Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
D espite being snarky with her host about it, Grace had intended to let herself be dragged out to whatever beach-side stage Wesley wanted and to dance barefoot until long past when the sun should have set in a normal, less magical land.
But while Wes was painting her nails, Grace had sat down at her keyboard and a different kind of magic took flight. Words began to flow for the first time in almost a year. If in the morning they’d been a trickle, this evening they were a veritable Fall Creek Falls , pouring out so quickly she almost didn’t have time to worry about whether they were the right words or not. They were words, and even Grace could see the value in getting them down on paper.
Thus engrossed, she nearly jumped out of her skin when a bowl of mouthwatering fish stew was placed at her elbow.
Wearing her skinniest jeans and knee-high boots, Wes offered a sunny smile. “ It’s happening!”
“Give me ten minutes to change,” Grace told her, running a hand through her messy hair and shoving her chair back from the dressing table.
Wesley shook her head, pressing Grace firmly back into her chair. “ I don’t want to interrupt. This is good.”
Grace glanced back at the ancient laptop. “ It probably isn’t. It’s probably flaming hot garbage.”
Wes shrugged. “ Gotta be shit on the page before you mine it for truffles, isn’t that what you always say?”
“Is it?” Grace teased.
“You know it is. So keep churning out that shit, babe.”
“You really don’t mind going out alone?”
“Gray, I am an only child. I broke up with my boyfriend so I could finally go places alone again. And because he was bad in bed, but partially the other thing. I’ll be fine.”
Grace studied her. Wes was one of those wonderfully underrated friends. How many others would have been content to tag along on this last-minute trip and then spend so much time on their own? She was a true, loyal… horny friend. “ You’re going to look for your mysterious sweater guy, aren’t you?” she asked.
Her wonderful friend’s cheeks turned pink as Wes spluttered a false denial. “ I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s a priest, Gray . A priest. ”
“You’re not Catholic .”
Putting her hand to her chest as though incensed, Wes said, “ Excuse me, I respect the cloth!”
“Yeah, but he?—”
Wes put up her finger, demanding silence. “ I can’t help it that he smells amazing. Eat something before you get a migraine.” Then she grabbed her denim jacket off the bed and headed out.
After devouring the delicious soup, Grace wrote until she couldn’t see straight. Both the good and bad thing about this northerly island was how the sun never quite seemed to set. It was easy to lose all sense of time. Before she knew it, Mr . Bee would probably be hammering away again.
What had possessed her to offer to help? He was stuffy and arrogant, and she didn’t know the first thing about renovating a cardboard box, let alone a historical stone cottage.
But he hadn’t thrown her and Wesley out of his place when he’d had every right to. And he’d been Diego’s friend, back when her big brother was a lonely rookie four thousand miles from his family and too busy being the big football hero to admit a shred of homesickness.
Worst of all, despite how much the guy irritated her, being near him seemed to spark her utterly dormant creativity in a way long walks and classical music and yoga had failed to do. Poking him just to get a reaction was an extra little treat. She liked watching him struggle to remain unbothered until finally he clapped back with a snappy retort—it was fun, right up until she pushed him too far and his retort landed in her own backyard. It was silly to get mad, but at this point, angry writing was better than no writing at all. Sparring with him somehow made her faster, sharper, all the things both said and unsaid spewing out onto the page.
At this rate, if she just kept rubbing him the wrong way, she might finish the whole damn book early.
Not that there was a right way to rub him. Bees were delicate and sting-y after all. Head in the game, Gracie !
* * *
When she finally stopped for the night, Grace realized two things: First , she was beyond ravenous, like so hungry if she didn’t eat something right this second she might pass out, and secondly, Wes had already returned from the evening’s festivities and gone to bed, all while Grace was in the zone. She closed her laptop softly and tiptoed out to the kitchen in search of more soup.
What she found was a freshly stocked refrigerator, with shelves of bread and cheese, fresh fruit and hummus, as well as a pantry bursting with earthy-crunchy snacks and staples. She turned back to stare into the refrigerator’s glow, wondering for a moment whether she’d been writing merely for hours or actually for days, when a gruff whisper said, “ I recommend the cheese straws.”
