This is Not a Love Story (13 page)

“Remee Lavelle.” Julian doesn’t falter in his lie. The surname is his, not mine. He glances at me, checking to see if I mind.

“Age?”

“Seventeen.” Never stretch the lie too far from the truth.

“You’re seventeen?”

“What? No, he’s seventeen. He’s mute. Can’t you see he’s the one who needs the fucking doctor?” Julian’s knuckles are white as they grip against the counter. The receptionist stares.

“
He
needs to see a doctor,” he repeats a little more calmly.

“Please step back from the counter,” she states icily.

Julian lowers his hands and grits his teeth as I sag against his side. It would be so easy to just slide down to the floor. I wrap my arms around my chest as another wave of coughing hits. I’m so fucking tired. At least we’re not outside in that Russian winter, I try to console myself; at least we’re together. Even if I’m burning up like a comet, at least he is the cool space that surrounds me.

W
E
LEAN
against the wall between the male and female toilet doors, waiting. I cough into Julian’s warm embrace, let his arms envelop me. People shuffle a safe distance away. Someone complains, and I’m handed a packet of tissues. I spit out blood. Julian presses his head against mine and closes his eyes.

I feel so distant from myself, each moment a still from a film, the continuity fucked. And sometimes the sound is gone too, and I am left in such yawning silence I think it might swallow me whole.

H
OURS
LATER
we’re no longer waiting. A tired, black-haired doctor pulls back the curtain on our tiny cubicle.

“You have a slight fever but it’s just a chest infection. The X-rays have come back clear—no fluid, no shadows. I can give you antibiotics for it.”

“What about the blood?” Julian’s voice wavers, and he grips my hand as he says this. I feel the strong pulse of his wrist as it presses against mine. The warmth of his skin.

“It’s normal. You’ve been coughing awhile?” The doctor looks at me. I nod. His gown rustles as he sits down on the end of the narrow bed and sighs. “But, if you stay out on the streets, it’s only going to get worse.” He digs around in his pocket and hands Julian a piece of folded paper. “This is the number of a street shelter in Victoria. They have space for you.”

Julian stares at the number scrawled across the paper and then folds it neatly along the creases and passes it back. The both of us must look so young and naive under these glaring hospital lights.

My body is wracked with another coughing fit just as Julian says, “We’re not going to any shelter.”

“Then your friend is going to suffer with this cough that can easily be cured, and he is going to end up with pneumonia.”

Wearily the doctor shakes his head. I can tell he’s sick of people like us, people he thinks are refusing to be helped. But it’s not as simple as that.

As soon as he leaves, Julian turns around and takes my hands in his. “I don’t know what to do,” he whispers helplessly.

I lean forward and fall into his arms, trying to breathe in through the rough material of his jumper to stop coughing.

“My mum died of lung disease,” he murmurs into my hair, his words making me shiver the way he presses his lips against the feather-soft blackness that now covers my scalp, despite the seriousness of his revelation.

Blindly, I reach for my pad, reluctant to pull away. He’s never spoken about his family at all, and because I don’t like to talk about my own mother, I’ve never asked him.

Is that why you left home?
I write.

He glances at my words and shakes his head before burying his face against my shoulder.

“I was nine. She used to cough up blood, and I used to hold her and try and stop it. I thought if I could just look after her well enough, she would be okay. But she wasn’t.”

Lightly, I trace each separate bone of his spine through his jumper, feel him lean into me, his breathing deepen. He likes to be touched like this, slowly stroked and explored.

“I’m scared they’re going to take you away from me if we go to the shelter,” he whispers. “But I can’t go back out there with you and make you sicker.”

J
ULIAN
LEAVES
me to steal some blankets from the laundry deep in the cellars under the hospital. He always seems to know where to find places like this—as though some sort of urban survival manual has been uploaded into his brain.

I wait nervously on the cellar steps, smothering my mouth with my sleeve to silence my cough, and listening out for his quiet footfalls.

