Chapter 14
14
After such a long day, I must’ve been worrying about sleep for nothing because it’s a couple of hours later when I wake up again, lost for a moment in the unfamiliar surroundings. I lift my head and check on Ava, who’s sleeping soundly on the other side of the bed, and then check on Ren, who’s not lying on the fold-out bed where he was when I last looked.
I push myself up onto my elbows to look around, and he lifts a hand in silent greeting from where he’s sitting on the window seat. I could lie down again and try to get back to sleep, but a far more attractive prospect is the gorgeous silhouette outlined by the moonlight shining in the window behind him, and I slip out of the bed, being careful not to jostle it and wake Ava, and pad across the room.
He holds up his mug and gestures to ask if I want a cup of tea. I glance towards the kitchenette, and at this time of night when I was asleep two minutes ago, it seems very far away, and like he can tell what I’m thinking, he puts his own mug down and clambers off the window seat, and I listen to the click of the kettle boiling, and within minutes, he’s back, holding a steaming hot mug for me too.
My fingers brush his as I take it, trying to remember the last time anyone did anything so thoughtful without so much as a second thought, and I take a sip to try and get my brain functioning properly and murmur my thanks as he sits back on the window seat, pulls his legs up, and pats the space on the opposite side.
I have never known a man who can look so ridiculously sexy in a pair of baggy blue check pyjama trousers and a plain blue T-shirt, and I can’t resist sitting on the other side of the window seat, facing him.
He smiles at me as I pull my legs up too, bent at the knees, so I fit alongside him and our arched legs rest against each other’s.
He takes a sip of his tea and lets out a sigh, letting his head drop back against the wall. His dark hair is mussed up and sticking out in a few directions, there’s a few days’ worth of stubble peppering his jaw, and he looks half-asleep and soft around the edges.
‘Can’t sleep?’
‘Only the recently deceased could sleep on that thing. If one of my ribs starts poking out of my neck tomorrow, you’ll know why.’
I hide my giggle behind my cup of tea to make sure I don’t wake Ava up, and he turns his head to look out of the window again, a distant look in his eyes.
‘Watching for mermaids?’ I ask quietly.
He makes an affirmative noise in response, and then blinks a few times. ‘Er, no, I meant… just sitting, watching the water. It’s perfect here, like a fairytale town. I could get used to a view like this.’
He rolls his head against the wall until he’s looking directly at me again. ‘I haven’t enjoyed life for a long while, but I’ve had such a good time this summer – because of you. Thanks for making me come here, no matter what questionable persuasion tactics you had to use.’
I go to protest and jokingly smack at his leg, but he catches my hand and squeezes it, and his cheeky grin lets me know he’s teasing.
He jiggles my hand gently to make sure my attention is on him. ‘You make me feel hopeful again. I’d given up on the idea that life could ever be good again, but since I met you, it… just is .’
I nod in recognition. I hadn’t realised how muddy my waters had got until he cleared them, but this has been the most enjoyable summer I can remember, and for the first time since losing Dad, I’ve started to feel normal again. Hopeful, like there really is something to look forward to.
He lets go of my hand, but before I can be too disappointed, his hand lands between our knees where they’re resting together, and his fingers start marking out mindless patterns on my knee, trailing warmth through the thin material of my pyjama trousers as he goes back to watching the glittering lights of the boats moored in the harbour, and the more distant lights of houses on the occupied islands on the horizon, and the silence is comfortable and so peaceful that I could fall asleep right here.
I wrap both my hands around my mug like I’m trying to warm up, not because it’s cold tonight, but because it would be too easy to take his hand and draw those patterns on his skin too and the constant movement is making me want to shift nearer to him.
‘Thank you.’ It’s nothing more than a murmur and he says it to the view outside the window before turning to look at me.
‘What for?’
He shakes his head like it’s a question he doesn’t have an answer for, and then turns towards where Ava’s asleep in bed. ‘How you are with her. You’ve been good for her.’ He pauses for a minute and turns back to me. ‘In a weird way, I think you’ve made me better for her.’
‘The highest form of praise,’ I say with a smile.
