Page 9 of As Many Stars
He’d always planned to come home. He alwayshadcome home: not his own empty hideous house, but Ash’s, which had meant Oxford, scholar’s rooms, cozy chairs, late nights and brandy and himself scandalizing Ash with stories, appreciating each astonishment or scolding or question about history, secretly tucking each reaction away into that longing tiny hole in his heart.
He’d always had that, at least. He’d thought he always would.
Ash might not be here much longer. They might not have any more of that always.
“No,” he said aloud. “No.”
The loose honey-and-silver light of the cloudy afternoon faded, dwindled. Night came on, thick and muffling. Blues, blacks, obsidian and velvet. Inside the bedroom, heat burned and shivered.
Ash woke up enough to tell him that this was ridiculous, entirely minor, Blake overreacting. Blake just shook his head, throat tight; and made him drink more broth. That had to help, didn’t it? Some nourishment?
Sitting in the chair beside the bed, he told Ash about ruined castles along winding rivers, and fairytale forests, and dazzling views over snow-laced ravines. He told Ash the story about the viscountess and her pet monkey and his best hat, and he told it in his best self-deprecating tone.
A thought tugged at the back of his head. Adventure. Explorations. The stories he did not tell, the moments he’d been happy.
An authoritative Scottish voice. A hand on his head, as he knelt and looked up and stopped thinking. Simple silent bliss—
Green eyes. That voice. And Cam was a physician. Perhaps a good one, from the kindness, the skilled hands—
He couldn’t ask. Impossible. They’d spent one night together, and they did not even know each other. He had no claim on Cam at all; he did not even know the man’s last name, and Cam did not know his.
But Cam was here. In London.
And Blake trusted him. Perhaps foolishly, perhaps imprudently, but nevertheless that was a truth: he did not believe that someone who’d seen him so sharply, who’d known so clearly what he needed, would be anything other than good at healing.
Maybe that was wrong. Maybe that was naïve. But maybe it wasn’t.
It’d be a second opinion, at least. From another physician. And Blake would do anything, including write to a lover he’d spent one night with, and beg and plead and humiliate himself if he had to, if it’d mean Ash was safe.
He summoned a footman—the same lanky anxious-eyed young man from before—and gave some orders. Visiting the Duke and Duchess of Straithern. Discovering the name and direction of their physician, the man who’d attended the house earlier that same day. The footman nodded with gratifying gravity, entrusted with this errand, and darted away.
“I’ll just borrow some paper,” Blake said to Ash, and got up and poked around the writing-desk, until he found some, and ink.
The footman would return soon. With an address. For a note. Which needed writing.
What could he write? What could he say, here in this desperate bedroom with the blue-and-cream prettiness, where his heart was cracking open?
Would Cam even care? Blake could offer him money—
Would this do anything at all? Would Cam even open the note, or might he throw it into the fire, because Blake meant nothing to him, or because the correspondence might be seen as a threat, a promise of revelation, something that’d cause Cam distress—
That thought sent a spike through his gut, the terrible lancet unleashed. He didn’t even know why.
He managed a steadying breath.
He awaited an address. He looked at the night, the fire, the gradual rise and fall of Ash’s chest under blankets.
He wrote, carefully,Doctor—I had the pleasure of your acquaintance in Edinburgh; we met outside a bookshop, in the rain. Please believe that this is not a threat, nothing unpleasant—my memories of our evening are entirely pleasant, I assureyou.
A reminder, if Cam did not remember him; nothing too obvious, trying to show that he could be cautious, that he would reveal nothing. He hoped that would work.
He wrote,I know we do not know each other well, and I have no right to ask this, but I will in any case. I need your help.
He gazed at his own writing; and felt the tears scratch and burn at the edges of his eyes. He shoved a hand across them.
He went on. Explaining that his friend was gravely ill. That he did not know what to do, and he had thrown one physician out already, but perhaps he had been wrong, and he needed assistance.
Desperation. So much so. But he did need help, and he hoped that Cam would remember him fondly, and he could not bear to not try every last chance.