Grace hoped it was somehow dark enough he didn’t see her jump, but light enough he caught the dirty glare she cast over her shoulder.
“For a midnight nibble,” he clarified. “ Hands down the winner, good any time of the day, and especially for fueling late-night activities.”
Unable to stop herself, Grace smirked at the word activities.
He looked away. “ Work -related activities.”
“Doesn’t sound very appetizing,” she said, letting him off the hook and leaning down to search the lower fridge shelves for the mysterious cheese straws.
“Neither does haggis,” he reasoned, rousing himself from his living room chair and coming up behind her in a way that made her spine tingle.
“Exactly,” she agreed, a little breathless.
He turned to the pantry, and she couldn’t help noticing the outline of his toned behind hugged by soft joggers. When he turned back around, she shifted her gaze up in time to see the box he was handing over.
“Have you ever tried haggis?” he asked.
“Definitely not.”
“Exactly,” he agreed with a smug smile.
Grace snatched the box of what looked like long, thin cookies, with a strong resemblance to bread sticks from the pizza chain of her childhood. She focused on tearing the box open, instead of looking at his dumb beard or his smug lips or his stupid arms as he crossed them over his chest.
“I suppose you eat haggis every meal?”
“I don’t have a death wish, Rios . I’m vegetarian.” He set down a tablet on the island and flipped the folio cover closed.
“What are you reading?” she asked, to change the subject as she bit into the savory, annoyingly delicious cheese straw. Good lord, where had these been her whole life? She took another before finishing the first.
“Ssspreadsheets,” he whispered, drawing out the S ’s like he was making fun of his own boring ass.
“Gross. But better you than me.”
He snorted, scrubbing a hand over his eyes like he was exhausted.
“Is it going to be super expensive? Your late-night work-related activity?”
He nodded. “ I try not to focus too much on the expense.”
“Because you’re turning the house into a distillery?”
“No, the house is just a demonstration of what I can do. I mean, it needs doing anyway, which is… convenient.”
“I don’t get it.”
“My investor’s very keen to see how it could work: a carbon net-zero distillery. I’m adapting the house to demonstrate a little of what it would take.”
“Like a diorama?” Grace asked, remembering a fourth-grade science project about the solar system.
He nodded enthusiastically. “ Like , how energy from the panels would run everything, how the water would be collected and filtered, how the flavor could be achieved without peat, all of it. There’s things we do ’cause it’s how they’ve always been done, but finding a new way forward is an art as much as a science.”
His face lit up and came to life as he talked about his plans and, for maybe the first time since they’d met, he didn’t look angry or annoyed. It took years off him. Grace had kind of assumed starting a distillery was just some youthful dream to have unlimited booze at his disposal, garnering the adulation of all the other drunken hooligans. She’d figured the eco thing was just a gimmick, his grandfather’s house a convenience. But this whole endeavor lit a fire inside him the way writing used to do for her not so long ago.
“Jules already likes my whisky. When the house is done, they’ll know they can trust me to operate green. If they like what they see, hopefully they’ll recognize the value in locating it here and give me the capital to get to work.”
God, but Grace was a sucker for a man with a plan and the passion to make it happen. It did things to her chest and her belly, things she’d rather not dwell on. It was all so terribly inconvenient.
“Do your neighbors understand all this?” she asked, nodding out towards the beach where more than one local had stopped to gawk that day, hurling insults loud enough to be heard each time the trio had set their hammers down. It had to be wearing on him. “ Ryan …”
He shook his head, scowling more deeply than ever.
“Have you told them though? With those exact words like you just told me?”
He opened and closed his mouth a few times as though testing out whatever hurtful things he planned to say when he told her to butt out. For some reason, she liked this careful side of him, as if he were a writer himself, revising before he spoke words onto the page.
More people should be that careful with their words instead of letting them fly the moment they entered their heads like both of them had done in the airport. He clearly regretted the whole exchange and was trying to avoid any further first-draft mistakes in conversation.
“They don’t give me a chance,” he finally explained, rather than telling her to mind her own beeswax.
And wasn’t that a familiar problem? There was nothing worse than being held to account for someone else’s mistakes, stumbling more with each unfair accusation to find the words or the fortitude to defend yourself.
