Page 61 of The Battle of the Bookshops
“Let’s just concentrate on you, shall we?” said the paramedic, getting him strapped in.
At the hospital, the staff—tactfully reading the room—placed the two of them in adjacent bays, with the curtains open so Jules could watch anxiously over Roman as a sweet nurse cleaned him up. Luckily most of the glass cuts were superficial, although his shirt was ruined.
With both of them cleaned and patched, they were then more or less ignored while the accident and emergency team dealt patiently with the usual Saturday night dramas.
“You’re an idiot for coming in after me,” Roman repeated, his voice rasping.
“Pot, kettle,” Jules shot back.
Roman laughed, which set him off coughing again. “I thought you must be dead,” he said when he had recovered, swallowing hard. “It was the worst moment of my life.”
“Yeah, same,” said Jules, soberly. She reached out, and the two of them linked fingers across the gap between them.
“How did you know I was in there?” she asked.
“I was...” Roman looked awkward. “Well, I was sitting in the car, in the carpark behind the high street, just thinking. I do that sometimes, when I’ve locked up the shop. Just for a while, before I drive home.” He paused. “Look, it’s going to sound creepy, but I can see your bedroom window from there and since we’ve been... Well, I just like to know you’re close by, that’s all.”
Jules smiled softly. “‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks,’” she recited.
“Yeah, whatever.” He grinned, apparently relieved at her acceptance of his faintly stalkerish habits.
Jules didn’t think it was necessary to admit she was in the habit of doing something similar, watching the light in his office night after night. It didn’t matter now.
“But still—how...?” she went on.
“Oh, okay, so I was sitting in the car, and I heard this pounding, hammering noise. It just isn’t what you expect to hear at two in the morning.”
“That was me, hammering on your shop door,” said Jules, realizing.
“It sounded like the crack of doom,” he said, “or some kind of police raid.”
“I might have been a bit desperate,” she admitted. On reflection, her hands felt stiff and sore. She hadn’t been aware at the time.
“So, I came out of the alley into the high street,” he continued. “Then, when I saw Capelthorne’s door wide open and the fire in Portneath Books, I knew exactly where you’d gone. It can’t havebeen more than a couple of minutes at the most, and I remembered you knew about the key to the back entrance.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Jules, hanging her head.
“Don’t be,” said Roman with infinite gentleness. “I think this has helped us both to understand how we feel.” His thumb strafed the hand he was still holding. At Jules’s silence, he gave her an inquiring look.
She nodded dumbly. Families, feuds, whether they married, where they lived... none of that mattered anymore. Realizing that either or both of them could have lost their lives that night made everything else irrelevant. She was with Roman now and that was that. A feeling of calm, of lightness and rightness, suffused her soul.
“We should go to New York,” he said. “Leave our families to fight each other as much as they like. We could just start again, you and me. A new dynasty.”
Jules shook her head reluctantly. “I can’t. I’ve got things I have to do here,” she said. “Aunt Flo...”
“I can wait,” he said.
“Oh my God, Aunt Flo!” Jules repeated in a panic. “She’ll wake up and not know where I am!” Jules remembered she had had her phone in her hand as she ran over to the burning shop, but somehow—probably when she was hammering on the door—she must have let it drop. Roman, miraculously, still had his, and he calmly arranged for Charlie to go to the shop first thing in the morning to pass on the news and reassure Flo that all was well.
And then, for a very long time, there was nothing else that needed saying at all. They simply lay in silence, fingers intertwined across the gap between their beds, preoccupied with their own thoughts.
Chapter 27
With the dawn came something like the resumption of normal life, with a flurry of noise and light. A new cohort of staff came into the department, brisk and efficient. Jules, desperate to get back to Flo, wheedled a reluctant discharge from a fresh-faced junior doctor. He flicked through her chart and then Roman’s, eyeing them both suspiciously.
“Okay, you can go,” he told them at last. “But ifanythinggets worse,especiallyany breathlessness, coughing up black stuff, dizziness—you come straight back in, understood?”
Jules nodded meekly, while Roman scowled, looking keenly at Jules as she jumped off the bed, ready to swoop in and catch her at the first sign of unsteadiness.
