by Zoe Sharp
And then I heard it. Little more than a gasp, a catch in his breath, brim full of anguish and pain. My night-dilated eyes could just make out Sean’s restless figure amid the snarled-up sheets only a metre or so away. For a moment I did nothing more than watch him sleep and listen to him dream.
The dream was hot enough to make him sweat, savage enough to send his heartrate soaring, and dark enough to force out quiet whimpers from between his clamped lips. Trapped in slumber, his subconscious was free to torture him at will.
I had nights like that myself.
I leaned over and stole a hand across the bedclothes. I found his twisting fingers and crept my own between them. He gripped tight, blindly, not knowing I was there. Instinct taking succour where it was offered, like a frightened child.
I suffered from my own nightmares. It had never occurred to me that Sean must have his monsters to face, too.
On the surface he seemed so calm, so solid and, despite what I might have thrown at him in anger, so in control. I’d never considered his doubt or pain. Yet here he was, crying out in his sleep and needing comfort of his own. Did I really have anything to offer him that hadn’t been irreparably damaged in transit?
Hesitant, I stood, pushed back the sheets and slid into bed alongside him, reaching out to him. His body was heated, febrile, so that where our skin touched I almost expected it to sizzle. For a second he resisted, tried to push me away. If he’d continued I think I would have let him, but he didn’t.
He seemed to rise a layer out of the hell where he’d been burning. Not enough to wake, but enough to recognise me. Or somebody like me.
He let me slink under his arm, sneak my head onto his shoulder and wrap my limbs across his shuddering body, anchoring him in this reality. His roughened chin skimmed the top of my head. I could feel his breath in my hair, slowing.
I lay awake and listened as his body began to drift, as his pulse climbed down. And I decided, fiercely, that I would give as much as I was able to. As much as Sean would take. Two broken halves could not necessarily be put back together to form a whole, but I had to try.
For both our sakes.
Twenty
When I opened my eyes the following morning, it was to find Sean lying on his side facing me, arm bent, head propped on his hand.
“Hi,” he said quietly, giving me one of those slow-release smiles.
“Hi yourself,” I said, feeling my breath hitch, my heart stutter. I stretched, hiding a yawn together with my self-consciousness behind my hand. “What is it with you and watching me sleep?”
He laughed, little more than a bubble of amusement, and reached to smooth a tangle of hair out of my eyes, using that distraction to neatly dodge the question. “You’re very peaceful when you sleep.”
“Not always,” I said. I paused. “And neither are you.”
The smile faded and Sean rolled away onto his back. The light filtering through the thin curtains touched on the healed scar at his shoulder and just for a moment I wished all his injuries had been merely physical. Instead, the one that had hurt him the most was the savage blow to his psyche and, as I well knew, treating those wounds could be a much more hit-and-miss affair.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what had brought you all the way over here from your own bed.”
“You don’t remember?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Nothing specific,” he said. “I never do unless something wakes me in the thick of it, so to speak.”
I passed over the admission of frequency. For the moment. “And then?”
He shrugged and it was my turn to rise up and lean over him. “Talk to me, Sean.”
A long sigh, a slow letting of breath. “Yes, I have nightmares,” he said at last, closing his eyes briefly. “Gut-wrenching vicious bloody nightmares.”
“The same one, or different?”
“Variations on a theme usually,” he said, using that flat emotionless voice I’d heard from him so many times before. “I’m either watching people die and doing nothing, or I’m killing them myself.”
“Who?”
He opened his eyes and flicked them sideways to meet mine. I saw him calculate whether to tell me the truth or just a version of it. Finally, he said frankly, “People I know. People I . . . feel strongly about. People I was in the army with, my friends, my family. The number of times I’ve slit my father’s throat in my sleep, the old bastard. Trouble is, I slit my mother’s alongside him without distinction. And then . . . there’s you.”
I laid a hand on his chest and told myself it was purely for balance. Under my palm his skin was taut and hot, a slightly elevated heartrate the only trace of his distress.
I stayed quiet, let him find his own way. “It’s like something’s trying to tell me that I’m only going to end up hurting you, Charlie,” he said then. “And not just you, but anyone I care for. It . . . worries me, sometimes.”
That was a dramatic understatement, I knew, but getting this kind of confession out of him at all was an achievement so I let it pass.
“Dreams are just a way of coping with the dross that’s going round in our heads,” I said at last. “I have them, too, y’know? I get to relive what happened to me in glorious Technicolor – the four of them, the dark, the cold. And it’s so powerful I can’t shake the reality of it. I can wake up freezing in the middle of a heatwave. And sometimes, yes, there are weird twists.” I hesitated, but he was being brutally honest, so why shouldn’t I? “Sometimes the only face I can see is yours.”
