I would have liked to have gone and stood with Matthew while we waited for the count to be done, just for the chance to be close to him, but F was looking like shit now, so I let him lean against me.
The chair called the meeting back to order and we took our seats again. Whichever way the count went, it wasn’t going to be good, and for a moment I doubted whether the staff had the collective will to carry this out, then someone behind me squeezed my shoulder.
The chair said, “By a margin of twenty-seven votes, the motion is carried.”
I should have stayed for the post-meeting discussions but I was exhausted all of a sudden. I just wanted to get out of there, pick Henry up, and be in my own home. It had been a long week, between work and Matthew, and I needed to just sit for a while.
Matthew was gone when I extricated myself from the crowd around F and got out of the room, and I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t have kissed him, or even touched him, but it would have been good to just see him smile.
Chapter Twenty One
The Morris wasn’t hard to spot, rusting away in the midst of the performance vehicles parked in the doctors’ bays in the car park. I sat down on the bonnet, knowing from experience the car had no alarm, and found myself explaining exactly what I was doing to the officious security guard who came around and shone a torch in my face suspiciously.
I showed him my medical student ID card and he wrote down the details and left me there, obviously unhappy.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing waiting for Andrew; for all I knew, he’d gone to the pub with Dr. Seagate. I just wanted to see him again. It wasn’t cold, I could wait a little while, and if he didn’t show up, I’d stick a note under the windscreen wiper and go home.
The security guard came around again, just as the fluorescent lighting in the car park flickered into life, and this time he didn’t point his torch at me.
My stomach rumbled. I pulled out a pen, found a sheet of notepaper in my backpack, and was scrawling a note for Andrew when footsteps made me look up.
All of a sudden I realised exactly how this looked. He’d said he was spending the weekend with his son and he couldn’t see me, and here I was, sitting on his car. Very stalkerish.
I put the pen and paper down as he walked up to me.
“Matthew?” Andrew said, and he smiled at me.
He looked exhausted, completely drained, and he leaned against the driver’s door of the car, keys in his hand.
“Um, Andrew,” I said. “I was just going to leave you a note…”
His dropped his keys in a pocket, his hand settled over mine as I went to screw the paper up and he took the paper out of my hand gently. He didn’t read it, just folded the paper up carefully and put it in his pocket, then reached out and brushed my hair off my forehead.
“I’m glad you waited,” he said.
His fingers were touching my cheekbone now, and he leaned forward and pressed his lips against mine.
I thought I knew about kissing. Kissing was what you did to someone’s mouth to show them what you 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.”