Hearing is a primary sense.
We hear in our mother's belly. We hear before existence, birth or consciousness.
And then, there is touch.
Sight comes later, much later. Why should she let her sight rule her life according to the color of the eyes, the deformity or the lack of it?
Touch is demanding in order to form a perception. It needs time. Time to feel, to stroke, to trace, to push, to let the sensation build, grow, settle before it's fully experienced and starts fading again. You can trick the eye but touch…smell…hearing? The combination of them all….
At the moment touch felt like the only crucial sense. Raw. Absolute. It forced her to shut her eyes, exile sight, to concentrate on the feel of his hands on her skin.
With her eyes closed there was no Kepler, no Radek, no P8, no obsessed art collector, no vigilante hunting down monsters. There was only a man touching her where she needed to be touched. So simple, so clear, so uncomplicated.
She sighed between her moans. Touch was an exquisite sense. A solid one, allowing no doubts, no questions, no miscomprehensions. If you felt it, it was there. And she did feel him. All of him. Every touch added a new detail that brought on an almost painful awareness of him. All her basic senses recognized him as her ears heard his—was it hers?—ragged breathing.
It felt as if her body was a bundle of threads, all ending in one place, and he knew where the tips of these threads were, he knew how to stir her need; or was it the other way around and wherever he touched her he evoked new threads and a deep, throbbing need to erupt? She didn't know. What she did know was that even after she was fully sated, pulling out of her body felt like an act of violence. Not physical violence but separation—and there was always a certain degree of violence in any unwilling separation. It felt as if something was breaking to pieces, something that moments ago was a whole.
Kepler rolled them so he was spooning her, his arm draped across her waist—lazy but also possessive. He buried his face in her hair over her shoulder, his heart beating hard against her back.
"Let no one tell you you have no rhythm, Doc."
She chuckled and pressed her body against him. In Kepler's arms everything else faded. Dilemmas, worries, guilt, mixed feelings seemed ridiculously small, insignificant, pushed into a parallel reality.
"If I asked you to take a vow of silence would you do that for me?" she asked after a while.
"That would be a little awkward, not to say impractical. I guess I'd ask the reason for such a peculiar request." She would bet he was frowning.
"I don't want you to talk to other women," she explained as if it was fairly obvious and he should have guessed.
"You mean you're jealous?" He sounded interested.
"Jealous is not the right word. You're looking at it from the wrong perspective…I'm generous to the other women. I don't want you to make them feel the way you make me feel with your voice. I'm doing it for their sake." She heard and felt his chuckle against her neck. "Sexual frustration is a nasty thing. You can't torment them like that."
"So what do you suggest? Should I satisfy them?"
"Very funny!" Her tone was anything but amused.
"It's the humane thing to do."
"The humane thing to do is the vow of silence," she warned him. His chuckle became full laughter. She didn't care how ridiculous she sounded. Within his arms Christine stretched her aching muscles. "God! This is not how tourists spend their time in London. This is how honeymooners spend their time in Paris," she cut herself off, tensing. "Not that I understand why someone would choose Paris for their honeymoon if they don't intend to set a foot outside the hotel," she rambled. The last thing she wanted was Kepler thinking she was dreaming of wedding dresses when nothing could be farther from the truth. She moved away a little to put some distance between them.
"So I do have rhythm, huh? That's something new I learned about myself today."
"See? Our relationship is working." He sounded carefree and happy. Another side of Kepler rarely seen. He rolled her so that now her head was resting on his chest and, relaxed, tucked an arm behind his neck.
"Anything else I should know about you?" She played with the hair on his chest.
"Cupcakes."
"What about them?"
"I hate them. I hate them with a passion."
"Can't blame you. So many useless calories."
"That's hardly my problem with them." Men!
"What's your problem then?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "I just hate them. We should go pack your stuff from the other apartment. You're staying here now." Another statement. "I'll break the lease. We don't need it anymore," he added when she didn't say a word.
She smiled at his possessive tone. She couldn't care less about the luxurious monstrosity he'd rented for her. Lifting her head to face him, Christine brushed a strand of brown hair that was falling on his damp forehead just to touch it.
"I love your hair."
