he said. “I’m a firefighter. There’s an ambulance on its way. I’m going to help you as much as I can until they get here, okay?”
“Gus. Don’t help me. Help Gus.”
“I am. But I’m going to need you to breathe into this mask and stay awake. If you pass out on me, I’ll have to stop helping him to help you, so I need you to do that for me.”
His words made no sense. And I had zero clue when I’d moved from the front steps of the cottage to the old oak tree by the garage, or who’d called 999. But there was a mask in my hand, attached to a tank at my feet.
The fireman pushed my hand to my face. “Breathe,” he said. “So I can help your friend.”
I stuck the mask to my face and took a breath, then another, and another, until I was breathing like a fucking yogi. The air rattled through the tubes, and the mist clouding my brain lifted a fraction with each expansion of my aching lungs. Gus. Fuck. Where is he?
With the mask pressed to my face, I sat up and searched the mess of flashing blue lights and people I didn’t recognise. The friendly fireman had moved away from me. He was crouching over Gus, holding an identical mask over his face and calling urgently to someone I couldn’t see.
Paramedics appeared from nowhere, or at least that was how it seemed to me.
They swarmed the driveway, their footsteps unnaturally loud on the driveway, and they obscured my view of Gus.
I dropped the mask and tried to stand, but strong hands caught me and sat me back down.
Two women dressed in green stooped in front of me. “Stay where you are,” one of them said. “You need oxygen.”
“What about Gus?”
“He’s in good hands, sweetie. Can you tell us what happened?”
“What?”
“What happened in the house? How did you get hurt?
“I’m not hurt. Gus is.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
It went on and on. The paramedics made me breathe more oxygen while more emergency workers crowded around Gus. They lifted him onto a stretcher. His arm dangled limply off the side, and in my heart I got to my feet, dashed to him, and set it safely on his broad chest. But my legs were still numb. Instead I watched as men in orange suits appeared and carried him away to a helicopter that had landed in the field across the road.
The helicopter took off and disappeared. Part of me vanished with it, and breathing the oxygen no longer seemed to matter.
I let the mask go. It fell into my lap. My stomach spasmed, and I lurched sideways and puked.
One of the paramedics caught me and set me upright again. She wiped my face and forced me to look at her. “We’re going to load you into the ambulance in a minute and pop you over to the hospital. Is there anyone you want us to call?”
“What?”
“Do you want us to call someone? So you’re not on your own?”
I’d been alone for as long as I could remember, then the world as I’d assumed it to be had changed. Gus had given me a life I never knew I wanted, but I was more than a sum of the stolen nights we’d shared.
I pointed clumsily at the van still parked on the drive. “Call the number on the van. It’s my brother. I need my brother.”
* * *
I came to in a curtained cubicle in the local A&E. A different mask was over my face, and I wasn’t alone. Rough, work-hardened fingers clutched mine, and Luke was bes
ide the bed, looming over me, his handsome features tight with worry.
“Hey. You’re awake. Are you okay? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Where’s Gus?”
“The doctors are working on him. Mia’s there.”
“Is he okay?”
“Not really. But they said he’s probably going to be.”
“Probably?” I struggled upright. “What does that mean?”
“It means he nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but you got him out just in time and called for help.”
“What?” The influx of information made my head spin, but the intense nausea I’d passed out with wasn’t there. “Carbon monoxide? How?”
“The boiler. Gus was working right above it all week. The fire brigade said their detectors went off the scale when they went in there. Said it was likely a leak that got worse over time. That’s why it didn’t kill him on Monday.”
If Luke was trying to be funny, I was going to punch him in the face, but when I focussed on him again, there was no humour in his haunted gaze.
He was still holding my hand.
I squeezed his fingers. “How long have I been here?”
“I don’t know. They called me when I was still on the motorway. We came straight here, but that was a few hours ago.”
“Hours?”
“Yeah. It’s the middle of the night. They kept you in A&E so I could stay with you.”
“What about Gus?”
“I told you. They’re still working on him.”
“Is he awake?”
“No. His oxygen levels are really low. They’re trying to bring them up while they assess the damage to his organs.”
“You said he was going to be okay.”
“He probably is. They’re just being thorough.”
“When will he wake up?”
“I don’t know, Billy. I’m sorry.”
Luke had nothing to be sorry for that he hadn’t apologised for a gazillion times, but I ran out of energy before I could tell him that, and sagged back on the bed. “It’s cold in here.”
“You’re in shock.” Luke pulled a blanket over me. “You were shaking like a leaf when I got here. I thought you were having a fucking seizure.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You weren’t really with it. You got poisoned too, just not as much as Gus because you weren’t in there as long.”
“He was in there all day.”
“What about you? I don’t understand why you were both there so late.”
“We weren’t. I went home at five, but he wanted to stay and finish the beams. He must’ve passed out after I’d gone. He’d been weird all day, though. All week, actually. Do you think that’s why? Because of the boiler?”
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. I googled it, then wished I hadn’t, so I didn’t get very far. But I suppose it might be. Or it might’ve had more to do with what was going on between you.”
“What do you mean?”
Luke leant over the bed and pushed my hair out of my face. He coaxed me onto my side and tucked me in like I was five years old and he was our dad. “I don’t know that either. But I want you to know that I’m sorry, okay? That I didn’t take whatever you two have been doing seriously.”
“He doesn’t want to be with me.”
“Tell you that, did he?”
