NOTE:

I suggest you fasten your seatbelts for this one. I decided to take the chapter I was planning to write and cut it in half, because there are quite a lot of heavy scenes coming up, and I also wanted to get something out to you guys! In this chapter, we find out (part) of why Tom is so anxious around Holly in the present-day. I hope you enjoy it…

Chapter 22: The Kiss | August 2017

HOLLY

In my dream, Ben is fucking me when I start bleeding. It's like the miscarriage all over again, yet worse, the searing pain and the quantity of blood increased to a terrifying level by Ben's thrusts. I open my mouth and try to tell him, but I have no voice and I can't move my arms. He's saying "I love you," but though it's his voice, his mouth isn't moving. And then I turn my head to see that the dingy, hunched figure of my father is sitting in the corner, slowly milking his disgusting erection, and that it's his mouth moving in time with the sound of Ben's voice. "I love you." Suddenly the vague outline of a figure appears, deeper in the corner, and then steps forward, materializing into my mother. She steps out of the shadows past my father without seeming to notice him. She doesn't notice me, either, where I remain pinned on the bed under Ben's weight, slowly sinking into the pool of blood that the bed has become. She's pulling a suitcase behind her, looking around for something. My father growls and chuckles in his own grimy, slippery voice. "You're such a good little girl." Suddenly both men orgasm hard, ejaculate drills against my cervix, and the whole wall of the room opens up to blinding light and disappears, leading out now onto a train station platform. My mother steps out of the room and onto the platform, beyond which a grey train is rushing past with a deafening whistle. My mother lets the suitcase fall, then walks forward and steps off the platform, falling down under the wheels of the train. A skidding sound. Sparks. Blood. All over me. Slowly closing over my face. I'm gagging on mouthfuls of it. "Good girl."

I wake up suddenly, my breath rattling in my chest and promptly turning to deep, cruel coughs. My body curls into the fetal position around my heart, where I stay for a moment until I work up the breath and will to turn onto my knees. The compression of my lungs forces a groan from my mouth, and I ride out a few more unsteady, half-coughing exhales before I finally unroll myself and manage to sit, slumped, on the side of the bed.

It's just after six in the morning by the red-numbered digital clock on the bedside table, and it's raining heavily outside.

It takes me a minute to regain my bearings after how real the horrific world of my dream had been. The room around me seems alien, objects spaced too far apart, everything too quiet, and for a moment I fear that I'm still dreaming. I step out of bed and look at the sheets. Totally white. I bend over and look at my legs. No blood. I feel between my legs. No blood. The walls are all intact. No sign of a train, no sign of my father in the corner, no sign of Ben, who I wish was here. I shudder, look again into the corner to see, of course, nothing.

I shake my head at myself and touch my throat, swallowing and massaging under my jaw until I can breathe normally again.

Needing to escape from it, I go into the bathroom, washing then rinsing my face with cold water. With a little look of spite at the package, I pop a birth control pill and take it with a hand-cup of water from the sink tap. But it gets stuck halfway down my throat and I cough again, trying not to panic, but after the dream my gag reflexes are all too sharp, and I do anyway. I carefully hold my breath and get more water in my cupped hand. On the second try it goes down, leaving an uncomfortable but bearable itching spot where it had lingered.

Tom is awake, too, eating breakfast, of which there is some waiting for me. I force myself to put some food on a plate, only taking what I'm sure I'll eat (which isn't much), avoiding Tom's gaze.

"Has something upset you?"

I try not to exhale in a way that betrays my lingering inner panic, and succeed, keeping my breathing light. "I had a weird dream." He raises an eyebrow. "Too much Russian literature."

He looks at me pointedly, probably thinking that any weird dream I could have is likely because of too much of something else… I have smoked weed with Harry three times since the first, and know that I shouldn't have but enjoy it too much to think very hard about it. I can't afford to be guilty about that, too, on top of everything else. Maybe next time Harry offers I'll make some excuse. But, then again, that's what I've told myself I would do 'next time' the last two times.