"And that's a part that belongs to me one hundred per cent." He smiled smugly but her expression forced him to go on. "Don't look at me like that. The rest belongs to me, too, no matter how difficult it was to get used to it sometimes. After the first five months when most of the swelling was gone, I looked in the mirror and a stranger stared back at me. I only recognized my eyes. It got better with time." He was right. At times, she looked at him, still feeling she was cheating on him with Radek. She couldn't imagine how difficult it must have been for him. "If my…transformation had been the immediate result of an accident, perhaps this face would have reminded me of my old face," he struggled to find the words. "My deformity was my face for so long, so I couldn't rely on that to find any similarities—"
"But Bioprinting works in a way that is closer to what you would have looked like…your bone structure defines the procedure. There would probably be more facial fat especially if you had the genes for it. I guess the 'before the accident' photos you provided along with your parents' photos—"
"Fake," he completed her sentence for her.
"Why did you do it, Kepler? Since you had accepted your face, your deformity—" She remembered his "the world is not ready for my deformity" quote and the possibility of a woman pushing him into such an out-of-character decision stung her.
"I wanted to be free. Not normal. Free." His voice was harsh as he removed himself from their embrace and stood up. "And I couldn't allow my face to rule my life. Not anymore." He walked to the bathroom but before he entered he turned to her.
"By giving me a face, Doc, you gave me the perfect mask. I can get lost in the crowd now and no one will spare another glance at me. Do you know what that means to me?"
.
.
.
"Why did you enter my life, Kepler? What purpose did it serve? You had your face, why did you call me that night at the cottage in Wales?" She crossed her arms over her chest and refused to take the mug with hot chocolate he offered her. He placed it on the kitchen table and sat on a chair, cupping his. He lifted a brow at her outfit—she had followed him into the kitchen after his shower wearing his grey shirt. Her wild imagination had pushed her patience to its limits.
"Two reasons," he sighed, "one noble and one self-serving," he repeated her own words from before.
"The noble first," she chose, sitting on a stool.
"I watched you punishing yourself for years. You could have had anything you wanted and you just couldn't move on. I wanted to shake you out of that. At first, I thought you needed money, that your father's medical bills were holding you back but it wasn't just that. Then I was caught in your web," he offered dramatically.
"Kepler—" She wouldn't let him escape so easily.
"It was as if we were the opposite sides of the same coin. So different yet attached, connected. Whenever someone pissed me off or rejected me, whenever I did something wrong, I fled and started somewhere else. You stayed. You stayed at BDS to see what went wrong with the procedure. You have integrity. You care, you stay, wait and fight no matter what. I admired that in you. I even envied it."
She snorted. She believed it was her cowardice that had kept her at BDS, her lack of ambition.
"Anyone else in your place would have left BDS and gone to work for another company, another lab, on another project. You didn't. I would have left." His tone was wistful as he traced the rim of the mug with his long fingers. She remembered his questions that night at the cottage, his cynical remarks about her demotion. He could not comprehend why she hadn't left BDS. They were really different in this.
"You were fresh, passionate, innocent in the way you perceived the world and I was attracted to you. I knew your father's health was deteriorating rapidly so the time I had leverage on you was limited." He made a face at this. Christine took her mug in hand.
"Well, I guess it's not such a 'noble' reason after all," his half smile was bitter, "but even luck had a part in this: the fire in your apartment. Unexpectedly, I had you here, I had a good reason to keep you around—your safety—and you were interested in me. I'm not a saint, Christine!
"I fought with my hopes every day and hope is a strange thing. It's like playing the stock market: you think you have something solid when in reality all you have is air. Nothing can be more distracting than hope. I fought to keep my hold on reality. When you first came here you weren't intimidated by me but it was clear you saw me only as a friend—"
"When did that happen?" she exclaimed, interrupting him.
He raised his brows, doubting her. "In that very bed, when you wore my shirt the second night you stayed here after the fire." She recalled she had left her things in the hotel room she'd booked, determined she would never see him again. "What were you thinking, then, crawling into my bed dressed like that and then asking me to sit by your side, tell you stories? The whole deal reeked of 'Friend Zone'—"
"Noo! Far from it—"
"So what? You did it on purpose? Were you torturing me? Admit it! I was certain you saw me as a friend at the time."
She shook her head, smiling. "Oh, Kepler, to think that for some time I believed you knew everything…I didn't do it on purpose! It never crossed my mind—"
"See? 'Friend Zone'."
"—that it was…stimulating. It was a casual—" She looked at the shirt she was wearing at the moment. It was comfortable and covered her fully. But it was carrying his scent and she had just gotten up from bed after sex. No, there was nothing casual about it.
"You are unbearable. All I could do was ramble like a fool for hours and be thankful for the pillow."
