Cold Fusion (17 page)

“I think I will. Should I bring the bedrolls back through here, or…”

“No. The house is much warmer now. We won’t need our survival arrangements.”

He meant he didn’t want to sleep curled up with me again by the fire. I wasn’t sure whether his empathy or his sudden barricades were harder to deal with. “Okay. I’ll go gather up my immortal verse.”

I didn’t dare look at the pages. Viv had piled most of them up for me, but I averted my eyes from the stragglers I pulled out from under the chair. I didn’t want to find out straightaway that I’d spent the whole night writing bollocks. The morning would do for that. Until then, I valued them enough to keep them out of the fire and no more, a short stay of execution.

I straightened up and handed him his pen. “Here. Thanks for the loan.”

“I’d like you to keep it.”

“Er, no. I’m pretty sure that cost more than my whole education.”

“It is valuable. I wouldn’t offer you a gift that wasn’t. Do you like to write with it?”

“Yeah, I did, but—”

“It feels right to give things away. I’d like to be the way this house is—nothing but myself, with no trappings or attachments.”

I snorted. “You’re doing pretty well with that. Most of your trappings got blown up at Spindrift, didn’t they?”

“Yes. So complete the process and accept this from me, please. I’d like to give it to a great poet.”

Hang on until you meet one, then.
I couldn’t say it to him. He looked so sincere and beautiful standing there at the table, holding the pen out to me. He ran one finger down the barrel, and a corresponding tingle shot down my spine, then lower still, and I’d have burst out laughing at the hokey symbolism and my absurd responses anywhere else. Instead I took the lovely thing from him, as seriously as it had been offered.

“Thank you.” Anywhere else I would’ve laughed. Anyone else giving me such a gift, I’d have kissed them for it, one soft press of my mouth to a cheekbone, the corner of the mouth. “Are you thinking of coming to bed yet yourself?”

That sounded terrible. I should have said
going
, not coming.
Coming
implied coming to bed with me. But he just smiled. “Not yet. I’m enjoying your aunt’s books. I think I’ll stay up and read.”

* * * * *

The bedroom door creaked open at an unknown point of the small hours, throwing a rectangle of firelight across the bare boards. I sat up, the shards of a broken dream falling down around me like glass. Gradually the figure in the doorway lost its angel’s wings, its infinite towering height, and became Viv, an urgently poised silhouette clutching the doorjambs.

“What is it?” I croaked. “Are you ill? Did you hear something?”

“Some of your aunt’s books are about witchcraft, Mallory.”

I released a breath. I didn’t quite see why this was cause for such a dramatic entrance. Unease touched me. I felt protective towards Lilian, unwilling for her to come across as a complete kook. Or had I hit some submerged rock of fear or prejudice in the oceans that swept around Viv’s rational mind? “She was into that kind of thing. Is that a problem?”

“Yes.” He left the doorway and came to stand at the end of my bedroll. “One of them says that magic works because we can change the world by envisioning it differently. By observing it, in fact. The author then goes on to give quite a sound argument for how this operates.”

“That’s nice,” I said weakly, trying to unzip my sleeping bag so I wouldn’t feel so helpless in the midst of this surreal irruption. “And you’re telling me this in the middle of the night because…?”

“You could offer almost the same argument as a basic explanation for the behaviour of subatomic particles. At the quantum level, we can’t observe them without changing their state. We alter the universe by looking at it.”

I had to make an effort to stay with him. He was rigid with intensity, his arms folded tight over his chest. “Like the Schrödinger’s cat thing, right?”

“Yes, except that Schrödinger proposed his principle of superposition in 1935. The book I’ve been reading was written by an elderly lady in the New Forest in 1918.”

“Well, never underestimate old ladies in the New Forest. This is all fascinating, but why is it such a big deal?”

“Because she got there via a path I’d never have known existed if I hadn’t lost everything and come here. There are so many paths, Mallory! And I’ve only been stumbling along on one, with my head down, with blinkers on. I’ve been blind. I’ve missed everything.”

Finally I got the zip undone. I wriggled halfway free of the bag and tried to smooth my hair. “We’ll make up for it,” I said, not sure what he wanted or what kind of promise I could offer him. “When all this is over and you’re safe, we’ll…I dunno, go down to London and raise hell in the clubs for a month or two. See life a bit, if you want. Fuck around.”

