Anna stepped cautiously down the marble stairs leaving shaky footprints in the dust.  Lifetimes seemed to separate the days since she had last made this journey.  The streets around her lay in ruins, the devastation clearer here than from the cracked panes above.  Cars lay sideways, street lamps were torn from the ground, cracks propagating through the burnt tarmac, the weak sunlight reflected in pools of water and oil and the cries of gulls echoed through the empty shells of houses hotels and shops, everywhere blue suited bodies swilled, Cheshire cats against the chaos.  Jie fell weeping at his mother’s knees as she grasped at his collar, his shirt, his hair, her cries echoing the gulls.  All this and yet Anna saw nothing, only him.

To Mark it felt as though the world had stopped spinning, nothing seemed real, only her blonde tresses and the thumping of his heart, everything else blurred around him, the edges beautifully out of reach.  Gulping he closed the space between them in a few awkward steps, tripping slightly on a broken road sign at his feet.  Her blue eyes seemed glazed and offered no clue of what lay beneath. The gash on her cheek was horrendously purple against her pale face and worsening. He reached clumsily for her hand, knocking her fingers greedily into his own, coughing nervously.  The words which had formed and died on his lips so many times the day before as he had left her to her own fate bubbled at the surface once more, and he choked.

‘Anna,’ he began, spluttering.  Her eyes widened momentarily at the tone in his voice, I think we both know why it took me so long to leave, why I stayed on, why you kept asking . . .’ he broke off, still unable to admit this strange sequence of events to himself let alone this perfect stranger of the past week.  This pause gave Anna time to open her cracked lips for the first time, her eyes darting across his face, ‘Do we?’
‘Yes,’ Mark whispered, the flush of his cheeks and the slight shudder of his words betraying the doubt he still held in her reaction.  But if the last week had taught him nothing else, he knew now that one had to grabs ones chances, and in one swift movement his hand was at her chin tilting her face upwards to his, and his lips were on hers.  He could feel the brittleness of them, but they lingered and then her grip on his hand tightened, it was a clumsy kiss but it was one neither of them were likely to forget.