Christine laughed and leaned forward to kiss his lips. "You never ramble, Kepler." Her voice was husky enough to pass her point. He kissed her back but she rushed to put some distance between them. She couldn't afford his distractions. "The self-serving reason now. Why did you approach me?"
"Despite their recent IT incompetence, BDS is a fortress. Their data is a maze of different projects—even Dylan could not make out half of them. I needed you, I needed your access to break into and focus on what I was interested in."
"And that was?" Her tone now was all business.
"I wanted to find out what happened during Phase I. There is no way for Gallagher to have entered BDS premises to poison me or use whatever he used. That is not his modus operandi, not his style. He usually pays others to do the dirty work for him. But the BDS reporting and surveillance system makes it impossible for any outsider to step in and do the job for him. I had checked that before Phase I. If nothing else, you people are professionals. No man could wear a robe, pretend he was a staff member and reach a patient during a procedure like this, undetected. It was clear it was an inside job." He let his words sink in. "Whoever did it was at some point in contact with Gallagher. We believe we know who Gallagher is but every new lead is precious."
The few gulps of chocolate she had taken felt like a ton of lead in her stomach.
"So someone was paid—"
"I have no doubt about it." His voice was soft even though the reality of his words wasn't. Someone she knew, she worked with….
"Raoul?" She hated the quiver in her voice.
"I have no proof of that. No. I can't say that. His was among the first names we checked. We have a room full of boxes. Reports, emails, bank accounts, transactions…printed material we haven't even had the time to check yet. Dylan tries to make sense of the medical stuff. It's a damn maze. I have to check other files but I didn't have the time—"
"But you checked me." She heard the complaint in her voice.
"I did." His tone was stern. "To humor the others. I didn't need to check you, Christine. I wouldn't be around if it wasn't for you." Her gaze fell on the table at his words. They weren't passionate or grateful. For Kepler, these were mere facts.
"But you checked Raoul and that Friday night you told me he was no good. That I should wait—"
"There is absolutely nothing connecting Reyes with Gallagher but I found some mails going back and forth between him and Ed Wilson." He paused and shifted in his seat.
"Kepler—"
"They had early signs that P8 was not doing well and they deliberately assigned me to you."
"But you showed the greatest progress compared to the other subjects—" She had considered it an act of generosity from Wilson to assign her P8.
"There were tests they didn't show you that forced them into action. They deliberately divided the team so that they'd look good. It was—"
"—damage control." And it felt like a bucket of cold water on her spine. "They let the weak link take the fall—"
"No, Christine! It was nothing like that! Your promotion to act as a team leader beside Reyes was decided before they could foresee any trouble with P8. It was out of Wilson's or Reyes' hands. You were worthy to be a team leader one hundred per cent. More if you consider the outcome." He slipped his palm under hers and cupped it with his other hand. "I guess being so young made you vulnerable to—"
"Politics." The golden word Raoul so often used. He had almost told her to her face at the bistro. They had celebrated her "lack of ambition" with champagne. Her "loyalty".
Her eyes stung with betrayal. Someone on their team, even before it had been separated into two, had tried to kill a helpless man and her closest colleagues had trapped her into an inevitable failure. She had provided for them the perfect scapegoat. Kepler squeezed her hand to draw her out of her black thoughts.
"Please tell me you're not making this up. You're not saying this just to erase the guilt I talked to you about before." Her voice was thin, uncertain. She didn't know what to believe. The enormity of this was too much to accept.
"All the documents, all the papers are available to you, Christine. You can see them for yourself. I'll ask Dylan to put them at your disposal. You could surely make out more than we did when it comes to the procedure but this…deal between Wilson and Reyes is perfectly clear. Perhaps you'll recognize the language they use. The emails are no fake. They wrote them. And you may always ask them. I guess in the end it's all a matter of trust."
Up until now she had trusted Raoul, she had trusted Wilson. But she also trusted Kepler. It was as if her new life was forcefully pulling her away from her old one and she was caught between them as they threatened to tear her apart with every secret revealed.
"When I told you earlier I feel guilty, why didn't you tell me? How could you even propose going back to BDS?"
He withdrew his hands from her and leaned back against his chair. His expression was blank but the familiar vein made its appearance under his eye.
"I'm not the same man I was three years ago, Christine. I wouldn't go 'surrender' myself to them. I have lawyers, I know my rights. I know their faults. I have many bargaining chips they can't even imagine." His smile was humorless, almost cruel. "I realize at first I'd even have to persuade them I'm your P8 but they have my DNA, that would be easy to prove. But I'd set the rules this time especially since BDS screwed up so magnificently. As for why I didn't tell you before…I knew it would hurt you. If I could have helped it, you'd never have found out."
