No Strings

Chapter 31

I was fucking exhausted. Totally and utterly drained, physically, mentally and emotionally. I had spent two hours in an interrogation room telling them what happened and filling them in on the background to events. That part didn't take that long. After all, I didn't know much about Sarah and Paul's relationship did I? I had had to tell them about mine and Sarah's relationship too but there wasn't much to tell there either. We'd screwed a couple of times a week. I'd run into her step brother a couple of times. It was hardly the stuff of best selling sagas was it?

It was weird being on the other side of that interview table. What with being tied to a chair, having a gun pressed to the back of my head, thinking Sarah might bleed to death and this, I was feeling fucking disorientated. And on top of it all, I had to deal with my boss who somehow had already heard about the 'incident' and was now on the phone to me using his concerned voice. He probably thought I was going to well and truly lose my marbles now. He probably had my counsellor on emergency alert. He was insisting I go on leave and I didn't have the energy to argue with him. I would deal with him after I had had some sleep.

The strange thing was, I had never felt saner. I was exhausted but surprisingly OK. There was no spinning head or shortness of breath or any of the other signs of an encroaching panic attack. My head felt clear, my heart beat at its normal rate. Under my hastily pulled on T-shirt my chest was still smeared with Sarah's blood but she hadn't died. She hadn't bloody died! I could hardly believe it. The bullet had ripped into her shoulder and she'd cut her head when she fell but she was going to be OK. The same couldn't be said for her step brother but I didn't care about him. Sarah was alive. I was alive. And this time history had not repeated itself.

Apparently her step brother had form. I really should have checked up on him. I should have trusted my instincts when I took an instant dislike to the guy, but I had put it down to jealousy on my part (even though I could barely admit that, even to myself). There was a couple of burglaries and drug possession when he was younger, then later fraud. My colleagues reckoned he was mixed up with some very unpleasant people. But none of that would have suggested he was about to do what he had done. Had Sarah known he was capable of this?

I should have gone home to rest, I was almost dead on my feet, but there was only one thing I wanted to do. There was one thing I had to do before I could even hope to sleep.

---

Jake walked in when I was picking at what had advertised itself as lasagne, but was just a mushy pile of something brown and orange. It didn't help that I was having to use my left hand and I had always been useless at that.

Even tired and crumpled with the remnants of a black eye and the start of a beard, he was so gorgeous my breath stalled for a moment. I noticed the talk from the other patients and visitors on the ward stop briefly as they all watched him walk up to my bed, all long legs and broad shoulders. He was still wearing the clothes he had had on last night. I was horribly aware of what I must look like, with bed hair, no makeup, in an unattractive hospital gown.

My eyes skimmed over him. "There's blood on your jeans," I said.

He looked down at me and smiled shyly. "Yes. It's your blood."

"What happened? After I was shot?"

He pulled up a chair and sat down so his face was level with mine. "He held the gun to my head but seemed to change his mind and shoot himself instead."

Jake could be dead right now as well as Paul. That was something I couldn't bear to even contemplate.

"I'm sorry Sarah," he said quietly.

"For what?" I asked. Wasn't it me he should be apologising to him?

"For what happened. For Paul being dead. For you being here."

"It's not your fault, Jake."

"I know but for a moment back there, in your kitchen, I thought it was my fault, that I was doomed to fuck up peoples' lives. That's why I tried to stay away from you, to not get involved."

What was he talking about? I had survived thanks to him. If he hadn't been so calm and controlled and grabbed that gun we probably would have both been dead. "What do you mean Jake? It was Paul who went psycho, not you."

He looked at me with tired eyes as if he were making a decision, then, taking a deep breath, he started to talk.

"On my nineteenth birthday, July 7th, my girlfriend and I were going to Brighton for a long weekend. I was going to propose to her there on the beach. I had the ring in my pocket. We were on the tube going to Victoria when a bomb went off."

My hand shot to my mouth as I realised - July 7th - 7/7 - the London bombings.

"Katie got the last seat when we got on the train. She was sitting near the bomber. She died in my arms. I had been standing a few feet away, there was barely a scratch on me."

He paused and I waited for him to continue. There really wasn't much that I could say.

"For a while I couldn't handle the fact that she had died and I had survived. I desperately wanted it to be the other way round. Then with time I learnt how to exist and eventually I joined the police force, to give myself some sense of purpose. But I guess it's not the easiest job to do when you're traumatised. You come up against a lot of things that remind you and a while back I was called to a murder scene - it was a young girl who looked exactly like Katie and I kind of lost it. I suppose I had a nervous breakdown. I was on enforced leave for a while and they took me back on the condition I get counselling and I started to get better and then I met you."

"And ..." My head was reeling. Why had Jake suddenly opened up about this after months of revealing nothing? "And ..." I couldn't think of anything to say.

"At first I convinced myself it was just sex. Bloody good sex, but just sex. But I was in total denial, doing my best to avoid feeling anything. But then I saw you kissing that bastard and I wanted to rip his throat out. I told you, didn't I? That you make me want to do things to you. You make me want to howl at the moon, to kiss you senseless. Sometimes you make me punch walls."

"So I'm not good for you?" I said in a little voice.

He gave a hoarse laugh. "No, can't you see? I'm saying that you make me feel. You make me have all these emotions that I've buried for too long and when I'm around you I'm alive and feeling stuff and ... alive." And he laughed shyly at his lack of eloquence. "Today we're both alive, Sarah. And I am so glad." He bowed his head so it was almost touching my arm and I laid my good hand on the top of his head where we stayed for a while.

Eventually, he lifted his head and there were tears in his blue eyes.

"Please tell me it's more than sex for you," he said.

"Of course it is Jake!" I cried. "Isn't that bloody obvious. Now come here and kiss me."

"In front of all these people?" he asked in mock outrage, glancing around at the other visitors who were all now oblivious to our conversation.

"Yes. I don't bloody care about them."

And so he slowly got up from his seat, tantalisingly leaned over me and giving me his irresistable smirk finally kissed me.