And Then We Fall

by Bryce Taylor

  She texts me when she leaves the hospital, always asking if I there is anything she can pick up on the way home and when I realise that it is important for her to feel useful in this small way I try and think of something most days, milk or eggs or some other thing that I could far more easily get myself when the supermarket is open.

  I try ignore the feeling that we are as children making house together, that it is all unreal and we have nothing beneath this veneer of a relationship.

  Her company and her worry for me reduces my need to drink but doesn't take it away entirely, it's always been a good coping mechanism and one that has been masked by always being around others who drink often. Now, my main friend being Leigh I feel as if I am the worst kind of alcoholic and I don't like it. That on recycling day it is clear that she drinks less bottles of mineral water than I drink of wine.

  The whole shipment of furniture and art turns up the next week and I happily spend my day off pointing where this and that should go. It all looks beautiful, the house has a spirit now, it's a home.

  When Leigh comes in the next morning I am waiting, wanting to see her reaction, hoping that she likes it as much as I do. She stares around incredulously, at the art, at her house.

  She shakes her head at me, amazed by the transformation.

  "It's perfect," she breathes. "Thank you."

  I'm shaking my head at her, because honestly, she can be such an idiot sometimes, thanking me. That I can see now she had no understanding of if it would even look good or not but still spent an insane amount of money because in my horridly hungover state I had thought it would look good.

  She walks around the house taking obvious pleasure in every last item, tracing her hands over this lamp and across the surface of that chair, gleefully impressed with how good it all looks.

  My heart is overflowing and I wish I had the ability to make her always look so happy.

  "You should have a house warming party," I tell her impulsively and look across to catch a look of uncertainty on her face.

  I smile to myself, seeing suddenly that Leigh often isn't sure of herself at all. That in her work she is master of all but outside of that she tries to stick to a routine, in the comfort of the familiar and the known.

  She is staring out the window towards the pool and I catch the slightest twitch in her arm, her uneasiness but when she turns back to me I see that she wants it too, that she wants to be the kind of person who has people over, she just doesn't know how.

  I tell Leigh that I'll organise a party but she has to pay for it. She grins and hands over her credit card.

  I ask her what kind of party she wants and she looks at me, shrugs, her face scrunched up, no idea at all. A little dejected that this is already seeming a little harder than she was expecting.

  "How about a pool party on Sunday afternoon, a BBQ and some ice boxes with beer and mojitos?" I ask.

  The forecast is for it to be warm even though winter is upon us and her face lightens, pleased with this idea, clearly thinking it is perfect.

  I put the word out at work with the other gays and queers, a whole network of nurses and doctors and administrators and suddenly we are hosting the hottest party of the season.

  I tell Leigh that there may be a sixty or so people coming and her blue eyes are widening in startlement.

  "Why?" she asks, baffled, unable to think of a worse thing that she would want to do than go to someone else's house party on a Sunday afternoon. Her disbelief that this many people would want to put themselves through this torture is unbelievable to her.

  On the day she is endearingly anxious, asking me what she should wear and who is coming and what she should do.

  I tell her to dress in jeans and a t-shirt, that it is just the village gays and place her in front of the BBQ and tell her sort out the sausages.

  Having a practical task immediately takes her nerves away and she quite happily stands around at BBQ, talking to people, handing out sausage sandwiches looking relaxed.

  I am surprisingly relaxed myself, it's somehow calming knowing that Leigh is going to be completely useless and everything else is up to me. That I trust she isn't going to question the choices that I make through the evening, that I might have bought the wrong kind of beer or played music that wasn't optimal for the crowd, only the faintest anxiety brought on from the last time I organised something like this.

  People are piling in, about eighty in the end, in the pool and on the deck, crowding the lounge and the kitchen, dancing and having fun into the late afternoon. The house feels like the kind of place where you would want to be, want to live, that laughter and conversation so easily fills it. Leigh is talking to a group of other surgeons, ones who she clearly didn't know socially before this and they are animatedly talking shop and I can see how comfortable she is, that they are now friends who she might hang out with again.

  Or not.

  With Leigh who can tell?

  The party quiets down of its own accord at sunset as it gets cold and shorts and t-shirts are no longer adequate clothing.

  I have my first drink of the evening, a corona that sadly, is all that is left in the icebox and I sit with my feet in the pool feeling satisfied. Quietly happy that everyone seemed to have had a good time and I didn't ruin the night.

