wanted to do to the rest of their body. You could kiss in public, and it wasn’t necessarily obscene, and as long as you weren’t too worried about being gay-bashed, it was acceptable behaviour.
Andrew’s lips slid across mine and his mouth opened and his fingers eased across my scalp, but this was different. He didn’t pull my body against his, he didn’t do that … thing he did with his tongue. This was slow and gentle and I melted completely under his mouth … his touch.
There were footsteps but he didn’t break the kiss, just kept moulding his lips gently against mine, his breath tickling across my face, his hand warm, cradling my scalp.
My chest felt tight, my hands tingled where they gripped his shoulders, and I moaned against his mouth and slid off the car bonnet and into his arms.
The tingling had slid up my arms now, and I pushed the fingers of one hand up into Andrew’s hair as a car drove past, its headlights bright red through my eyelids for a moment.
Andrew was moaning; I could feel it rumbling through us both, and I clung to him, sliding my hand under his white coat just to feel his body heat.
A car started nearby, the distant roar of a motorbike echoed through the car park, and I was lost. We could stay there forever, kissing, and I would be happy. This wasn’t about sex, even though we were both hard; this was about touching and breathing, and the feel of Andrew’s mouth on my neck, and I was hopelessly lost…
Andrew’s phone rang, and he extricated himself from my arms to answer it, keeping one arm around me still. “That’s Henry’s ring tone,” he said, lifting the phone to his ear. “Hey, kiddo. No, I haven’t left the hospital yet … The stop work meeting went well, yeah, we’re on strike on Monday.”
I could hear Henry’s voice, tinny through the phone, and Andrew chuckled. “No, you don’t need to donate your graphic novels to the strike fund, you maniac … We’ll grab some food on the way to my place. I’m just about to leave now, though I think I have to drop a friend home first … Say, thirty-five minutes.”
He smiled at me and said, “Love you, too,” to the phone.
The fluorescent tube overhead flickered one last time and died. Andrew’s eyes were on my face, lingering on my lips.
“I’m going to miss you tonight,” he whispered. “I want to hold you all night, just to feel you against me.”
The security guard walked past again, with his damn torch, and had the good grace to just keep walking and ignore us in the shadows.
“You need to go,” I said as my hand stroked the back of his neck.
He nodded and stepped back and when his attention was on the lock, I hung onto the car quickly to stop my knees from giving way.
He leaned across the car and undid the passenger door, and I found the presence of mind to walk around the car and clamber in.
We didn’t say anything in the car; he just flicked the radio on and Radio 3 played quietly. He pulled up outside my place, and the lights were on and the door stood open, but there was no music booming. Maybe everyone had gone out.
I went to open the door, and Andrew caught my hand in his. “Sunday night?” he said. “I’ll be taking Henry home Sunday evening. I could pick you up afterwards.”
I leaned across the car and pressed my lips against his.
“Please,” I said, then I got out of the car before anything unfortunate, like begging, happened.
Andrew drove off, and I skirted the pile of bulging black garbage bags on the steps and walked into someone else’s home.
The front hall had been cleared of debris and swept, the lounge room was neat and tidy, there was no bong on the coffee table; even Clive’s mattress looked neat. A middle-aged woman in jeans and T-shirt appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Angie, Heidi’s mum. Who are you?”
Ah, now the whole tidiness thing made sense. We’d been combat-mothered.
“I’m Matthew,” I said. “How’s Heidi going? I didn’t get a chance to see her today.”
Angie had hair the same dark blonde colour as Heidi’s, or at least the same colour as Heidi’s would be if she washed it.
A broad smile spread across her face. “Matthew!” she said.
“You must be the lovely medical student who lives here, who saved Heidi.” She was across the room and hugging me in an instant.
I hugged her back briefly. “It was Andrew who did it, not me,” I said.
She let go of me and smiled knowledgeably. “He’s your boyfriend, right?”
“Um, I guess so.”
She took hold of my elbow and led me into the kitchen. “I made a casserole and a nice pudding. Come and have something to eat, you must be starving.”
There was food, real food, with meat in it, and water-soluble vitamins and fibre and stuff. I hadn’t eaten so well since I’d last been at home at Christmas. Angie sat across the table from me, poured extra cream on my crumble, and said,
“Tell me about your boyfriend.”
I felt myself colouring. After the way he’d kissed me in the car park, I wasn’t sure I could talk coherently about him, but I was willing to try.
Chapter Twenty Two
Henry stared at my office.
“Um, Dad,” he said. “If my bedroom looked like this, Mom would kill me.” He wrinkled his nose. “It smells funny in here.”
I pushed enough of the runaway paperwork aside to get the door open fully, then forced the window open. It did smell funny, and I knew exactly why. “Yep. And if I don’t clear this up, someone will come along and kill me, too.” I pushed the power button on my work PC and it lurched into life, then took the rubbish bin out to the janitor’s room to empty it.
“Give me a moment to log you in, then you can cruise around online. Just, please, try not to set off the net nanny,” I said when I came back.
“’K, Dad,” Henry said, and he stepped over the mess and clambered into my office chair. “Can I print stuff out?” he asked.
“Sure.” I leaned over him to type in my password. Once he was in and typing in a url, I turned my attention to the paperbomb that had gone off in my office.
Henry was safely occupied, going through every site that might have cheats for his favourite game, and I began to sort and stack the papers. There were coffee stains on some, from yesterday, but nothing important seemed to have been ruined. I really needed to sort this whole disaster out, because if I was fired on Monday, someone would have to deal with this, and I couldn’t just drop this on whoever replaced me.
It took a long time, long enough that Henry made two raids on the snack machine in the main hall, but eventually I had seven neat piles of papers on the floor, twelve coffee cups on the desk, and I’d completely filled the recycling bin that I’d dragged to my office door.
I filed the seven piles, ignoring the issue of cleaning out my filing system, washed the coffee cups up myself rather than leaving them for a janitor, and emptied my office rubbish bin again.
It was done; they could fire me now.
Henry looked up when I came back into the office carrying the rubbish bin and said, “You’re a slob, aren’t you, Dad?”
I sat down on my plastic chair. “So I’ve been told, though I’ve seen much worse,” I said, thinking of Matthew’s house.
“You finished? Want to follow me around on a quick round? I’ll stop any of the nurses from hugging you, I promise.”
“Sure, Dad, but you have to tell me what all the machines do, even the gross ones.”
