Beyond Repair (15 page)

Until she found herself crouched by the skirting boards in
the hallway, a piece of sandpaper worn to smoothness clenched in her fist,
knuckles bleeding because she’d been doing it so long and so badly, sweat
coating her body in a thick, greasy film. She didn’t know when she’d started
this crazy crusade or what time it now was, but she understood one thing very
clearly.

She was on the verge of passing out.

She’d pushed herself to the point of passing out.

And he
still
hadn’t removed himself from her mind. It
was as if he had died—though she supposed he had in a weird way. Bernie was
gone and Holden would carry on from here, gleaming and glorious and able to
forget. That guy she’d known no longer existed, or perhaps never really had.

Captain Amazing is not going to catch me as I fall from
the sky
, she scolded herself, only this time she
did
cry. She cried
not because she wished that he would, but for the idea that he
could
have. If things were like they were in the movies, he could have done just
that, that very thing, and oh the thought was unbearable.

It haunted her dreams. It kept her awake.

She came close to calling him in the middle of the night
just to take it back.
Please just tell me I was wrong, please tell me I was
,
she wanted to say, and then she’d wake in the clear light of dawn and be mean
with herself for it.
He can’t tell you that you’re wrong
, this new,
cruel her would say.
Any more than you can ask the Goblin King to take you
away from all of this right now, or dive into a river and find yourself in Oz,
or somehow read a book and be Atreyu. The very idea of everything turning out
wonderfully is as mythical as all of those, and you know that now. Don’t you,
Alice?

She did. She knew it so hard and so thoroughly that she
didn’t realize the package was from him. She opened it, sure she had ordered
something then just forgotten, and even after she’d found the disc inside she
didn’t think anything of it.
It’ll be a movie from that website that burns
old unavailable crap for idiots
, she thought, and continued to do so all
the way up to the point of pressing Play.

It was
Last of the Mohicans
—though not all of it. It
didn’t start at the beginning. It started at the part with the waterfall, and
the moment it did she knew. She knew what it was. She tried to deny it but it
was impossible to. There was Daniel Day Lewis, and he was saying the only thing
that was on the disc. The only part that had been captured—“You be strong, you
survive…you stay alive, no matter what occurs. No matter how long it takes, no
matter how far, I will find you,” he said.

I will find you.

* * * * *

The next day there was another, and this one was somehow
even better and more heart-wrenching and less bearable than the first. He’d
picked something from one of her favorite movies—not just a line that made
sense for their situation. This one kind of didn’t in context, yet the effect
was staggeringly good. She held her breath all the way through hearing it,
thinking of how he must have worked out exactly which ones she loved above all
others. He must have found her shelf of best movies, and he even knew
why
they were the best. He knew what she liked about them.

“You are my sun, my moon, my starlight sky,” Mad Martigan
said. “Without you—dwell in darkness. I love you.”

And then her heart attempted to consume her whole body. She
had to sit down, but the couch was three feet away. It might as well have been
three miles for all the good it did her. She just had to kind of crouch a
little to take the strain off, though it hardly helped at all. Nothing would
have helped her.

He was doing this to prove her wrong. To tell her that life
could
be like a movie, if she wanted it to be. It was obvious he was. It had been
obvious the day before, though that message hadn’t seemed so direct to her.
That one could have just meant
don’t worry, don’t do anything stupid, I’ll
come back to you
—which was lovely, but maybe just meant as a fun way to
tell her something.

This on the other hand…this was different.

This was someone declaring
love
.

Every message from then on was someone declaring love, in
one way or another. He sent her Johanna reading Beethoven’s letter at the
window. Kyle Reese telling Sarah Connor that he’d come across time for her.
There was Driver kissing Irene, and James asking “if there was a place not in
silence and not in sound” and the Dread Pirate Roberts saying “As you wish.”
Some meant more than simple love and some meant less—she heard “don’t let this
chance pass” in the scene from
Immortal Beloved
and “however you need it
to be” in
The Princess Bride
—but all of them amounted to the same thing.

And even if they hadn’t, even if by some miracle she hadn’t
begun to believe that she’d been wrong, so wrong…there was the last one. The
last one was not a clip from a movie at all—though that wasn’t a
disappointment. How could it possibly be? It was what she’d been waiting for,
hoping for, without even knowing it.