"Because you're so fond of Raoul?" She couldn't restrain the irony lacing her voice.
"No. Because I know you are fond of him. Because I saw that even though he was a son of a bitch to you his main concern was not to harm you but to secure Phase II, the continuation of the program. But most of all because I know how insecure you are and how you'd question everything you've accomplished so far—like you just did—which, honestly, is a crappy way to see it, Christine." Amazingly, his expressed anger—at her—somehow soothed her. But she wasn't ready to let go of her frustration yet.
"So you're defending Raoul to make me feel better?"
"Studying people's motives is the first step to understanding what moves them. Only after knowing that can you truly manipulate them." He shrugged his shoulders as if stating common knowledge and a shiver ran down her spine. It was easy to look at him and see Radek. It was in the grey T-shirt he had pulled on, his jeans, his hair, even in his rare insecurities whenever they managed to slip out but this…this was Kepler through and through. Calculating, ruthless, cruel. Frightening in his determination.
"And what am I supposed to do? Forgive and forget?" There was no real frustration in her voice anymore. She felt herself surrendering to his reasoning, to its raw logic. At this moment she'd do whatever Kepler told her.
"You can do whatever you choose to. I know I will never forgive Raoul for the way he treated you but that's me. I don't know whether it's you."
His words broke the spell and she exhaled, relieved. It was as if for a moment she had been hypnotized. She wondered how much of her recent decisions were of her own free will. She shook the crazy thought away. She didn't make sense anymore. Instead, she retreated to familiar ground.
"I've been played for a fool here, Kepler, and I didn't even find out myself. Talk about lost dignity—" she snorted, bitterness lacing her voice.
"I walked into the trap myself. How smart does that make me?" He was trying to make her feel better.
"Why? How could you have left yourself vulnerable to that kind of people, Kepler? Okay, I was an idiot. I was young, stupid and naïve but how could you risk so much?" She sounded as helpless as she felt. The half-empty mugs with chocolate on the table spoke of domesticity and comfort, not betrayal and idiotic gratitude placed on the wrong people. Her "loyalty" mocked her intelligence.
"I hate that I'm the one shattering that innocence, Christine. At times, it feels as if I'm doing it piece by piece with my bare hands." He looked at his clenched fists on his knees. "I don't want to. There were moments, before I got to really know you, that I was mad at you but now I know better…if you think you're stupid…" He leaned closer to her with an urgency evident in every tensed muscle of his body but he didn't touch her. "You have many faults—you are stubborn, short-tempered, you keep tormenting yourself with self-doubts—but being stupid is not one of them."
"Thank you for the vote of confidence." She made a face, trying to break the intensity of the moment. Why did his approval mean so much to her? His stare on her was fierce as if that alone and not his words was enough to convey his message. It was.
"You can't say my love for you is blind." He smirked, leaning back on his chair again.
"But you still haven't answered my question."
"You're stubborn."
"Tell me something new." She took a deep breath. Playing with fire was not her favorite sport and she didn't know how she would handle what she'd find next. Especially if a woman was involved. "I know you had entered Phase I at the same time Spencer was charged." She tried to frame the picture. Whatever, whoever drove him to Phase I was more powerful than his friend in need.
He nodded.
"A few months before that Spencer had a brilliant idea." Suddenly he couldn't stand still. It was obvious in the way he surged to his feet and opened some drawers, retrieving pots and bowls. "I'm making pasta," he stated curtly, but she knew the tone wasn't addressed at her but at the memory. For the first time she wondered whether cooking relaxed him.
"We had a great breakthrough to Gallagher but we didn't know how to proceed after that. Spencer was impatient, as ever. He decided to proceed on his own. We all wanted this to end. It felt so close…Spencer thought of luring Gallagher out using a sex video—the perfect bait for this kind of prey. A new addition to his collection."
"What? Something like the videos celebrities shoot for publicity purposes?"
"We'd already came to the conclusion that Gallagher's Library showed a great deal about his character. Spencer believed he understood him, that he had a grasp of the way he thinks, what appealed to him and what didn't." He emptied a can of mussels in a small pot after the tomatoes and the anchovies.
For a while he had his back turned to her as if waiting for the sauce to boil. Then he adjusted the fire. The boiling turned to a simmer.
