Just the two of us now. Bryan rides his bike along the towpath from Port Meadow, me a short distance behind. We pass over Fiddler’s Island, water lapping close on either side of the narrow causeway. Our tires make slow clacking sounds as we cross the footbridge.
“This is where I lost Kira,” I say, and he stops, turns back to me.
“You never told me that.”
I shrug, still feeling hurt by his anger, unsure of myself. “I was holding onto her. At least I was trying to. But she didn’t want me to.”
Bryan’s voice is tense. “We need to keep going. The weather is turning.”
“I kept playing it over and over in my mind. She had this look in her eyes. She wanted me to let her go.” I can make out a thin stretch of sky through the branches of creeper-cluttered hawthorn and willow. “I don’t want to go home.” What I mean is I don’t want to leave him with this hanging between us. “I wouldn’t…I mean, nothing was going to happen to me.”
He runs a hand through his wet hair. “Not yet.”
“I can’t turn back from what’s happening to us.”
“And I don’t want to lose you.”
“I thought you said—”
“It doesn’t bloody well matter what I said before!” Water trickles down his chin. We’re both thoroughly soaked. Finally, he shakes his head. “My house then, okay? The rain is getting worse.”
His place is a part of an old council property on the opposite side of the Thames. Decaying terraced houses and empty parking lots, debris that hasn’t been cleared from the communal gardens. Most of the ground floor flats have been abandoned, and the windows are boarded up but damp darkens the frames. The signs of neglect are everywhere.
Bryan leads me up a concrete external staircase. “The funding goes to flood defences in posher areas,” he mutters. “Places like Osney. The river broke the bank close to here, but they still haven’t been able to afford proper repairs. Da bought this place when he was young and thought it’d see Mum taken care of. But now? If the banks break again, the foundations may not last. We could lose everything.” He pushes the door open. “Mum won’t be back tonight. She’s just started her shift at the hospital.”
Inside, there’s plenty of space, but somehow we’re still bumping into each other in the hallway. The ceiling is low, webbed with tendrils of black mould above the windows. Bryan tries the light switch and sighs when nothing happens. “I’d offer you tea, but.”
Nervousness makes me want to hold my body tight, compact.
“It won’t be long before the power’s back, I reckon. But you need to get dry at least.”
“Bryan…”
He doesn’t answer. Instead he turns and disappears into the room on the left, returning a minute later with an oversized Glastonbury T-shirt. It smells thickly of him. “Sorry, I don’t have much that’s clean,” he says.
“It’s fine, really.”
He steers me toward the bathroom, which is lit only by a small window, looking out toward the river. I change out of my clothes quickly. A slug of toothpaste is crusted against the drain of the porcelain sink and plastic pill bottles are lined up along the wall, exposed, all with Bryan’s name on the label. Paroxetine, an antidepressant that Mom has used, Haloperidol, and others I don’t recognize. Fibrin sealant glue like I have to carry, in case of cuts that won’t stop bleeding. I wonder what else his mother might be hoarding, what contingency plans she has made.
After I’m finished I find Bryan in the living room, where he has opened all the windows and got a small heater going to dry my clothes. He takes my shirt and cut-offs, and hangs them on a rack. A small puddle begins to form beneath the edge of the pane, and he sets out an old cake pan to catch it.
The T-shirt is long, but it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. My thighs prickle with a shivery warmth. I take a seat on the ground, enjoying the coolness of the floorboards. The heady smell of naphtha fills the room, reminding me of the camping trips my family used to take to Algonquin, good memories.
“I’ve always loved this smell. It reminds me of autumn, going back to school. I was always excited about September.”
“Never was much for school,” he says. “Except for sports.”
I try to imagine him hurtling down the field, tussling with the other boys on the team. It makes me smile. “Our street always smells like this, you know.”
“It’s the houseboats. They use lamps like these.”
He shifts next to me. There’s an undercurrent between us, as if the air itself is vibrating. “Freakazoid,” I whisper.
Bryan’s mouth relaxes. The ghost of a smile, but it’s enough.
“I was wondering…” I’m looking for words now. I know nothing has changed between us but something has changed inside me. I don’t want him to hold back. All I can do is trust these moods, the impulses, trust where they are taking me. “Yeah?”
“Can I kiss you? Would that be all right?”
