‘And it was so thick and stodgy that none of us actually wanted our main course.’ His fingers curled around her hand, touching the soft palm, stroking down to her wrist. ‘Oh, Gwen, when did we stop having so much fun?’ he asked softly.
She sighed. ‘When I got a promotion, and you got a promotion, and we both ended up working silly hours just so we could get together enough money to pay the bills and take an exotic foreign holiday, once a year, just to keep ourselves sane.’
‘Looking back, we may have made the wrong choice, somewhere along the line. No promotion, and a week in Criccieth every August. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds like hell. Have you ever been to Criccieth?’
Rhys looked down at the remains of his chicken. ‘Lovely though that is, I’m not sure I could finish another mouthful.’
‘You usually clear your plate. What’s wrong?’
He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought I could do with losing a few pounds.’
Gwen reached out and placed her hand over his.
‘I wouldn’t complain,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t find you shaggable just the way you are.’
Gwen could feel a slight tugging in her hand, as if Rhys subconsciously wanted to pull her towards him. Or was it subconscious? There was a slight curve to his lip, a certain glint in his eye, that sent a tingle through her, from her head to her toes but lingering somewhere around her middle. She could feel her nipples getting hard, rubbing against her dress. ‘Er, you know I did dessert?’
‘Get thee behind me, temptress.’
‘I was rather hoping to have you behind me,’ she said, enjoying the way his eyes widened.
‘We could always bring the dessert with us,’ he said, teasingly. ‘I could lick it off your… stomach. And your breasts.’
‘It’s creme brulee,’ she breathed. ‘I need to caramelise the sugar.’
Rhys stood up at the same time Gwen did.
‘The way I’m feeling right now,’ he said, pulling her towards him, ‘heat isn’t going to be a problem.’
As Gwen felt his fingers spread themselves through her hair, pressing her lips hard against his, she in turn pressed herself hard against him. They stumbled together towards the bedroom, not even noticing the amber light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, from the dining table.
Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six looked exactly like the twenty-five chambers that had come before it and the fifteen that Toshiko had overshot by: a red-brick arch in a red-brick tunnel, water trickling down and etching the mortar away, small patches of fungus spread across the walls. Toshiko hoped that they were good, old-fashioned Earth funguses, and not spores of something alien that were patiently eating their way into the walls. She hoped that the rats that she heard scurrying in the darkness sometimes really were rats, and not tiny things with many legs and many eyes that had snuck in along with some of the alien technology they had found. She had nightmares occasionally that something was growing, deep in the bowels of Torchwood. Something alien. Something bad.
Toshiko shivered. They were just dreams, provoked by some of the strange things they did and saw in Torchwood. They weren’t real. They weren’t backed up by observation, or evidence. By science.
She looked around, trying to work out where they were exactly, in relation to Cardiff geography. The Hub was directly beneath the centre of the Basin, but now they were probably some distance away, somewhere under the Red Dragon Centre, if she didn’t miss her guess. How much of Cardiff rested on Torchwood’s tunnels? How many ways in or out were there?
‘Here we are,’ Ianto said, stopping by a stack of metal, bolt-together shelving. ‘Shelf eight, box thirteen.’ He indicated a box at eye level: an ordinary plastic box — more of a crate, in fact — institutional grey in colour, half a metre along each edge.
There was nothing written on the box, apart from what looked to Toshiko like a random string of alphanumeric characters. She couldn’t work out how Ianto had got to the right box so quickly. In fact, she couldn’t work out how he had even got to the right chamber, given that there was no way of telling them apart. She gave him a sceptical look.
‘I have a system,’ he said, affronted.
Together they pulled the box off the shelf and lowered it gently to the floor. It was about the weight of a portable TV. Funny, she thought, how they kept comparing alien devices to ordinary things, like iPods and portable TVs, as if they were just different examples of the same thing. But they weren’t. They really weren’t.
The box was sealed with tape. Ianto ran his thumbnail around the edge of the lid, splitting the tape in two.
‘Do you need me for anything else?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks for helping me find the stuff. I might have been down here for days looking for it, otherwise.’
‘Helpfulness is my middle name.’ He looked down the tunnel, towards where Toshiko had seen him earlier on. ‘If there’s ever anything else you need down here, let me know. I can find it for you much quicker than you can find it yourself.’ And with that he walked off, back towards the Hub, walking fast and not looking backwards.
Dismissing Ianto from her mind, Toshiko reached down and pulled the lid off the box.
Afterwards, when all passion was temporarily spent, when they were lying with Gwen diagonally across Rhys’s chest and with his hand cupping the heaviness of her breast, with the sweat and the moistness of their bodies cooling on their skin, the silence between them was the silence of lovers who didn’t have to say anything, not lovers who couldn’t think of anything to say. Gwen had climaxed twice: once quietly, biting her lip, while Rhys touched her with insistent gentleness, and once again gasping, hips raised, while Rhys moved deeply within her. Rhys had climaxed once, crying out like a man who had just run into a brick wall, the sweat trickling down his face and dripping onto Gwen’s shoulder blades. Now they lay there, on the same bed where they had made love so many times before, trying to incorporate this latest time into the story of their lives.
‘That was incredible,’ Rhys said. He was still breathing heavily. ‘
‘You weren’t too shabby yourself.’
‘Don’t expect me to recover any time this week. You’ve used me up.’
‘I could go again. Just give me a few minutes.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s no good. I’m finished. You go on without me.’
Gwen laughed quietly beside him, her breast moving gently in his hand in time with her laughter. He felt himself stir. Perhaps he could manage one more time. Once he’d caught his breath. And had a piss.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted. Drained. I need vitamin pills. Lots of vitamin pills. In fact, I may just try to dissolve as many of them as I can in a glass of water and drink it.’
Gwen giggled, and rolled off him. He rolled in turn to the edge of the bed and stood up. His clothes were strewn across the floor. Responding to a half-formed thought provoked by the mention of pills, Rhys reached down and burrowed in his pocket for a moment. There, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, was the blister pack that he had been given by Doctor Scotus that afternoon. Closing his fingers around the pills, he looked down at himself, at the curve of his stomach, at the way his thighs flattened out against the mattress. Gwen still loved him, but if he wanted to show her that he loved her then he needed to do something dramatic. He needed to lose that weight.
Padding to the bathroom, he was already pushing the ‘Start’ pill from its blister as the door was closing behind him. The pill was larger than he had realised, spherical and a mottled yellow. He popped it into his mouth and swallowed. The pill stuck in his throat for a moment, as if fighting to get out, then a wash of saliva carried it down.
As he returned to the bedroom, the night air cold against his naked skin, thoughts of the pill led Rhys to think about the Scotus Clinic, and that in turn led him to think about Lucy, who had given him the Clinic’s address. His brain wasn’t editing his thoughts properly: he was feeling tired, in a good way, and still turned on. That’s why he suddenly said: ‘So have you thought any more about Lucy coming to live here?’ He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with horrified fascination, knowing exactly what kind of reaction they would provoke but unable to call the words back. ‘Just for a while,’ he added, weakly.
Gwen’s head popped up from the tangle of sheets on the bed. ‘If that’s a joke,’ she said, ‘it’s in really poor taste. What’s the matter — one woman in bed not enough for you?’
