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I knew there had to be something wrong! I knew it all along: these two voices whispering and crying in the dark - they couldn’t belong to us! Not to Mr Ambrose, and certainly not to me! Someone else had to be saying all those strange things.
‘Come here,’ I heard the him that sounded like Mr Ambrose say. ‘Let me hold you.’
Bloody hell! Now I was two hundred and fifty per cent sure someone else had to be talking! That could not, under any circumstances, in this or in any other universe, have been Mr Rikkard Ambrose talking!
‘Yes! Please!’
And that most certainly could not have been me answering! And yet, I felt myself being pressed against a lean, hard body in the dark, felt my face glide over cloth and sand, until my cheek was touching another face. An angular face it was, chiselled and hard in some places, soft in others. Like his lips, for example. His lips were soft. Familiar.
But how could they be familiar? After all, this was not Mr Ambrose I was feeling against me, and this was not even me doing the feeling. Those were two phantoms in the dark who dared to say things we could never say, do things we would never do.
‘Rick?’
‘Yes, Lilly?’
‘I’m glad you’re here.’
Not me. Not me talking.
‘I’m glad you’re here, too.’
Not him talking either.
‘Really?’
‘Well…’ A touch of sarcasm entered the voice of the phantom man. ‘Not glad that you’re here in the sandstorm, in imminent danger of suffocation, obviously. I meant here with me.’
‘Yes. I meant that, too.’
‘Good.’
‘Yes.’
A moment of silence. A moment of roaring storm winds.
‘Lilly?’
‘Yes?’
‘If we don’t survive, I want you to know that I…’
And the storm gave another bellow, cutting the phantom short. Maybe it was better that way. It really did sound entirely too much like Mr Ambrose.
*~*~**~*~*
When the darkness began to lighten and, by some strange coincidence, I found my face - not the face of a phantom or doppelganger, but my actual face - tucked against Mr Ambrose’s chest, I immediately flinched back from this suspiciously unfeminist position. He hurriedly opened his arms, which somehow had gotten tangled around me, and we slid back over the sand, eyeing each other cautiously, like a kitten and a dog caught in flagrante delicto.
The roaring of the storm subsided somewhat.
He cleared his throat, and sand landed in his open hand.
‘Ehem. Are you well?’
‘You mean apart from the fact that I’m bruised and parched and almost roasted? Yes, Sir.’
‘Adequate.’
Now that was Mr Ambrose talking.