“That’s not why I brought you here!” he said in a half-strangled voice. “Not for—that.”
“Even so. I want to.”
He sits perfectly still as I pull myself an inch toward him. The floor is sandpapery, grit in the crevices between the floorboards. The rain drips into the cake pan, ping ping ping. I rest a hand on Bryan’s knee, then I touch his cheek. His eyes are very wide, but he doesn’t stop me.
“You have to give me permission. Okay?”
“Yes,” he breathes.
Gently, I touch his lips. He tastes rich and earthy. I lose myself in the sensation of it. Flecks of emotion, like fireflies sparking in my brain. Mine or his, I can’t tell.
“Is this—?”
“Yes,” he says in a different pitch than I’m used to. “Yeah, it is.”
The warmth from the heater is sweltering, crisping my face. This should be easy, I think, easier than it is. How do I summon him out of himself? The two of us are satellites, half glaring, half in shadow, as we circle one another. But then his mouth fits against mine, his tongue brushes the inside of my lower lip. My senses expand to take hold of everything: the chipped-lacquer lamp, a tablecloth slipped too far at one end, the size and shape of every room above us, around us, beneath us, the water whispering through the pipes.
He leans toward me, covers my body with his. My shoulders touch the floorboards and I’m finding it difficult to breathe. I’ve never been kissed like this before, never felt another body pressed against me this way, the crook of his hips, the velvety hairs on the back of his neck.
He slides off the T-shirt and kisses my shoulders, my neck. His blunt nails graze my nipple. Oh.
“I thought you didn’t want this,” I whisper, which is stupid, because I don’t want him to stop. But there is an image in my mind of someone a year older than me, pretty. Very pretty. Skin like silk when he touched her.
“I never said that.”
A faint popping noise, then all the lights in the room flare on at once. The radio crackles to life, spitting out static and then the hint of a melody, words floating: I always knew you’d take me back.
“Bloody hell,” he murmurs.
“I thought it was your mum!” I start to giggle.
“Let me check the fuses.”
“No. Stay.” Jangly pop music fades in and out and for a moment he doesn’t move.
“Sophie…” He rolls off me, kills the radio. Blood rushes in to fill all the squeezed out places. The heat is intense but I feel colder without him.
“Do you want to kiss me again?” I ask. His hesitation is back, that wariness you see in certain trapped animals torn between fight or flight.
“No. Yes.” And then, thuddingly: “No. I want to—”
“You never manage to find your way to the end of that sentence.” I balance on my knees beside him, reaching for my own shirt. The heater has made it brittle without drying it all the way through.
“Let me try, will you? Please?” He tugs me down next to him onto the blanket. “It isn’t just…this.” He holds out his hand for me and it’s shaking. “I was in love once.”
“I know.” I can’t help the hurt from creeping into my voice.
He sits up. “Have you ever been in love before?”
“No.”
Bryan brushes a lock of hair behind my ears and gives me a happy-sad look.
“You don’t know what it’s like then.”
“So tell me.”
His eyes cloud over, lost in his own thoughts. “I didn’t always live out here. When I was growing up we lived out in the woods. In a house surrounded by bluebells, woods—an old gamekeeper’s cottage. In the springtime it was lovely. You could hear muntjac deer calling. Ha-ha! Like someone breathing. I hated it when they were out in the night. I’d lie awake listening, thinking there were people outside. In the winter the lake would skim over with ice. If you tossed a coin on it would ring like a bell.”
He’s never talked much about his childhood. It makes me realize there’s so much I don’t know about him, about who he was before he was sick. “Go on, Bryan. Please.”
“I loved it out there but it was lonely. There weren’t many buses. We moved here a few years ago. Mum thought it would be easier for me to go to school. But I was never good at making friends.”
“You didn’t want to go to university?”
“Astrid was accepted here but there was no way my grades were good enough. I didn’t have much saved up so I thought I would work for a year. I loved her. She was this bright, fantastic force in my life. She brought me out of myself. When she—died, I fell apart. I didn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t bring myself to. Her father came round, but I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t speak to any of them, not one. It was as if I’d fallen into a dark hole. I could see people around me, could hear them, but I shut them out. Didn’t know why talking about it would even matter.”
“How did she die?”
