Running Scared

I'm flabbergasted. I can feel my mouth opening and shutting, as if willing the words to come out, but nothing happens. I'm speechless. Never do we invite each other round to our flats, that fear always in the back of our minds, of watchful government eyes in unseen cameras, the worrisome conclusions that people may arrive at.

"Look - I'll walk in first. I don't want to force you to come in but I'd like you to." he tells me, fumbling with his keys, dropping them twice. I'm nearly overcome with pity, nearly rush over to help him but I don't.

When he gets the door open, he stands just inside, giving me enough room to enter if I want to. He waits there, hugging the bag into his chest.

I'm not sure when my feet decide to move but I suddenly become aware of crossing the threshold, of briefly glancing at the metal plaque with him name emblazoned on the door. I don't know why I'm doing it, leaving the safety of my home and the bliss of a warm bath to enter Grahame's flat - maybe it's for the same reason why he asked me in to begin with? Maybe we've been through a lot tonight, have realised the potential of communication? Something we've never encountered before; the delight of just talking to one another, of being with someone. I'm reluctant to let it go so soon and I know he feels the same.

In the safety of his own home, he transforms. He seems upbeat, a side of him I never knew existed even when we lived at the orphanage. This is the first time I see his face change from the usual defeated grimaces and I secretly admit to myself that it suits him. I find myself wishing that he would smile more.

"How about a celebratory drink?" he says with an astonishingly easy grin, holding a glass bottle from the bag aloft, so happy that I chose to follow him.

Drinking is something that I do not enjoy doing but like everyone else, I drink when I can because it is the only thing left for us to do. The ultimate rebellion. You drink until you bleed out your misery with every tear, every bead of sweat, every drop of blood you lose in your drunken stupor. Tomorrow is another day but the course of your actions remain the same. Drink, cry, fight, bleed, sleep. We are alive but barely. The government have us running scared and they revel in it.

We don't bother with glasses, just drink straight from the bottle. I grab it from his outstretched hand and take a sip, feeling it burn its way down my throat. Determinedly, I swallow another mouthful, resisting the urge to spit it back out. It's strong, eye-wateringly so. Maybe it's a special request to have it so potent; it's enough to knock you out, to make you forget.

"Hey, save some for me." Graham laughs, taking it from me. The sound of his laughter is a marvel to me, I manage to stop myself from asking to hear it again. He takes a larger mouthful of the drink than me; half the liquor has already gone.

Without having the bottle to hold onto, I let my hands fall uselessly to my sides and I start to realise how uncomfortable I am standing in his room without the distraction of the bottle. I take to staring around his flat, silently thinking how similar it is to my own in way of furnishings. The place is almost empty, besides a spindly chair and table, a badly tarnished desk, the unmade bed that I can see through a doorway leading into his bedroom. He must have a small kitchen area that I can't see because he's vanishing behind another door with his arms full of his share of the liquor (I let him have my bottle), the sounds of cupboards opening and closing echoing around the quiet room. The only thing here in abundance is piles of spiral-bound books.

Curious, I move toward them, assured that Grahame is still putting away his spare bottles of alcohol in hidden places. There's one notebook lying open on the table, a pencil sharpened to the point of non-existence in the crease. Despite only having had two swigs of the drink, I already feel woozy; it's hard to keep myself from swaying on the spot as I crouch down to examine the scrawl written on the yellowing pages.

The writing is practically unintelligible but I pick out words, a few phrases, even a sentence. Always alone...going on a run - I want to...what do we live for when we can't even express ourselves? I've lost who I am.

These are serous thoughts to record. I want to erase them, rid his room of any trace of them, burn all the books until they're nothing but ashes. I want to protect him.

Then I see it, the photograph on his desk, tucked beneath the notebook. Pinching the corner between my thumb and forefinger, I slide it out until I can see the whole of it, to be stared back at by every single unsmiling face in the picture. I recognise it instantly; a snapshot of us all at the orphanage, taken in a fleeting moment by a headstrong worker. I pick Grahame out in the crowd, his dark hair easily spotted among the mostly blonde and brunette group. Even then, he was beautiful in his own way, destined to be a heartbreaker if the world had allowed it. I scan the faces of the other children, struggle to remember most of them. And there, further along the line, there I am; skinny arms, wide-eyed, with pale blonde hair in pigtails. I haven't changed much, except perhaps my hair has subtly gone darker over the years. Same skinny arms, same green, owlish eyes. I don't know how Grahame came by this photograph, probably sneaked it out of the drawers of the workers office one day. Why did he want it though?

His voice makes me jump and I spin, seeing him framed in the doorway. I don't know if he has seen me reading from his notebook or stooping over the photograph but he doesn't mention it.

"How do you like it?" he asks, sweeping his arm out towards the room.

"It's different...but familiar." I answer, wrapping my arms around my torso self-consciously. Being here unnerves me somehow. Maybe it's because I'm not used to it?

"Wanna go for a walk? We won't go far, promise." he suggests, probably picking up on my discomfort, wanting to make me feel easy around him.

This doesn't seem the most sensible of decisions after our meeting with Jones but I find myself nodding enthusiastically, wanting to get out of the stuffy room as soon as possible. Besides, examining his few personal possessions, seeing the stacks upon stacks of notebooks filled with his daily thoughts, makes me feel as if I'm getting to know him more than I want to. Even thinking of that photograph makes me feel strange.

