She stood in the foyer staring at him. How did I get here?
She tried to think back over the hours since she left the mansion – Jack's, the penthouse, Central Park – Washington Square Park? Could I have walked that far? – but her memories of the evening seemed too vague and insubstantial, as though she had only considered going out for a moment, and then discarded the idea. But I must have been passing the time somewhere – the whole house is asleep and Niles is wearing his nightclothes.
"What are you doing here?"
"I…" she looked around discreetly, trying to formulate a coherent thought. Am I drunk?
"Miss Babcock, didn't you hear me? I asked you what you're doing here."
He advanced a couple of steps toward her, his robe swinging open at his sides. She felt her stomach contract and her mouth go dry. I must be drunk.
Niles stared at her warily. "It certainly wouldn't be the first time."
"What?"
"The first time you've shown up at the mansion out of your senses on gin." I must have said that aloud. She stared into his familiar face, drawing comfort from the familiar, mocking quirk of his brow, and took a breath. It must have been Jack's.
"I was at Jack's."
He barked out a laugh.
"You were not."
"What?"
"Wherever you've been drinking, it wasn't Jack's. I was there all night."
"I must have just missed you."
He opened his mouth to answer, but his throat closed around his response, and his shoulders sagged. I missed you too. I miss you already.
She heard his response as clearly as though he'd said it out loud, and suddenly she remembered why she had returned to the mansion.
"I'm resigning," she told him.
He looked up. She met his eyes, and abruptly the entirety of their fight played out in her mind.
"I'm resigning. That's why I'm here. I'm here to drop off my resignation. I must have…" she looked down at her briefcase clutched in her hands. Her brain felt like a swamp in a fog – thick and slow, and impossible to see anything clearly. Trying to focus on the basic body functions - how to stand, how to breathe, how to speak - she murmured to herself, "I must have written it after I went to Jack's. But my briefcase was in the penthouse, so I must have been there before. Unless I wrote it after I'd been drinking?"
"Miss Babcock - "
"- or I suppose I might have written it at Jack's. But then where did the briefcase come from?"
"Miss Babcock."
"I must have gone back to the penthouse first, and then- "
"CC." She felt hands grasp her shoulders and she looked up. His gaze was upon her, his brow furrowed in concern, his mouth set in a firm line. He looks terrible, she thought. No, I didn't mean terrible, I meant tired. He looks tired. He looks-
"Exhausted," she breathed.
She felt the warm rasp of his hand as it slid along her jaw, until he cupped her cheek. He tilted her head so that she met his gaze straight on.
"Is that what's wrong with you, Babcock? You're exhausted?"
"No, I meant you. You're exhausted. You look like you haven't slept in years."
"I don't think I have." His mouth curved up in a grim smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Your demon minions have been torturing me. I never get any peace."
Her thoughts were coming clearer now. She focused on his hand against her cheek, his breath across her face, his strong fingers still grasping one of her shoulders.
"Niles, I don't think I'm drunk."
"No," he replied softly. "You aren't drunk. Although I never thought I'd live to utter those words." But there was no humor in his voice, and no smile in his eyes. She could smell the whiskey on his breath, but only because he stood so close. He had been drinking the way he did everything else – carefully, enough to provide himself with temporary comfort, but not so much that he couldn't come to the rescue if someone should need him. Thank God, she thought. I don't think I've ever needed him more.
"I think I'm going mad," she whispered. "But I suppose I've already done that." At that, he attempted another sad smile and slid his hand slid reluctantly from her face. She found herself leaning into him, pushing her face against his retreating hand. His frown deepened as he began to worry in earnest.
"What's come over you, Babcock? Where have you been all night?" His hands drifted back to her shoulders and caressed them carefully. He ducked his head to meet her errant gaze. "What happened to you?"
"I'm not sure, Niles. I'm here, and I seem to have my resignation with me, and -" she patted her coat pockets to check for cigarettes, only to discover that she had been dripping water from her hair and clothes all over the floor. "And I haven't been smoking, but I'm soaking wet. It must be raining." She clicked opened her briefcase to examine the evidence of her night. "And I've brought my tape recorder."
Instantly his hands dropped from her shoulders and he took a step back. Startled at the loss of contact, she looked up. His face was all fury and shocked incredulity, his spine stiff, his hands fisting and flexing at his sides. Her mind had gone fuzzy again the moment he stopped touching her, so she could only stare at him in sick fear as he tried to reign in his angry breaths.