  Leigh comes and sits beside me, puts an arm around my shoulders and I raise an eyebrow, because it is already an implausible explanation at work that Leigh and I are just flatmates and I've already been copping enough gossip about our possible relationship without adding fuel to the fire. I can already see that the people who are still here have noted Leigh's action and I am now anticipating at least a week or two of knowing grins.

  Leigh eyes me quizzically and I realise it isn't that she doesn't care about what they think, it's that she doesn't even know what other people are thinking at all sometimes.

  If she isn't going to be bothered by this then I am not either.

  I rest my head on her shoulder and look out over her pool at the glimpse of ocean down the hill.

  "Have you ever been drunk?" I ask her, gesturing with my beer bottle to her bottle of water.

  Leigh laughs.

  "Of course I have," she says amused.

  "Did you not like it?" I ask her.

  "I liked it," she says genially, "it's not why I don't."

  I stare at her because I don't ever think to ask Leigh the questions that have troubled me, I just turn them over in my head, puzzles to vex me.

  "Why don't you drink?" I ask her curiously.

  Only Leigh makes a sound in her throat and shrugs, not wanting or not able to answer.

  "Do you know what I like about it?" I ask her and Leigh turns to look at me intently, very much wanting to know the answer to my question.

  There are a lot of reasons that I drink, but there is one thing that I like most.

  "It creates opportunity," I tell her, "it makes you say things you otherwise wouldn't, makes you take chances that you know can't ever work out."

  Leigh is watching me.

  "Do you remember what it is like to be drunk?" I ask her.

  She nods slowly, not creating the opening I was hoping for.

  We sit in silence for a few minutes, me feeling a little stupid now, her looking pensive.

  "If I was drunk," she says eventually, conversationally, looking out over the ocean, "I would tell you that I have ET."

  I stare at her, my gazing dropping unbidden to her hand that is resting on her leg, immediately understanding the whole sorry mess.

  That the tremors might have hardly started yet but when they do it is all over, a surgeon cannot work with shaking hands.

  That she is doing everything she can to save them, her austere diet and lifestyle, waiting with a death sentence over her head.

  "Oh god, Leigh," I say, because there isn't anything else. I can't make this better and she shrugs mutely in agreement.

  In hindsight I should have told her that surgery is a career, not at all a mea
sure of her self-worth. That there will be many other things that she is good at.

  That I love her because of her kindness, her dry wit, her laughter and intelligence, the way she listens and the way she sees the world.

  That I love her English accent despite being predisposed to hate it.

  That I love her just a little for her body which is sexier than she has any awareness of and that I love her not at all for the hours that surgery takes her from me.

  That she drives me crazy with her honesty and by turns her unnatural intuition and her complete cluelessness about me.

  I don't tell her any of that and we sit in silence for a half hour longer only interspersed with goodbyes, until everyone has gone. Then we both clean and tidy, working in separate rooms, surprisingly little mess left behind in the wake of the party.

  As I'm climbing the stairs to my bedroom Leigh calls out to me.

  "Thank you," she says, "I had fun tonight."

  She sounds surprised and I smile down at her through the banisters.

  "Me too," I tell her and I sound a little surprised myself.

  Chapter 15

  Leigh comes home unexpectedly early on Sunday afternoon and finds me halfway through a bottle of wine, cooking a hearty stew, craving a taste of home.

  Hoping that if I make it we can eat it together one night, on a rare evening she isn't in surgery.

  She sits down at the counter and watches me finish it. I serve her a bowl of stew and a side of greens and crusty bread and she smiles at the unforeseen pleasure of being fed food that she likes, of coming home to a house that isn't empty, her enjoyment of my company. Her expectations are so low of what other people could ever offer her that anything good that happens can't but be a delight.

  I drink the other half of the bottle over dinner and enjoy the feeling of our legs occasionally touching under the table.

  "When was the last time you had sex?" I ask her suddenly, in a silence that was amiable enough until I said that.

  Leigh stares at me, her eyebrows raised.

  "I was just wondering," I ask innocently, "you know because you didn't end up getting any on your birthday."

  Her eyes are still fixedly on me, trying to divine an ulterior motive until she gives up.

  "Two months ago," she says eventually.

  Fuck her.

  "You are doing better than me," I tell her, "it's been fecking ages."

  Almost six months, a few drunken one-night stands before I left London.

  "I was thinking that we should have sex," I tell her bluntly.

  She laughs and then trails off when she sees that I am not joking.

  "Jesus Christ Leigh, I'm asking you as a friend to put me out of my misery. I haven't had sex in ages and all I want is a fuck, yeah? It's not a big deal," I say this as casually as possible.