After eating breakfast, Tom gets ready to go out for a run in the rain, and suggests that I come, in his neutral way that allows equally for either answer. I decline at first, my earlier panic surging up again at the prospect of being spotted by someone, of being photographed and talked about. The photos from the premiere and from outside the hospital still haven't run out of momentum on the internet and social media, and I certainly don't need to see new ones, or hear all over again the same old ways in which total strangers try to pick my life apart. But then, when he comes out again in a raincoat, running shoes and his "handy-dandy" sunglasses, a running joke between us especially when we use them on days that aren't sunny, such as this one, I change my mind. I need to move, to do something of use with myself. I know working out will make me feel better, and I can't even imagine going outside on my own in my current state of mind. Tom smiles at me and waits for the two minutes it takes me to rush into my running clothes and find my own pair of sunglasses, the sight of which makes him chuckle.

I'm only out of practice for two weeks, but it feels like a lot more time than that has passed since my last run, the day before the premiere, and the additional challenge of Tom's unfairly long legs doesn't help. But Tom is patient, not trying to make too much conversation, and after a half mile, once I've ridden out the initial cramping, brought my breathing under control, and calmed down about the possibility of photographers, I'm glad I had a change of heart.

TOM

What is the purpose of this terrible, unyielding lust of mine? It is an ever-present wolf, gnawing absentmindedly at my gut as though I were its chew toy, especially when I am alone. But when she is with me, it begins to sear, jealousy growing teeth like razors, canines sinking into and shredding up my very lungs. To witness her so constantly in pain these past weeks has proven so hurtful to me that there were many times I could barely breathe for the ache and the sting and both together.

Yet, now that we sit together, both of us having showered off after our run in the rain (how fast and unreliable my heart had seemed; how hard it had been to breathe normally) now that we are sitting together at the kitchen table, her face clear and flushed and bright and tired and her mood fresher and more uninhibited than it had been in many days, now that her pain seems diminished, my own only swells to a point of greater pitch and searing than it had when she was bedridden and unable to speak, or even when she had been in the bathtub, a red line of blood snaking around her thin arm.

I try to find an exterior point, separate from my painful body, from which I can be happy for her and with her. I focus my energy on this task and my body is tired enough from the exercise and hot water that I manage to achieve it, to an extent. But then, just as she's started to tell me something about a book she's looking into reading, she suddenly stumbles over something in her own mind and falls silent, her face darkening in stages, the joyful tautness caused by her former smile loosening. She's staring at a certain or uncertain point on the table in front of her and again, at the devastating, drained look on her face, that gnawing returns, a dim and dull pain that has no focus and allows me to think, to speak, but still without clarity.

I bend my neck and shoulders to look into her downturned face and reach out to touch her, slowly, against my better judgement. But once I've realized I shouldn't, my hand is already laying over hers, and contrary to what I'd expected, she doesn't react in the slightest. It seems as though she cannot feel it at all, in fact, and this is proven by the blankness on her face when she looks down at my hand upon her hand.

My breathing slows down, my every fiber focused upon her as she starts shaking her head and saying something under her breath, which I strain to hear but fail to. Then, unexpectedly, she sinks down to the floor from her chair, her hand slipping away from mine, her body making the transition all too smoothly, and then curling in upon itself, her forehead pressed to the presumably cool floor. I stand up from my own chair, and from my height she looks so startlingly small that I lower myself to my knees quickly from some sense of disproportionate size which only adds dizziness to the whirlpool of emotions raging in my chest. Kneeling down in front of her, I take her hands in mine and pull her up a little, feeling the quickness of her pulse in her wrist. I've seen her disassociate before, but nothing like this, and to see someone so beloved to me brought so low fills my blood with undiluted hatred for the monster at fault.

I calm myself enough to speak in a measured voice to her. "Holly, no-one is going to hurt you."