“That’s just it.”

“What—the clubbing thing? You fancy that?”

“No. The fucking around.”

Wow. He was like a volcano sometimes—motionless for centuries, innocent peasants growing vineyards on his flanks, and then boom. I leaned back, propping myself on my arms, trying to ride the blast. The impact woke up a devil in me. “Well, my friend—the night is still young.”

“Do you know why I watched you and Alan, even though I knew it was wrong?”

“Oh, God, Viv. You said you wouldn’t—”

“I wanted to know what was involved. And I came to the conclusion that I can’t…” His voice scraped, and he faded out. For long seconds, there was no sound in the room but the patter of snowflakes on my makeshift window. “I could never offer you what he did. But I’d still like to try.”

The devil fled, leaving me wide-eyed and lost. I had to be getting him wrong. “Try… Try what?”

“The sex. I don’t want to have missed that too.”

“Oh.” I nodded to show I’d understood, soberly as if we’d met up in a boardroom to discuss this. My heart was beating so hard I could feel the squeeze of my pulse where my palms were pressed to the floor. “Tell you the truth, I’m not sure I could cope with anyone else offering me what Alan Frost did. There’s more than one way to skin the cat, you know.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this to him. I scrambled out of the sleeping bag. “Come and talk to me about this in the warm, all right? Is the stove still going?”

“Yes. I’ve been feeding it, like you said.”

“Good. We’ll make a crofter of you yet.” I put a hand between his shoulders and guided him back into the kitchen. I could feel the bones of his spine. He was wound up tight enough to snap over this, his arms still locked around his ribs. He wasn’t doing much for my peace of mind, either. I’d gone to sleep in my thermal leggings and a T-shirt. I was intensely aware of the close-fitting fabric on my skin, of the fact that I hadn’t had a proper wash in a couple of days. “I could use a bath,” I said nervously, sitting down beside him on the sofa. “We’ll be able to have one in the morning, if the stove keeps going long enough to heat the tank.” Damn, that was worse than coming or going to bed—
we’ll be able to have one
, as if I’d run one tub and he’d hop in there with me. The image of those elegant limbs folding round me in warm water…

“I like the way you smell. If there was an essence in the universe called Mallory, you’d be…particularly Mallory tonight.”

“Particularly Mallory, eh?” I chuckled, shifting forward to rest my elbows on my knees and hide the inconvenient swell at my groin. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Right, here we are—just the two of us in the middle of nowhere. What’s all this about you missing out on the sex?”

He’d taken up his usual position three inches away from me. “You must have worked out,” he said roughly, as if the words hurt, “that I’m not…experienced.”

“You said you’d never had the kind of relationship I had with Alan.” I spread my hands. “I didn’t make any assumptions from that. And you said you’d never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend?”

He ducked his head. “I’ve never even had a
friend
.”

My heart lurched. I took hold of his wrist. “You have one now. Okay?”

“Yes. I still don’t understand why, but—yes.”

“I’ve never had one either, not like you.” I decided to get this ball rolling. “I’ve had boyfriends, though—five of ’em—and one girl. All the relationships with the boys were sexual.”

He glanced at me cautiously. “What about the girl?”

“That was sexual too, for about five minutes. She was very nice about it.”

I hadn’t expected to make him laugh. It was only for a couple of seconds, but it seemed to release a tension in him. “I’ve never had sex,” he announced. “I’m a virgin. I hate the label because it seems so histrionic, but it’s true. And that’s ridiculous, at my age.”

“Is it?” I tightened my grip. “Plenty of people go through life not wanting sex, or feeling it’s not relevant to them. It’s not a thing you have to cross off your list of experiences, you know, not if you’re not keen.” I’d made so many mistakes with him during this brief liaison we’d both come to call a friendship. I wanted to get it right now. “It’s all right for you to be however you are.”

“But how can I tell how I am?” He sat up, ruffling his hair in frustration. “How can I tell if I’m keen or not? I can hardly walk up to a stranger in the street and ask him to try me out.”

The stranger would be male. That was a start. “Who said anything about a stranger in the street? What’s wrong with a friend in a derelict house?”

His jaw dropped. It would have been so sweet to lean in and cover that startled mouth with my own. “But I can’t ask you to just… What if I’m not like that? What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then it doesn’t work. At least you can say you tried. I tell you what.” I paused for a deep breath. Words could be dangerously sexy, and I was already half-hard in my thermals. “Let’s start with basics. Do you, um…? Do you get erections?”

