Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,14

She just about had the moral high ground now, and she didn’t want Rhys to feel that he had a genuine grievance.

So she decided to do something that was, she had realised during her time with Torchwood, a defining human characteristic. She was going to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long night. I need to get to bed. Lucy, can we put you in a cab?’

‘It’s OK,’ she said, forestalling Rhys who had opened his mouth to make some gallant offer to walk her home, or offer her use of the spare room for the night. ‘I parked round the corner. I’m OK to get back.’

She got up, and put her coat on. Looking at Rhys, she said, ‘Thanks for letting me talk. I needed someone to listen. See you in the office tomorrow?’

‘Er… yeah. Goodnight.’

And with that, she headed for the door. Rhys, to his credit, didn’t watch her elegantly skinny arse wiggling in her too-tight jeans as she went. Instead, he turned to Gwen and said something that gained him several brownie points in her eyes, and saved him from a night on the couch.

‘I feel like a man who’s just been pulled back from the edge of a cliff.’

‘You know, you really don’t want to be thinking about “going down” right now. Even in passing.’

He laughed, and it was a genuine laugh, not a forced one done for effect. ‘Gwen—’ he started.

‘Rhys, we don’t have to talk about it. We really don’t.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said. ‘Which is probably why we need to talk.’

They moved toward the door together with the kind of sub-telepathic harmony that partners get after a while. ‘Lucy is cute—’ he continued.

‘You mean “hot”.’

‘No, you’re hot. She’s cute. And she’s got some real problems with her boyfriend. He’s doing heroin, and he’s stealing her stuff to pay for it. And she’s never sure what kind of mood he’s going to be in when he gets home, which is becoming more and more infrequent. She’s been reaching out for sympathy, and I just happened to be there. That thing with her holding my hand – I didn’t know she was going to do it, and I was trying to work out how to get my hand back when you walked back in. I’m really sorry it happened. So – are we OK?’

Gwen reached out to take his hand. ‘No, we’re not OK, and it’s my fault. I’m never home. I don’t spend enough time with you. And when we are together, it seems like all we do is argue. Rhys, I don’t want it to be like this. I love you, and I don’t know how things got like this.’

He squeezed her hand as they left the restaurant, walking into the humid, petrol-scented air of Cardiff’s city centre. Behind them, the waiters set to work like worker ants, clearing the restaurant in record time. ‘I love you and you love me. That’s what’s important. Anything else is a trivial problem that we can sort out with enough chocolate and massage oil.’

‘Rhys, I really love you.’

‘I know. Oh, by the way – is it OK if Lucy comes to live with us for a while?’

Owen gazed, fascinated, over Toshiko’s shoulder. ‘That can’t be a face,’ he breathed. ‘I mean, it just can’t. Can it? Tell me it can’t.’

But it was. At least, it was something approximating a face. Not even as close as the Weevils got, but the same basic shape, the same proportions, the same general relationship of features.

Toshiko was whistling to herself: a tuneless lament that grated on his nerves. He tried to ignore it, and process what his eyes were telling him.

As a biologist – or, rather, as a trainee doctor with a solid knowledge of human anatomy – Owen had assumed that life on other planets would follow a completely different course from life on Earth. Not that he’d thought about alien life on a regular basis before he joined Torchwood, of course, but it was the kind of thing that occasionally bothered him in those stretches of time, late at night, somewhere between the fifth bottle of San Miguel and the tenth, when his mind could raise itself from thinking about sex and consider some of the deeper mysteries of the world. Evolution meant that everything from bilateral symmetry to five fingers and five toes was the result of random mutation that, by sheer fluke, conferred a slight advantage over other random mutations,