"Sorry." He rolled sideways, and she turned with him, so they remained embraced though he popped out of her. "Oops."
"Shame," she said, then burped. "Oh."
They shook together in shared laughter.
"Now what are we going to do?" Josh stared at her in the darkness, amazed at the world.
"We could sleep."
"I guess."
He continued to stare, wonder seeping through him, with no awareness of the moment when he drifted downwards into restorative sleep for the first time in an age, with a sense of correctness, of security at last.
Everything paused.
They awoke still embracing, with no trace of cramp, as though their bodies fitted together exactly. Their kiss was soft, on the lips, and then she had him pulled inside her and they rode together, for longer this time, grinning, staring into each other's eyes at the moment of explosion, his before hers but only by seconds; and then he collapsed beside her.
"I need to brush my teeth," he said. "And did I mention you're beautiful?"
After taking it in turns to use the bathroom – a quick trip each, then a longer sojourn in the shower – they dressed and went into the small kitchen area. Suzanne put coffee on, then turned to him.
"You realise I'm not white?" she said.
"My God. And did you notice I'm not black?"
"I noticed everything."
"Me too."
The world was at peace as they kissed again, very soft and very still. Then they disengaged and got ready for breakfast, putting out bowls and cereal, occasionally glancing at the door to Richard's room, neither mentioning the boy's name.
"You're going to work with him today?" Josh kept his voice low. "Or would that get you in trouble with the disciplinary board?"
"Probably, if it gets that far."
"Ah. Let's sort out his problems, then maybe nothing will happen. It's his father who-"
The guest room door clicked open, and Richard was standing there. "Can I use the-?"
"It's over there."
He nodded, then shuffled past them to the bathroom, and went in.
"The poor lad looks awful," said Josh, "but not as bad as last night."
"No. The first thing I need to deploy is a powerful psychophysical technique for integrating body and mind for the day ahead."
"Cool."
"It's called breakfast."
Afterwards, while Suzanne did more work with Richard, Josh went into her bedroom to use his phone, checking the hospital for Opal's condition. He could have hacked into the watchcams, but the always-present memory of Sophie stopped him. A nurse told him that Opal was in post-op recovery, no further details available. The earliest she might possibly receive visitors would be tonight at 7.30, but he should call in advance, in case she was not ready. Thankful to have talked to a human being, Josh closed the call.
When he entered the lounge Richard was in an armchair, apparently in a light doze.
"I'm going to talk to Josh now," Suzanne told the boy. "And when I talk to you again directly, you'll know the difference. For now, just rest."
As she turned to Josh her tone changed. "He's all right."
"Good." He said nothing about Opal. "That's good."
Suzanne nodded. Somehow they were on the same wavelength – if there had been positive news from the hospital, it would have been OK to share it; otherwise it was best to say nothing. She reached out her hand; when he took hold, it felt wonderful. With a smile, she led him into her bedroom – their bedroom? – and this time he knew it was only to talk. They smiled, holding each other's hands, as though about to start some oldfashioned dance.
"So what are we going to do?" she asked.
Josh let go of her hands and sat on the bed.
"You've no idea how warfare" – remembering fourteen years old and the rifle coming up and his head exploding but that was not the worst of it – "screws you up."
"We can deal with this later," said Suzanne. "And I mean it – we will deal with it."
"Maybe there are things that shouldn't be… but it's Richard we need to think about. Sorry, my l… Sorry."
Her lips twitched.
"Everyone," she said, "has the resources they need to deal with their life and make it better, and I mean everyone."
"What if I want to learn Chinese, and I have no materials and no ability? There's positive thinking and there's delusion."
"I didn't say you could learn the language in ten minutes, but that's more than enough time to dissolve whatever holds you back, like the false belief that you can't learn a language. I worked with a webmovie writer who'd been blocked for three years. Freeing up the block took five minutes. It still took him a year to write the next script, but he did it, that's the point."
"And you didn't discover what caused the block?" he said.
"Actually, the guy knew precisely what had caused it, but if he hadn't, I wouldn't have tried to find out. I didn't need to know. It's a form of brief therapy, and that's a technical term."
This was what he did not understand about her work. Despite the counselling he had been through, he still thought of therapy as uncovering hidden pasts.
"So treating traumas, you don't need to know the details."
No heads exploded in his memory. Her presence kept him calm.
"It depends. If someone was in a traffic accident, not their fault, just something dreadful they had experienced… then all I need do is recode the memory, so they don't re-experience anguish whenever they think of it. Not amnesia, but no overwhelming emotion, either. Delving back into their childhood and how they related to their parents would be nonsense, because it's not the problem."
"All right."
"The old opponents of that approach called it treating the symptom instead of the cause, but sometimes treating the symptom is all you need. For example, sweating is a symptom of bubonic plague. During the Black Death, if the victims had been given more fluids, many would have lived, because it was the dehydration that got them."
This was not what he wanted to hear, because there was something odd about young Richard's reactions, and not just to witnessing his friend fall.
"On the other hand, if the trauma patient is a victim of violence" – Suzanne glanced down at her own inner forearms – "then recoding the memory is not enough, because two-thirds of such people become victims again within eighteen months. Their behaviour patterns mark them out as soft prey for predators, so then I do have to explore their world, use the psychodynamic approach, and help them get more freedom in their lives."
"So maybe you need to uncover Richard's past."
"Ah. That's what you're after."
"Look, obviously my first sight of him was when he's under stress. But he gave this strange reaction…"
He described the soft cry that Richard emitted, seeing the bulldog logo on the back of a paramedic's jumpsuit. And how his catatonia – if that was what it was – started then, not at the moment Opal fell.
"I'll ask," said Suzanne. "But when the moment is right."
"OK."
"So what are you going to do next?"
"I thought I'd take a drive to Surrey."
"To Richard's father?" She glanced at the closed door.
"Yeah, but maybe I should do it after you've talked with Richard some more."
"That would be wise."
"Why don't I go fetch my car from the hotel, and bring it back here?"
"To take Richard home?"
"Only if he's ready."
"All right. I may not have anything for you. Uncovering memories is delicate, because it's too easy to implant false ones, vivid hallucinations of things that never happened."
"I have vivid memories of last night. Something I must have imagined."
She leaned over, and their kiss was fire.
"A shared hallucination," she said.
"Relax now, in trance everything is fine, and my voice will go with you as you go deeper still into the tranceinside-the-trance, and go back in time to a moment when…"