DAYLIGHT FADING

thirty | you'll wake up and she'll be home

"Promise me, Lacey," the wizened, accented voice of a grandmother I have never met crackles down the phone line, "promise me you'll get yourself tested."

"I promise," I try not to think about it, about what it means, "I promise."

And when I go to the doctors they take blood samples and they talk to me about tests and measures that slow down the disease and how having a genetic history doesn't necessarily mean anything but I just want them to be quiet until they can tell me. I want to know if I'm a genetic time bomb or if I'll be fine. I need to know.

It takes them three weeks and I am sat as the doctor looks at me, agonising and feeling the crushing weight of the breath in my lungs. The look she gives me is sad and I'm sure that this is it, where she tells me that I've got a dominant allele and that I'm cursed.

"You don't have a dominant allele but," she deliberately adds in the word before I can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to dreaming of stages and bright lights and maybe just a little bit of Adam Marr, "you have 37 CAG repeats."

"So what?"

"So you may develop Huntington's, even though you don't have the gene."

"What do you mean you might have it too?" he looks at me as though I've just said I'm going to run in front of a bus.

"I mean I don't know. My grandmother rang from Italy after she was diagnosed with Huntingdon's and made me promise to get myself tested. Mum had been diagnosed the week before and I knew I had to. And then they told me that they had no idea if I'd develop Huntington's or not," I sigh, "and I knew we were in it for the long run - not just the band. I knew it the first time you kissed me that I wouldn't find anyone else, probably knew before then. And I couldn't let you watch me devolve until I didn't know who you were anymore."

"I should have had a choice, Lace. You should have asked me," he is just as sad as I am.

"I knew what you'd say," I suppose it's time we both stopped lying to ourselves as well as to each other, "and I couldn't let you. You saw this version of me that was better than who I was and I couldn't let you give up the rest of your life for her. You could have been happy, with someone normal, who wasn't going to be me. I thought I was giving you that."

We both knew, I think, the second I ran into him in that hallway. What is it that they call it?

Koi no yokan.

The sense upon meeting another person that they will fall in love.

"I haven't been with anyone except you," he looks down at me, "just so you know."

For some reason, I do. Because even with all of the groupies around him, with the fame and the world at his feet, he was still so angry about me. I suppose it was easy to cling to that because it meant he still cared enough that he could hate me for leaving him.

No, we needed this journey we've been on. We needed the hope, the knowledge, that we'd always be led back here, back to where we were. Back home.

And so I stretch upwards, just slightly, and place my mouth to his. He sighs into me and then finally, after so long, I am kissing him and he is kissing me in return. His lips are better that I remember, his hair half-soft where it brushes the tips of my fingers, my palms cupping his cheeks and holding him to me. His arms finally stretch out, fingers splaying across my back, keeping me close.

I let my eyes close, let the world pass by, and lose myself to the feeling of his lips gently moving with mine. I move one of my hands up, thread my fingers lightly through his hair and pray that this never ends.