I probably won't be able to keep a regular weekly update of this story. But I'm working on the next chapters and they will be publish, it just will take a little bit longer.
XI
They were together. He and Cuddy. Hannah's memory still persisted in fragments in the man's mind when they kissed but that memory had started to slowly fade away when Cuddy removed his jacket, his T-shirt and cleaned up his neck wound.
After that, Cuddy had unbuttoned his trousers and had pulled them down. And then she had kissed his scar.
A wave of gratitude washed over the man in that moment. A wave that cleaned away all suffering, sadness, pain, loneliness. He felt his heart full to the brim. He felt reborn again. He felt as a child in the beginning of the world. Everything was beautiful and painful at the same time. Electric shockwaves ran throughout his body. The man was pure electricity. He felt alive, truly alive. His soul was singing. He was joy and love. And at the same time, perplexity. The man still could not believe that the woman he loved was there, with him; that this time it was not a hallucination.
Cuddy was there, he could feel her, he could feel her kisses. It was amazing, it was… he didn't know if he deserved such happiness but that was not the time to speculate about the issue. No thinking, only feeling was allowed.
After Cuddy kissed his scar, he lifted her in his arms, gently, like someone picking up something precious and fragile, and carried her to his bed. There was no rush. They had all the time in the world. Time had stopped just for them. Nothing beyond that room existed. Everything he ever wanted was in there. The rest did not matter. His bedroom was a point of light in the dark, a solitary ship sailing in the interstellar space. He and Cuddy. Cuddy and he. Cuddy inside of him and him inside of Cuddy. Two in one. One being, one body, one heart, one soul, one spirit. He felt complete. She was mending him, piece by piece. She was curing him. He felt like a man again. A man. A giant. An immensity. All. He was all. His heart was exploding in thousand little fragments of light. And he was each one of those fragments. He was pure light. He was the light. He felt melting, liquefying. He was water. He was light and water and fire and ice and all. He was all. They were all. All. Forever.
The man had looked at Cuddy and smiled. The blue of his eyes was bright and intense. It was a saturated blue where joy danced. The man had looked at Cuddy wishing to absorb everything: the softness of her hair; the texture of her skin; the curves of her body; the light of her eyes; her smile. Her smile.
Cuddy's body was a landscape that we wanted to explore, a landscape where he wished to lose himself, a landscape that he desired to know thoroughly just to be able to forget and start the whole process again and again. He would never get tired of her body.
He had arrived there. At that happiness that he had searched for so long. It was like reaching the summit of a mountain that had taken ages to climb. He was now on the summit and he was looking around. The sun was bathing everything. All was white, luminous, phosphorescent, beautiful. There was no pain, only peace. His inner child was smiling with an open smile and a song came to his mind.
In the next morning, when he awoke, the man couldn't help feeling surprised by Cuddy still being there, lying by his side. The sunlight, filtered by the curtains, bathed the room in a soft light. The man looked at Cuddy sleeping. Sweetness and love were shining in his eyes, and something else. Could it be sadness? A doubt had appeared in his heart. What if what he was living with Cuddy couldn't stand reality? What if she came to regret her decision? What if he couldn't change? But he could change, couldn't he? He had decided to change before. It was not too late. Maybe he could still do it. The man wished to touch Cuddy, to feel her presence, but he didn't want to wake her. So he stood watching her, in the morning silence, thinking about everything that had happened and trying to foresee what the future would bring.
They spent that day together: talking, playing games (he tried to open a bottle of champagne with his father's sword), making love (several times), enjoying each other company. Only Wilson had come to interrupt for brief moments the little world they had built just for themselves.
It was a fragile world, the man had felt it. A world made of crystal that ran the risk of shattering at any moment. A brittle world.
The enthusiasm of the morning and the afternoon had given way, at night, to a certain apprehension. The man had sensed that what he had with Cuddy was not going to have a future. He told her so himself, when she was preparing to leave. He told her that he hadn't changed and that he probably would never change; that she was going to regret being with him; that he was going to end up hurting her. His words had come from the bottom of his heart, fuelled by his fears. He was afraid of the future.
Cuddy had listened to the man, and at the end, when he had stopped talking, she had looked well into his eyes and, with determination in her voice, she had said that she didn't want him to change, that he was the best man she would ever know and that he would always be the best man she would ever know.
"I love you", had been the man's answer.
I love you.
The man repeated the words for the dark to listen.
"I".
"Love".
"You".
The sound of the words vanished in the air, swallowed by the silence of the cell.
The man had never trusted words. He always believed that words meant nothing. Only actions mattered. Words were a lie. Language was a lie. Actions can be lies too. But actions were facts, were tangible, had substance. Words were just empty air. Said in a second, forgotten in the next. From the moment something was said, from the moment in which a sentiment was transformed into language, the purity of that sentiment somehow got diminished. This is what the man believed. But the human being is made of language. Therein lay the problem.
It was not that the man had lied when he had said to Cuddy that he loved her. He had been completely honest. He loved Cuddy. But his "I love you" was just a shadow of the sentiment that he harboured in his heart. As faithful to it as a photocopy is faithful to the original. The words fell short to express everything he felt for Cuddy.
Remembering that moment, with the knowledge of what came next, the man couldn't help but think that probably he shouldn't have said what he had said. His love should have been proven only by actions, shouldn't have needed the reassurance of words. Cuddy should just have known without the need for him to say anything. The same could be said about her words. She shouldn't have said them. The man didn't doubt that she had believed, at the time, that what she was saying was the truth. She had believed. But believing that one thing is true does not make it necessarily so. And that had been the case. And he shouldn't have believed in Cuddy's words. But he did. He did with all his might.
The man sighed. Love was a dangerous thing. The hand that was stationed on his leg started the familiar up-and-down movement again, almost without the man's notice. The dark seemed to encircle him more, almost like a solid thing. The man yearned for light.