He hadn’t checked the time and wondered now if it was earlier than he’d thought. His heart sank slightly at the prospect, conscious that he’d be tired all through the following day if he didn’t get back to sleep. And he didn’t want to be tired when he got to Garrington, whether Matt was there or not.
He closed the window and lay on the sofa for a while, drifted in and out of sleep a couple of times but only in short bursts. Finally, he put one of the table lamps on and took a book of short stories off the shelf - young American writers - working his way through it until he heard Kate’s alarm go off.
There was a view through the window now, a grey dawn breaking. He put the book down on the coffee table and went to the bedroom, almost walking straight in but stopping himself and knocking first, waiting for her bemused invitation to come in.
She was sitting up in bed with the lamp on, smiling as she said, ‘You’re up early.’ She looked concerned then and added, ‘You didn’t have a bad night?’
‘No, no, just the jet lag kicking in. What sleep I had was really good.’ He liked the way she looked in the mornings, her hair messy and unkempt, her face always surprisingly fresh. ‘Does the no sex rule mean I can’t give you a good morning kiss?’
‘It isn’t a no sex rule. I just think we should be careful about not rushing back into things. We need to take our time. Maybe a good morning kiss might be a nice place to start.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and kissed her briefly, holding her then, burying his head in her hair, the faint scent of oranges on it.
‘Your hair smells of oranges,’ he said, his voice muffled.
‘It’s not natural, just the conditioner I use.’ He laughed and let go of her and she said, ‘Do you really think we could get back together?’
‘Honestly?’ She nodded. ‘I hadn’t thought that much about it until I got here. I’m not saying I hadn’t thought about you. It just seemed like something that was beyond our control.’
‘But?’
‘Yeah, but. But a lot of things have changed recently, with these deaths, the attacks getting worse.’
She was side-tracked by that, looking concerned as she said, ‘Really?’
He nodded.
‘Much worse. So I’ve kind of been thinking for a while now that I needed to do something, put my life in order. Seeing Matt is a part of that but it didn’t occur to me that you might be a part of it too, not until last night.’ He looked apologetic, for being honest, for finding it so hard to see what had always been there. ‘And yet the thing is, it should have occurred to me. That’s why the attacks stopped when I was with you - well, almost stopped - because I was happy.’
She looked troubled, the way she’d looked when she’d first seen him the day before.
‘Alex, I don’t understand.’ She shook her head. ‘Your attacks didn’t stop when you were with me.’
She was wrong. He remembered them stopping, reminding her now.
‘Not completely, but they were few and far between. Insomnia, sure, but the sleep paralysis almost ceased. You must remember that it got better?’
She shook her head again and said, ‘I remember being woken two or three times a week because you’d just had an attack and flown out of the bed, turned the light on. It used to really scare me just to see the way you looked, the fear on your face, your eyes glaring at me like I was a stranger. And I remember times when I’d look at you during the day and it was as if you couldn’t even see me because you were thinking about...’ She paused and added simply, ‘Whatever it is that you dream of.’ He was confused, thrown by the detail of her memory, a memory that should have been familiar to him and yet wasn’t. The attacks had almost stopped when he’d been with her, he’d been certain of that, one of the few certainties he’d had left.
‘I don’t remember. I mean, I remember it differently.’
She didn’t say anything but held him again. He felt like crying but didn’t want to upset her. Nothing was clear anymore, not even the things he’d held onto. He was trying to find out if Matt was a murderer and yet he was losing sight of who he was himself. At the very least, though, meeting Matt would fill in some of the blanks.
It had to help because he was pinning his hopes on it now. Whatever the truth behind these deaths, he had to take the good from it, the chance to face up to his problems and question his own part in them. This conflict of memories with Kate was just more proof, that he couldn’t go on living life as a stranger, to himself, to the people around him, to the women he encountered.
That was the worst of it, that he’d let Natalie go and then Kate. And he was beginning to understand why now, the things Kate had said, that at some deep level he’d never been with them, always holding a part of himself back, one woman in his life poisoning and stunting his relationships with all the others.
13