"This is another game. I can't believe you. I cannot dare to think that you have come back in the middle of the night to take another stab at me. After all that's been said between us today, you have the gall to come back into this house and try to pick up where you left off?"
His body was shaking in anger, his robe slipping from his shoulders. He began to stalk toward her.
"My heart is broken. Don't you understand that, CC? If you are truly so unfeeling that you cannot understand heartbreak, can you at least recognize the concept? Surely you've heard of it before. CC - " He stopped in front of her, trembling now not only with anger but also with grief, and madness, and something else she couldn't yet identify. His hands reached out, not to touch me, she realized in despair, but in supplication. "CC. I'm bleeding to death on the inside. For God's sake, please leave me alone. Please, just let me -" He let out a ragged breath. "Just let me -" Moving as though hypnotized, CC walked into his trembling body and slid her fingers into his outstretched hands. She twined her fingers in his as he fumbled for the remains of his sentence. "…alone."
"Niles." She could feel the heat from his body radiating through his pajamas. Her fingers tightened around his as she fought the urge to launch herself onto him, wrap her arms around his back and slide her hands under his shirt, press her cheeks against the warmth of his face, urge her hips and legs against his so that she could finally be warm. I didn't come here to torture him. I wanted to give him something, not to take something away. Why can't I- CC felt Niles drop his forehead onto hers. "Please, CC," he whispered. "Please call off your demons. Have mercy on me, please, CC, please."
And suddenly she remembered.
"Niles." He was rolling his forehead back and forth across hers, still whispering, "Please, CC, please, please."
"Niles!" His body slumped as he began to step away from her. "I'm sorry, CC, I-"
And her mouth was on his. He stilled in shock and trepidation as she released his hands and raised her own to cup his face. Her lips moved restlessly over his, trying to urge him into some kind of response, pulling and stroking with gentle fervor. He recovered enough to begin to pull away, baffled and wounded more deeply than ever by this apparently new method of torture.
But she wouldn't let him escape. "No, Niles, listen to me."
Feathering kisses across his rugged face, she tried to talk and explain herself and touch him and make him understand all at once. "Listen. I left the mansion in such a fog this afternoon, I don't know how I managed to make it back to the penthouse. I wrote my resignation letter, put it in my briefcase, and walked around New York for hours. I couldn't feel anything. It was like I was dead." She felt hot tears spring to her eyes; they burned where they poured down her face. Niles reached up one hand in a daze, and wiped her tears gently with his thumb, staring at her at she looked up to meet his gaze.
"I know what heartbreak feels like, Niles, and it's a thousand times worse when you break someone else's heart while breaking your own. I've hurt you badly, Niles, but I've been hurting you for so long that I didn't even notice when hurting you turned into hurting me." She pressed soft, urgent kisses along the edge of his jaw, his temples, the creases of his forehead. His hand dropped back to his side and he stood very still, unresponsive to her touch. "I don't know how to make you understand. When I left the mansion today, I was processing something so horrible that my mind had to reject it. I couldn't understand what I was feeling, because I think if I had let it all in, it might have killed me."
She reached her hands up to press them against his chest, and realized that she was trembling. I'm cold, she realized. I'm freezing cold. It's raining outside, and I've been walking in it for hours, and I'm shaking with cold. Her tears burned hotter and hotter against her cheeks, and her trembling intensified as she began to let in her panic. She could barely see him through the wet blur. She felt her nose begin to leak, and against all logic, her body began to sweat. Sobs welled up in her chest, though she barely noticed as she gripped the edges of his shirt.
"Don't you understand what I'm saying Niles? When you suffer, I suffer. When you bleed, I bleed. When your heart breaks, my heart has to break, too, because - " the first sob broke from within her, and she collapsed into his arms. "Because my heart is yours."
Niles sank to his knees, clutching CC to him, trying to warm her with his body. "CC" he breathed, over and over, "CC, CC." She sobbed in exhausted relief, trying to press herself closer. If only I could crawl inside of him. Countless minutes passed as she cried in his arms, and as the shock of her confession finally ebbed and the truth of her desperate, crumpled form on the floor of the Sheffield's mansion began to take shape in his heart, Niles felt a dam within him burst. On his knees in the foyer, Niles buried his face in CC's damp hair and cried along with her.
Eventually their tears died down, and Niles realized that in spite of the firm clasp of her arms around his neck and back, CC was trembling harder than ever. She cried out at the loss of him as he adjusted his grip to remove her sodden coat, her jacket, her shoes. "Darling, you're soaking wet," he admonished.
