Me Before You: After You Part 25

His hair was flattened from the rain, his skin glistening in the hall light, as I let him pull me to my feet. I winced, and he saw.

'Hip?'

I nodded.He sighed. 'I wish you'd talk to me.' The skin beneath his eyes was mauve with exhaustion. There were two long scratches on the back of his left hand. I wondered what had happened the previous night. He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard running water. When he came back he was holding two pills and a cup. 'I shouldn't really be giving you these. But they'll give you a pain-free night.'

I took them gratefully. He watched me as I swallowed them.

'Do you ever follow rules?'

'When I think they're sensible.' He took the cup from me. 'So are we good, Louisa Clark?'

I nodded.

He let out a long breath. 'I'll call you tomorrow.'

Afterwards, I wasn't sure what made me do it. My hand reached out and took his. I felt his fingers close slowly around mine. 'Don't go. It's late. And motorbikes are dangerous.'

I took the screwdriver from his other hand, and let it fall onto the carpet. He looked at me for the longest time, then slid a hand over his face. 'I don't think I'm good for much just now.'

'Then I promise not to use you for s.e.xual gratification.' I kept my eyes on his. 'This time.'

His smile was slow to come, but when it did, everything fell away from me, as if I had been carrying a weight I hadn't known.

Y ou never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.

He stepped over the screwdriver, and I led him silently towards my bedroom.

I lay in the dark in my little flat, my leg slung over the bulk of a sleeping man, his arm pinning me pleasurably beneath it, and gazed at his face.

Fatal cardiac arrest, motorbike accident, suicidal teenager and a gang-related stabbing on the Peabody Estate. Some shifts are just a bit ...

Sssh. It' s okay. Sleep.

He had barely managed to get his uniform off. He had stripped to his T-shirt and shorts, kissed me, then closed his eyes and collapsed into a dead slumber. I had wondered whether I should cook him something, or tidy the flat so that when he woke I might look like someone who actually had a handle on life. But instead I undressed to my underwear and slid in next to him. For these few moments I just wanted to be beside him, my bare skin against his T-shirt, my breath mingling with his. I lay listening to his breathing, marvelling at how someone could be so still. I studied the slight b.u.mp on the bridge of his nose, the variation in the shade of the bristles that shadowed his chin, the slight curl at the end of his dark, dark eyelashes. I ran through conversations we had had, putting them through a new filter, one that pitched him as a single man, an affectionate uncle, and I wanted to laugh with the idiocy of it all, and cringe at my mistake.

I touched his face twice, lightly, breathing in the scent of his skin, the faint tang of antibacterial soap, the primal s.e.xual hint of male sweat, and the second time I did so I felt his hand tighten reflexively on my waist. I shifted onto my back and gazed out at the streetlights, feeling, for once, that I was not an alien in this city. And finally, I found myself drifting ...

His eyes open on mine. A moment later he realizes where he is.

'Hey.'A lurch into waking. The peculiar dreamlike state that suffuses the small hours. He is in my bed. His leg against mine. A smile, creeping across my face. 'Hey yourself.'

'What time is it?'

I swivel to catch the digital readout of my alarm. 'A quarter to five.' Time settles into order, the world, reluctantly, into something that makes sense. Outside, the sodium-lit dark of the street. The minicabs and night buses rumble past. Up here it is just him and me in the night and the warm bed and the sound of his breathing.

'I can't even remember getting here.' He looks off to the side, his face faintly lit by the streetlights, frowning. I watch as memories of the previous day land softly, a silent, mental Oh. Right.

His head turns. His mouth, inches from mine. His breath, warm and sweet. 'I missed you, Louisa Clark.'

I want to tell him then. I want to tell him that I don't know what I feel. I want him but I'm frightened to want him. I don't want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else's, to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.

His eyes are on my face, reading me. 'Stop thinking,' he says.

He pulls me to him, and I relax. This man spends each day out here, on the bridge between life and death. He understands. 'You think too much.'

His hand slides down the side of my face. I turn towards him, an involuntary reflex, and put my lips against his palm. 'Just live?' I whisper.

He nods, and then he kisses me, long and slow and sweet, until my body arches and I am just need and want and longing.

His voice is low in my ear. My name, pulling me in. He makes it sound like something precious.

The next three days were a blurred ma.s.s of stolen nights and brief meetings. I missed Idealization Week in the Moving On Circle because he turned up at the flat just as I was leaving and we somehow ended up an urgent mess of arms and legs, waiting for my egg-timer to go off so that he could dress and race to pick Jake up on time. Twice he was waiting for me when I returned from my shift, and with his lips on my neck, his big hands on my hips, the indignities of the Shamrock and Clover were, if not forgotten, swept aside along with last night's empties.

