Falling (5 page)

As I stare at him, it occurs to me how much he looks like her, like Eleanor. He has her leaf-shaped eyes, her straight nose, and her dimples when he smiles, and yet he is so much himself—so beautiful and so completely unaware of it….

I close my eyes. I need to stop this.

“I feel kind of… weird,” I hear Oskar say faintly, stumbling through the doorway, looking confused and running his hands through his hair.

At the sound of another person’s voice, Angus looks round and jumps in shock, pressing himself back against the sofa, stuttering, “Wh-who?”

Before I can answer and reassure him he is not about to be fucked over again (because, yeah, Angus got threatened in the robbery too, and it’s just better somehow that I bury how I feel about that along with everything else), I notice that Oskar looks even paler than before, and I’m not sure how that’s even possible. His movements are dizzily uncoordinated. Without warning, his arms drop, and his face goes slack. I reach him just as his knees give way and he swoons toward the floor.

“Angus!” I yell, but he’s already there, lifting Oskar with me and helping carry him to the sofa.

Surprisingly Angus takes charge of the situation, checking he’s still breathing (which thankfully he is) and telling me to raise Oskar’s legs.

“Have you got something with a stopwatch on?” Angus asks me calmly.

Actually, I’ve never seen him so calm and together. I am at sea. Oskar looks dead, and the thought chills me to the very core.

“I…. Yeah, here.” Shakily I pull out my phone.

“I need to check his pulse. Can you time me?”

I nod and fiddle around, unable to work out where on earth the stopwatch is.

“He’s just passed out. He’ll be okay,” Angus says, watching me closely.

I pass him the phone and wish he wasn’t seeing me like this, but being shaken up is not something I can hide.

I watch as Angus wraps the blanket around Oskar’s unconscious body.

“He’s really cold, and his clothes are soaking.”

“I brought him back here to give him some dry clothes. I ran over his foot,” I admit, feeling completely crap about everything.

Angus nods, counting. “We should take a look at his foot.”

As we’re taking off Oskar’s worn-out shoe, I watch a little color come back into his skin and his eyelids flicker.

Even with his sock on, I can see his foot has swollen to twice the size it’s supposed to be.

“I think it’s probably broken. We should take him to the hospital,” Angus says.

“All right. What about changing his clothes?”

Angus shakes his head. “He needs an X-ray.”

“Now?”

Angus nods, biting his lip when he looks at me.

“Okay, help me carry him to the car,” I say. I need to pull some control back. I need Angus to still see me as the one in charge, though I’m not sure why.

“What about Mum?” Angus asks worriedly as he grabs his coat and locks the front door.

“My car is only parked by the curb, it’s not far. It’ll only take two minutes.”

Angus stops and looks down at the cracked tiles that decorate the floor. I can’t see his face behind all that hair.

Perplexed, I stop too. And then I realize.

“I mean, it’d be easier if you came with me to the hospital to help me, but I can probably lift him on my own.” I owe him far more than this simple concession. “But if you want to come, I’m sure she’ll be okay. Those tablets knock her out completely.”

“It’s dark,” he says quietly.

And I know he means
What happens if they come back in the middle of the night to finish the job
,
like Eleanor is so sure will happen
,
and we’re not there
—
we’re stuck at the hospital
.

“I’ll make sure we’re not gone for long. Trust me.”

O
SKAR
IS
still pretty out of it, and we strap him into the back seat as best we can.

Things don’t seem quite so weird with Angus, so I ask, “How did you know to take his pulse and to raise his legs and all that stuff?”

Now I think about it, he’s generally very calm with Eleanor too (apart from when she gets super anxious and starts getting the knives out). I guess that’s why I thought he could cope being at home to look after her all day.

“Um…,” he says as though he’s talking to his hands.

I swallow, reluctantly admitting that despite the fact it drives me insane, I like his shyness quite a bit. It makes something inside me go weak with want.

“I did sport science at school. I was really into all that stuff.”