"And why did Spencer think a sex tape he made would appeal to Gallagher? Did he stage something disgustingly sick?" She grimaced at the thought. She couldn't imagine anything that would interest a man as sick as Gallagher.
Kepler covered the pot and turned to her, rigid and aloof.
"Spencer went for authenticity. I guess he believed nothing staged would intrigue Gallagher. He used footage from the security videos in the building. He used the cameras at the swimming pool and sent the video to Gallagher to draw him out. Nothing special. A man and a woman having sex. Hardly anything original other than the fact that the man was deformed and he wore no mask at the time."
Christine gasped as the realization sank in. She brought the back of her hand to her mouth. Not that she had any words to restrain.
"You should have seen our faces when Gallagher sent it back. The message was very close in tone to the one you received with the graft. Unsurprisingly, Spencer hadn't informed anyone of his initiative so when we got the DVD Dylan just slipped it in the player and pushed the play button. Poor Taylor, at some point she tried to enter the office and we closed the door in her face. I don't know how celebrities feel about it but some moments are meant to be kept private for a reason." If that was an attempt to defuse the tension, it didn't work. His features were taut but other than that he looked in control, distant.
The exact opposite of what she felt.
"What did you do? To Spencer," she rushed to clarify.
"The rape charges against him followed the next day. Gallagher had orchestrated it perfectly. I was too mad at Spencer to help him at the time. I don't know if I could have done anything but…. It's not that I didn't want to hurt him but what could I do to him? What was worse than what Gallagher did?" He shoved his hands in his pockets.
"Don't you see? He used Spencer's 'moral advantage' against him. Spencer hunted him believing he was better than him—and he is!—and Gallagher paid him back accordingly. Sending back the DVD he shamed Spencer to us, he divided us, exposed our ethics, had us questioning each other.
"The rape charges shamed Spencer. People who knew him—not we who were close to him but all the rest—started wondering whether he did it. Whether his Gallagher quest had other motives. Everything he had accomplished was tainted.
"He humiliated him. He bathed him in the shame that rightfully belonged to Gallagher and that for Spencer was worse than death. Even the fact that he ran…I wonder whether Gallagher knew what Spencer would do, whether he had predicted it and aimed for that. Because by running Spence as good as admitted his guilt. It was the perfect revenge against a man like Spencer who valued and worked more for his reputation in our field than money."
He leaned against the kitchen counter, deep in thought. "Shame is a poison. You fight against it with reason but it has a taste that lingers no matter what, a doubt that never fades." And he knew the feeling because, with that video, Spencer had shamed Kepler to his closest people, to his friends and partners. And for a man as proud as Kepler….
Suddenly it was all clear. She wanted to get up, try to comfort him but she was numb. The depth of Spencer's betrayal was still inconceivable to her as a whole, in all its aspects and effects. The ringing of Kepler's phone forced her to stop biting the nail she had started attacking. The exchange was short.
"Dylan is coming up," his voice was grim as he removed the pot from the fire.
She still couldn't fight the numbness. How could they all have stayed together after that? She guessed that only the disasters they had to face had kept the team from breaking apart.
"Bad news." Dylan's first words as he exited the elevator were accompanied by a frustrated hand running over his now shorter hair. "I just heard from the lab. The graft belongs to Spencer. The DNA matches."
Frozen, she watched Kepler stride into the bedroom, taking off his T-shirt. The scene wasn't very different from the one she'd witnessed a few hours ago. The deja vu feeling overwhelmed her. She felt frustrated and trapped when she wanted to do something. Anything. Instead, she sat motionless on the stool, watching as the bedroom door closed.
"Just when there is a tiny illusion that we might be able to live like normal people—" Dylan's voice trailed off. He looked shaken. He had really allowed himself to hope.
Kepler exited the room wearing a turtleneck over a black pair of pants. His hair was slicked back and he had his mask and a pair of gloves in hand as he walked to the elevator.
"Dylan will answer whatever questions you have," he looked at her and turned to the blond man to make his point. "Any question—"
"What are you going to do?" Her voice sounded embarrassingly frail to her ears. She couldn't control her wide eyes, couldn't pretend she was composed when her stare locked on Kepler's as he strapped on his mask. The eyes looking back at her were black. He had his contact lenses on.
"I'm going to find him and bring him home. What else can I do?"
Thank you for reading and reviewing. (Stay safe!)
TOWDNWTBN and Vale, thank you for reading this before anyone else.
So, what do you think will happen now?