Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [114]
For all Creed knew at that point, she might have gone back to her husband. Perhaps for all that Justine knew, too.
It might have happened that way.
Justine had been hanging indecisively between the two men. Her husband and her lover. Fate had made up her mind for her; fate in the shape of a man called Harrigan who’d walked in carrying a gun. Walked into this same kitchen, all those years ago.
Justine had been sitting here between her husband and Creed, and Harrigan had walked in carrying his gun. He had come here to take Creed’s life.
Afterwards, after they stopped him, Justine had run to Creed and put her arms around him and that had decided the matter. Justine had made her choice. She stayed with Creed, and so her husband turned away and walked out of their lives.
They never saw Vincent again.
The Doctor pulled out a rickety wooden stool and set it beside the kitchen counter. ‘You look rather distracted,’ he said, offering the stool to Creed.
Creed sat down on it and began to take his jacket off.
‘Just thinking,’ he said.
‘Lost in the past?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I know what that’s like,’ said the Doctor. ‘Let me make you some coffee. I’m sorry if that stool’s uncomfortable but all the cushions are still in the hearse. I’ll get Benny to unload them.’
He put the coffee on and wandered out of the back door again, leaving it open so that the cool early morning smell of the garden drifted in. Birds hopped in the patches of sunlight on the rough paving stones outside.
Creed hardly noticed. He was lost in thoughts of Justine.
It was strange how fate had nudged them together, intervening at critical moments. They never would have ended up in bed if Paulie Keaton hadn’t threatened to kill her baby and Creed hadn’t come to her rescue. They never would have come together if Harrigan had not come stomping into this kitchen with his cowboy boots and his revolver.
The Doctor came back into the kitchen and began to rattle around in a cupboard, selecting mugs for the coffee which was beginning to pulse up hotly in the percolator. As soon as the jug was full he poured the first steaming aromatic cup for Creed and set it in front of him with a delicate Victorian bowl full of coloured crystal sugar and the milk bottle he’d just picked up outside. The delicate seal on the bottle was ruptured and the Doctor apologized. ‘They’ve never been able to work out a way to stop the birds getting at it. I trust you don’t begrudge a small bird a drop of milk.’
Creed smiled and shook his head. He stirred his coffee and reflected that, as strange as it was to remember how he and Justine had come together, it was even stranger to be back here now, with all those years of love, marriage and kids, stretching out behind him.
And to know that he might not be going back to her.
Creed was tired from the long night and the uncomfortable drive down to Kent. Never accept a lift in an overcrowded hearse, he thought.
In his mind he was telling the story of the ride in the hearse. Telling Amy, her sea-green eyes wide open and staring into his, as she listened to him, spellbound. Then Creed found himself sleepily slipping through the colour of those eyes into an erotic waking dream where he swam naked around the warm waters of a lagoon with an equally naked blonde girl, lithe and young, and tanned.
She flickered through the warm water in front of him, gold of hair and limbs against the blue-green water. And he was swimming with her, swimming in circles in the warm lagoon.
Then he realized that they weren’t swimming at all. They were being swept around by a swirling current, around and around in this tropical lagoon like a giant jacuzzi.
And then the warm vortex swept them together and she was in his arms, hot and wet, her lips tasting salty.
Suddenly outside the kitchen, someone started to scream and it ripped Creed awake.