Chapter eleven
LUCAS
Ishouldered open the cottage’s back door and an intense burst of garlicky tomatoes and cheese washed over me.
My day of back-to-back appointments at the surgery had been gruelling.
I didn’t manage to take a lunch break between cleaning up the examination room and checking over a hamster for a little girl.
She came through the door crying but left hiccupping with laughter after I explained that her new best friend was just sleeping.
Coming home to a delicious meal after a long day was good, but knowing that when I climbed the stairs I’d be greeted by someone I didn’t have to avoid anymore was even better.
I pulled off my coat and boots. A casual observer wouldn’t have been wrong if they’d noticed the skip in my step as I made my way up to the main living space of the cottage.
It was as cosy and inviting as it had been on the night of the macaroni fiasco. A ball of black and white fluff was tucked into one corner of the sofa. Kit was cuddled under a blanket with a book open on his knees, his skin glowing pale gold in the light of candles flickering on the coffee table.
He turned to smile at me, but his face fell when the ball of fluff launched from the sofa and hurled itself at my legs.
‘Oh, no. Sorry.’ Kit fought his way out from under the blanket, his book thrown to one side. ‘Kat has absolutely no manners and I’m sorry if she claws you.’
I looked away from his flailing to the cat peering up at me, my shins vibrating with the force of her enthusiastic purring. ‘I think I’m okay?’
Kit walked around the sofa, staring between me and his cat. ‘Kat likes you? She doesn’t like anyone. Not even me.’
I crouched to rub between her furry ears. She fell onto her back in a fit of ecstasy, but her tail twitched when Kit took a step closer.
‘Did you get her recently? Aster never mentioned a cat.’ I would have heard stories about Kit’s pet if he’d met her. Aster talked about the pygmy goats of the island as though they were his children.
Kit shook his head and the cat glared at him for daring to move in her presence. ‘Ah, no. I got her a while ago, but there was a bit too much noise for Kat while Aster stayed here.’
‘Her name is Kat?’ I stroked her exposed belly, the fur ridiculously soft. ‘And you’re Kit?’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Kit kept his distance as his pet allowed me to rain attention down on her.
‘I didn’t come up with it; Louisa did. By the time I realised no one was going to bother calling her Katrina, it had stuck and KitKat was born.
’ His chin dipped into the folds of his light green scarf as he looked fondly at his cat.
‘At least visitors to the bookshop get a kick out of it.’
The oven timer pinged. I gave Kat one last tickle under her chin and stood. ‘I promise I’m not running off upstairs to avoid you. I’m covered in hair and probably other stuff from being at the surgery today. What you’ve made smells amazing, but I want to change and wash up before I eat.’
Kit smiled shyly at the compliment almost buried in my over explanation. ‘It’s pizzas, and the timer was to swap them around. You’ve got another ten minutes until they’re ready.’
‘Perfect.’ I side-stepped the cat desperate for my attention and hurried upstairs. I opted for a quick shower to clean the dried drool and other animal essences off me, then bundled into a hoodie and a pair of pyjama bottoms.
I didn’t let myself think too much about how I looked as I walked downstairs, my damp hair dripping onto my shoulders. It was impossible that I’d ever look as effortlessly good as Kit. Today, he’d matched his scarf to a navy jumper, his long legs covered by deep green trousers.
He was wielding a pizza cutter as I hopped down into the living room, nudging Kat out of the way with one sock covered foot.
‘Can you take care of your admirer for a second?’ he asked as the ball of fur wound around his ankles. ‘I’ve made a tiny cat pizza for her but she doesn’t understand the concept of letting it cool and she’s more likely to wait patiently with you than with me.’
I bent to pick up Kat, and my knuckles brushed the inside of Kit’s shin. He sidestepped out of the way, then went back to chopping up two huge pizzas and occasionally fanning a small third.
He didn’t seem too bothered by my accidental touch, but it reminded me of what I’d noticed the night before at Joshua and Bonnie’s. I bit my lip. That felt like more of a conversation to ease into, perhaps after we’d established if we actually could be friends.
‘When did you get Kat?’ I asked, opting for a much safer topic.
Kit might be warmer and kinder than anyone else I’d met, but he was exactly the same as everyone else in one respect; pet owners loved talking about their furry friends.
