Taking Lots of Falls

She reached out her hand and popped the fob with the number and the other details off the necklace and I could hear her tapping the digits into her phone. I let my head rest back on the path while she talked. The stone was cold against my cheek and I could feel small bits of grit digging into my skin.

"My name is Laura James, I'm at the corner of Regent's Park near the Baker Street entrance, I have Poppy Grant here and she says she's broken her leg. She seems very confused."

She'd sat down on the path beside me by now, a sleek goddess in spandex. I heard her agreeing to stay with me and I suppose that reminded her that I might need some comfort as she reached her free hand around to hold one of mine. Even with the pain getting in the way I could tell I liked that.

She finished the call and hung up, "They're coming."

The ambulance zeroed in on the gps signal from the necklace fob and like the whirling-bladed thunderous god of all flying omnivores it landed only a few minutes later. Ducks scattered in terror. The look on Laura's face was quite special. Even over my pain her open mouthed shock was the sweetest most engaging thing.

"What the fuck." she said slowly, enunciating each word as its own sentence, "Who the hell are you?"

I was having too hard a time even keeping my breathing under control at that moment to launch into a complicated conversation. The initial anaesthesis of whatever cocktail of emergency response chemicals had been pumped into my body by the shock was starting to wear off. I felt very cold and the throbbing pain was making me feel ill. So I mumbled something at her about having really good medical insurance.

Paramedics were asking me what had happened by now and I had to tell them I'd been startled by something and fallen. I think Laura made the connection and realised I was talking about her because a horrified look passed onto her face. I squeezed her hand which was still holding mine, repeatedly and as hard as I could, to get her attention back.

"This is not your fault ok."

They gave me an injection for the pain at that point and maybe they overdid the dose, or maybe this was the easiest way to make sure I didn't scream annoyingly while they moved me, but either way it knocked me out almost instantly.

*****

I woke up in a hospital bed. There wasn't really any moment of disorientation or confusion. I could feel the rigid web of the cast around my lower leg and foot and the dull thump of the broken bone still making its presence known through the blanket of painkillers trying their best to silence it.

It did take me a moment or two to recognise the woman asleep and snoring loudly in the chair across the room and remember who she was. The tightly fitting running clothes helped bring the memory back, oh yes indeed. There was nothing going on so I drifted off again but the second time I woke she was still there and awake this time too, playing with her phone.

"What are you still doing here?"

She looked up, smiling briefly, before the meaning of my words sank in and her face dropped.

"I'm sorry, I thought you'd like someone to be here. I'll go."

"No, wait, look that came out all wrong. Thanks for staying, and for helping me when I fell."

"Well it was kind of my fault wasn't it." and she put on a silly singsong kind of voice, "Big, clumsy, Laura, startling you like that."

I didn't really follow this. She really wasn't even that big. Ok she was bigger than me for sure but really that went for just about everyone, even down here. Also I wasn't sure how running past someone was supposed to add up to clumsiness. And you know what, this conversation was going terribly and it didn't even make sense. There was far too much apology and blame and general misunderstanding going on.

"Laura can we start again. I just took a bad fall ok, and I am glad you stayed. Can you help me find my phone, I need to tell my parents where I am."

Laura looked a little sheepish, "I've, already told them actually. They're fine. But you're phone is right there. You should probably let them know yourself."

She gestured at table next to my bed and yes the phone was right there.

Of course she'd looked me up while I was asleep, as you would let's face it. So she knew exactly who I was now. I wasn't exactly a public figure or anything but my name had been in the press when I came down. While I typed out my short reassuring message she explained how she'd looked up my mum's email address on our company website and let her know what had happened.

"I think at first she thought I was one of the doctors, and now I have no idea who she thinks I am, probably a friend or something."

That rang a distant bell, ah yes, homework project! I'd been told to make a friend and here we were, one had basically run right into me.

"You can be my friend." I said it almost to myself really.

She beamed at me and I found myself wanting to find other ways of making her smile like that again. "That would be nice Poppy, if that's ok."

I held up my hand to seal the deal and she took it. I still liked that, I still liked that a lot.