“It was August of last year. There hadn’t been many JI2 cases here in Britain. Or maybe there had been others but they hadn’t been diagnosed. It was sudden. An ischemic stroke. They said it was very rare for someone as young as her. Anyway, the doctors weren’t checking for JI2 back then—so her parents had her buried, see? When the cremation order came through, it…had to be applied retroactively. They had to dig up anyone who might’ve had JI2. Astrid was one of them.”
“Oh.”
“Her da came to me. He said he wanted me to come when they reinterred her ashes. I never got to see her body.” Neither of us says anything for a while. “That’s why when I saw you with Kira—”
“You helped me save her.”
“Sometimes I think about what it must have been like for Astrid, underground. I used to have these dreams, you know? That I was trapped in this black space, burning up. Every part of me hurt. I could hear voices. And now I wonder if that was her. If she was trying to tell me.”
“You couldn’t have known. What could you have done?”
“I could’ve done what you did. I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they cremated and reinterred her. Her da was glad I was there. Her mum? She hugged me, but it was cold, you know? I don’t think she wanted me to come. And I can’t blame her.”
I reach out and touch his hand. His knuckles are laced with small cuts from the work he’s been doing on the paramotor. His body is close to mine, but his mind is far away, drifting. And when I withdraw my hand he looks at me as if he’s seeing me for the first time.
“What was home like for you?”
“Different. Normal, I guess. Dad was always working long hours and Mom didn’t like it. At school things were fine but…” Back then high school had been everything: me dreaming about whether Markeys would kiss me, Jaina egging me on. “It seemed like there was so much I was supposed to do. There were all these straight lines between one point and the next. Volunteer work. Sports. Projects for extra credit. Life was happening around me, happening to me. Until Kira got sick.”
He nods.
“At first it was almost exciting. Suddenly we were special. But then things dragged on and on. Mom was always after the doctors for a diagnosis, Dad wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. No one knew what was wrong with her and when they figured it out no one knew what it meant. So they got scared—first of her, then of me.
“The only person who stuck by me was Jaina. She was—well, cool.” Her close-cropped hot pink hair, the jut of her chin when she was angry. Dimples when she smiled. “I had a letter from her. It sounds like things are pretty bad back home. And there’s no way for me to talk to her now.” He folds his fingers around mine. “You know, I would give anything to stay here with you.” I mean it.
“But?”
“Don’t you feel it? This…can’t be forever. Maybe the world worked one way for our parents, for their parents—but not for us. It isn’t the same.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, though. We’re at the start of something new.”
He touches my hair, smooths it back and the feel of it makes me shiver. “The way you look at me sometimes, it’s like lightning. But I’m afraid of something happening to you.” A long pause, then: “I don’t want to die, Sophie.”
“Me neither.”
“It seems like you’re rushing toward it. As if you’re waiting for it.”
“I’m not.” Thinking about Liv and the choice she has made—Kira too, that look in her eyes as she slipped from the bank. “But I’m not turning away, either. I’m not pretending.”
“I never used to be afraid of dying,” he says. “When I was a kid people would say it was like going to sleep, and if that’s what it was, I thought, why are people so afraid? And as I got older I figured maybe it wasn’t so bad if you just—stopped. No heaven, no hell. The lights go out and you’re done. It meant how you lived was the important thing, not because of what happened after, but because of what it meant to the people around you.” He grits his teeth. “But when Astrid died it was as if she’d never existed. Her family was devastated and it nearly destroyed me. We couldn’t just take the good things and move on with our lives. And I’m afraid of what’ll happen if I die, how much it’ll hurt the people I love.
“When I saw the nymph I felt something—I know it wasn’t as strong as you but it meant something to me. It means something comes after. It isn’t over. Still I’m scared because I don’t know what they are. What we might become.”
I squeeze his hand. “I know. It’s why I want to go up there. I just feel like a candle, you know. Melting away. Like my time is running out.”
“It doesn’t seem as if there are any good choices.”
“Maybe not.” A shudder runs through me, sweet, but also sad. “So maybe we should just grab hold of what we can while we’re still here.” I kiss him softly and when I pull away, I can still taste him on me, salt and copper—a good taste.
He brings his lips to mine again, with more urgency, and a warm shiver runs down my spine as if I’ve slipped into a hot bath. “Will you stay?”
“For a little while.”