“Yes, at awkward times. Over some things you’d find strange.”

I prided myself that I was pretty broad-minded. But this was Viv, and I braced up against some revelation that would knock me sideways. “For example?”

“When I make a breakthrough in the lab, formulate an equation that properly expresses a process. Then.”

“Okay. And does anything come of these occasions, so to speak?”

He looked puzzled. Then his brow cleared. “I’ll tell you something I never thought I’d share with anyone. When the discovery of the Higgs boson was confirmed in the LHC at CERN, I went upstairs, locked myself in my room, and I came so hard I thought my eardrums would burst. Does that answer your question?”

It did. It also ripped the rug from under my attempts to listen to him seriously. I doubled up, squawking with helpless laughter. I wrapped my arms over the back of my skull, but still I couldn’t contain myself. “Oh, God! I’m sorry!” My eyes burned with a rush of tears. “Oh, my God, Viv. The Higgs
boson
?!”

“It isn’t a thing I would expect anyone to understand.”

“No, I—I do.” I sat up, shuddering. “I actually do. When I saw my first pilot whale—first whale of any kind I’d ever seen—I had a huge rush like that, only it didn’t go straight to my cock. Oh, Viv, forgive me. You crack me up.”

“Apparently.”

But he wasn’t offended. He was smiling faintly at the mess he’d made of me, as if he’d guessed I would react like this, and because it was me, he didn’t mind. I wasn’t sure how I’d become a special case to him, but I was grateful for it and glad. I put out my hand, and he reached for me, not pulling back when I laced our fingers together.

“So,” I managed, getting my breath back. “Everything’s in working order. You don’t want to be a virgin anymore, and you’re the hottest particle physicist I ever clapped eyes on. I think I see a solution to your problem.”

“Am I? Attractive to you?”

“Are you kidding? You’d melt the barnacles off the hull of my dad’s trawler.” I turned to him, and he closed up the three-inch gap of his own accord, shifting so that his thigh was pressed to mine. “The question remains…whether I can give the Higgs boson a run for its money.”

“When I saw you curled up on the ground outside the chalet, I knew even then that you were different. When I picked you up to carry you in…my skin didn’t crawl. I didn’t feel sick.”

“That’s a relief to hear.”

“You were someone I could touch for once. You’re strong and clean. Your hands are kind, and I can smell the sea in your hair. I imagine you would taste of salt.”

He wasn’t going to have to imagine for long at this rate. I was beginning to feel a whole lot sexier even than the very latest quantum particle. “That’s a point,” I murmured, rubbing my fingers gently through his. “What happened to that whole non-touching rule?”

“It still stands. It would repel me to be touched by anyone else. There’s only you.”

I leaned back. There was only me. That meant I had to be brave enough to keep hold of him, to take a handful of his jumper and ease him close to me. He followed without recoil, tucked his feet up under him and knelt breathing quickly but soft. We were almost brow to brow on the sofa. I kept one hand on his shoulder, the other wrapped tight around his. “You know how you asked me not to touch your hair?”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

“Is that rule still in force?”

“No. I asked you to stop because it made me think of sex things, and you were only being nice to me. Comforting. So it wasn’t right.”

“Okay.” I released his jumper, ran my palm across his thick curls. “Sometimes there’s a gap between comfort and sex things, sure. But there doesn’t have to be, not when the people fancy each other. Understood?”

“Understood.” He shivered, pushing catlike against my touch. “That can be the first part of my lesson.”

“If you like. If you think I’ve got any business teaching you. I’m not exactly school board certified, you know.”

“You’ve got six times more experience than I have. Six hundred percent.”

“Given the business with Morag Sinclair, I’d say five hundred and two. And knock a few more points off for my first time, because that was…”

“How was it? I’d like to hear about your first time.”

I looked him over. Anxiety was radiating off him in waves. The fabric of his jeans was undisturbed across his lap, and I wondered what
sex things
meant to him when it came to a person rather than physics. If, like so much of his world, it all happened inside the confines of his mind, I could cope with that, though I longed to close my fingers in his hair’s soft ripples and draw him in for a kiss. I owed him at least the effort to find out how he worked.