Zoe Kemp (lightningseed) wrote in darker_london, @ 2017-10-23 01:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | cai finch, zoe kemp |
Anywhere the sleep dust lies (Zoe & Cai)
It was a little after eleven, and Casa Rosa was quiet. The rain fell across the window and down the weatherboards, and Zoe’s hot water bottle and the spare blankets were doing their job of keeping her warm. She was staying in the spare room, as she had done a couple of times before, and it wasn’t just so that she could put off explaining her face to Liz even though that was a not insignificant part of it. She didn’t want to leave yet. She didn’t want to leave Cai.
She moved slowly up the stairs, keeping to the edges because they seemed less likely to creak. Just because she hadn’t heard any movement in the house didn’t mean that everyone was asleep. Nonnie had a kind of supernatural awareness about her that meant Zoe wouldn’t have been completely surprised if she’d stepped out of the storage room opposite Cai’s, asking if perhaps Zoe had gotten lost. And Faye and Roe – well, Faye was too excited by Zoe’s presence and Roe was too suspicious, so Zoe was also prepared for a creak in a floorboard to bring them both out into the hall.
The only one she wasn’t anticipating was Dom, which meant, half way up the stairs, she turned quickly over her shoulder and expected to see him.
He wasn’t there. The hall below was empty. And Cai was right – the curtains really did look out of place.
Lightly, she touched his door with her fingertips and slowly, she creaked it open. She didn’t want to knock, as if everyone else in this house might have supersonic hearing. “Cai?” she whispered.
The warm light from his bedside lamp filled his room. “What’s wrong?” he asked, as she slipped through the doorway and closed the door behind her, gently, till it clicked.
Zoe thought it might be the first time in her life – or at least the first time in London, that she had said, genuinely and without sarcasm: “Nothing’s wrong.”
He sat up and shuffled over slightly, in his bed. His stomach was roving to new and exciting places in his body. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about her sneaking into his room, but he hadn’t actually expected it. He’d just been happy knowing she was somewhere on the floor below, happy that he was going to get to have breakfast with her before school. “Do you want…?” he asked, pulling his duvet back a little.
Zoe nodded, taking a handful of the duvet. It was his big fat dark duvet, covered in constellations, that she’d first seen when Cai had given her and Danny a tour of the house, that she’d sat on many times, sometimes because she was recovering from a painful vision, sometimes because she was laughing too hard to stand up. She’d never been underneath it, though.
She slid in now, pulling it up over her shoulders, and lay her head on the pillow, facing him. Cai lay down beside her, facing her too.
“It’s been a weird sort of day,” Zoe whispered, which meant Cai could stop trying to think of something to say because all he felt he could manage right now was ‘hi…’
“A better sort of weird than I’ve had for a while,” he said, finding the courage to reach out and touch her, brushing her hair away from the edge of her bandage. “Apart from the bit where the footpath disfigured my girlfriend, I didn’t like that bit.”
My girlfriend. Zoe absorbed these words, turning them round in her head to see how she felt about them spoken out loud. Good, she thought. Scarily good – scary and good, like her feelings had always been for him, but this time good had giddy-safe-grateful on its side, and scary wasn’t winning anymore. “Disfigured,” she scoffed, and slapped him on the shoulder. “The barefaced cheek of you.”
Cai’s smile was on high beam. “I really like you, Zoe.”
Zoe’s smile faded a little, but it wasn’t fading away to sadness, just thought, and Zoe rarely smiled when she was thinking. “I don’t really know how,” she said, searching both his face and her own feelings at the same time. “But you kinda make me like myself too.”
“Result,” whispered Cai, and reached out to lace his fingers with hers.
They whispered together for a long time, interspersed with periods of muffled giggles, or long, silent, thoughtful moments, all of it against the backdrop of the rain outside. By the time Zoe had stopped waiting for one of Cai’s family to bust the door down, she was spending more time talking with her eyes sleepily shut than open, and a little while after that, Cai snored gently in the middle of one of her sentences. She smiled against the pillow, and let herself sink the rest of the way into sleep as well.
They both dreamed that night of salt air, and a cool, wild wind on their faces.