Part 4- Living in the Distributed City

We'd permitted our phones to exchange contact details with each other before she'd left the hospital which was one of the opening moves of a new friendship down here apparently. Then she was off because it turned out I'd been asleep for half the day and she'd had hers interrupted partway through her morning jog so she presumably had a lot of catching up to do. They kept me in and under observation basically until I wasn't under the influence of any of the more extreme painkillers any more.

After that hospitals don't tend to want you in and occupying a valuable bed any longer than you must especially after a purely mechanical incident like a broken bone. Added to this I was very keen to leave, so things ended up working out well for everyone concerned. They issued me with some medication to control the pain, and some more to help the bone knit, and then dropped me off at home late afternoon.

Getting around in the house was awful. It was tiring enough without an injury but lugging the cast around was much worse. It looked as if I was going to have to sleep in the bed too as there was no way I was going to be able to clamber up into the hammock. In the meantime though I flopped carefully into one of the armchairs and dozed off again there.

I woke up to the sound of the buzzer on the door going which was odd, nobody was due at this time on a Sunday evening. Lumbering my way out of the chair I lurched over to the door and opening it I found Laura beaming at me again. She was dressed now in tee-shirt, jeans and jacket, shopping bags weighing her down.

"Hi Poppy," she said, "I didn't think you'd feel much like cooking so I thought I'd drop by and lend a hand."

I found myself smiling back as I said hello and let her in. It was great that she'd thought to come around.

I didn't recognise half the things she pulled out of the bags. She'd brought meat but when I pointed out I couldn't digest it she shrugged and went to the fridge to stash it away. She looked baffled when she opened the door and looked inside but I couldn't see why. It made sense to me. Microwave meal shelf, categorised by type, fruit shelf, also categorised by type.

She chopped, prepared noodles, and stir-fried while I sat in the corner looking on and keeping out of the way. The whole room filled with smoke, an event I'd associated my whole life with the threat of imminent death. The fire alarm on the ceiling even started to sound but rather than us evacuating the building Laura just stood on a chair and switched it off again. Her attitude toward it was so casual and reassuring that I found myself going along with it while we figured out how to switch the extractor on and open the windows. There was some coughing and my eyes stung for a few minutes but we both survived.

Since then I have found that Laura is an excellent cook but at the time when we sat down to eat I had no frame of reference. What I was tasting was unbelievably wonderful though. The fresh spices and vegetables let loose a kaleidoscope of flavours and there were so many different things jumbled together in the bowl that every psychedelic mouthful was different. She'd brought white wine as well to go with the food which was another new experience. To be honest I wasn't convinced about trying to drink it at the same time, I found it clashed with the food rather than complementing it. But after finishing eating it came into its own and was a flavour sensation in itself.

We lounged in the armchairs after dinner and I explained a bit about life back home. She listened apparently captivated while I told her about the most ordinary things. Like how down here cities were all clumped together in one place but for us they were distributed rather than contiguous, the component parts of Upper London scattered tens of thousands of miles apart and connected by their economic dependencies and social allegiances rather than their physical location.

In a very real sense, due to my presence, the support work I was still doing for Mum and Dad's place, and the way it had been paid for, my house was functionally just a part of my home city. An outpost which happened to be stuck in a geosynchronous orbit zero feet from the ground. She laughed at this.

"So I'm visiting Upper London?"

"Yeah, I guess if you wanted to say it like that then you could do."

And of course ordinary is all a matter of perspective as evidenced when she traded me back stories of her own about riding horses. That seemed so amazingly primal to me, terrifying even to hear about, although apparently she'd been doing it since she was eight.

"They're not as dangerous as ducks mind." she said with a wicked grin on her face so I flung a cushion at her. We watched it drop to the ground in front of me with a disappointing thud when it should have soared gracefully in a straight line right over to her and slapped her in the face. I was struck by the realisation that in spite of the background ache I could still feel from my hurt leg, and the pressure steadily pushing me down into the chair, I had lost track for a moment of that awareness that I wasn't in space. I'd been perfectly comfortable here. And maybe it was partly the wine, but I think it was mostly the company.

