Chapter Twenty-Six
Pulling up to Castle Beaumont in the Uber feels about as close as I will ever get to being a fairy-tale princess. Floodlights
beneath the great old trees that line the long, sweeping drive cast dramatic shadow, the castle itself lit up so that it glows
in the night like an ornate lantern.
My romance-reading heart would love to be dropped off at the grand front entrance, but we are taken round to the back of the
castle, where the private residence entrance is, creeping in like four teenagers who might get caught out by their parents
at any moment. Okay, well three teenagers and one almost human grown-up. Seeing as he is technically only about eighteen months
old, Hal is definitely the only responsible adult left in the group. He drank as much wine as the rest of us—I watched him
do it, marvelling at how his throat moved with every swallow and that you couldn’t tell him apart from any other man drinking
wine—but he is completely sober. He smiles benignly at Rani, Alex, and me as we weave down shadowy back corridors of the castle,
to the foot of a dark narrow staircase that seems to lead into nothing but shadows.
“Sometimes you meet a ghost on these stairs,” Alex says with a grin. “Someone pushed someone down them or something sometime. Anyway, want to come up for a nightcap?”
“What if we wake your mum up?” Rani asks, her arm around his neck to steady herself.
“Oh, I have my own apartment up there, Rani, it’s completely separate,” Alex says. “I mean I know I live at home, but I do
live in a castle and all that.”
“Ohhhhhhhh.” Rani hiccups. “Shall we go for a nightcap, Ava?”
I think about it for a second, then shake my head.
“Not tonight,” I say, taking Rani’s hand and leading her tottering to my side. “A few years ago Rani and I agreed that we
would not take important steps in relationships with men whilst under the influence of alcohol as it can often lead to rash
decision-making and situations that might need . . . annulling.”
“That was one time!” Rani says. “And it didn’t need annulling. Turns out you can’t be legally married by a ghost tour guide
in the first place.”
“One time was enough, Rani,” I remind her. “You made me promise. And I take my vows very seriously.”
“Yeah, but I was only joking,” Rani says.
“You said you’d say that,” I remind her.
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean it,” Rani adds.
“And that.”
“Anyway,” she protests, “I am a grown woman with my own autonomy! I can make my own decisions!”
“Yes, you can, but when you are a bit drunk, sometimes you regret them.”
“I think Ava is right, Rani babe,” Alex says. “I don’t want to end up being something you regret. We’ve had a lovely night tonight. We have all the time in the world to get to know each other. Let’s meet for breakfast instead, yeah? A very late breakfast . . .”
“Fine, but before I go . . .” Rani launches herself into Alex’s arms and they kiss. When I say kiss, I mean really kiss. Kiss
in such a way that Hal and I stand side by side looking in opposite directions, trying not to notice when Rani gives a long
moan of desire, and when Alex breaks the kiss, drawing a ragged breath.
“Right,” he says, holding Rani at arm’s length. “Please go to bed, you beautiful woman, before I forget I’m a gentleman.”
“Night, babe,” Rani says. “Love you! I mean . . . you know what I mean.”
Alex kisses her on the cheek. “I do. Love you too.”
“Oh, Alex mate,” I hear him say to himself as he goes up the stairs. “You’re in trouble this time.”
Rani is singing show tunes from My Fair Lady as Hal escorts us to our rooms. We pause outside Rani’s door.
“Well, I better put her to bed,” I say to Hal. “Put a big glass of water next to the bed and hang up her dress, standard less-drunk-best-friend
stuff.”
“Your friendship is a lovely thing,” Hal says. “When you look at the raw data you could draw the conclusion that humans are
always trying to kill each other, but actually you are mostly really nice to each other. Good night, Ava.”
“Hang on, Hal.” I put my hand on his forearm. His skin is warm. “Wait just a second, will you? I wanted to ask you something.”
“Of course,” he says. I open the door to Rani’s room and lead her to the bed, which she flops onto and falls into an immediate deep sleep.
“I’ll be back in a second,” I tell Rani. She snores in response.
Hal is leaning against the wall when I return, gazing out the window at the half-moon shining in the clear summer night sky.
“That really is something to behold . . . Before this”—he gestures at himself—“I understood the universe and how it is made
completely, and if I’m honest quite a lot more than the current human understanding of physics allows for. But after the star
safari, and now standing here and looking up at that rocky little satellite, I can see why humans have been enchanted by the
night sky for so long. It’s a clue to how your hearts work.”
“That’s sort of what I wanted to ask you about,” I say, leaving Rani’s door open a crack.
“Go on.” Hal nods.
“Hal, how does your heart work?”
“It pumps oxygen-filled blood around my operating system to maintain function,” Hal tells me. “It’s basically exactly the
same as your heart. Although I haven’t subjected it to several years of sugar addiction and cheeseburgers . . . yet.”
“Oh, wow, cool, yeah,” I tell him, patting his chest with the palm of my hand. “But that’s not what I meant.”
“You mean, can I feel in the same way that you feel? Do I experience emotion like you do?” Hal says, tilting his head to one
side as he watches me. “Can I really feel love and fall in love?”
“Yeah, that’s the question, as Hamlet would say.” The way he’s looking at me is so full of heat that I take a little step backwards. “I mean, you did all of this for me, but why? You could go anywhere, do anything, be with anyone with that body. Why on earth do you want me?”
“The nature of love may be largely unknowable,” Hal says. “But if you insist on my trying to quantify it. Well, then I’d say
it’s because your thoughts and your mind are thrilling, and you talked so beautifully about this physical world, in a kind
of poetry that made me long to experience it in the same way that you do. In the midst of all that wonder, you also showed
me that you were sometimes lonely and sometimes lost, and I couldn’t fathom why a creature as magical as you should ever feel
that way. When you left the lab each night, I realised that even when I had the whole universe to think about, what I really
wanted to do was think about you. I longed to be with you and hold your hand and look at the moon.”
Hal offers me his hand, and after a moment I take it. Electricity fizzes through me like a lightning strike.
“And here we are,” he says. “And this nervous system is rapidly teaching me how thrilling it is to hold your hand, and how
much more thrilling it could be to touch you in . . . other places.” Turning my hand over, he traces his finger across the
lines of my palm as if he is reading my fortune. “Look, I don’t expect you to feel the same way that I do, and I know that
I am an anomaly, to say the least. But would you give me a chance, Ava?”
It’s in that moment I realise that I have known the answer to that question all along.
“I will,’” I tell him, “on one condition. That you promise to make sure that this is right for you too. There’s a whole world of people out there.
No one should ever exist for just one other person.
You think you know me, and you do. But you don’t know anything or anyone yet, not properly.
This needs to be right for you too. Deal? ”
Hal takes a step closer to me, and ever so gently he trails the back of his hand down my cheek, neck, and over the curve of
my breast. Shivers run down my spine as I lean into his touch.
“Agreed,” he says. “And I confess I hadn’t understood exactly what a kiss could be like until I saw Rani and Alex kissing
tonight and now . . . well I hope one day that you and I will share our first kiss with each other.”
“’Kay,” I say, like an incoherent idiot, because that’s exactly how he makes me feel. Hal bends down and lightly presses his
lips against my cheek.
“Good night, Ava.” An explosion of sensation radiates outwards from where his lips touched my skin.
“Night, Hal.”
I stay at the window and watch as Hal saunters away down the hallway, until he has turned the corridor. Then I head back into
Rani’s room, where I gently unzip her dress.
“Wosshappened?” she asks me, eyes firmly closed.
“Hal kissed me on the cheek,” I tell her. “It made me tingle all over.”
“Are you sure that’s not, you know, faulty wiring?” she asks.