I wanted to resist him, but I couldn't. I was giddy, diverted, sleepless. I got cyst.i.tis and didn't care. I hummed my way through work, flirted with the businessmen, and smiled cheerfully at Richard's complaints. My happiness offended my manager: I could see it in his chewed cheek, the way he sought ever more feeble misdemeanours for which to tell me off.

I cared about none of it. I sang in the shower, lay awake dreaming. I wore my old dresses, my brightly coloured cardigans and satin pumps, and let myself be enclosed in a bubble of happiness, aware that bubbles only ever existed for so long before they popped anyway.

'I told Jake,' he said. He had half an hour's break, and he and Donna had stopped outside my flat with lunch before I went off for a late shift. I sat beside him in the front seat of the ambulance.

'You told him what?' He had made mozzarella, cherry tomato and basil sandwiches. The tomatoes, grown in his garden, burst in little explosions of flavour in my mouth. He was appalled at how I ate when I was alone.

'That you'd thought I was his dad. He laughed more than I've seen him laugh for months.''You didn't tell him I told you his dad cried after s.e.x, right?'

'I knew a man who did that once,' said Donna. 'But he really sobbed. It got sort of embarra.s.sing. The first time I thought I'd broken his p.e.n.i.s.'

I turned to her, open-mouthed.

'It's a thing. Really. We've had a couple in the rig, haven't we?'

'We have. You'd be amazed at the coital injuries we see.' He nodded at my sandwich, which was still on my lap. 'I'll tell you when your mouth's empty.'

'Coital injuries. Great. Because there aren't enough things in life to worry about.'

His gaze slid sideways as he bit into his sandwich, so that I blushed. 'Trust me. I'd let you know.'

'Just so we're straight, my old mucker,' said Donna, offering up one of her ever-present energy drinks, 'I am so totally not going to be your first responder for that one.'

I liked being in the cab. Sam and Donna had the no-nonsense wry manner of those who had seen pretty much every human condition, and treated it, too. They were funny and dark, and I felt oddly at home wedged between them, as if my life, with all its strangeness, was actually pretty normal.

These were the things I learned in the s.p.a.ce of several s.n.a.t.c.hed lunch hours: Almost no men or women over the age of seventy would complain about their pain or their treatment, even if a limb were actually hanging off.

Those same elderly men or women would almost always apologize for 'making a fuss'.

That the term 'Patient PFO' was not scientific terminology but 'Patient p.i.s.sed and Fell Over'.

Pregnant women rarely gave birth in the back of ambulances. (I was quite disappointed by that one.) That n.o.body used the term 'ambulance driver' any more. Especially not ambulance drivers.

There would always be a handful of men who would answer, when asked to describe how much pain they were in out of ten, with 'eleven'.

But what came through most, when Sam arrived back after a long shift, was the bleakness: solitary pensioners; obese men glued to a television screen, too large even to try to get themselves up and down their own stairs; young mothers who spoke no English, confined to their flats with a million small children, unsure how to call for help when it was needed; and the depressed, the chronically ill, the unloved.

Some days, he said, it felt like a virus: you had to scrub the melancholy from your skin along with the scent of antiseptic. And then there were the suicides, the lives ended under trains or in silent bathrooms, their bodies often unnoticed for weeks or months until somebody remarked on the smell, or wondered why so-and-so's post was now spilling out of their pigeonhole.

'Do you ever get frightened?'

He lay, oversized, in my little bath. The water had turned faintly pink with the blood from a patient's gunshot wound that had leaked all over him. I was a little surprised at how swiftly I had got used to having a naked man in the vicinity. Especially one who could move by himself.

'You can't do this job if you're frightened,' he said simply.

He had been in the army before he'd joined the paramedics; it was not an unusual career arc. 'They like us because we don't scare easy, and we've seen it all. Mind you, some of those drunk kids scare me farmore than the Taliban ever did.'

I sat on the loo seat beside him and stared at his body in the discoloured water. Even with his size and strength, I shivered.

'Hey,' he said, seeing something pa.s.s across my face, and reached out a hand to me. 'It's fine, really. I have a very good nose for trouble.' He closed his fingers around mine. 'It's not a great job for relationships, though. My last girlfriend couldn't cope with it. The hours. Nights. The mess.'

'The pink bathwater.'

'Yeah. Sorry about that. The showers weren't working at the station. I should really have gone home first.' He looked at me in a way that showed me there had been no chance of him going home first. He pulled the plug to let some of the water drain away, then turned on the taps for more.

'So who was she, your last girlfriend?' I kept my voice level. I was not going to be one of those women, even if he had turned out not to be one of those men.

'Iona. Travel agent. Sweet girl.'