‘You’re confident in what you like, and you aren’t afraid to like things other people would laugh at, and that’s been good for her. You’re unequivocally you, unapologetically you, she doesn’t have many adults like that in her life, and it’s been good for her to realise you can be who you are and people will like you for that, and anyone who doesn’t like you isn’t worth your time anyway. All I’ve ever shown her is that if someone doesn’t like you, you should change yourself to please them, and I hadn’t realised how harmful that is until I met you either.’
He’s obviously talking about his ex, and I reach over and let my fingers brush over his hand where it’s stilled on my knee.
‘Even having the courage to talk so freely to the old man on the bench today, and to Caryl on reception, and to see her helping customers in your shop has been fantastic. I hadn’t realised how much confidence she’d lost until I’ve started to see her regaining it. And that’s you . Making her believe in herself and trust her feelings and just… know that you like her. That you want to spend time with her. After her mother…’
He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I know what he’s getting at. Her mum not showing up for arranged visits, and then leaving without the slightest bit of contact. ‘I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to face that kind of rejection at her age, and I can only imagine how much it must destroy someone’s self-worth. One of the most powerful things in the world is being wanted, as you are, for who you are, and one of the worst feelings is being unwanted, and being made to feel like you’re not good enough, when you are.’ I add a pointed tone to the last two words so he knows we’re not just talking about Ava.
He holds my gaze as a tired smile creeps across his face, growing wider with every second that passes, and his fingers twitch towards mine, barely grazing them, like he’s trying to stop himself holding my hand.
My hair is loose, long waves that cascade down to my lower back, a bit haywire where I didn’t bother to smooth it down when I got out of bed, and rather than taking my hand, he reaches over and lifts a section of my hair and then sits back with it still in his hand, his thumb rubbing back and forth over the red strands.
‘Maybe I’ve gone too far,’ he murmurs. ‘Tried to be too cautious. There are worse things in the world than having coloured hair. Yours is… beautiful.’
He meets my eyes again as he says it and the word sounds so heartfelt that it makes my breath stutter. ‘Why are you so against it?’
‘Because her mother would’ve let her get her hair dyed, and I don’t want to be anything like that woman.’ He answers without thinking about it, and then looks surprised, like he didn’t intend to answer so openly.
‘There’s such a thing as compromise,’ I say. ‘You can let her express herself without giving the impression that you’re about to swan off into the sunset too.’
‘All right, you know a lot about hair colour – what if it goes wrong?’
‘What if it does? Every woman has many hair disasters in her life, we’ve all got to start somewhere. Besides, why should it go wrong? Her hair is brown and she wants it purple. There’s no bleach or other harsh chemicals involved. They’ll use a vegetable dye and it’ll probably wash out within three weeks. You’re overthinking it.’
‘Yeah, I do that.’
‘Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed.’
A laugh bursts out of him and he clamps a hand over his mouth to keep quiet, and then chuckles to himself, and it makes a huge difference to see him not taking himself too seriously for once. I can’t help giggling too, consistently surprised by how easy it is to enjoy simply spending time with him.
He picks up my hair and starts playing with it again, and I squish my legs tighter against his because the position is impossible for a proper hug, and his hand slips over my knee again and he gives it a tight squeeze, and we smile at each other in the darkness, and it doesn’t feel like anything else needs to be said.
I lose track of time passing as we sit there. His hands are resting on my knees and his fingers are twiddling in my hair, plaiting and un-plaiting the section he’s holding, and it feels like such a gentle and intimate thing, and it’s only a movement down in the harbour below that makes me sit up so fast that my hair falls out of his grasp. ‘Did you see that? It looked like a tail diving into the water!’
‘Dolphin.’ He rolls his head along the wall and looks down again, but I scramble up onto my knees and cup my hands around my eyes to block reflections and look out onto the water.
‘Okay, firstly, dolphins are something to get excited about too, and secondly, it could have been something else.’
‘A harbour porpoise or a large fish, maybe even a nocturnal seabird catching a late-night feast,’ he suggests, making it obvious that he’s deliberately trying to avoid what I’m suggesting.
‘It could have been a mermaid.’