The wine was certainly having an impact though and before long I was yawning. It struck me that there was now a solution to one of my other problems - I could ask Laura to help me into my hammock. When I mentioned the idea though and she went to look at the setup in my room she returned having spotted the flaw in my thinking. If she had to help me in, how was I going to get back out.

"I could stay though I suppose," she mused aloud, "Sleep on the bed and help you down in the morning."

And that is what she did. I changed into my night top, she stripped down to her tee-shirt and panties. Bloody hell she was even hotter in her underthings, the hours of jogging had thinned and tightened her. I mean my therapist might have been maybe an eight on my own personal scale, but Laura, well she was much more than an eight.

When we were both ready for bed she cradled me in her arms and I really wanted to lean up and kiss her while she was holding me. I lost my nerve though and she lifted me up effortlessly and laid me gently into the hammock, then she got into the bed below me. I stretched the fabric out and looked down into her eyes through the loose netting of the hammock, I remembered looking out through that other net only a few weeks ago and seeing a shooting star and wondering about symbolism. And doesn't reality creep up on you in strange ways sometimes.

"Goodnight Laura." I whispered, and I think I must have coloured it with a hint of my gradually budding desire.

"Goodnight Poppy." and maybe I could sense a hint of reciprocation in her voice, or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

Laura lifted me out of my hammock far too soon, much earlier than I'd usually get up but she had Laura things to do, a jog then a lecture, and she had to get me down first. She lowered me onto the bed which was still warm from her and I burrowed my way sleepily under the covers to doze a while more. Before she left she sat back down on the bed and hugged me goodbye. I fell back asleep with the memory of her arms around me and the scent of her hanging in the air.

She was back again that evening. I was expecting her this time as we'd exchanged a few texts during the day. In fact she made dinner and stayed over for the next few nights. I wondered a little whether she didn't have better things to do than to act as my nursemaid. She must have been at my house about fifteen hours a day and I couldn't help wondering what she had been doing with all that time before she'd started spending it with me.

I thought about asking but I didn't want her to get the wrong impression. The last thing I wanted was to end up giving her the idea I didn't want her around. She wasn't there during the day though so I was pretty bored as the ankle was preventing me from doing a lot of my exercise and I had to swap over to doing a lot more upper body. My physio reckoned I'd be able to start reintroducing some gentle lower body in two or three weeks time though.

I'd very much have liked to have made a pass at Laura but there were a couple of things stopping me. Firstly I wasn't quite sure how; my knowledge of these things was fairly theoretical. Back home an arrangement to meet up in person socially was a fairly big signal in itself as inter-habitat travel tended to be difficult to arrange and always carried an element of risk. Down here I supposed you probably had to be more direct. Secondly I'd made a friend and was really enjoying having her company. I didn't really want to jeopardise that by making things awkward if it turned out she wasn't interested.

After about a week my mobility was definitely improving. The cast was brilliant, advanced breathable plastic webbing with some really clever planes of flex that allowed a degree of movement where I needed it but kept the setting bone exactly in place. I was controlling the pain with entry level painkillers by now and was almost definitely agile enough to clamber up into my hammock.

But I kind of didn't check. I kind of, you know, let myself assume that I couldn't. And I reckon Laura could tell too that I could probably have done it on my own if I'd tried, and somehow she didn't bring it up either. So she kept on staying over, you know, to help out. She'd pretty much moved in by now really. And she kept on helping me up each night, and down each morning, and I kept on not quite kissing her.

My next therapy session came along and I thought about skipping it and I told myself it was because of the difficulty of having to get there. In the end though I had to accept that I was making excuses and I was letting my fear of going outside again govern me. So I booked the cab and went. I did make him park right outside this time though.

When I got in I found the first part of the session involved me reassuring my therapist that it wasn't her fault I had hurt myself either. This seemed to be part of damaging yourself - looking after the people you've happened to. After she'd decided she was going to believe me on that score we got down to talking about my progress. She arched her eyebrows at me. "So tell me about your new friend then? She seems to be doing you a lot of good."

