Chapter Twenty-Seven
LUCAS
Iwoke up warm and dry. It took a confused second to remember why it was so freaking wonderful to not be soaking and chilled to the bone, then memories of the storm crashed in. I cringed and snuffled my nose further into a pillow that smelt like clean cotton and lavender.
My recollections were dark and hazy, full of relentless rain. I could still hear it now. It poured down a gutter somewhere nearby. The wind whooshed in regular blasts.
I frowned. I remembered falling, but it couldn’t have been too bad. I wriggled my toes. Nothing hurt. My foot brushed something warm.
My eyes snapped open.
Aster was in bed with me. He laid close enough that I could easily pick out the freckles across his forehead. There were forty-nine of them. He’d made me count them once. They were extra bright today.
He looked as cosy and sleep mused as he did after a thousand sleepovers. His dad and my mum hadn’t bothered with blow-up beds after the first few nights Aster and I spent together. He’d always wound up snuggled with me, his hands tangled with mine.
None of that had startled me. Waking up in a bed with Aster hadn’t happened since I’d moved to Doughnut, but it was familiar enough that it wouldn’t have jolted me from dozing peacefully.
What was more unusual was the other person tucked into the bed behind me. They had one broad hand pressed firmly to my chest, over my heart. The other rested on my belly.
‘Um.’
At my wordless expression of confusion, Aster woke up. His brown eyes grew wide, then filled with tears. He snuffled closer until his head was tucked under my chin, his arms holding me tight.
His tears soaked into the soft fabric of my T-shirt, and it was almost like I could taste them.
The thick saltiness rolled over me. As confused as I was by waking up in an unfamiliar – but incredibly comfy, no complaints here – bed with unknown person spooning me, my priority would always switch to Aster when he was sad.
I held him close and nuzzled into his chaotic hair. It smelt amazing. He must have just had a shower, or maybe he’d changed the recipe for his homemade shampoo bars. The lavender scent I’d drifted awake to intensified as I breathed against his scalp.
‘It’s okay, Aster,’ I whispered. My bestie was my priority, but I kind of wanted to establish who exactly was tucked up behind me without waking them, and slip out of bed without their knowledge if the opportunity arose.
Keeping my voice down increased my chances of a sneaky getaway.
‘Whatever it is, we’ll sort it out together. ’
‘We absolutely will,’ Aster said thickly, giving me one last squeeze before retreating to his own pillow.
I pushed my eyebrows high, looked down at the hand on my chest, then back at Aster. The universal sign for Can you please explain who this is?
Aster didn’t get the message. He sniffed, bloodshot eyes not leaving my face.
‘Who’s behind me?’ I breathed.
‘Oh. That’s Callum,’ Aster said, like his boyfriend snuggling with his best friend was perfectly normal.
I struggled to recall what had happened after I fell, but drew a blank. Obviously, I’d made my way to Callum and Aster’s cabin, then somehow I’d consented to spend the night in the middle of an awkward sandwich.
Aster’s hands tangled with mine. ‘I’m so fucking happy you’re alive.’
His words snapped me from worrying about why I’d allowed such a weird sleeping arrangement.
‘You’re happy I’m alive?’ The whooshing wind grew louder. ‘Was there a point when I could not have been alive?’
Aster’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘What do you remember about the storm, Lukey?’
I breathed deep, grounding myself with Callum’s hands on my chest and stomach. Despite how odd it was to cuddle with a man I’d only met a handful of times, I couldn’t deny that his presence behind me felt good. Calming.
‘I remember that the weather changed quickly.’ Oscar might have said there was a storm coming before I left his farm, but there was no way to know one was truly on the way until it was on top of me.
‘I’d passed a couple of goat huts on the way out to the cliff to check on the eagles, so I walked back along the path to find them. Then I fell over.’
I frowned. From there, my memories grew dim. Aster lay quiet beside me, the toes wiggling against my shins betraying the restless energy always bubbling inside him.
‘It couldn’t have been too bad?’ I hedged. ‘I’m here and I’m not hurt, so I must have found shelter, then made my way here?’
The tight press of Aster’s mouth turned that final statement into a question.
He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. ‘I’m going to explain a whole load of stuff now. I need you to promise you’ll listen and remember that I would never lie to you.’
‘Did you once try to eat a frozen hash brown?’
Aster rolled his eyes, temporarily derailed from being either sad or super serious. ‘That happened one time and I cannot understand why everyone must continuously go on about it.’