He winced. “Christ,” he murmured. “I’m not surprised you knocked me flat on my back the other night. I guess I was lucky you didn’t kill me.” He brushed a fingertip across the mark on his cheekbone and allowed his lips to twitch in bitter self-contempt. “God knows, I showed you enough ways to go about it.”
“Yes, but it does not have to be this way,” I said, angry with the effort of trying to keep the anguish out of my voice. “We can do something about it if we want to.” His eyes were on mine again, black like sorrow, and I couldn’t read a glimmer of his thoughts beyond them. “All we have to do is want to enough.”
“Oh, trust me, I want to,” he said with quiet feeling. I caught the gleam in his eye only a fraction before he reared up and tumbled me back onto the pillows. He swooped for the hollow of my neck like a vampire, muttering almost to himself, “Of that you can be quite certain.”
My hands clutched convulsively at the bedclothes while he feasted at the jagged pulse that raged beneath the scar at my throat, robbing me of breath along with logical thought and any willpower I might have once possessed. Flames ignited like arson along every nerve-ending until they threatened to engulf me totally.
At last, when I thought I’d go crazy under him, he came up for air. Both of us were gasping. His mouth traced lazily across my shoulder and my hands came together of their own volition to meet at his spine, delicately sketching the ripple of muscle beneath the skin. I felt him quiver under my touch. So tough, so strong, so vulnerable.
He shifted suddenly, rolling onto his back again and this time taking me with him, hands firm at my waist. I ended up sprawled along the full length of him, leaving me in no doubt just how badly he wanted me. But there was reticence about him, too, a shadow of restraint.
He was holding back to let me make all the running, I realised, doing nothing that was going to trip any alarms. Not this time. I put a fist either side of his shoulders and arched my back so I could look down at his face.
“I never thought of you as the kind of guy who’d lie back and think of England,” I said, and my voice was husky.
Sean laughed softly. “Oh, it’s not England I’m thinking about,” he said. The laughter fell away in the face of his sudden intensity. “It’s you, Charlie. It’s always been you.”
His hands lightly braceleted my wrists, then skimmed upwards to my shoulders and I felt my elbows almost buckle. When those long clever fingers finally brushed across my collarbones and dropped to my breas
ts, my arms gave out completely. I sagged into him.
Infinitely slowly, he nudged my chin up and kissed me. Something spun and shattered behind my closed eyelids. His hands moved lower down my body, his deft touch causing a trail of devastation.
My illusion of being in control was fragmenting, like the last few seconds before the crash when you still have the faint vain hope that you can ride out of this intact but you’re already beyond redemption. I knew I had only moments of sanity left before little things like consequences wouldn’t matter a damn.
I wrenched my mouth free and heard a mewl of protest that could possibly have been me. Robbed, Sean went for the pulse-point at my neck again and the haze of his breath against the shallow indentation below my ear was almost my undoing.
“Sean,” I managed, even as my vision bulged and distorted. “Wait—”
He gave a low groan of protest but immediately stilled. I didn’t have to ask him twice.
“Erm, you weren’t ever a Boy Scout by any chance, were you?” I asked, pulling back a little and trying to force the shakiness out of my voice.
I saw by the quick flash of his grin that he’d caught on right away, even if he was going to make me work for it. “No, but I got chucked out of the Cubs for fighting when I was seven,” he said lightly. “Does that count?”
“No. Have you got . . .?” I said, annoyed to find myself so tongue-tied. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting—”
He took pity on me. “Inside jacket pocket,” he said, nodding to where his leathers hung on the chair next to the bed. He lifted up and nipped at my lower lip with his teeth. His hands had begun to coast again, making bolder forays that wreaked havoc with my concentration. “You don’t have to be a Boy Scout to be prepared, you know.”
I twisted under his touch, gulping in air like it was my last breath. “So sure of me, were you?”
“Sure? Never,” he said. “Hopeful? Always.”
Sean stretched out for the pocket he’d indicated. I’ve never been so glad to see a condom. He stripped the foil packet open without a fumble but still it was all taking much too long. The need was a brutal chanting in my head now, a roaring in my blood that echoed burning in my belly.
Desperate for relief I scraped against him, growling in sheer frustration, limbs slick with sweat. Then his fingers were grasping my hips to hold me steady, ready, poised, but at the last second he hesitated. I could have wept.
“Christ, I don’t want to hurt you,” he gritted out. “I’m not sure, if we go much further, that I’ll be able to stop.”
“Then don’t,” I said, swept with certainty as my voice cracked. “Don’t stop, I mean. Oh God, please don’t stop.”
And somehow he knew that I was way past the point where I needed gentleness from him. His hands jerked downwards.
I came the instant he was inside me.
There was a moment of suspension, then I was flooded by an overwhelming barrage of sensations, a sweet rush so sharp it could almost have been pain. It surged up through my body and burst out of the top of my head, scattering my brains, exquisite and unbearable.