I gave her all the basics, name, occupation, amusing story about ducks, medical emergency, not dying of smoke inhalation. All the standard girl meets girl stuff.

"Yes but what is she like? How does she make you feel?"

"She's lovely." I said without thinking about it, and I could feel the blood rushing to my skin and the uncontrollable grin breaking out on my face. Well you can't give those kind of signals to an empath and not expect to be understood. Really let's face it you can't give those kind of signals to a chunk of meteor fresh from the flower hopper and not expect to be understood.

"That sounds ideal." she replied, "Maybe you two should have a talk about how close you'd like to get then."

I'm quite good at taking instruction from experts.

Part 5 - Extending family

But on the other hand how do you open a conversation like that. I ran through a few catastrophically awful options in my mind.

"Say Laura, shall we take our clothes off?"

"Hey Laura, I was thinking maybe we could have sex?"

"Laura would you like a close look at my tattoos? See how many you can find!"

You can probably tell that I was struggling a bit, and panicking more than a little too. So in the end I just went non-verbal and did what I'd wanted to do since the beginning. When she lifted me into her arms that night I leaned up and kissed her on the lips.

Her eyes opened wide and she squeaked, although the latter was pretty muffled by my mouth. It was a very sweet squeak though, and she didn't drop me which had been a concern. Instead she lowered me back down onto the bed.

"What the fuck Poppy, don't tease me like that."

I didn't get it, I'd made my big statement of intent and this didn't feel like rejection, so ok bonus whoo hoo, but I was still getting some very confusing messages.

"No teasing I promise, I just been really wanting to kiss you. Didn't, wasn't, was it not nice for you?"

"Oh bloody hell yes, of course it was, how could you imagine it wouldn't be." she blurted out, "But why Poppy. You're so pretty and I'm not."

And I reckoned I got it then, it all meshed together. The way she'd talked about herself, the way she'd clung to the chance of a friend and been so desperate to please. All these little things. The way she'd wanted to look after a total stranger and the way she'd basically moved in and dropped her life, as if maybe the answer was that there wasn't much of a life to drop in the first place. And the awful way she was talking now. Poor Laura was someone who for no good reason I could see had somehow ended up almost as detached from life on Earth as I was.

I realised retrospectively how hard it must have been for her to stay and wait for me to wake up when she'd convinced herself that she had hurt me. And how lucky I was that I hadn't frightened her off with my careless words when I had finally woken.

Whatever the fuck had done this to her made me very very angry but I couldn't do anything about that, it was all in the past. I kind of hoped I could do something about the future though. I started as I meant to go on, by leaning up and kissing her again. She moaned and opened her mouth so I slipped my tongue in and for a while there was just that, and that was fine, much more than fine, but eventually I wanted more and a pulled back to look at her properly. Her eyes glittered and she looked cautiously happy.

"You are so very, very hot Laura, and you really have no idea how I have been thirsting after you, do you."

I ran my hands down to her waist, stroking back up over her stomach to her breasts. I felt that I quite definitely needed to reassure her with my actions as well as my words. Yeah this was totally all about her, not even slightly about the panicky hungry need running through me like lightning. Not at all about the overriding imperative to feel as much of her soft naked flesh under my hands as possible. Oh no no, not at all.

So now that I had that clear I pressed my hands against her chest, guiding her down onto the bed and then stripped my own top off. I loved the way she looked at me, reflecting my own desire. I held the hem of her nightie and lifted it, her arms came up to help me take it off of her.

I saw her breasts for the first time, pale, small for her frame but beautiful, with big fat nipples tightly erect and pointing invitingly at me. I leaned down and sucked one into my mouth, rubbing my tongue slowly over it. It felt sensational and her sighs made it clear it was working pretty well for her too. I could feel the little stabs of hunger growing stronger between my legs and I was definitely getting wet. That thought made me want to explore so I let her nipple fall from my mouth and edged gradually backwards, kissing and licking my path down her stomach, setting off twitches and gasps along the way.