I don’t take my gaze off the road, but I’m hyperaware of every little movement he makes: brushing his hair out of his eyes, looking out the window, glancing at me.

“I wanted to be a physical therapist, but my dad laughed at me and told me all I’d ever be good for was stacking shelves in the supermarket. He said I needed to get real and get a job to pay for my food and rent. He refused to buy any of the course books I needed for the A-level subjects I took, so I couldn’t keep up in class. That’s why I didn’t finish school.”

Angus had never told me that before. He’d just said he had some time off school. His reaction to my comment about no school friends visiting makes a lot of sense now.

“Your father is a complete bastard, you know,” I say, feeling an honest-to-God hatred for the man.

To my surprise Angus laughs.

“Sorry….” He blushes, though I’ve no idea why he is embarrassed. “I can just imagine you saying that to his face, though, and him going ballistic, and you standing there all stone-faced and intimidating like last time.”

Me, intimidating? I have no idea where he gets these ideas about me from. All I did was tell the fucker to piss off or I’d call the police and get him arrested for harassment. It was hardly intimidating behavior, but at least he heeded my words and didn’t come back.

And it was pretty unlike me, really. Confrontation of any sort, and I’m headed for the hills. Literally. I’m not trustworthy. Or loyal.

I
T
’
S
HALF
eleven by the time we get back from the hospital. Things are beginning to grate on my nerves, and every time I look at the rough plaster cast around Oskar’s foot and ankle, I feel the hole inside me getting bigger and I know I have to put something right. And not just with Oskar.

But I don’t know how.

We used my name and details to sign Oskar in at the hospital. He pretended to be more out of it than he actually was so he didn’t have to answer any awkward questions, which seemed to stem his panic about being there a little, though I know he still wasn’t happy we’d taken him there. But I’m glad we did because his foot
is
broken.

As soon as we’re back, Angus rushes inside to check on Eleanor, who is still sleeping the deep and soundless sleep of the drugged, and then helps me carry Oskar upstairs. All of a sudden he is inside my flat again. They both are.

“Make yourselves at home. I’ll go sort us out some food.” I wave my hands vaguely toward the living room and then vanish into the kitchen to try and deal with how I feel about this and to think about what I’m going to do. I can’t chuck Oskar out with a broken foot—
especially when I broke it
—but I really don’t like the thought of him staying here either. I don’t know anything about him. And more than that, he’s in my space. I need to be on my own. It’s how I have learned to function.

I pull some noodles and various vegetables out of the fridge and stare blankly at them until some sort of autopilot takes over.

Cooking takes me away from thinking, and I become immersed in what I’m doing—chopping, stirring, adding a bit of spice, a bit of rice wine, looking for enough plates and glasses in the cupboard above the sink….

I don’t realize Angus is standing in the doorway watching me until it’s too late, and I inhale sharply and stumble against the cooker in shock.

“Um, Oskar’s shaking pretty bad. Do you have some dry clothes he could wear?” he asks hesitantly, looking everywhere but at me.

Okay,
so we’re back to being weird
, I think resignedly.

“Yeah, just stir this, and I’ll go get some,” I say, pointing at the pan.

I come back with some pajama bottoms I have never worn in my life, a T-shirt I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and a fur-lined hooded top I actually quite like.

“Here.” I hold out the clothes to Angus who, to my mortification, is no longer watching the pan on the stove but instead peering at the walls.

“
Oh
,” he breathes, almost as if he doesn’t want me to hear him.

Fuck, I forgot.

I collect myself enough to roll my eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read any erotic fiction before?”

I actually hear him swallow. He shakes his head and mumbles, “No. Not even… watched any porn. Dad would’ve killed me.”

“Well, you’re not staying in my kitchen all night to make up for it,” I say matter-of-factly. “Take these through to Oskar.”

“Why did you put it all over your kitchen walls?” he asks, carefully taking the clothes from me.

“Why not? Beautiful writing pleases me wherever it is,” I say as coolly as I can, moving back to my position in front of the cooker so that I can pretend it’s the heat of the flames that’s making me flushed.

