by COE 3. 1. 0
“OK,” she sniffed.
He kept his face very straight.
*
Notch Two on her bucket list.
Felicity stared at the bottles of alcohol in front of her, all lined up at the bar which cornered the dining area. There seemed to be every label possible which could be bought from a liquor store. Jack Daniels. Glenfiddich. Bailey’s Irish cream. Jim Beam.
“Maybe we should make a game out of this,” Oliver said. “Truth or dare.”
“How does that work?”
“Our variation goes this way. I ask you something, you tell me the truth. If you pass, you must take a sip of whatever I ask you to.”
“Just a sip?”
“Maybe more than a sip.”
“I don’t do too well with alcohol. The last time I downed a shot glass of gin, I threw up.”
“This is your bucket list.” He grinned. “Ready?”
“Wait. I get to ask you questions too, right?”
“Right.”
“And if you don’t choose to answer, you have to take a shot too.”
“Of course. This is how the game works. Ready?”
“Sure.” But she couldn’t help feeling nervous all the same.
“I’ll go first,” Oliver said. “Truth or dare. Did you ever have a boyfriend?”
What? Oliver Greene was asking her if she ever had a boyfriend? Was it to satisfy his morbid curiosity about her or was it to make small talk?
“Truth,” she said. “I never had a boyfriend.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Not even in high school?”
“That’s three questions.”
“So it is. But I’m asking anyway.”
She said, “You know it’s the truth. You think someone like me can ever get a boyfriend? This fits completely in your perception of me, doesn’t it?”
He paused.
Then he said, “Why do you always put yourself down, Felicity?”
“You put me down.”
“I thought we called a truce. I’m sorry for what I did in the past. We drew a line between then and now, didn’t we?”
She was contrite. “Yes.”
“Then you’ll stop putting yourself down. You’re perfectly capable of getting a boyfriend like the rest of us. Me notwithstanding. You know.”
“Oh, really?” she challenged. “You would date someone like me?”
The moment she said it, she regretted it. Okaayyyy, this is where the put down starts again. Or maybe he thinks I’m fishing. Or trying to trap him into saying something he wouldn’t normally say.
She was right. He was at a loss.
He finally said, “Is that a question? Truth or dare?”
She paused.
Then she said, “No. I take it back.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
She clasped her hands. What on earth possessed her to say that?
“Your turn,” he said.
“OK.” She needed to dissipate the tension. “How many girls have you slept with?”
None of her business, but she really wanted to see his reaction. After all, he started it with his boyfriend question.
He laughed. “You really want to know?”
“Truth or dare?”
He paused as he gazed at her. After a while, he said, “Dare.”
“I don’t believe it. You don’t want to tell me. I know at least one.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“I don’t know because I’ve lost count.”
Her heart winced a little. But you’ve always known that about him? Why should it hurt you?
She said, a little too sharply, “You have to drink up.”
He grinned. “What should I drink?”
“The Jim Beam.”
She poured a shot glass full of the Jim Beam. He took it and downed it with one gulp.
“Next,” he said. “My turn to ask you a question. Have you ever had sex?”
Now she was really galled.
“What kind of question is that?” she demanded, her heart beating fast. Why did he want to know? Evil curiosity? Fat girl can’t get a boyfriend and can’t get laid.
“Truth or dare,” he challenged.
She stared at his knowing blue eyes. What was he trying to pull here? They both knew he wasn’t interested in laying her in any way. But it was the end of the world, and maybe going without sex for a few days was proving too much for him.
She took a deep breath.
“Truth,” she said, meeting him head on. What was going on in that head of his?
“Go ahead.”
She said, “No.”
“Seriously?”
“Why do you want to know so much about my sex life? Or lack thereof? So you can laugh at it?”
“No. I promised I won’t laugh. I just wondered if that was on your bucket list.”
Her cheeks flamed.
It was.
“Don’t worry, Oliver, I’m not going to ask you to do it.”
He stared at her, a faintly amused expression on his handsome features.
“My turn,” she said shakily, lest he say something else to hurt her. “Are you really rich?”
His eyebrow rose. “Am I really rich? What sort of question is that?”
“They say you’re really rich, or your parents are really rich. Is that true?”
“Why? You think I’m a billionaire?”
“I don’t know. No one from your ‘circle’ really talks to me. So I’m curious, you know. Not that it matters anymore in this world.”
He paused.
Then he said, “Truth. My Dad was a used car salesman. My Mom was a homemaker.” His face flinched with pain.
“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you of your family.”
“It’s OK. I need to talk about them. If I stop talking about them, I might forget . . . what they sounded like. Their voices. What they looked like. What they smelled like.” There was a wistful, faraway look in his eyes.
She fell silent.
Sometimes I just put my foot in my mouth. Why do you do it, Felicity?