Here was reality finally being what all of those films
promised.

These are my words
, he wrote,
not as beautiful as
Beethoven’s or as incredible as coming across time for someone. But know that I
would, if I had the chance. I would be the survivor of a harrowing future war,
just so I could come for you and have you understand beyond any doubt that I
love you. I want the movie to be real too, because if it was I know you
wouldn’t be afraid of what won’t happen next. Don’t be afraid, my love. Don’t
think the ending has to be you sitting on the floor, alone in your grief. I’m
with you.

If you want me to be I’ll always be with you.

Bernie

She closed the letter then, though not because she’d
finished reading. She could have gone over those words a million times and
still have been no closer to a stopping point. The urge to look again was
already so great she could hardly stand it—but she had to. There was someone at
her door, and she knew who it was. She didn’t suspect or hope or maybe dream
that one day it could be.

She knew.

It was him.

He had come to her door like the long-lost hero of every
romance story ever, and now she was going to do what every romance heroine did
in return. He deserved it, more than anything he deserved it. If he could give
her this then she could run to him, without reservations. She didn’t stop to
think that it could be the postman. She didn’t wonder how she might ever be
able to offer him more.

She would find a way.

And she would start by flinging open the door, and hurling
herself into his arms.

She didn’t need to think about it. Once his arms were around
her and his mouth was on hers it just seemed easy—or at least, far easier than
it had before. There were no extra questions or brutal doubts. She simply
started shedding her clothes at the door, one gloriously relief-filled piece at
a time. First her jersey, then her t-shirt, then her socks, sure each time that
this would be the item that did her in.

Here she would stop. This would be the thing that took it
too far. She was getting too naked; she was exposing too much. She’d never
reach her jeans. Removing her jeans meant he would see her legs, and she
couldn’t have that. Her legs were the worst. They were like the roots of some
old tree, gnarled and knotted and rough.

She couldn’t possibly.

Yet somehow she did. She wriggled them down her legs as she
led him toward the stairs, full of the oddest sort of relief she’d ever felt in
her life. She didn’t even know how to identify it properly. All she could think
of was a snake shedding its skin—as though she’d been carrying around extra all
this time and just hadn’t known it.

She knew it now.

She knew that she hadn’t just hidden all of this from him.
She’d been hiding it from herself too. Her head flooded with memories, all
suddenly seen from a different angle—like the time she’d turned around the
full-length mirror in that hotel room the airline had gotten for her, just so
she didn’t have to see her own ravaged body. Or at the hospital, when she’d
closed her eyes as she struggled out of the bath.

She’d thought it was because of the pain, but she understood
now.

She hadn’t wanted to glimpse her reflection in the mirror
over the sink. Who would have wanted to? Everything had been so red and raw
then, so unlike the person she’d been before. But it was different now. It was
okay now. She needed to start accepting that it was okay. She liked her scars,
most faded to pale pinks and nearly whites. They reminded her of that future
war he’d mentioned—as though
she
were the one who’d survived. She was
the one who’d come across time.

He certainly looked at her as if she had.

He looked at her the way she’d always hoped someone would—not
as a victim of something terrible, but as a warrior who’d fought her way to
him. He looked with love and awe and all those good things, and then just when
she was starting to feel he’d stared too long he said the best possible words
she could think of.

“Why did you ever think you had to hide from me?” he asked,
as though it had always been that simple. She could have told him from day one;
she didn’t have to veil it all in half-truths about being inexperienced and
wanting to go slow. It was obvious now, and not only because he was saying this
thing and looking at her with the same warmth and desire he always seemed to
feel.

There were also the words he then added, as simple as a
handshake.

“Did you really think I didn’t know?” he asked, and for a
second she couldn’t decide what to feel. On the one hand there was this huge
swell of heartbreaking relief, to know he didn’t care and probably wouldn’t ask
now. If he already knew, he wouldn’t ask about it. And then on the other, there
was a twinge of the most delicious embarrassment she’d ever felt in her life.

Of course he had guessed.