‘Okay. Test over. You wouldn’t lie to me.’ I took another deep breath, Callum’s hands firm. ‘Tell me stuff then.’
Aster’s face switched from dramatically exasperated back to solidly serious.
It was the same expression he’d worn at age nine when he explained to me that he was deeply and irrevocably in love with the puppy his next-door neighbours adopted.
I didn’t think anything he was about to say now would be quite as cute, but hopefully it would result in less breaking and entering.
‘You broke your leg when you fell.’
I tensed, but no pain pulsed from my shin.
‘Yeah,’ I said slowly. ‘It really fucking hurt.’ I screwed up my face. ‘That makes no sense. It’s not broken now.’
Aster nodded. ‘There are reasons for that, but I’m going to tell you everything in chronological order because otherwise I might forget something and this will all sound way more freaky and weird than it needs to.’
I wasn’t sure how it could sound more freaky and weird than it already did. Apparently, I’d broken my leg the day before but was miraculously unhurt now.
Unless.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
Aster’s nose scrunched in the way it did whenever I ruined one of his best stories. ‘I’ll get to that.’
Very rarely, I wanted to shove my best friend. Just a bit. But more than that, I trusted him. He said he needed to tell me about how I’d ended up in bed with him and his boyfriend in a certain way, so it must be important.
‘Carry on.’
Aster widened his eyes at me, like that was what he was going to do anyway and he didn’t need my permission.
‘No one was with you at this point, so we don’t know exactly what happened.’ Any playfulness in his expression fled. ‘You managed to get yourself to one of the goat huts, but you were exposed to the storm for a while before that.’
‘Oh, fuck.’ Memories, harsh and jagged, crashed into my mind. ‘I passed out after I fell. When I woke up, I saw the hut and dragged myself over to it.’
It had been agonising. Tentatively, I flexed my left ankle, then knee. No pain at all.
Maybe Aster was reluctant to tell me how long I’d been asleep because it had been months. I must have been out for a while for my leg to completely heal.
‘Kit, Errol, and Louisa found you and brought you here.’
‘Kit was there?’ Soft fingers on my face. Comforting whispers. A grip on my hand I didn’t ever want to let go. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s at his bookshop.’
I looked away from Aster’s face to the jumper he was wearing that I was fairly certain Callum had been bundled up in the last time I came over for dinner. My bestie couldn’t know the strange thoughts creeping over me. They had seemed so natural while freezing and hurt and alone.
I didn’t know if I still wished I’d kissed Kit, but I certainly wished he was here.
‘There was loads wrong with you. Too much,’ Aster interrupted my musings about Kit’s lips.
‘Your leg was broken and one of the bones had pierced a vein. It looked seriously messed up, like your leg was a huge red sausage.’ Aster grimaced after painting such a vivid and wonderful mental image.
‘You had advanced hypothermia from being exposed to the wet and cold for so long, and rain must have gotten into your lungs somehow. Maybe when you were unconscious. You had pneumonia as well.’
‘Fuck,’ I hissed. Aster being glad I was alive made a whole lot more sense now. If all he’d said was true, it was a death sentence without immediate medical attention. ‘How did you get me to a hospital quickly enough? Did they put me into a coma?’
The wind was rising again. Aster gripped my hands, his thumbs smoothing over my knuckles.
‘This is when it’s going to get freaky, okay?’ he warned me.
I nodded. I needed to know how I’d gone from knocking at death’s door to waking from what felt like the best night’s sleep of my entire life.
‘The storm was still raging. There was no way we could get you off the island.’ Aster’s fingers tightened.
‘To save you, we had to make a choice. Well, I made the choice really. Best friend privilege. If you’re about to die and there’s some way to save you but it’s a choice between death and something you might not want, I get to decide.
And spoiler, I’ll always choose to keep you around. ’
‘Aster?’ I said over the thumping gusts of wind battering the cabin, trying to keep my voice steady as nerves zinged through me. ‘What choice did you make?’
Maybe he’d risked someone else to help me, had demanded a helicopter travel to the island during the storm. My stomach sank. I hoped no one had been hurt.
Aster shuffled closer so that his legs pressed against mine.
His hands gripped my elbows. Sardined between my best friend and Callum, it was almost like they didn’t want me to escape.
Or knew I’d need some kind of anchor once Aster finally flipping revealed whatever he’d done to keep me alive against monumental odds.