She manages to lift her eyes from the point on the floor at which she'd been staring fixedly, and looks first at my face, and then at my eyes. But though she nods her head, breathing shallowly through her nose, I'm still not sure she'd heard me. Desperately, I place my hands on either side of her head, her own hands slowly sinking to the floor where they rest, clasped, between her knees. There is nothing I wouldn't give up to take this away from her, to simply extract it through her temples and do away with it forever. "Please, Holly. Be here with me. You're going to be okay."

With deliberation she starts to sync her breathing to the pace and depth of my own. Then she nods her head again, and I know that she's heard me, but she still remains limp, her gaze threatening to become distracted at any moment by some rabbit-hole point upon the floor.

I plan to bring her gently into a protective but easily escapable embrace. But I find, in the next moment (though time has already shattered into unnameable particles and pieces) that I have, instead, kissed her.

I hadn't known in the slightest that I was going to do it, "it" being that strange moment of action in between leaning forward and pressing my mouth upon hers. If I had thought of wanting to kiss her in the moments before I had, I would have turned against the idea and doubled my inner enforcements against my carrying out such an act. But no such warning thought had passed through my conscious mind, not even like the momentary winking of a distant comet. And so there had been no thought involved, at all.

But this does not leave me blameless for what takes place in the next handful of moments. Impassioned, rather than stop as my mind quickly races to tell me to do, I continue to kiss her, my heart stopping and then hammering insistently, unable to move my lips at all, only pressing forward, one hand moving to the warm, soft back of her neck. Though it only lasts a beat, it feels like a minute before I manage to claw myself away from my overburdened senses and draw my face backward, shocked and holding my breath.

She doesn't look at me; doesn't breathe. It's as though I'm not here. She gets up off the floor, pulling herself slowly by the edge of the table as though burdened by some physical pain. Then, with a stumble, she leaves the room soundlessly and slowly, without a glance back at me. I close my eyes and listen to her footfalls receding down the hallway, followed shortly by the quiet closing of a door.

I feel my face crumble in the moment before the tears begin to flow. I raise my fingertips to my eyelids, pressing down on them as hard as I can before my courage fails and I lean back against the chair, whose legs scrape against the floor until it braces against the wall, leaving me still and worthless. The tears, I realize with a terrible mingling of honesty and disgust, are both from the feeling of pure goodness which her lips had given to me, and that the feeling had not, in fact, been given to me, but had been something I'd taken without her consent. As if that was an even remotely sensical way to help her out of a ditch caused by trauma that comes exactly from a man using her body without her consent.

My whole body trembles with shame and the knowledge that nothing can excuse my actions. I had told her no-one was going to hurt her, and moments later, I had hurt her. I have never done anything like this before. This is so unlike me. I must not know myself as well as I believed I did. I won't even try to apologize to her. I will run away and never see her again… or at least I will retreat to a space in which I can process it alone and figure out how to say I am sorry respectfully. But how could I do that? I would be the most selfish man alive to process it on my own first. Yet I feel it's equally disrespectful to pursue her right now, so immediately. I wouldn't even know what to say. I don't have the right to say anything, to even dare to appear before her.

What would Ben do to me if he had seen that? What will Holly think of me now?

I remain glued in the quagmire of my emotions, trapped on the kitchen floor.

What is the purpose of this terrible, unyielding lust of mine?

HOLLY

I pace alongside the bedroom wall, my breath coming quickly, my head dizzy. I hadn't even felt it at first. But then I had. And it felt good. I don't know why. I tell myself I do know why, and that it's because I'm missing Ben to the point of becoming delusional. That should make enough sense, but it doesn't stop my pacing or the irregular thudding of my heart.

Part of me, a significant part, wants Tom to rush in and shove me against the wall: anything to help me stop feeling, to take me away from my body, if only for a minute. But I quickly shut away the thought, shaking my head violently at myself until I am forced to stop pacing and quell my dizziness by sitting down on the bed. That is not me. These are not my real thoughts. It's just my demon talking.