The hospital is a huge Victorian monolith, and although brightly lit and painted shiny yellowing white, I can smell the damp, blackened bricks a paint’s thickness away from my fingertips. I can feel the freezing Russian wind as it forces its way through the thin windowpanes and howls down the corridors and stairwells like a wolf… or a ghost.

A whisper, and my name hangs in the air. I glance around behind me, shivering. The door at the top of the cellar steps bangs lightly against the wall in the breeze.

There is no one there.

“Hey, baby.”

Julian’s voice has me near jumping out of my skin. I didn’t hear his approach at all.

His gentle hand steadies me.

“You look spooked. You okay?”

Fuck.

Oh, I’m fine
, I think.
I’m just hearing things
.

People say you can hallucinate with a fever, though I no longer feel particularly feverish.

I try to smile at him. He leans in and softly kisses the side of my mouth. And I do smile, genuinely, my mouth against his for a fraction of a second before I need to cough again.

“Sorry I took so long. I had to search to find the clean blankets.”

He reaches down to the pile at his feet and hands me a couple.

They’re so much heavier and thicker than the ones we left behind on the bench.

“Didn’t want to pick ones people might have died in or anything.”

I shake my head,
no
, because that would be bad, like an omen or something.

How do we get out?
I sign, after I’ve pulled the blankets around my shoulders and settled under their weight.

“Well, we can go this way.”

He points up the cellar steps, back the way we came.

“Though people might wonder where we’re going with these.”

His fingers tug at the blanket around my shoulders.

“Or we can get out this way.”

I watch him incline his head briefly toward the dimly lit cellar and instantly think,
no fucking way
.

“It’s not far,” he says softly, his eyes catching the low shine of the lights and glowing warmly. That way he has of looking at me, as though there is nothing else on this earth he would rather rest his eyes on, it sometimes makes me wonder if I could ever have felt like this about anyone else, whether I would have lived, but my life would have been forever incomplete without him in it.

I
T
’
S
NOT
so cold down here wrapped up, but I’d rather be wandering the freezing streets. I don’t like it. At all.

There is a central corridor that runs through the cellar, doors coming off either side leading to rooms full of equipment or rubbish. There doesn’t seem to be an end to it, despite Julian’s reassurance that it wasn’t far.

We see a porter in one of the side rooms moving trolleys. I stop. Trolleys with mounds of something other than blankets on. Oh God.

This is where they take the dead!
I sign hurriedly.

Cautiously, Julian steps back toward the doorway and takes a closer took. He nods, he looks a little pale.

How far?
I sign as he takes my hand.

After maybe a quarter of a mile of corridor, we come to a short flight of stone stairs, at the top of which is a door with an emergency release bar that I suspect leads to the street outside.

I’m ready to run up those stairs to get out of here, but Julian stops, lets go of my hand, and edges toward a small dark anteroom to one side. He disappears inside. After a moment he leans in the doorway and says, awkwardly without really meeting my eyes, “Hey, why don’t we stop in here for the night?”

He’s never done this before, planned something, planned to
do
something he knew I wouldn’t be overjoyed about. He’s usually so straightforward, so
clear
, the truth shining through him like sunlight through glass.

And I can see now he’s unsure of my reaction.

Reluctantly, I peer past him into the room. It’s small and empty—concrete floor, concrete walls, door on the back wall leading to God-knows-where. I know he only wants to find shelter. I know he’s scared.

I nod without enthusiasm, because I’m scared too, of this place.

The door on the far wall is locked. We huddle in the corner farthest away from it and cover ourselves in blankets. Julian leans against the wall, and I sit between his legs with my back resting against him. His arms envelop me. One hand rests against the cool skin of my chest beneath my top and strokes soothing circles across my ribs when I cough.