‘We arrived on the island five years ago.’ Kit sent me and Kat a beaming smile over his shoulder before he went back to slicing up the pizzas. ‘She was a sneaky stow-away in one of my boxes. I got a nasty shock when I opened it and an angry beast jumped at my face.’
Kit’s back was turned to me, but I would have noticed if he had scars. His first meeting with Kat couldn’t have been too bad.
‘Despite trying to maul me at every moment except from when I fed her, Kat stuck around.’ Kit transferred the pizzas onto a couple of big plates.
He placed the third into a bowl and pressed one finger into the dough to check the temperature.
‘Errol shared lost cat posters on the mainland, but no one came forward to claim her.’ He raised one eyebrow as he placed the bowl on the floor and Kat yowled from my arms. ‘I can’t think why. ’
Most animals liked me more than they did the average person, but I wasn’t about to put that to the test by getting between Kat and her food. I placed her on the floor and she arrowed straight for her bowl.
Kit carried the pizzas over to a small table by the window that overlooked his back garden. ‘I guess being good with animals is helpful in your job?’
We spent the meal chatting about how I’d become a vet after Aster noticed the effect I had on pets and wildlife alike. Getting into veterinary college was hard. It was only with his not so gentle encouragement that I kept trying when my A-Levels were horribly difficult.
I managed to limit my compliments to how freaking awesome the pizza was, rather than mentioning how lovely Kit’s laugh was, how his smile made me want to smile, or how his eyes sparkled each time they caught the light of the candles across the room.
Generally, it was a perfectly ordinary meal shared between two new friends.
I was feeling optimistic about having gotten through a whole day without making things weird when Kit asked if I wanted to help him with a new puzzle.
I followed him to the sofa, but veered to an armchair on the other side of the coffee table. ‘I’ve never completed a puzzle before.’
Kit gestured across the coffee table, the fabric covered square propped on his knees. ‘You’ll find it hard to help from over there.’
‘Um.’ I frowned down at my hands. ‘I don’t mind sitting here.’
‘Lucas?’ Kit waited until I’d fought off the urge to tell him the way he said my name was like no one else and looked up at him. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes.’ I slipped my hands under my legs to stop myself fiddling with the laces of my hoodie. ‘I just thought maybe you’d be more comfortable with me here?’
If I’d been right about what I’d observed at Bonnie and Joshua’s house, then this gave Kit an easy out. We wouldn’t have to actually talk about something that was probably hard for him, but he’d know I wouldn’t go stomping across his boundaries.
He scrunched his nose. ‘Why would I be more comfortable with you over there?’
Perhaps I was being more subtle in alluding to Kit’s issue than I realised, which didn’t seem likely since I’d been about as subtle as a brick through a window with him so far.
‘I wasn’t watching you or anything like that.’ I began as I meant to go on by making this as awkward as possible. ‘It’s just, I noticed last night that you moved away every time someone touched you. I thought maybe you don’t like it when people are close, and I didn’t want to make you unhappy.’
Kit’s eyes widened as I spoke, then he dropped his face into his hands.
‘I’m sorry if you don’t like to talk about it,’ I went on when he didn’t do anything but breathe heavily, his slender shoulders rising and falling. ‘I just wanted you to know I’ll respect your boundaries. If you don’t want to be touched, I won’t touch you.’
Horror lashed through me when Kit’s back heaved with a sob.
It wasn’t that he was crying, but that I had no idea how to comfort someone who didn’t want to be hugged.
Mum always said a cuddle made everything a little better, and Aster would have climbed inside me on several occasions if that was possible.
‘I’m sorry I made you sad by talking about this.’ I moved to the edge of my chair. Still a good distance from Kit, but close enough that he would know I cared. ‘We don’t have to ever speak about it again.’
‘You’re wrong there.’ He straightened and pushed his hair back from his forehead, his fingers burrowing into the soft looking strands as he gazed up at the ceiling and laughed. Dimples popped on the smooth skin of his cheeks. ‘We need to talk about it more right now.’
‘You’re not crying.’ I struggled to compute that Kit was smiling, when I thought I’d pushed him into a deep sadness.
