Page 5 of A Dark Fall

I lift my head, but she’s turned away from me, focused on the hole in my neck—the one inflicted by some violent, irrational bitch who is way more within my league. I wonder if it’s fitting that Sharon fucks me up and I get to be fixed by this pristine, classy, elegant wet dream.

The first look I get of her is the side of her neck and face and its smooth, flawless, cared-for pale skin. It makes me wonder if her whole body is like that. I picture her sprawled naked on my bed, and then I picture fucking her from behind, hard.

I wonder what she smells like right there, in the crook of her neck. I want to smooth her hair back before touching my mouth to it. It’s reddish, I notice, her hair. A rich, deep red, not brown, and it’s redder where the light hits it. It’s tied up at the sides, but it’s long and thick and falls way past her shoulders. I wonder how that smells too. Her nose is small and turned in at the end. Her fucking nose? Seriously? When have I ever looked at a chick’s nose? When have I ever looked at a chick’s hands either? Her mouth is pink and set in a straight line as she concentrates. I picture it wrapped around my cock.

Now, that image I don’t feel bad about, because I could die at any moment, and having that as my final image is only fair. Her sucking my cock with that mouth. Jesus fucking Christ. I’ll think about that later, in the shower, assuming I live through this.

Then, because I’m staring at her like a tool and not answering, she looks around at me.

And it’s over.

Something flashes across her eyes, and they widen for a split second before relaxing again. They’re smart and warm and a bright pale green color I’ve never seen before. She has a small beauty mole under her right eye as well as a sprinkling of pale freckles on her nose and forehead. Perfection. She’s fucking majestic. I want her.

More than that, I want her to want me back. I want her to look at me as if she needs me. The way I normally wish women wouldn’t. Fuck, I’d do anything to get her to look at me like that.

My heart feels as if it’s going to beat out of my chest, and I am hard for her. Fully fucking hard. I’m staring at a fully clothed woman who’s sewing my neck back together, and I have a fucking hard-on. I laugh inwardly at how pathetic it is. How pathetic I am.

The longer I stare at her, the clearer it becomes that I have no fucking clue how to go about getting a girl like her. It’s not as if I mind a bit of hard work, but what would make a woman like her even look at me? Unless I’m bleeding all over her in her place of work, of course.

Getting what I want has never been much of an issue for me though. And if I don’t get it, then normally, I take it.

Yeah, I’ll get her. Fuck it—I might even keep her for a bit.

I need a fucking plan.

For the entire drive home, my mind relives the events in HD. What if I weren’t around? Would he have bled to death on the street? Do I care? Why the hell didn’t he go to a hospital? The reasons I come up with make me feel uneasy and out of my depth, as though I’ve been involved in something unwholesome.

At some point between getting off the A23 and reaching Shere, I decide not to mention it to the other doctors in the morning. Whether it’s the threat from the aggressive one or something else, I’m not sure, but since I don’t know who they are or what happened, there isn’t a whole lot to tell anyway. If anyone asks whether I happened to treat a bleeding man at my drop-in, then of course I won’t lie, but I also won’t be sending out a group email either.

As my mind flits back to the memory of the attractive one I sewed back together and how he looked at me, I start to feel warmer. I reach out and turn the blower down to the coldest end. Try to think about a glass of wine instead.

It’s just before 10:00 p.m. when I get home, and Fred starts meowing hungrily at me as soon as I walk through the front door.

“I’m sorry I’m so late, baby. Are you the hungriest cat in the world? Aw, I bet you are. Mummy is sorry.” I pick him up to kiss him on the nose as I stroke his tortoiseshell fur.

The moment I put him down, he bounds enthusiastically into the kitchen to purr against the cupboard that stores his food.

I feed Fred too much before going to the fridge to see what I can salvage for myself. There are a few slices of leftover chicken on a covered plate from yesterday, which I uncover and start to nibble on before pouring myself a cold glass of chardonnay.Then I stick the empty plate in the dishwasher before going upstairs to run a bubble bath. There’s little chance of me sleeping tonight without the aid of wet heat and wine, and by the time I climb out of the bath an hour later, my eyes are heavy and my bones languid and soft.

Boiled, pink, and too hot, I crawl under the duvet as Fred jumps up, stretches out, and curls himself into a tight little furball at my feet. My eyes close almost instantly after I switch out the light, but before my consciousness fades, an image of a hard, tattooed body, green eyes, and full, kissable lips floats across my mind.

The rest of the week is truly remarkable in its banality. So banal it begins to feel as if I imagined the whole episode on Tuesday night. Maybe it never actually happened, and I invented it purely to add some excitement into my life. Which wouldn’t be unreasonable since excitement is something my life distinctly lacks at the moment. No one mentions a local knife attack, and no policemen turn up at the surgery asking any questions about it either, which makes it far easier to stick to my decision not to mention it to anyone.

I say “easier” when, actually, I feel heavy from it, guilty even, as though I’ve committed some terrible crime and I’m going back to the scene of it over and over again.

Exactly a week after my run-in with my dangerously attractive patient, Sam asks me out. I get the sense it’s something he’s been working up to. It has the feel of something practiced about it. Sam’s adorable—one of those genuinely nice guys. As well as being cute, smart, and a doctor, he also has a lot in common with me. We’re a perfect fit. So I wonder why I’m not more excited by the prospect of going out with him. Maybe it’s the fact we work together. It’s never a good idea to mix the two, but how else do you meet prospective partners if not at work? Certainly not in nightclubs or bars, where everything is a line or a come-on for the sole purpose of getting you into bed.

At the end of another monotonous week, the weekend finally arrives, and with it, the first night out with the girls in a while. I’m mainly a hermit homebody these days, but this is a chance to catch up with Robyn’s hen-night girls before her wedding. We’ve also managed to swag invites to the opening night of a new “nameless” club in town via my brother.

During the week, the invites came by special delivery to the surgery with no return address or sender details. But since they’re addressed to Dr. Marlowe, with a VIP booth and access to a free bar, we are most certainly going.

Nick’s job in PR comes with a wealth of freebies, which he often passes my way. Three months ago, it was movie premiere tickets where Rob and I sat next to the members of a boy band we’d never heard of. The film was based on a comic book and terrible, but the after-party was fun.

I still haven’t decided whether to tell Robyn about what happened with the hot tattooed guy last week. I’m also not sure why I’m still thinking about him, or at what point he went from probable criminal to “dangerously attractive” to “hot tattooed guy” either. Probably around the time the whole incident began to seem like a dream and I started to fantasize about him.

Last night, I had the briefest, most fleeting sex dream about him. It was gone before it began, but I woke up thinking about him. Then I spent the rest of the day falling into daydreams about what might happen if I were to come out of the surgery and see him standing there one night. He’d tell me he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about me and demand I go somewhere private with him. The blush that hits my cheeks as I imagine myself on top of him in the back seat of his car somewhere causes my stomach to clench almost painfully, a soft moan escaping my lips.

I’m sure Robyn would champion my daydreaming over a hot and dangerous stranger; she’s desperate for me to get over Ben and move on. And since it’s completely safe, as this is a man I’m never going to see again, I decide at some point tonight—after several glasses of champagne—I’ll tell her all about it.