The food is ready and doesn’t need stirring, but stirring it gives me something to focus on, something to do with my hands.

“Oh… you didn’t like the coffee,” he says quietly.

Swinging round, I catch his disappointed expression before he can hide it.

Mentally I kick myself for leaving everything sitting on the table, exactly where it was when I left for work this morning.

Sighing, I turn the cooker off. I never know what to say, but right now I feel like I should be as honest with him as I can. He looks upset.

“Angus, I just couldn’t work out why you’d brought me breakfast. Last night shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have let it. It was a mistake. But you did
nothing
wrong.”

I find myself staring at his neck, but his jumper comes up too high to see the skin I marked, the only evidence of our brief encounter.

He shrugs self-consciously.

“I just wanted you to….”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but he doesn’t have to. I know what he was going to say; it’s written all over his face.

I do like you
, a traitorous voice in my head cries.
I like you so fucking much.
I close my eyes trying to shut it out, trying to clamp down on the feelings that threaten to rise up.

Briskly, I grab a plate and dish up the food onto it. “I’m going to take this through to Oskar,” I say without looking back.

I
T
IS
eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, and yet I have work in half an hour. It just seems wrong. Sundays are for never getting out of bed. Except I haven’t got a bed right now… Oskar is in it. He crashed out almost as soon as he’d wolfed down the food I made last night, and he’s still sleeping.

I’ve been brooding at the kitchen table since dawn. I didn’t sleep well on the couch—it’s comfortable, but I couldn’t stop the stupid chatter in my head. I still can’t.

How can I leave a stranger alone in my flat while I go to work? How did I end up with a stranger sleeping in my flat in the first place?

I still haven’t been down to see Eleanor.

I take one last gulp of coffee, then grab my keys and make my way downstairs.

Although I always bring it with me, I never use my spare key to open Eleanor’s door in the morning. It just seems rude somehow, so instead I knock softly.

I’m not surprised when it’s Angus who opens the door.

“Hey,” he says, doing the smile-look-down-blush thing that makes me want to reach out and tilt his head up so I can see the beautiful gray of his eyes. “How’s Oskar this morning?”

“Sleeping,” I say wryly, feeling a lot less than wry about it.

“Aren’t you working in a bit?”

I sigh. “Yeah. Maybe he’ll sleep all day.”

But I know how unlikely that is and how far more likely it is he’ll go poking round my flat. Maybe he’ll work out I have nothing valuable to steal and hobble off to wherever he came from. Here’s hoping.

Eleanor is sitting at the table, her hands wrapped round a mug of steaming coffee. She looks up as I walk in, but her blue eyes are a little unfocused, and she doesn’t seem quite herself.

Angus stands behind her head and mouths, “
Temazepam
.”

Right.

She grips my hand as I sit down. The gesture reminds me of my nan when she was dying and scared she wouldn’t ever see any of us again. But Eleanor is not an old lady.

“They’re going to come back,” Eleanor says quietly, her nails digging into my skin. “We’ve got to be ready. Angus is going to get the bars for the windows put on today.” I look over at Angus perched on the arm of the couch, fiddling with the threaded leather bracelet wrapped round his wrist. Beneath the collar of his loose gray T-shirt, I can now see the faint bruise-colored mark on his neck. I wonder if Eleanor has noticed. I can’t stop staring at it.

“Why don’t you wait until I get home after work, and I’ll have a look at the windows, and we’ll see how you feel about it then,” I say, using all my willpower to bring my focus back to Eleanor, where it should be.

Bars on the windows will make this flat into even more of a prison.

“I see their shadows outside my window. They’re going to come back. We’ve got to be ready. Help me get ready, Josh,” she pleads.

I can see why Angus gave her the temazepam. I know if he hadn’t, she wouldn’t just be sitting here pleading, she would be ceaselessly checking the windows were still locked, the doors bolted. The curtains would be opened, then closed in a restless cycle of desperate paranoia.