He brings a bottle with him and we pass it back and forth between us without speaking. Somewhere on the nineteenth floor, we finish it. It shows, too. We no longer care about keeping quiet, seeing who can jump the furthest down the stairs. It goes well until Grahame slams into a wall. I've never felt this free in my life.

Our bodies fuelled with illegal liquor, we stagger through the streets, keeping to shadows and taking short cuts through alleyways, speaking in hushed voices that still seem too loud. No Enforcer crosses our path.

We step out into the beam of a streetlight and with bleary eyes, gaze up at the boarded windows of a deserted warehouse. Grahame stumbles forward, almost falling into the road, moving closer to the building.

I can detect danger in this, even through the fog that the alcohol has cast over me but it's not as urgent as it should be. Shaking off the muted anxiety, I hurry after Grahame, wobbling in as straight a line as I can. When I catch up with him, he's at the entrance. The door is broken, hanging off its hinges. We look at each other with lazy grins on our faces. I find enough sense in me to string a half-hearted warning together.

"We shouldn't be here."

The slur in my voice kills any affect the words may have had on Grahame, makes it sound like I'm merely joking around. He belches, making me giggle as if it's the funniest thing in the world, and he traps my fingers between his, pulling me with him into the warehouse. The feel of his hand in mine is something bizarre but I don't pull away. Maybe I should.

We don't make it far into the building. The first room, vast and dark, the stench of damp in the air, is where Grahame trips over his own feet and crashes to the floor. My hand still locked in his, I fall with him, my knees crunching against the concrete. There must be pain but I don't feel it; all I can do is laugh hard at the look on Grahame's bemused face. He can't figure out how we ended up on the ground.

I wipe tears from my eyes and find him watching me intently. His eyes, as dark a blue as the deepest part of the ocean, so blue they're almost black, latch onto mine, sucking me in. The laughter dies in my throat, I can still feel the smile pulling at the corners of my mouth but I forget why I was even laughing to begin with. He gropes almost blindly at me, finding my shoulder and leaning his hand heavily on it.

I sober up ever so slightly.

"Grahame - "

"Amelia." he breathes, lurching forward, the alcohol in his system making his movements slow and clumsy. "Millie - please."

The nickname is unknown to me. I've never been close enough to anyone to be given a nickname; Grahame makes it sound like an endearment.

My body seems frozen in this half lying, half sitting position from when we fell. My left arm is leaning against the floor, bracing the rest of my weight, holding me up but Grahame leans over me, dragging himself closer with his hand still clamped on my shoulder. Yet I can't shake the feeling that this is what I want too. I want the release, I can feel the tension in him from the way his fingernails are digging into my skin, wound up like a coil about to spring into action. The need to escape, even for a little. Was this his plan all along when he suggested the walk? I'm not sure.

He seems to be a revelation to me, illuminated in a patch of moonlight. That face which I thought handsome enough before evolves and shifts so that he's so much more; his smiling eyes, the curve of his mouth, the curl in his hair at the nape of his neck, even the scar that has been apart of him for as long as I can remember but never asked how or why. Everything about him is cast into a higher definition, rendering his beauty into something magnificent.

"We're drunk. We should go." I tell him quietly but neither of us breaks away. Besides, are we really even that drunk?

Outside, the wind has picked up and it howls, rattling what little glass is left in the windows of the warehouse. Slowly, his face tilts forward and I can hear his breathing, loud and ragged, warming my cheek. It reminds me of the sound in a seashell when you place it next to your ear, that ferocious sort of roar.

He starts to trail wet kisses down my neck as best as he can with my scarf in the way. I try to shrug him off, fail because I find that I don't really want to. There's a small part of me that's screaming to walk away. This is dangerous, so reckless of me.

"Tell me to stop," he says, as if reading my mind, locking his eyes onto mine. "Tell me and I will."

But then his hands are brushing my cardigan from my shoulders, exposing my arms to the draft; goosebumps rise on my skin, hairs standing on end. My scarf unravels from my neck and slips away in his fingers, which are now sliding into my hair, along my cheeks, across my lips. It's all happening so quickly, so smoothly.

What resolve I had left evaporates. I see my own hands tugging on Grahame's coat, desperate to tear it away from his shoulders. He helps, sits up, shrugs it off, comes back to me, lets me throw his hat aside with my scarf and all those layers I'd pulled on earlier. When I get to his shirt, my hands shake so much that I lose my grip on the buttons and it takes a while before I can get the top one undone. He slides a hand along my arm, over my trembling fingers, does the job much more efficiently. I press my palm against his chest when he tosses the shirt over his shoulder, his heart thumping sporadically under all the muscle and flesh and he inhales sharply at the touch of my hand, making me feel giddy.

I realise that neither of us will stop this.

"You're going to kill us both." I say simply, before letting him push me down so that my spine presses into the concrete. He gives me the softest of smiles.

"Only with your help." he whispers.

Grahame hovers over me, his weight pressing against me and I can't help but feel vulnerable and exposed in this creaky, rattling, windy warehouse. I think he reads it in my expression because his face edges closer until he's whispering into my lips, telling me it's alright - he's here, we're safe, it's fine. He kisses me then, long and lingering, expelling everything other than him from my mind.

Together, we're lost in the darkness, drowning in grief and kisses and longing for what life could have been.