  She is looking at me with a raised eyebrow, not at all thinking this is not a big deal.

  I don't either but I'm going insane.

  She rubs her eyes with the tips of her fingers, trying to think this request through.

  "Aednat, I can't," she says and stops.

  "Do you want to?" I ask her angrily.

  She is looking at me, her brow knitted together, pain on her face. Crippled by her inability to lie to me and bound by a promise that she is going to keep.

  "Yes," she whispers eventually and my heart is twisting at her words, waiting for the other shoe to fall.

  She holds up a hand to stop me as I open my mouth to ask her what is stopping her.

  "It's not what you are asking for," she says far too perceptively, not looking at me, "it couldn't ever just be that. It would never be enough."

  Her eyes snap to mine.

  "You deserve more," she says a sadness in her voice.

  My eyes are telling her that I don't want more, that I just want her.

  Her cool fingers are cupping my chin.

  "You deserve much more," she says forcefully, "you deserve everything, you deserve someone who will move mountains for you. Someone who doesn't want to make you believe that this is enough."

  Her eyes are pained.

  "That person isn't me," she says harshly, judging herself. "Because I won't make the time to make it work. Because I only have room for only one thing in my life. One thing that I am going to do to the best of my ability."

  At this her lip curls, she looks out into the distance, lets out a short-exasperated breath.

  "It's everything Aednat. You are my friend, a very good-looking friend, one who if I was to."

  She stops abruptly.

  I wonder if she is going to complete that sentence.

  Hope rising from a dark place inside.

  "If I was to choose you to be my friend forever, I would choose exactly that," she says eventually. "I'd choose that I could always keep you. Not just have a few short days or weeks until I start to disappoint you. Until you realise that you are in this by yourself."

  She stops again, visibly gritting her teeth.

  "Because you would be. For the most part by yourself. I wouldn't ever be there for dinner, for birthdays, to meet your friends. I'd never ever be there," she says with cutting self-recrimination.

  She lets go of my face, her hands dropped loosely by her side, turns her to leave.

  I catch her arm.

  "Leigh," I tell her, "you can't make these decisions on my behalf, only yours. You need to know that I will take whatever you are offering. If that is just the occasional fuck then that is what I'll have. Whenever you want it. Wherever you want it."

  Leigh is looking at me in horror, that she has reduced me to this. I should be horrified too but I'm not.

  "You've been drinking," she says, not at all accusingly, just a statement of fact, pulling her arm back but not away completely.

  I shrug, it is not unusual that I have been drinking and not just lately.

  "When you get home in the morning I'll be sober," I tell her firmly. "You know where my room is."

  Letting go of her arm and leave her standing there in the hallway. I go back to my room where there are the dregs of a bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey that is waiting for me beside my bed.

  A week later when I haven't even seen Leigh in passing, when I've given up any hope of anything, let alone a pre-dawn visit I hear the front door shut quietly. I've been considering going to the travel agent to book a flight home when I hear Leigh's footsteps in the hallway outside my door. My room is nowhere near anywhere she needs to go at five in the morning. The sound stops and I can't tell if she has left or if she is still here.

  I don't think, I just get up and open the door.

  She is sitting there in the hallway just outside my door and she looks up and her eyes are, I don't even know. Hurt, tired, confused and something else.

  I'm only thinking that I don't want to see her like this, a reflection of my own misery, that neither of us need to be this sad.

  I straddle her hips and she opens her mouth to say something and I glare at her. There is to be no talking, because I can do this sober, but I can't do this with talking.

  We both already know the rules.

  That there are places we aren't going.

  Back to my bed.

  To her bed.

  We aren't going to make love. No sweet words or meaningless platitudes. No excuses, this is never going to lead to happily ever after. But there are some places that we can go and fucking here on the floor is one of them.

  Her hands are flat on the carpet, fingers curling into the weave.

  I take one and move it to my breast. The other. I'm holding them there, my hands flat over the top hers, right there, our eyes connected painfully, feeling the energy pulsing through us. I rock my hips into her and both of us groan softly. There is a terrible vulnerability in her eyes, but there is desire growing too, a grass fire taking hold.

  Her fingers tighten slightly, long fingers cupping around each, my nipples hardening in response through the thin material. She is biting her lips
together and I can see her gathering her resolve to stop this.

  I need to stop her thinking, it is far too late for stopping.

  I move one hand to her neck, curl my fingers around her jugular and her eyes widen.