How would anyone not have guessed? She wasn’t a master
criminal, living by her wits alone. She was a fumbling, bumbling idiot who didn’t
realize simple, obvious things like, “You limp, honey. You wince without even
knowing you’re doing it. Do you know how many times I’ve felt as though I
accidentally hurt you, and wanted to pull away? And yet you never say. That’s
the worst part. You’d rather pretend it didn’t hurt than make a sound of
protest. I’ve sometimes thought I could be popping stitches I didn’t even know
were there, without you telling me a single thing about it.”

“There aren’t any stitches. It happened…it happened a long
time ago.”

She wished she didn’t have to lie in amongst all of this
truth. But then, she was giving him so much here. She was standing in front of
him in just her bra and panties, shrouded by the dim light of her bedroom but
still completely visible. He could still see the rope-scar around one of her
legs and the place where the metal had gone through her middle. There were the
burns over her right shoulder like a piece of medieval armor, weird lines
around her upper arm where something white-hot had held on.

It was a lot, a lot, a lot.

She hoped it was enough.

Thank God he let it be enough.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said, and though showing him
should have been the hardest part—though telling him should have seemed easy
compared to this—somehow she was still relieved. She wasn’t sure why but it was
there, buried at the bottom of her. But there it was—a certain pleasure to know
that she still wouldn’t have to reveal the worst thing.

They could just have this.

Oh, this, this.

“You just have to believe in me. Believe that I won’t let
you down—that I won’t walk away because you think you can’t give me
something
.
You give me
everything
. You’ve given me peace and comfort and love. Just
let me give the same back to you.”

And in that moment, she really thought she could. It wasn’t
hard to let him come to her, and touch her, and take off those last items of
clothing. On the contrary—there was a kind of bliss in it she’d never felt
before. She closed her eyes and just drifted on a wave of his careful
caresses…the way he stroked the back of his hand down over the burns on her
shoulder and collarbone, so soft it barely sparked that prickly feeling, so
tender it made her ache right through the middle.

But best of all…there was no curiosity in it. No lingering
on her scars as though they needed prettying up and paying apologetic attention
to. He touched the rest of her in the exact same way, with that same sweet
deliberation and barely checked lust. His breath caught as his knuckles brushed
over the smooth slope of her left breast, and there was barely any difference
when he found the knotted star just left of the rich curve of her right hip.

Everything was given the same weight.

And that weight seemed to be dragging him down, down, down
into the depths of his desire. By the time he got to her underwear he was
flushed and feverish, clearly trying to be patient but getting pretty close to
failing. He went to ease that scrap of cotton down her legs, and somehow wound
up yanking a little instead. And when he realized what he was doing—that he was
getting too hot and too eager—he cursed at himself and drew his hands back.

It didn’t help him, however. He still didn’t seem to know
how to be careful and passionate at the same time. After a second of flummoxed
indecision he finally settled on tearing his jacket off, as though his jacket
was the thing causing all the problems. It wasn’t her body or the situation or
the fact that he was finally touching her bare. It was the suede, the goddamn
suede. “I fucking hate suede,” he said.

Though she felt pretty sure the suede had nothing to do with
the way he leaned forward to press his face between her legs. That was all him,
from the desperate way he reached up to cup her ass as he did it, to the sound
he made once his mouth was against the light fuzz that covered her pussy. She
knew that sound so well now—lost somewhere between a moan and a sigh of relief—and
it thrilled her.

But not as much as the feel of where he currently was. She’d
thought she was ready for it, sure that the touches they’d shared through
clothing were pretty close to the real thing. How different could they possibly
be? How could she have known the answer was
extremely different in every
possible way
?

Because it was, oh it was. She seemed to have a thousand new
nerve endings on the surface of her skin, and the slightest movement from him
set them all firing. He turned his head and she nearly collapsed, and not just
because of the place he was brushing. There was also the near-cutting sensation
of his stubble over that tender skin. The hint of his lips, all soft and near
slippery.

And then it wasn’t a hint at all. His tongue slid over the
seam between the lips of her pussy, seeking entrance—at first softly, gently,
but then with an insistence that made her shiver. He wanted those lips to part
for him…and they did. Slowly, slowly they did. They eased open the way a
tightly clenched fist might, as someone soothes it.

And it felt like that too. She had the sense of being
stroked into calmness, of being teased and caressed until she surrendered
completely. He didn’t push or force or grab—he waited until she simply had to
part her legs a little more, and maybe lean toward him a little bit. Then once
she had, once she was trembling and impatient…

That
was when he decided to lick a little deeper.