'But you weren't in love with her.'

'Why do you say that?'

'n.o.body ever says "sweet girl" about someone they were in love with. It's like the whole "we'll still be friends" thing. It means you didn't feel enough.'

He was briefly amused. 'So what would I have said if I had been in love with her?'

'You would have looked very serious, and said, "Karen. Complete nightmare," or shut down and gone all "I don't want to talk about it." '

'You're probably right.' He thought for a bit. 'If I'm honest I didn't really want to feel much after my sister died. Being with Ellen for the last few months, helping look after her, kind of knocked me sideways.' He glanced at me. 'Cancer can be a pretty brutal way to go. Jake's dad fell apart. Some people do. So I figured they needed me there. If I'm honest, I probably only held it together myself because we couldn't all go to pieces.' We sat in silence for a moment. I couldn't tell if his eyes had gone a bit red from grief or soap.

'Anyway. So, yes. Probably not much of a boyfriend back then. So who was yours?' he said, when he finally turned back to me.

'Will.'

'Of course. n.o.body since?'

'n.o.body I want to talk about.' I shuddered.

'Everyone's allowed their own way back, Louisa. Don't beat yourself up about it.'

His skin was hot and wet, making it hard for me to hold on to his fingers. I released them, and he began to wash his hair. I sat and watched him, letting the mood lift, enjoying the bunched muscles in his shoulders, the gleam of his wet skin. I liked the way he washed his hair: vigorously, with a kind of matter- of-factness, shaking off the excess water like a dog.

'Oh. I had a job interview,' I said, when he finished. 'For a thing in New York.'

'New York.' He raised an eyebrow.

'I won't get it.'

'Shame. I've always wanted an excuse to go to New York.' He slid slowly under the water so that only his mouth remained. It broke into a slow smile. 'But you'd get to keep the pixie outfit, yes?'I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn't expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall.

I finally made an effort to sort out the flat. On my day off I bought an armchair, and a coffee-table, and a small framed print, which I hung near the television, and those things somehow conspired to suggest someone might actually live there. I bought new bedding and two cushions and hung up all my vintage clothes in the wardrobe so that opening it now revealed a riot of pattern and colour, instead of several pairs of cheap jeans and a too-short Lurex dress. I managed to turn my anonymous little flat into something that felt, if not quite like a home, vaguely welcoming.

By some beneficence of the shift-scheduling G.o.ds, Sam and I both had a day off. Eighteen uninterrupted hours in which he did not have to listen to a siren, and I did not have to listen to the sound of pan pipes or complaints about dry-roasted peanuts. Time spent with Sam, I noted, seemed to go twice as fast as the hours I spent alone. I had pondered the million things we could do together, then dismissed half of them as too 'couple-y'. I wondered whether our spending so much time together was wise.

I texted Lily one more time. Lily, please get in touch. I know you're mad at me, but just call. Y our garden is looking beautiful! I need you to show me how to look after it, and what to do with the tomato plants, which have got really tall (is this right?). Maybe after we could go out dancing? x I pressed send and stared at the little screen just as the doorbell rang.

'Hey.' He filled my doorway, holding a toolbox in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other.

'Oh, my G.o.d,' I said. 'You're like the ultimate female fantasy.'

'Shelves,' he said, deadpan. 'You need shelves.'

'Oh, baby. Keep talking.'

'And home-cooked food.'

'That's it. I just came.'

He laughed and dropped the tools in the hallway and kissed me, and when we finally untangled ourselves, he walked through to the kitchen. 'I thought we could go to the pictures. You know one of the greatest benefits to shift-working is empty matinees, right?'

I checked my phone.

'But nothing with blood in it. I get a bit tired of blood.'

When I looked up he was watching me.

'What? Don't fancy it? Or is that going to stamp all over your plans for Zombie Flesh Eaters Fifteen?

... What?'

I frowned, and dropped my hand to my side. 'I can't get hold of Lily.'

'I thought you said she'd gone home?'

'She did. But she won't take my calls. I think she's really upset with me.'

'Her friends stole your stuff. You're allowed to be the one who's upset.'

He started to pull things out of the bag, lettuces, tomatoes, avocados, eggs, herbs, stacking them neatly in my near-empty fridge. He looked up at me as I texted her again. 'Come on. She could have dropped her phone, left it in some club, or run out of credit. You know what teenagers are like. Or she's just throwing a ma.s.sive strop. Sometimes you need to let them work it out of their system.'I took his hand and shut the fridge door. 'I need to show you something.' His eyes lit up briefly. 'Not that, no, you bad man. That will have to wait till later.'

Sam stood on the rooftop and gazed around him at the flowers. 'And you had no idea?'

'None at all.'