It feels nice, and it’s starting to turn me on, especially when he brushes his fingers over my nipple like that—almost, but not quite carelessly. My breath hitches, and I shift uncomfortably, feeling myself grow hard in my jeans.

“When do you have to take your medicines, baby?”

Warm breath whispers against my neck, and I lean my head back to feel more of him, to tell him without words where I want to feel his lips, his tongue.

He’s so good at distracting me.

I wish I could forget about this fucking cough, though.

“Remee… baby…,” he whispers, and a rough wetness licks the ridge of my ear.

Fuck
, I think weakly as I melt against him. I am his. Completely.

I spread my bent legs open against his, push my hips back and up, the tight friction of my jeans almost painful as I rub against them.

I start to cough. And we slow it down. Julian’s fingers trail slow delicate lines along my ribs, all the way from the back to the front, and then he’s dipping down beneath them, ghosting his hand across my stomach, causing me to suck in breath after breath as he goes lower and lower until I’m coughing uncontrollably again and ready to cry with frustration.

“Baby,” he whispers as he presses soft kisses down my neck. “I just wanna do this for you. I just want you to lie back against me and relax, okay?”

Okay
, I sign into the darkness.

I’m malleable as clay right now.

He kisses my neck and hair while his gentle fingers trace the outline of my erection through my jeans. Nothing compares to this feeling of being so completely surrounded.

With one hand still stroking my chest, he deftly undoes my button and zip and slips his hand beneath my pants. I arch up into his touch as his fingers tangle in the hair at the base of my erection, the side of his hand rubbing firmly up and down its length. He likes to touch me everywhere, reaching lower between my thighs, cupping my balls, feeling their weight in his hand. I’m so supersensitized and wide open, I lean my head right back, let my eyes close, and gasp when his mouth sucks on the tender skin between my neck and my shoulder.

“Come for me,” he groans as he grips me tight and pumps my cock in his fist.

M
ORNING
ARRIVES
,
and we are woken early by the whirring hum of a milk float dropping crates off somewhere nearby. Julian pulls me tight against him, breathing deeply.

The room is still dark, and my body craves the lighting dawn, the way the sky cracks brightly along the horizon and spills over.

I tug at him, and sleepily we gather the blankets and make our way up the steps and out into the icy backstreet. Almost immediately I’m bent in two, my lungs convulsing, and I’m coughing and coughing and coughing. Julian pulls me against him, my head to his chest so I can breathe in through the warm fabric of his jumper.

“That shelter was in Victoria, right?” he says softly. “Let’s go.”

T
HE
SHELTER
is in an old factory building, the accommodation set out over four huge floors. Each massive factory window is made up of smaller panes of obscured glass, so you can’t see in or out. In between bouts of coughing, I lean my head back and try and take in the enormity of the place. Above the roof I can see the dawning sky is going to be bluer than it’s been for weeks, the air clear and colder than ice.

Julian slips his hand around my elbow and tugs me gently.

“Come on,” he whispers.

The double doors are hard to push open, and Julian lets go of me to place both hands on the glass and push. A cloud of warm chemical air engulfs us as we step inside the reception area. There are posters everywhere, papering the walls: faces, help lines, drug advice. I don’t look at them. They make me feel hopeless. They don’t reflect the truth at all. Not one of them can help us. No one can help us. Not in the way we need to be helped.

Even though it’s early, early morning, the reception is manned by a middle-aged man in a tracksuit. He looks more like some sort of night guard than a receptionist. Overweight and hard faced, his demeanor suggests we don’t want to fuck with him.

Julian walks over to talk to him, leaving me by the door to avoid staring at the walls.

This place is bigger than any we’ve been in before, and we’ve both stayed in shelters, albeit separately.

Bigger and more organized.

There is space for 256 in need, and there is always need. It is always full.

The man doesn’t care that we’re together—he gives us beds on different floors.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess it wasn’t this.

I walk with wavering steps to sit on the metal stairs a short corridor away and cough miserably into my thin coat.