My last coherent thought was a fierce affirmation. This was right. It was meant to be. Sean and I.
And to hell with everyone who tried to tell us different.
***
Next thing I knew, someone was hammering at the door to the room. Groggy and disorientated, I had no idea how long we’d laid together.
I felt Sean slide out from under my cheekbone almost before I’d come to. He yanked his T-shirt over his head and pulled on his shorts, checking me briefly over his shoulder as he moved to the door.
I just had time to sit up in bed and clasp the sheets primly around me as he slipped the chain and opened up.
“Wakey wakey, Charlie! Come on, you’ll miss breakfast and—”
William’s voice broke off suddenly as he registered Sean in the doorway. Embarrassingly, the rest of the Devil’s Bridge Club also peered in through the gap. Only Tess was missing – if I had to be thankful for small mercies.
Paxo pushed to the front and led the way into the room, glaring at the obvious signs that Sean and I had shared the same bed. As if that wasn’t confirmation enough, I flushed painfully, feeling the glow of it suffuse my face right up to the roots of my hair.
Paxo’s outraged gaze went from Sean to Jamie and back again. “Jesus H Christ,” he said, his voice cruising with disgust. He jerked his head towards me. “Is there a fucking rota or something for her I don’t know about?”
Sean’s face never changed. He took a step forwards and closed in on Paxo, butting up against him, forcing the smaller man to retreat until he was hard up against the wall to the bathroom. Sean’s shoulders were angled towards me, his body blocking the movement of his hands, but suddenly Paxo’s colour bleached out and his eyes bugged.
“I’ll pretend – for now – that you didn’t say that,” Sean said, his voice soft and pleasant. “But if you’re ever foolish enough to try and repeat it, Martin, we may have to have this little chat again, OK?”
He stepped back and Paxo started to double over very slowly, like a tree falling. He got far enough down to brace his fists on his thighs and stopped like that, fighting tears and asphyxia. He was wearing his bike jeans and the thick leather should have afforded him some protection. But – in this case – nowhere near enough.
The others stood frozen, unsure exactly what it was that they’d just been witness to. Sean turned back to them and smiled.
“If you wouldn’t mind giving us half an hour to get sorted,” he said politely, “we’ll meet you downstairs, OK?”
Dumbly, they nodded, began to file out. William looped an arm round Paxo’s shoulders but Paxo shrugged him off. He straightened with an effort and staggered out, red-faced, coughing. Daz was last to move. His eyes met Sean’s and clashed silently, then slid away.
Sean shut the door firmly behind them. “Not quite the discreet assignation I had in mind,” he said, his expression rueful. “Sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said and was surprised to realise that it didn’t. Not any more. “I assume that Martin is Paxo’s real name?”
He nodded. “Martin Paxton. Manages a bar in Lancaster. Daz – Darren Henderson – runs some kind of craft centre just outside Manchester, and William Lacey works for the ferry company. Madeleine dug out the gen on them and I didn’t think it would do any harm to scare Paxo a little.”
“On top of halfway castrating him, you mean?”
Sean shrugged. “You would have done the same,” he said with the barest hint of a smile. “I just got to him first.”
He moved back across to the bed but as he did so his foot kicked something that was hidden just under the valance. He bent to retrieve it and when he stood he was holding an ornate silver ring between his fingers.
“Yours?”
“Damn,” I said. “It must be one of Tess’s. She was here last night.”
His eyebrows went up. “Wow,” he said. “So Paxo was right about you. Girls as well – I’m impressed.”
“Oh please,” I muttered, trying to keep my face stern and failing miserably.
He snagged a corner of the sheet and whipped it out of my hands, ignoring my yelp of protest. “Come on,” he said, grinning. “Out of bed, you. You can fill me in while you’re in the shower.”
He showered quickly first, then shaved while I showered. I felt surprisingly relaxed amid the unfamiliar domesticity, helped by the fact that we were talking all the while. I ran through the events of the evening before, from the reappearance of the Vauxhall to Tess’s near miss and what both she and Jamie had told me.
When I emerged, it was to find Sean absently turning the ring he’d found over in his fingers, looking at the pretty cut of the stone against the light from the window.
“So we still don’t know why Jamie borrowed the money in the first place,” he said, sounding distracted.
“No,” I said, rubbing a towel vigorously over my hair. Alt
hough I kept it roughly in a bob, no longer than my jawline, there wasn’t the time to dry it properly and after a day scrunched under a helmet I knew it was going to be uncontrollable. “But I reckon he might fold if I keep nagging at him. I’ll have another go . . . what is it?”
Sean was holding Tess’s ring up and something in his face had changed.
“What do you make of this?” he asked, throwing it across to me so I had to let go of my towel to catch it. I rolled the ring in my fingers for a moment and shrugged, frowning. “What about it?”