Only a little, she thought, yet it felt like a lot. The tip
of his tongue just barely grazed her clit, but the flood of sensation it
produced was almost too much for her to take. Her legs really did give in then,
though it didn’t matter much anymore. He had hold of her, he had hold of her.
His hands were on her hips now, steadying her.

He was always steadying her. Just when she thought she was
going to fall, there he was. And he kept being there, no matter what she did.
She wound up sort of crouched over him, breathless and shaking, one hand
twisted in his hair.

He didn’t care. He kept licking her in that good, good way—in
these short, sharp shocks that made her buzz all thick and nice—and when she
said his name he did it faster. He did it with more intent, as though the sound
of those two syllables spurred him on. “Bernie,” she said, “Bernie,” and
suddenly he was ravenous.

She could feel him kissing at her now, rather than just the
little licks. His plump lips parted and slid around all sorts of things, making
everything wetter and hotter and messier. Oh she was so incredibly, undeniably
messy. She could feel it all slipping and sliding beneath the stroke of his
tongue and the press of his mouth, could feel it spreading outward over her thighs.

It was probably all over his face; he was probably
swallowing the taste.

But the strange thing was—she didn’t care. If anything, the
idea only excited her more. She thought of his chin all glossy with her
slipperiness and felt a surge of squirming arousal, half embarrassment and half
sweetness and all perfection. She was going to come if he carried on this way.
She was going to come if he carried on any way. He could have clicked his
fingers, if she was being honest.

Though she was glad he decided on sliding them between her
legs instead. That was a much better way of finishing things off—and it
did
finish them. The second she felt him just sort of easing his thumb over her
tightly clenched pussy, stroking rather than pressing inward but with that
hint
…
That hint of actually doing it…

She went over for that hint. She imagined him there, sliding
in and out of her, stroking and finding all kinds of interesting things, and
everything just disappeared over the edge of pleasure. She plummeted headfirst
into a shivering, insane maze of intense bursts and sudden pulses, and even
that seemed like an understatement.

It just wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced before.
She’d touched herself there, of course. She’d let her fingers slide in just a
little, egged on by curiosity and something like excitement. But none of it had
even remotely gotten her close to this.

His hand on her through her nightie hadn’t gotten her close
to this. That last orgasm seemed like a pale imitation compared to the
full-bodied gut punch of this thing, and not just because of the sheer
intensity of it. There was also the length, dear God the length, oh Jesus no
why wasn’t it stopping?

It wasn’t stopping. He’d pulled back a bit—he’d had to,
because she had hold of his hair and she really wanted him away—but it was
still going on. It was squeezing her and squeezing her now, like some great
giant’s hand that wanted to wring every bit of pleasure out of her body. By the
time it was done she was a wet rag, completely boneless and ready to accept
anything that he might want to do with her.

So it was lucky, really, that his main urge was to pick her
up and spread her out over the bed. And even after he’d done that, stroking and
petting her into a peaceful laxity as he went, he didn’t go straight into
something else. He didn’t let his own obvious desire overwhelm him.

He went slowly, oh so slowly. He stood at the end of the
bed, watching her gradually come back to herself. Then once she was breathing a
little more steadily, he started peeling off his own clothes. One at a time,
like before—like he knew she wanted to look and didn’t mind obliging.

Yeah, he obliged all right. He shimmied his jeans down his
legs and lingered over the stretch that helped him take his t-shirt off, and
when he went for his socks he bent in a very particular sort of way. He put on
a real show, in a way that should have pleased her. Yet strangely, it didn’t
seem to.

Instead she thought of how many times he must have posed in
his life. How many photo shoots he had probably done, with someone telling him
how to stand and be and what to do to look just right. To look like Holden
Stark, she thought—and that pretty much sealed it.

She closed her eyes.

She closed her eyes and just said his name—his real name.
And once he was still and silent and probably confused, she added the rest. “I
just want to hear you be the person you are,” she told him, then waited for a
response. She waited and waited until she was certain he hadn’t understood,
every word she’d said suddenly nonsense in her head. What kind of thing was
being
the person you are
?