"I don't care."
"But I do. Not an hour ago, you barely knew where you were. You've spent all your strength on your walkabout of Manhattan, and you'll catch your death if I don't get you warm right away." Niles turned his face into his sleeve to wipe at the puffy wetness of his eyes.
He banded one arm across her back and slid the other under her knees, and grunted as he scooped her up against his chest. "Look, Shamu, if I'm going to carry you off into the sunset, you might as well put your arms around my neck. It's not easy hauling a wet whale up the stairs."
She giggled in spite of her exhaustion and nuzzled into his neck. "It would be easier if you weren't such a decrepit old bag of bones."
He smiled – a genuine smile, one that shone out the blue of his eyes – and pressed his lips to her temple. She turned her head to look up at him, her face unusually earnest. "I can walk, Niles. I don't want you to hurt yourself. I need you to be -" Niles lowered his face until their noses pressed together.
"You need me to be what, darling?"
"I need you to be-" she rubbed her nose against his, before tilting her head so that their mouths pressed together. She whispered against his lips, "-in full working order."
Niles deepened their embrace, sliding his tongue across her teeth and shaping her lips with needy, open-mouthed kisses. The pleasure of their kisses and the sharp pangs of excitement at their intimacy distracted him long enough for CC to disengage his arms and slither down his body, somehow without breaking contact with his mouth.
"CC," he murmured between luscious sweeps of her tongue inside his mouth, "Don't walk away from me." His hands swept up and down her back in sensuous glides. "Don't leave me."
At that, CC buried her hands in his hair and kissed him frantically, finally pulling away just far enough to whisper, "No, baby, I'll never leave you. I'm not going anywhere." She attacked his mouth briefly, then continued, "I'm done walking away. I'm done walking at all." Her hands moved to wrap around his back as he shifted her in his arms to press her even closer.
"Niles, did you understand what I was trying to tell you before? I want to make sure you know that I wasn't playing a game, I wasn't -" he cut her off with a swift kiss.
"I know. You were trying to tell me that after our fight today, your heart was broken too, but you were so shocked to realize that you…" he paused briefly, but when her eyes began to widen he hurried on. "You were so shocked to realize that your heart was broken, too, that you walked around New York in a fog, trying to understand what was happening inside you." He swept a still-damp lock of hair from her neck, and pressed his lips to the spot instead, his hands resting on her hips. "In a fog, and in the rain."
CC felt herself go light-headed with relief. "That's it, Niles, that's it exactly. I didn't even know I loved you until I wounded both of us to the core. And then it hurt so badly I stopped feeling anything at all."
"CC." Niles pulled back deliberately and stared at her. "Please tell me again."
"I couldn't feel anything?" She gave him a half-hearted smile, already sorry she had tried to make it into a joke. Tell him that. Tell him you're sorry. Tell him –
"I love you. Niles, I love you. I love you and I'm sorry I tried to make a joke, because I've never meant anything so earnestly in my entire life. I'm too broken to marry you now, but I'll heal because you'll fix me, and I'll fix myself too, and we'll put ourselves back together, only… only together this time, because we love each other."
He hadn't moved at all during her speech, except for the tightening of his fingers on her hips as he listened, staring hard, as though he could absorb all the contours of her words if he refused to blink.
CC felt her stomach drop as an awful voice whispered her anxieties within her. He doesn't want you anymore. He thinks you owe him for what you've done and he's going to take it out in sex. He doesn't want to marry you anymore and he's never told you he loves you because he never loved you in the first place.
"Niles? We love each other… don't we?" Please, Niles, please-
"Love each other? God, CC." His mouth was on her before he finished saying her name. He kissed her over and over, trying to tell her between kisses. "I love you with my whole heart… always loved you… always, CC… I love you… love you so much… for the rest of my life, CC, there's no recovering from you, no moving on, love you too much…" And she felt several things happen at once: his tongue was in her mouth and her body was back in his arms and he was carrying her up the staircase with an easy strength that belied his age and his heart condition.
"Niles, careful, please, your heart -"
He looked down at her as she pressed her hand against the strong, even beat beneath his left breastbone, and he gently kissed her lips. "But you told me downstairs that your heart is mine, darling. And I gave you my heart long ago. So that means that this heart beating in my chest-"
"Is some grotesque Frankenstein monster."
Niles threw back his head and laughed, and as CC brushed giggling kisses against his throat, he carried her off to his bedroom.