Looking at him, no one could tell that he'd almost died this afternoon, been an inch, a heartbeat away. I couldn't tell and I'd stopped it from happening, saved his life, like he'd saved my life on countless occasions, put a bullet in the brain of a creature from another time. I'd have kicked its stupid head in if I hadn't had the gun - nothing was taking Nick from me, I'd decided, particularly not something with teeth that didn't even belong here. We'd both ditched our seaweed-logged boots after the chase through the rock pools, he'd changed his clothes - jeans to cargo pants which I'd never seen him wear before, the tight-fitting green T to a loose white cotton shirt which was bring blown gently around his torso - a torso tightened and firmed in the last two years of chasing dinosaurs or more often running away from them. His clothes had been soaked after his almost-drowning, the collar of his T covered in blood from the claw wound in his neck that had been patched up by a confused nurse at the local hospital who clearly hadn't bought our story about the drunk with the knife. The white of the dressing stood above the open collar of his shirt, hidden momentarily as he bent to collect another stone. It was a stark reminder of the sudden terrifying moment when he'd slipped on a wet rock, lost his footing, unbalanced and fell with the creature - an overgrown, featherless chicken with teeth like razors and a squawk like death - bearing down on him. Just another day at the office. Or in the field. One day one of us wasn't going to make it back. Still, there was something more bothering him than the latest close shave of that afternoon. He looked as exhausted as I felt, and that had nothing to do with chasing an unspecified dinosaur out of an unexpected anomaly and almost having his head bitten off. Seriously, my life wouldn't hold together if Nick wasn't in it. "Are you all right?" "I've been having nightmares; really, really bad nightmares." Okay. Me too, I told him. I was surprised by Nick admitting it to me although I'm not sure why, he'd always been very open with me. He was looking at me, questioning, and I nodded. "Last few days. I'm… in a room, this huge room, and there are yellow cages but the creatures have escaped. They're all around me but all I'm seeing is -" "- is me. I'm watching you from behind a door which you won't open, through a porthole. I'm shouting at you, yelling for you to open the door but you just keep backing away and the creatures keep closing in on you." We were staring at each other - how the hell he knew my nightmares I had no idea, and he was looking at me with the same question in his expression. "One of them… bites me, and it hurts like hell, then another slices at my stomach… and I wake up." "I watch them tear you apart until eventually I can't watch it, I close my eyes and slide down the door. I just keep sliding until I'm sobbing on the floor. I'm still crying when I wake up and reach for…." He turned back towards the sea, and I wondered what he reached for in the dark in the middle of the night. I'd know if it was a 'who'. "It's always the same." He nodded. And that really scared me. "How can we both be having the same dream, Nick?" It was the obvious question, the one we were both thinking. "I don't know. But I want it to stop." ~ Luckily it was out of season. The seaside town wasn't altogether deserted but the only tourists were professionals getting out of the city for a short break and the hotel we'd been booked into, while not exactly five star, wasn't a B&B either and we were the only residents. I wasn't sure what Lester would do about the potential threat if the anomaly on the beach re-appeared during the summer and right then Nick looked as if didn't really care, sitting in the hideously patterned armchair, third pint cradled in his hands and an empty whisky glass next to mine on the table between us. "Let 'em eat the tourists," he'd muttered when I'd mentioned phoning the ARC and that had kind of been the end of the conversation. "What if we've… changed something, going backwards and forwards through the anomalies?" It seemed like a valid idea. "And the nightmares are what? Some… echo of what should have happened?" "Possibly." Did it sound utterly ludicrous? But he seemed to visibly shudder. "God, Stephen…." "Believe me, I'm not fond of the idea either." Truth was we'd both been through enough to know that anything was possible. We were fucking with time, with history and we both knew it. For Nick things had already been screwed up once - he'd told me all about Claudia and I respected him enough to believe him. Who the hell even knew if we were the same people we'd been when we'd started this 'project'? If we'd all been affected there was no one outside the ARC to know. He was shaking his head. "You have to promise me… if it happens, if we see that room, you stay away from it. No heroics." He looked at me intensely, leaning forward. "Stephen, promise me." "Hey, you've got my word." Why would anyone willingly walk into a room full of predators? But Nick was still looking at me, expression deadly serious. "Promise me." I was surprised. A couple of months ago I think he'd have willingly let me stroll inside, held the door open for me. "I promise." He was still leaning over the narrow glass coffee table, intense look in those stunning blue eyes, my gaze drifted to his lips for a second before they turned up into a smile and I snapped back. Was I seriously considering kissing that month? "We're dreaming about each other, Stephen," he said quietly, without sitting back, staring at me. "I wake up with that feeling of sick dread and I grab my mobile to call you and something stops me - the time of the night but that never used to make a difference did it? I just… after that dream I just need to hear your voice, assure myself you're okay. I would…" he dropped to a murmur, "…would love to wake up and see your face next to mine." He paused and I wondered if he was waiting for something from me. "It's just reaction, Stephen, it doesn't mean anything." It dawned on me, slightly delayed I'll admit, that he knew I'd been thinking about kissing him. There were so many things I could have said that would have broken the moment, dropped it back to the low-lying tension that had always existed between us. "It means something," wasn't one of those things. "What?" I could hear the challenge. "What does it mean?" "Why are we dreaming of each other?" "Like you said…." "No. Why are you the one