Guilt threatens to toss me against the rocks of my situation, but I keep it at bay, not even daring to unlock the door of the event itself, behind which lies in wait the endless landscape of Tom's side of the story. I stand up again and resume pacing, wiping my lips with my sleeve, rubbing them until they become painfully dry and raw. I keep going. They suddenly start to sting and I hiss, pressing my fingertips against them to see if there's blood. There is none.

I go into the bathroom and rinse out my mouth.

What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck.

Don't go there, Holly. Don't open the fucking door. Swallow the key. It's worth the stomach ache.

I decide that I am not going to say anything about this to Tom or to Ben or to anyone. I will keep it quiet and let it go away in its own time, which I hope is short.

Eventually my mind settles enough to allow my body to cease its frenetic, ceaseless motion, and I find myself lying facedown on the bed, too numb to cry.

I stay inside the bedroom, confining myself to it, and hear the door when, half an hour later, Tom leaves for rehearsals for Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh for a fundraiser for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Once I'm certain he is gone, I venture out of the room, as into a forest, reminded of that old picture book "Where the Wild Things Are," which I know my mother used to read to me before she left…

Fuck. Fuck. Stop fucking thinking. Just shut up. Don't think about her. Shut. Up.

Clenching my teeth, I raise my hands to my head and indulge the will of my fingers, allowing them to curl into fists around my hair and tug gently, until a distant headache has thinned out my previous thoughts. I realize that I've somehow braced myself against the wall, my head between my knees, and carefully I draw myself up though I'm unable to prevent the rush of blood to my head, forcing myself to walk.

I walk into the kitchen.

I look at the floor beside the table. Both chairs have been pushed in by Tom's hands, which had held my own hands, which had held the sides of my face, one of which had held the back of my neck. Hands which had let me go.

Overcome by a sudden compulsion to clean the place where it had happened, I retrieve a spray bottle and towel from the cabinet under the sink and get on the floor, well practiced in the art of scrubbing from my days of waitressing in New York, when it had been quite common for my wicked boss to stand and watch me while I was on my knees. But I don't think about that now. I scrub for myself; I scrub for my own sanity.

By the time I think to look at the clock, it's nearly six in the evening. I've been cleaning for upwards of eight hours and when I stand up, leaning over for a moment to get my bearings and struck by the sight of my raw, red knees, I realize, surveying the kitchen, that I've truly cleaned every surface, obsessively, without even stopping for a minute.

Tossing the rag into the laundry and replacing the bottle under the sink, I wash my aching, trembling hands under scalding water. Faint, I stare into the fridge until it starts to beep, and then close it without taking anything.

Upon the moment the door closes, it dawns on me like some unknown thing; too much has happened today to allow me to stop and think about it; but tomorrow, Ben is going to arrive at eleven in the morning. I observe this fact from a distance, as one standing in the center of a circular room in a gallery might observe one of many equally distant pieces of art. Though this particular canvas does stir something in me, I don't have the strength to bring the feeling out further, so let it go.

Regardless of my empty stomach and the earliness of the hour, I retrieve a sleeping pill (from the bottle in the cabinet, now that Tom has deemed me responsible enough not to overdose), swallow it on the first try and retreat to the bedroom, where I soon fall into a lonely sleep.

NOTE:

The title of the chapter, "The Kiss," is a nod to the song of the same name by The Cure. It's very good and definitely sums up how Holly is feeling. (If you're listening to it for the first time, know that there ARE lyrics, they just come in about halfway through).

I had NO IDEA up until literally the day I started writing this chapter that Tom Hiddleston was ever in Hamlet, and have been so devastated since that there's no way to see a recorded version of it! So, I'm sorry that rehearsals for that weren't mentioned earlier, but I thought it was just too cool that he was in that, and with Kenneth Branagh as the director?! Awesome. Also, it more than kind of fits with the angst of Tom right now, in the plot. Unrequited love has been fun to read about ever since Romeo, but in real life, it's the worst.

BENEDICT FINALLY COMES BACK NEXT TIME! I CAN'T WAIT BUT I'M ALSO SO NERVOUS!

Please let me know your thoughts…

26 June 2021
On_Errand_Bad