‘It could …’ He smiles an indulgent smile, and then yelps under his breath when I accidentally kneel on his foot as I try to press my face closer to the window. There’s a gentle lapping of waves against the hulls of moored boats, but no other movement now. ‘What do you want me to say, Mick? Oh yeah, that was definitely a mermaid’s tail disappearing under the water ? It wasn’t. We both know it wasn’t.’
I sigh and sit back on my knees, and he pokes my thigh with his toe until I look at him.
‘I want you to believe it could have been,’ I whisper eventually. ‘I know , okay? I know they aren’t real, but there’s no harm in believing in magic, even for a moment. Everyone’s life is better if they’re open to possibilities. And there’s something about the diary that feels real.’
‘It does feel real.’ He holds eye contact so intensely that I feel like there’s a hidden meaning. ‘A lot of things have been feeling real lately…’
Eventually, he looks away and back out to the distant sea. ‘Historical reports of mermaid sightings have been proven to be manatees. I believe there might be some truth in the diary – the boat sinking, the island perhaps – but I cannot, not even for a moment, believe that she’s really a mermaid. I agree with your assertion that the ocean depths are vast and there are undoubtedly things out there that we don’t know about, but I don’t believe they’re half-human, half-fish affairs who sing songs of love and rescue princes from drowning.’
‘Okay, what is she then?’ My attention is half on him and half still looking out the window, hoping for another glimpse of whatever we just saw in the water. ‘Based solely on the diary, if she’s not a mermaid, what do you think she is?’
‘My honest, sceptical opinion that you’ve heard before and won’t like?’ His teeth pull his lower lip into his mouth as he waits for me to nod. ‘I think she’s a novelist. A good novelist writing a first-person point-of-view story. Within thirty seconds of arriving, we were told a fairy story about a mermaid. This isn’t the origin of that story – this is someone who’s been here and heard that same fairy story and written a tale about it. They probably employ that bloke on the bench to sit there and spoon feed that junk to tourists.’
‘Oh, don’t be so cynical.’ I smack at his knee and he catches my hand again and holds it between both of his, his fingers playing with mine, pressing, squeezing, stroking, and I sit back down again and scooch nearer to him, because no matter how cynical he is, he isn’t anywhere near as contemptuous as he was a month ago, and tonight, he’s touchy-feely and soft, letting me see a tired, vulnerable side, and I get the feeling that he wishes he could believe in mermaids in a metaphorical sense.
He’s still holding my hand but he leans his head back against the wall and his eyes drift shut. I watch the water for a while longer, but whatever it was that splashed down there, it’s long gone, and the hands of the clock on the wall have moved past 2a.m. now.
I give his hand a gentle shake. ‘You want to go back to bed?’
‘Nah.’ He blinks hazy blue eyes open and focuses on me. ‘I’m going to stay here. The window seat is more comfortable than that folding contraption.’
The look he gives the offending fold-out bed makes me chuckle to myself, and I reach over to squeeze his knee. ‘I’m going back to bed. Give us a shout if you see any mermaids out there.’
Even half-asleep, he manages to raise the most disbelieving eyebrow and I have to bite back laughter again.
I slip off the window seat and he reaches out, silently asking if he can pull me in for a hug, and I step into his arms and lean down to give him a squeeze. His arms slide around me and his hands splay on my back, his fingers warm through my pyjama top making me shiver in a definitely- not -cold way.
‘You know what’s powerful?’ His voice is muffled against my shoulder and his lips graze my neck with every word. ‘You got out of bed to spend time with me.’
I’d think he was teasing if I didn’t know how much little things mean to him. ‘I can sleep anytime. How often do you think I’ll get to drink tea and watch for mermaids in the middle of the night with you? That’s a better option than any dream.’
He makes a noise that sounds like someone’s just punched him really hard in the solar plexus. His face is still buried in my neck, and his arms squeeze me impossibly tighter.
‘Night, Ren.’ I let my fingers slide through his hair and tuck it back once, and then press my lips to his forehead, right on his hairline, and I hear his breathing stutter, and his hands tighten in my pyjama top, holding on so tightly that there’s the sound of fabric stretching, and he keeps his arms around me for an abnormally long time, so long that I half-wonder if he’s gone to sleep in my arms, and honestly, although going back to bed is the only option, I could quite happily stand here and hug him until morning.