Page 58 of Nine Lives

“What should we do now?” she said.

“What do you want to do?”

“I asked you first.”

“I think we should get into bed with each other,” Ethan said. “I don’t care whether we have sex or anything, but I want to lie by your side and be able to touch you and kiss you.”

“That’s what I want to do too.”

Two hours later they were drinking the wine and eating the fruit in bed, both enormously relieved that they felt as close to each other now as they’d felt for the past few weeks. Periodically, one of them, or both of them, would suddenly laugh.

“If anyone saw us...” Caroline said.

“I don’t care. I’m so happy to be here with you.”

“I am, too.”

An hour later they both lay facing each other, sheet and blankets pulled up tight around their naked bodies. They were both exhausted. “‘We met at the end of the party,’” Ethan said.

Caroline looked confused for a moment, then laughed. “You’re quoting poetry at me.”

“It was the poem you found.”

“Yes,” she said. “‘We met at the end of the party, when all the drinks were dead.’”

“Do you know the rest?”

“Some of it. Not all of it. I’m done quoting poetry.”

“I’m glad we did this,” Ethan said.

“Think how strange it is, the way we met.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Do you believe it was somehow fated?” Caroline said.

After a pause, Ethan said, “No, I don’t. I don’t believe in soul mates or that there’s only one perfect match for all of us out there. I think there are many perfect matches, and sometimes people never find theirs, or they find two or more. It’s random.”

“I agree with you. I don’t believe in soul mates, but I do believe in disposition.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ethan said.

“In some ways we’re not alike, but we have similar dispositions. It’s everything, I think, and I’m very glad we did this.”

“Me, too. If nothing else, this is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.”

“Ha. It is, isn’t it?” Caroline said.

They fell deeply asleep, aided by the liquid benzodiazepine that had been injected into the wine through the cork. Neither was awakened by the injections they then received, first of much higher doses of the same benzodiazepine, followed by injections of fatal doses of morphine. Caroline, nearly forty pounds lighter than the man in whose arms she was sleeping, convulsed slightly, her brain starved of oxygen, then died.

Three

1

Saturday, October 29, 2:22 a.m.

Twenty minutes later, Ethan Dart died in the same manner as Caroline Geddes had.

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