‘I’m not crying.’ He dropped his hands onto the puzzle board on his lap and lowered his gaze to meet mine. ‘And I don’t dislike it when people touch me.’
‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘Why did you move away when people touched you last night then?’
Kit bit his lip, and I rewound what I’d said.
‘Shit. Sorry.’ I dug my fingers into the undersides of my legs. ‘You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. I know we said we want to be friends and I really do want that, but it doesn’t mean you have to share everything with me.’
‘I don’t mind talking about it,’ Kit said after I’d babbled myself into silence. His high cheekbones coloured a deep rose. ‘It’s kind of embarrassing.’
That shocked a laugh out of me. ‘You’re worried about embarrassing yourself in front of me?’
Kit smiled, his dimples popping again, but then worried his lip with perfectly straight teeth. ‘You had nothing to be embarrassed about. This is something most people would find weird.’
‘I won’t find it weird,’ I promised, then revised, ‘Or, if I do, I promise to be as nice to you about it as you have been about my mouth malfunctions.’
Kit pressed his lips together, but it looked more like he was holding in a smile than any sadness.
‘Fine.’ He spread his hands on the puzzle board. ‘It’s not that I don’t want my friends to touch me. It’s actually the opposite.’
‘You want them to touch you,’ I said slowly. ‘Then why do you always move away?’
The blush tinting Kit’s cheeks burned bright. ‘Because I want it way more than they do.’
I blinked at him. Before I could find the words to unpick what he’d said, he forged on.
‘I wasn’t very well as a baby, which meant I had to spend a lot of time in an incubator,’ he said in a rush, his eyes flicking between me and his spread hands.
‘I don’t know if that changed something in me or whether I would have been like this anyway, but I always want to touch the people I care about way more than they want to touch me.
’ His shoulders hunched, his gaze fixed on the puzzle board.
‘Even my mum had to tell me to back off sometimes. I’ve been told by partners that it’s not normal to be so needy, that I have to give people space. ’
I marvelled at the sudden urge to push whoever had made Kit feel bad about needing touch over Doughnut’s seawall.
‘Kit?’ I waited for him to look at me. ‘Can I join you on the sofa?’
His eyes wary, he nodded.
I didn’t go for anything mad, like enveloping him in the tight hug he clearly needed but had been told he shouldn’t want. I kind of wanted to cry about his mum. I didn’t know her deal, but my mum would cuddle me 24/7 if I needed it.
I lifted his blanket so that I could sit snug beside him. I rearranged the puzzle board so that it was spread across both of our laps, our legs and arms pressed close together.
‘Is this okay?’ I checked.
He took a deep breath. ‘Is it okay with you?’
I laughed and grabbed the puzzle box from the coffee table. Kit’s arm was tense alongside mine as I settled back into the sofa cushion. ‘Have you met Aster? Do you think he had any concept of personal space growing up? Scratch that. Does he have any sense of personal space now?’
Kit huffed out a laugh. ‘I know that. It’s hard to miss. But.’ He tensed again, like he’d been gradually relaxing but had caught himself. ‘I don’t want you to feel like you have to do this.’
I nudged his shoulder. ‘I only really have one friend, and we’ve always hugged and touched a lot. It's actually something I missed, while he was here alone. Now he’s all loved up with Callum in the mountains so I can’t get my daily dose of being clambered over by him.’
If I’d been asked before Aster took his trip here, I would have said that the amount me and my best friend touched was dictated by him.
That wasn’t untrue, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t welcome.
I’d either been trained to expect a lot of hugs in my life or my best friend fulfilled a need I’d always had, but I’d felt the absence while he was gone.
Had felt it again during my first few days here.
Kit let out a shuddering breath and finally his arm and leg went lax alongside mine. ‘Thank you.’
‘You don’t need to thank me.’ I passed him the puzzle box as Kat leapt onto the sofa beside me to demand scritches.
He really didn’t. I wasn’t sure if his need for touch was weird, but he didn’t think my inability to not compliment him was weird either. I didn’t know if either of us was right, but it didn’t matter. So long as we were both happy, that was what counted.
I stroked a purring cat and snuggled close to Kit as he plucked out the edge pieces of a new puzzle of a rustic cottage beside a river. His mouth refused to do anything but smile, and making him happy seemed like a pretty wonderful thing to do.