at the door, why are we - you and I - dreaming of each other?" ~ I woke up with the echo of that same dream in my head; blood and pain, and the agony in Nick's eyes and voice as he shouted and screamed and banged uselessly and in vain on the door, asking me, pleading with me to open it. He would have sacrificed himself for me - for everyone - not willingly, not like some insane martyr, but because he would have considered himself the only one able. In my dream-mind I remembered hitting him, stopping him from getting into the room before me. I remembered his cries when he came to after a brief loss of consciousness, those pleas…. He would rather have died than had to watch me die. None of us want to be the one left behind, the ones left to grieve, left to remember. I couldn't imagine Nick having to live with that memory. Throwing the covers back I swung my legs over the side of the bed and grabbed my shirt from where I'd dumped it on the floor. I was so tired I could have gone straight back to sleep, but I'd only dream it all over again, with more and more detail being added each time. A beach and a phone call, Helen telling me Nick was dead, finding him alive but almost defeated, faith gone, hope extinguished. In the corridor I hesitated. Standing there with my shirt hanging open over tired boxer shorts, I tried to recall which room was Nick's. I pictured him saying good night, door open, leaning on the handle. Room… 17, next to the bad painting of the schooner on the rough ocean. I could see him standing there, looking as tired as I felt, as clearly as I could see him standing on the other side of the heavy yellow door, staring at me wide-eyed through the porthole window. I knocked on the white wood with a light knuckle, not wanting to wake him if he wasn't already awake. There wasn't an answer so I waited, put my ear to the door and let out my breath without taking another in. I thought after a couple of seconds I could hear… crying. I leaned on the handle and to my surprise the door opened. Nick had left his curtains open too, and in the bright sodium light from the street outside I could see him on the bed, sitting up, one knee pulled up under his chin, one arm wrapped around his leg, forehead against his knee. His shoulders were moving sporadically, shaking in time with the harsher of his sobs. Only once, twice, three times as I watched. "Nick." He lifted his head and looked at me. "Every time I go to sleep I watch you die. Every time I close my eyes I see you die. It feels so… real." His voice was a whisper in the lit darkness. When Helen went missing I saw him cry at the funeral, in our office when he thought he was alone, late at night after half a bottle of whisky. I'd never seen him cry over me before, never thought he would. Crossing to the bed I dropped to sit on the edge of the too-soft mattress and hesitantly I put one of my hands on one of his shoulders. "I'm alive. Whatever this is, it isn't real." "I've watched you die so many times." "I've died that many times. Only I wake up when the pain gets too much, when the bites feel like they're killing me. When do you wake up?" For a long time Nick looked at me. Eventually he said, "When I'm kneeling on the floor, sobbing my heart out." "Why would you do that for me?" "You're my best friend, Stephen." In the cold light of day, maybe if I'd had more sleep or if it didn't feel so isolated in that silent seaside town devoid of tourists, I wouldn't have pushed it. But it was isolated, it was out of time and out of place, away from our extraordinary lives so for one night only we were just two men in an empty hotel. "Is that it? Is that all? Sobbing your heart out for your best friend?" My hand on his shoulder, his face so close to mine. I'd never have expected him to make the first move but then maybe I had made it, at least verbally. He was hesitant, like I hadn't made myself absolutely clear and to be fair I'd been as subtle as I could get. But despite that his mouth touched mine and I encouraged him to be bolder, to kiss me before I pressed him back into the pillow and crawled over him, skin to skin, tongue reaching deep into his throat. God, I wanted him, I'd wanted him since the moment I'd met him. Call it whatever you want, hero worship at the start, longing, lust, greed, whatever. I wanted him. I knew what he was like when he was happy, sad, sober, drunk, peaceful, angry, excited, depressed, enthusiastic, bored... I wanted to know what he looked like, what he sounded like, what he felt like when he came. I ground my lips against his, hooked my right ankle over his left, got fingers in his hair. I didn't realise he was wrestling my shift from my shoulders until my arm got caught and I had to let him go for a second to fling the creased material to the floor of his room this time. Wrapped around one another we found the perfect friction that brought us to simultaneous climax. And wrapped in one another we found a dreamless sleep at long, long last. ~ I'd woken to his lips pressed in my hair, against my scalp, and whispered words, deep breaths, Nick wrapped around me. I felt him at my back, arms around me, and if the night before I'd imagined it would only lead to a one-night stand I knew in the morning that it was more than that. "Why didn't we dream that dream again?" Nick shrugged, eyes locking with mine over the white tablecloth and egg-stained, chipped plates. "Maybe we changed something." "By sleeping together?" "By… doing more than that. Didn't we do more than that?" When he nodded, a knot untied inside me I hadn't even been aware of. "I promised you last night, if we come across that room, I won't go inside." "In the dream, you sacrificed yourself for me before I could do the same for you. Haven't we made that… more likely now?" "We'll find another way. If it comes down to it, remember, I can't live without you. I won't live without you. Your turn to promise me, Nick. Don't do it. Promise me." For a second, two seconds, three, I didn't think he would. Then he just said it, "I love you, Stephen. So… I promise." ~ We recognised it instantly. We went in together, armed to the teeth. And when it was over we slid down the wall, side by side, wounded and bleeding but alive, surrounded by the dead bodies of predators from the past and future. I looked at him and smiled, and in the middle of chaos he grabbed my hand and I threaded my fingers between his. We were still sitting there when Lester and the cavalry turned up, Nick keeping a hold of my hand. |