Rating: M, future sexy stuff
Disclaimer: See chapter 1
Spoilers: Everything
Pairing: David/Julia
Summary: She's a fugitive trying so hard not to exist. He's the lover trying so hard to forget.
They haven't had sex. They haven't even kissed yet. She'll touch him now, as she wouldn't before. Brush his arm with her fingertips. Hug him goodbye, dismiss him with a brief pat on one shoulder. Once when they were strolling down a pier, the kids running ahead of them, Vicky let him sling an arm about her shoulders. It took a moment but her arm wrapped loose and low around his hips in response. It felt tentative, it felt strange. After so long, after everything – her affair and his. It's what he's wanted for so long but it doesn't feel like it should, like he expected it to.
Most of their time together is spent out and about with the kids. They go to parks, beaches, movies. They take trains and go on rides. They eat holiday foods like pizza and popcorn and ice cream and chips. Their family life looks like one endless circus, all bright colours and flashing lights. At the end of each excursion, he drops his family back at the home he used to share with them but never ventures far past the vestibule. He drives home alone with the radio on and a window cracked.
He avoids the news, not that there's any fear of her name being mentioned. The country has moved on – the government, the Home Office, the media. They mourned for an appropriate amount of time before promptly resuming their backbiting and scandalmongering. They all just got on with business as if Julia Montague never existed. And so did he, ostensibly. If anyone were to look, they would find no recordings of her voice stashed in his flat, no searches retrievable in his recent internet history. There were no newspaper clippings of her funeral, complete with an impervious portrait of her face. No mementos of The Blackwood and their brief but consuming liaison.
He thought about moving, finding a new flat. A clean slate. A fresh start. But there was no escaping what he'd done. Or hadn't done. Hadn't been able to prevent. His shrink keeps telling him that he needs to stop blaming himself for Julia Montague's demise. David nods in compliance but says nothing. Because even if his head were shrunk for one quiet hour every damn day for the rest of his life, he knows he will carry her death with him until the moment he breathes his last breath.
The gym helps more than anything, more than talking ever could. Without his work, without someone to watch over, he has all this surplus energy, tension, attention. He expends it on weights, on the treadmill, in the pool. He gets into a rhythm with it. He ignores the television screens, suspended on brackets and broadcasting a seemingly endless series of breakfast shows and infomercials. He sticks earbuds in his ears and listens to lyric-less music. Music with a dead pulse, a consistent beat, an increasing drive. Treadmill first, then weights, then pool. Arm over arm, breath after breath. Reaching the pool's bounds, he rolls, pushes off the slick tile and returns down its limited expanse. After twenty laps, he emerges anew. Fresh. Purified.
Almost.
As he swims, he tracks the black line at the bottom of the pool and thinks of her in her black one-piece, cutting through the water at The Blackwood. She was on the swim team all through high school and university. He didn't get that from Google. He got that from her lips. He'd returned one night from The Blackwood's state of the art facilities, hair still dripping and heart still pumping. He'd done a full hour and a half workout only to find her exactly where he'd left her, on the couch ensconced in official government documents. The wine bottle they'd started together was empty. She'd played with her glass, swirling the remaining liquid as she relayed her impressive stats.
"Butterfly," she told him, rising from the cushions and downing the last of the Merlot, "was my best stroke."
It made sense, he remembers thinking, that the most difficult yet most feminine stroke would be Julia Montague's speciality. She'd sidled closer and he'd suppressed a smile. Rarely one to ask obliquely, he'd known exactly what she was angling for. He told her he'd check the area to see if it could be adequately secured and, if it could, then she could take a swim.
"Tomorrow night?" she asked, brows lifted.
He chuffed. "We'll see."
She wound her arms round his neck and kissed him, a glimmer of humour in her eye and a trace of manipulation in her tone. "You're so good to me…"
She'd abandoned her work and they'd made love, as they had almost every night of their stay at The Blackwood. Often more than once. He passes the place occasionally. Out of necessity, not intention. And once, he passed by her building and couldn't help gazing up at its pale, imposing façade. He avoids going that way now. It's not healthy behaviour. Julia Montague is gone. She no longer lives there. Or anywhere.
He is alive. His wife is alive. His kids. Vicky, Ella and Charlie are his future. They are what matter now. As do his colleagues, his principles, his job – if he can hold onto it. If he can find a way to put all those fractured pieces back into their rightful places, then maybe he'll have some semblance of a life worth living. If they give him his job back, he'll prove himself worthy of their trust, a committed and capable officer despite his disastrous failure as the Home Secretary's bodyguard. If Vicky gives him the chance, he'll prove himself a dedicated and loving father to their two children and any more they might have in the future. If she allows him back into their bed, he will touch her gently, treat her tenderly. He will ensure her happiness and she will cleanse his skin of the memory of Julia Montague.
For she remains the last woman he kissed. The last woman he touched. The last woman to take him into her bed and into her body. The memory of her body haunts him, her face and hips, her kisses and sighs. He still feels ghost-like touches of her on his skin, like a scent that can't be eradicated. Part of him can't wait for Vicky to re-stake her claim on him, to repossess his guilty arms and mouth and cock, to take them back from the greedy ghost of the late Home Secretary. Another part of him – a quiet and covert part – waits more patiently. It lives with her traces, it loves them. And dreads the moment he will have to relinquish all remaining traces of her forever.
