He stepped back, just a little bit, just so that he could look at her. Her lips were parted and she breathed more heavily now.
She dipped her head. Everything seemed to be happening all at once.
"Should I not have said that?"
He asked, his hands finding hers, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.
She smiled and shook her head, glancing up at him.
"It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself..."
She paused and tilted her head to one side.
"I'm just not sure what to say...where that leaves us?"
She thought of Max as she spoke. Somehow she had found herself between these two men without realising it.
He glanced down, biting his bottom lip against a smile.
"It doesn't have to mean anything."
He said, he pulled up his shoulders as if half way through a shrug, and looked back up at her.
"Unless you want it to."
He added.
She exhaled slowly, her head began to throb again.
"Did you do the test?"
She asked quietly. She felt him tense against the words, as if he had momentarily forgotten about their situation.
"I did."
He said simply.
She could feel his hands, interlinked at her back, his thumbs rubbing her spine up and down repeatedly.
"What will you do...if you are?"
She asked, hoping for some sort of a clue as to what she herself could do if the tests did indeed come back positive.
He drew up his shoulders again and let them fall, his thumb slowing their motion at her back.
"I'll find something to do. I've re-invented myself so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman working in a Chinese takeaway..."
He spoke quietly, attempting a smile, which she returned with hesitation.
"Doesn't it bother you?"
She asked quietly.
He pursed his lips, pulling her just that little bit closer so that she could smell him, the clean smell of his shirt, his aftershave, the smell of coffee on his breath.
"That I won't be able to work as a surgeon again? Or that I won't be able to have any more children, or even have sex because I'm allergic to bloody condoms...oh, and I'll probably die a slow and undignified death...?"
He paused to take a breath.
"Yes, it bothers me."
He concluded.
She closed the gap between them, pulling him closer and resting her head against his chest, hugging him close so that she could hear his heartbeat through the soft cotton of his shirt.
"Surely they make latex free condoms?"
She whispered against him after a pause. She heard him smile and felt him place a soft kiss on the top of her head.
"Interesting that that's what you picked up on..."
He kissed her hair again and pulled his arms so tightly a bout her that it squeezed the air from her momentarily.
"Yes they do, I was just making a point."
He whispered against her hair.
"What will you do?"
He asked. She closed her eyes against him.
"Oh...research..."
She answered with the false certainty and her voice had the far away sound of someone lost within their own mind.
He tightened his grip on her again, his heart beat drumming faintly against her cheek, the warmth of him providing the faint sense of comfort.
Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding had astonished her from the moment that they had met, his ability to read her, to flow with her as they did in surgery, or on the wards. He knew what was needed of him before she had the chance to speak.Despite the pull of him she felt the unnerving threat of his extinction. Somehow she felt that he wouldn't be forever, or at least not hers, not here. He had that look about him, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world, taking him with them.
She felt the tightening in her chest that she had felt so few times before, with Michael, with Will... But somehow Tristan was different in his otherness. He was self-contained, and she knew that if she were the sort of person that wrote love letters, or notes of affection, he would leave them unanswered. And it was for that, that in this moment she loved him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant of his affect on her she assumed that he would pass from her life as easily as he had crept in, as all the others had done before. And she too would pass, incredible as it seemed, into other lives where she would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch; this was only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only. For he was too like herself to be anything other than a passing fancy...
"I'd better go."
He whispered.
More very soon! Apologies if my getting caught up in poetic description gets a bit much, I struggle to reign myself in sometimes :) xxx