He said, “Dad was the best salesman in the whole state. He made more commission than everyone else put together. Soon, he had enough to start his own used car dealer shop. He did good, and then he opened another one. And then another one. Soon, he had a chain of them. All this happened when I was growing up with my brothers and sisters. If my family is rich, it’s because Dad self-made himself that way. But he made sure we never forgot where we came from.”
She said, “Is that why you work so hard? I mean . . . guys like you . . . you could do anything you want in college and get away with it. You didn’t have to swot like the rest of us.”
“Dad told me never to take anything for granted. We had to prove ourselves – all six of us – before we could see any inheritance. We didn’t care about the inheritance, but we wanted to make him proud of us.”
He got up and slowly went to the bay windows.
“And now he’s gone,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Oliver. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No. It was good to talk about him.” Oliver had his back to her, but she could see him wiping his eyes. That was why he chose to walk away, she knew.
She said, “We don’t have to play anymore.”
He turned around. “Hell, I want to play. I haven’t got plastered yet.”
And he walked right back to his barstool and sat down.
They played ‘Truth or Dare’, only with less provocative questions. At the end of it, she got to know him pretty well – or at least, his family, what he liked to do in his spare time (“working out, because exercise stimulates the brain”) and how he got turned down by a girl he hit on (“I was ten, and she was my teacher”).
In return, he got to know more about her as well. One of his less (but still) provocative questions to her was:
; “Why do you try to come off as such a badass when you’re really not one?”
She paused. “Huh?”
“What I said. You’re not a bad ass. But you come off – to everyone – as this tough, ‘take no prisoners’ B-word, pardon my language. Why do you do that?”
She was speechless. But only for a moment. And only because someone actually confronted her about it.
She licked her mouth.
“Truth,” she said.
“Great.” He leaned back, waiting.
She averted her face so that he wouldn’t see her blush. “I think it’s because it’s a defense mechanism. When you have been taking as much as I have about your looks, your weight and the fact you’re a nerd, you kind of build up walls around yourself so that you wouldn’t be hurt.”
“Hurt before you can be hurt?” he observed.
“Kind of.” She tried to make her tone light now. “So you’re a psychoanalyst now?”
He laughed. His face was flushed with all the alcohol he had drunk. “There’s nothing else to do here. Seriously though . . . I ‘kind of’ understand why you are the way you are. Or what you make yourself to be.”
“I’m not making myself to be something I’m not.”
“I don’t think you’re a badass.”
“Maybe slightly,” she said.
Just then, a thud sounded on the front door. Both of them were immediately on the alert. Oliver put a finger to his lips. They both listened, their ears pricked. Felicity felt her skin crawl.
The growling started almost immediately. Then the clawing at the door.
“Let’s move upstairs,” Oliver hissed. “They may be smelling us.”
Honestly, neither of them knew exactly how the fast mutants operated. Did they see, hear, touch, smell and taste like human beings? Were they alive or dead, like zombies, with only a prescient subconsciousness to guide them?
As quietly as possible, Felicity and Oliver padded their way up the stairs. The doors rattled, and Felicity cast a frightened look at the chest-of-drawers and other furniture they had stacked in front of the entrance. Should they have had stacked some more? Would any of it hold?
They stood by the railings upstairs and watched the doors creak and rattle. The growling got less, and Felicity could swear that she heard the shuffling she had become familiar with. There was a rule, here, right? If the fast mutants spotted you, they went into hunt and kill mode. But if they didn’t see you, they went into sniff and track mode.
Felicity and Oliver didn’t make a sound as they waited for about thirty minutes until the shuffling got less and the fast mutants went away.
Or so they hoped.
“Look,” Oliver whispered, “I’ll take first watch tonight. You take the second. I’ll wake you after six hours.”
She nodded.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
“You gonna be OK?”
“Yeah. If anything happens, I’ll wake you.”
“If something does happen, what do we do? How do we get out of here?”
“If something does happen,” he said grimly, “we fight for our lives.”
8
Felicity woke up with a start in the master bedroom. Their sleeping arrangements were clearly delineated, seeing as there were five bedrooms in the penthouse. Oliver slept in the second bedroom down the hallway.
But now, the sun was shining through the windows and it seemed like a beautiful day. Except . . . it wasn’t supposed to be a beautiful day. She was supposed to wake up much earlier than this. Oliver was supposed to wake her up for her shift.
Why didn’t he?
Ohhhh. The headache struck her and made her wheel. Her head felt like it was about to explode.
“I’ll never, ever drink again,” she said out loud.
Still –
She got out of bed and took hold of the walking stick she had found as a weapon. Then she crept out of the bedroom and peered over the railings. Her pulse fluttered at her throat despite her hangover and she didn’t know what she expected to see. The front doors flung open and the furniture thrown everywhere? Carnage and blood?
Please, please let Oliver be OK.
It was surprisingly quiet in the penthouse. Of course. Why shouldn’t it be? If there was a din, she would have woken up.