“Not exactly.”
Luke shook his head. “Then don’t assume. You think he’d have been this upset if he didn’t want something more out of this?”
“He said we had to stop because you couldn’t lose me again. That we couldn’t lose each other.”
“Well, he was right about that. I can’t explain how I felt when I took that call today. They didn’t tell me anything. Just that you’d been in an accident and they were taking you in. Then Mia’s phone rang too—” Luke shuddered. “Whatever. My point is, you and I getting our shit together doesn’t need to come at the expense of everything else. You aren’t going to run out on him, are you?”
“What? Fuck, no. I want to stay, like with him, in his house, for as long as he’ll have me. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll just move in with you and ruin your life too.”
“Charming. But it doesn’t have to be that way either. You have a job and regular money. I’d help you get a deposit on a place if that’s what you wanted.”
“I don’t want that. I want to live with Gus and only annoy you some of the time.”
“Because you love him?”
“Yeah, I really do.”
Luke nodded as if we’d settled world peace.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Gus
I threw up every time I opened my eyes. So I didn’t bother. At my bedside, I was dimly aware of Mia’s presence, and then Luke’s a little while later. But as much as I loved them, they weren’t Billy, so ignoring them and letting whatever headache-fuelled cloud I was floating on take me away was the easiest option.
At some point, a voice I didn’t recognise told me I was going to ICU.
I ignored them too, and I had no idea how much time had passed by the time being awake became a state of mind I couldn’t blank out.
There was an oxygen mask on my face. I pulled it off and scrunched my eyes against the fluorescent light shining into my face. Moving hurt. But I did it anyway, and groaned as my aching muscles protested.
“You’re awake then.”
I blinked and followed the sound of a voice I didn’t recognise. A nurse was at the end of my bed, making notes on a clipboard. He had blond hair and tattoos, and the kind of bod I’d have been all over if I hadn’t had a head full of Billy. But I did have a head full of Billy, which made the fact that he wasn’t here all the more horrible.
The nurse was still looking at me. I licked my lips. “I’m awake.”
“Good. It’s five o’clock in the morning, so your family got sent home, but I’ll give your sister a call when it’s light to let her know you’re back with us.”
“How long was I gone?”
“Since they brought you and your friend in last night.”
“My friend—shit, Billy? Where is he? Is he oka—” Damn. Too many words. My stomach gave a warning flip, and the nurse moved like a ninja to pass me a cardboard basin.
He fiddled with the oxygen supply while I got myself under control, and replaced them with tubes that fit into my nose. The sensation of having arctic air blasted into my skull wasn’t entirely pleasant, but it helped with the nausea, and unlike the mask, I didn’t feel like it was trying to kill me.
I sucked it all down and fought for the coherence I needed to get my words out. “What happened to Billy? Is he okay?”
The nurse set his clipboard down. “If you want me to answer questions, you’re going to have to ask me in English, okay? Your sister isn’t here to translate.”
“Am I speaking French?”
“You’ve been slipping in and out of it, but to answer your question before you get upset again, Billy’s your housemate, right? He was with you at the cottage?”
“I think so.”
“And you remember what happened there?”
“No. And I don’t care. I just need to know Billy’s okay.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked already. How many hours had I spent knowing he wasn’t here, but giving no thought to why that was? Or what the hell had happened to me to lay me out in a hospital bed? Fear gripped my heart. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. What if I had? And it had hit Billy too? What if—
The nurse laid a cool, gloved hand on my arm. “Easy. Billy’s okay. They kept him in A&E for the night as a precaution, but he didn’t absorb nearly as much carbon monoxide as you did. He’s fine. His brother took him home.”
Billy’s okay. He’s fine. I absorbed those words before
I found room for the others, but before I could ask more questions, we were interrupted by a doctor.
The nurse squeezed my arm, then stood back. “I’ll be back in a little while. Just try and stay calm, okay? You’re doing really well, Gus.”
He left.
The doctor took his place and pulled up a chair. “Morning. Good to see you awake. How are you feeling?”
I made a blah sound and waved my hand. It was all I had.
The doctor nodded. “I’d expect you to feel quite under the weather, but the good news is your test results are pretty stable. If your oxygen levels continue to rise, we should be able to move you to a ward this afternoon.”
“Where am I now?”
“ICU. You really worried us for a little while, but I’m pleased with your progress. Do you remember what happened at all?”
I started to shake my head, then changed my mind. “No. Just that I threw up a lot, and I’m not at work anymore.”
“You haven’t noticed the bruises all over your body and the lump on the side of your head.”
I touched my fingertips to my temple and winced. Now my pounding headache made sense. “Did I hit my head?”
“Among other things. There was a carbon monoxide leak where you were working. Your colleague noticed you didn’t come home and returned to find you. By then, the leak was quite profound and you were unconscious. He pulled you out, and very grateful we are too, or you wouldn’t be here. Your friend saved your life.”
“Is he okay? Have you seen him?”
“No. I didn’t need to. As far as I’m aware, he was treated in A&E before they discharged him.”
It was the same information the nurse had given me, but it still wouldn’t sink in. The gaps in my memory were obscene. The last thing I remembered was Billy storming out of the cottage. How could it be that I’d missed everything in between?
The doctor asked me more questions about how I was feeling, then instructed me to keep breathing the oxygen and sleep as much as I could. The only two things I was apparently capable of, as I didn’t stay awake long enough to hear him leave.
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