-x-
The pool is her favourite part of rehab. She'd always been called a wet blanket at school – a cold fish, an ice queen. She'd embraced such slurs, joining the swim team and collecting a cabinet full of medals and trophies. Gold, silver and bronze spheres that were all comfortingly cool to the touch.
She won't be collecting gold any time soon. Her hip was shattered in the explosion. Her wrist fractured. And one leg broken in three places. The buoyancy of the water relieves her joints and bones of the weight of her battered body. And it cools the singed skin that still seems to smart. She feels constantly hot. She can't stand things against her skin – bandages, blankets, clothes. In the pool, all that touches her body is the lycra of her plain black swimsuit and the cool, chlorinated water.
Her physio doesn't crowd her, he knows she doesn't like that. He's figured out that the best way to get her to do what he wants her to do is to remain outside the pool, giving instructions while she works at her own pace in the water. When she asks him how long it will be before she can swim laps, he pauses and replies:
"We're getting there."
Then he hands her her robe, just like David did at The Blackwood. She hadn't swum for years before that night. But there was something divine about the water at that hotel. It's possible that having a lover for the first time in years had put her in a heightened erotic state. Because the cool blue water had felt like silk, stroking her limbs, her breasts, her belly with every movement. She'd found an almost blissful rhythm the moment her body penetrated the still surface. She lost track of time, never wanted to leave the water. Too soon for her liking, David had approached the edge to tap on his watch. She rose out of the water, folded her arms on the wet tile as her chest heaved with exertion.
"Five minutes, Ma'am."
She smiled up at him and panted, "I can do at least as many laps in that time."
He was on duty but he smiled back before returning to his place at the door. The space was dark and empty and cavernous, every swish echoing off the damp walls. The only way to secure it was if she swum after hours, late at night. But The Blackwood had only agreed to an extra half hour, at the end of which David stepped up with her robe. She climbed the ladder, dripping and energised and reluctant, and he threw it around her shoulders, drawing the collar up close to her chin.
"Thank you," she said breathlessly.
"Welcome," he answered, sneaking a quick kiss before escorting her to the exit.
Her physio is nothing like David. He is blond and tanned and very gay. He seems to have absolutely no investment in her recovery. Which, in a way, she prefers. Being surrounded by ambivalent strangers is no more uncomfortable than being surrounded by untrustworthy adversaries. And "surrounded" would be an exaggeration. There's her physio. A team of doctors to treat different parts of her. A constantly revolving door of nurses for days, nights, weekends and relief work. She has four tall security officers who all look the same. A lady with no English comes every two weeks to do her nails. And her mother calls once a week to chat for fifteen minutes. That's the entire circle of her acquaintance.
She's considered getting a pet. A cat perhaps. Just so there's some semblance of warmth in her life, some true enactment of a relationship. She doesn't. Probably because she has a vague sense of waiting. For something to happen, for the next stage of her life to begin. She can't live like this forever, no one could. But she hadn't considered that when she'd gone into hiding. Preservation had been her priority. And now she feels trapped in the life she preserved.
She still remembers the horror of the first time she was cognisant enough to log her various injuries, to question what exactly those doctors had given a second life to. The right side of her head had been shaved, sliced into then sown up again. Dried blood and puss stuck to the taut stitching. There were mottled, weeping burns on her neck, down her right hip and flank. An angry slash ripped at her torso. Every part of her four limbs that wasn't bandaged was irreversibly bruised or burned or cut. Even now, her eyes remain sunken, her frame hunched. Her body seems to concave where it used to curve. She's a patchwork doll fashioned by an army of disembodied hands rather than by her own desire or determination to live.
In the end, it may well have been pride that made her run, vanity that dictated her fugitive state. Anonymity and escape were preferable to presenting this female Frankenstein to the world. To the British parliament and public. To him. To David. What would he have said? What could he have said? Theirs was a short-lived affair – precipitous and perilous. Such relationships were not built to last. Yet she'd offered to risk more than they already had – everything of hers along with everything of his. Just like a fool. A grasping, misguided, middle-aged fool. Throughout her career, she'd watched senior male colleagues fall for bright young women to the all too predictable detriment of their reputations and families. She'd rolled her eyes on hearing whispers of their weakness. She'd felt smugly superior that, as a woman of sense and resolve, her path would never be impeded by such ridiculously romantic, stupidly sexual impulses.
David's response to her proposal had been reticent. Shocked, she'd thought, but moved. They had much to discuss. But they had time. They had the rest of their lives to work out the details, and she was very good with details. They were on the same page – or so she'd thought. Then, she'd thought that he wanted what she wanted just as much as she wanted it. But it's possible, she thinks now, that he was simply biding his time, working out a tactful way to extricate himself before completing his plan of destruction. She wasn't his future. He'd never wanted her to be. If anything, she represented his past. A past he wished to avenge. A past he wished to banish, not embrace.
Her physiotherapist helps pull her out of the pool, drops her robe about her shoulders then leaves her sitting on the edge, tracing the scars on her thigh with one finger. He turns his back, stuffing things into his bag as he talks in an upbeat way about their next session. Julia doesn't listen. Her heart beats in her ears, her feet swish in the pool, her gaze doesn't lift from the scarring she now lives with. She's thinking about all those tabloids that called her a heartless, unnatural monster. If only they could see her now in all her deserved disfigurement. She almost smiles at the thought, but it dies on her lips. Because no one can see her now. No one does.
She's a woman who doesn't exist.
TBC...