Oliver was fast asleep by the door. He had pulled up the couch and he was sleeping on it.
Peacefully.
So much for being on night watch. So that was why he didn’t wake her up.
Part of her was irritated that he had shirked on his responsibility. A responsibility he had tasked himself with. But the other part of her knew he had drunk a lot, and it wasn’t possible to wake up when you had drunk so much.
Still –
She didn’t hear any noises outside, and so she called softly, “Oliver?”
He didn’t wake up.
She padded downstairs, almost reeling from her headache, and went right up to him.
“Oliver?” She put her hand on his shoulder.
And drew back in shock.
Oliver Greene was burning up.
9
It was difficult to get Oliver up the stairs and into her bedroom, but somehow, she managed. Thank goodness she was such a huge woman and with the strength to match.
She chose the master bedroom because it had a large king-sized bed, and she thought he might be more comfortable on it. He was not moving much, and he seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep, which had to be good for him, she supposed. She kept looking out for signs of bleeding from the eyes or his nostrils and his mouth, but so far, there were none.
She was so worried. Not so much for herself, but for him, to her chagrin. If I’m going to be sick, I can’t do anything about it anyway. And she had come to enjoy Oliver’s company over the past few days. He was certainly much nicer to her than he had previously been, and it was inescapable that he was easy on the eyes. There were far worse people to be stuck with in an end-of-the-world scenario.
So she was worried. More worried than she had thought possible.
She rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for pills and found a box of Tylenol. However, it was difficult to make Oliver swallow it. So she settled for crushing the pills in a glass of water and dribbling sips of it into his mouth. Most of it dribbled right out.
Next, she tried the cold compress method. There were many hand towels in the bathroom drawers, and so she soaked a few in cold water and sponged his forehead and neck. He was sweating and his clothes were soon soaked through. Sweat was a good sign, right?
Or maybe not, she wasn’t sure.
So she changed his clothes by rolling him over and stripping him to his underwear. She tried not to admire his smooth, golden skin and the hard planes of his chest and abdomen, and how well everything seamlessly fit and flowered into other body parts to make him so beautiful.
She tried not to look at the bulge at the crotch of his underwear. He was sick. He needed her help, not her stares. She should be ashamed of herself for looking, really.
But she still couldn’t help it.
He was so damned beautiful.
She slept by his side that night, and when she woke up in the middle of the night to check on him, the fever still had not broken. Now she was really scared. She prized open his eyelids to check for bleeding, and his pupils contracted, but he still did not wake up.
She didn’t know what to do. There was no cure for this. You had to ride it out, and so far, the news items had given them no indication that this would pan out well for anyone who had contracted the virus.
She didn’t know what to do except to lie by his side, hold his hand and pray for the best. She had lost so much. She had lost an entire world. She couldn’t bear to lose him too.
Her own sleep was troubled and fretful. She dreamed that they being chased by fast mutants. They rounded a building and were confronted by a brick wall which went up to the sky. She whirled round.
“Oliver,” she cried. “We ar
e trapped!”
Fire shot out of his blue eyes, which were bloodied. He growled, showing lengthened teeth. He sprang at her.
Felicity woke up in fright.
It was morning, and in the light of day, she wondered if she was unwise in allowing herself to get so exposed to Oliver and the virus that he had obviously contracted. Well, too late now. She glanced anxiously at Oliver.
To her horror, a dried trail of blood leaked from his left nostril.
“Oliver?” she cried, taking hold of his arms and shaking him. “Oliver, please wake up.”
He grunted something and trashed his head. At least he was awake!
“Oliver,” she said urgently. She clasped his face in her hands. “Oliver, you can fight this. You have fought it so far. You can do this.”
Was it her imagination, but did he not feel as warm as before? Maybe this was part of the symptom continuum. Fever . . . then the lull. Then the bleeding. She hadn’t heard anyone coming back from the bleeding.
She felt her own forehead. She didn’t feel warm. Yet. Or maybe it was in contrast to Oliver’s still feverish skin.
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” she said.
Who knows? In the absence of reported news, they could have found a cure by now and were at this very moment dispensing the vaccination or antiviral or whatever it took to get rid of this fatal disease.
But how was she going to get Oliver all the way downstairs? There was a hospital three blocks down from here. Bethseda, it was called.
She needed a wheelchair.
But where the hell was she going to get one? And if she did get one, what if the fast mutants spotted them and came after them?
So many questions. And virtually no answers.
Think! she told herself furiously. Don’t panic. Just think!
Perhaps, she thought slowly, it would be better if she scouted out Bethseda first. It was no point risking their lives to get to the hospital, only to find that there wasn’t a cure or that it was swamped (which it probably was).
Armed with purpose, she slowly got off the bed. She needed a jacket and whatever passed for a weapon. Or a few weapons.
She gazed down at Oliver.
“Don’t die until I get back,” she said.