Grace supposed it was the same reason she became a writer. As a kid, she’d always had the right words at the wrong time. As a writer, she could give her characters the speeches her teenage self had been unable to say, the courage she’d been lacking.
Could she do the same for him now?
“They will listen,” she said, with more conviction than she felt. “ You’ll make them.” Where was this coming from? How could she even know? “ Or you won’t, and they’ll either get over it or run you out of town.”
He looked like he might actually cry.
“I’m kidding. People hate change, but they’ll get over it.”
“It’ll create jobs.”
“Yeah?”
“Not many: one, two percent.” He shrugged. “ That’s ten new jobs wouldn’t be here otherwise. Not to mention, hopefully, increased tourism. Islay’s got the peated whiskies. Lewis has the stones. Give folk a reason to come down here aside from Bàgh a’ Chiùil ,” he spat, rolling his eyes.
“One percent, huh?”
“Give or take.”
“That’s like three million jobs back home. You’re bigger than… Microsoft .”
His brow furrowed like maybe that was too much pressure.
“If it doesn’t work out, you could always get a job as the spokesperson for these cheesy things,” she said, shoving another one indelicately into her mouth.
“Good, right?”
“Oh my god. When I have to buy new pants, I’m sending you the bill.”
He barked out a laugh, covering his mouth too late, and they both glanced towards the bedroom, hoping they hadn’t woken Wesley .
She shouldn’t have said that about her pants, as though she weren’t wearing any. Didn’t they call underwear pants here? A sweaty feeling ran over Grace , but when she looked back at him, his gaze was on the counter as he reached for a cheese straw himself, as though she hadn’t just mentioned pants like it was nothing.
Was it nothing? Was she just being ridiculous?
He looked younger with his eyes downcast and the shadowy summer light playing across his cheekbones, the residual smile of his unexpected laugh still gracing those fine lips. A smile looked good on them.
The effect was ruined the moment he bit into one of the cheese straws and moaned lasciviously.
“You’re disgusting,” she said. “ I hope they push your distillery into the sea.”
He laughed again, but then his face grew taut. “ They might.”
“Why do it, then?”
He frowned, and for a moment she worried she’d hit a little too close to home with the brusque question.
“What, follow my dream?” he asked in a sarcastic tone.
“Why do it here?” she elaborated. “ When you’re already fighting an uphill battle? You have a Sisyphus complex or something?”
Why was she asking? It was none of her business what he did or didn’t do with his house and his ambition and his time. She was only here for a few weeks, and then she’d be back home straightening Percy Jackson books on the school library shelves and reminding rebellious adolescents to spit out their gum. But since her novel felt a lot like rolling a boulder uphill too, she found herself desperate to know his answer.
He eyed her for a minute, like he might just tell her to fuck off back to bed, and she wasn’t sure she’d blame him. But then he slumped against the counter.
“I regret the manner of my leaving,” he finally said with a half shrug. “ Our cousin Alec went off to uni. And Teàrlach was sent to Glasgow for treatment. Me , I just pissed off in a huff like a toddler having a tantrum and left Eòghann here all on his own. He didn’t deserve that.”
Her heart did something funny at his admission, too chock full of too many feelings. She’d been the one left behind when Diego went away. Did he ever feel guilty for following his dreams and leaving her to fend for herself in Catholic school?
“He could’ve gone too, if he wanted,” she pointed out, offering her companion the same forgiveness she held space for in her heart.
“No. He couldn’t,” was all he replied. “ Alec … never came back.” He shrugged, frowning. “ I didn’t want to be like him anymore.”
“What was your tantrum about?”
He smiled ruefully and shook his head. “ What wasn’t it?” He stretched then, a thin line of hairy tummy peaking between his t-shirt and the waistband of his joggers, which set off a warmth in Grace’s own belly that she tried to ignore. “ You’re off the hook tomorrow,” he said, and she ought to have felt relieved instead of set aside. “ It’s getting crowded up there. Mounting the rest is really a two-person job, and Lùc needs something to keep him out of trouble.”
Why did it please her so inordinately that he said two-person and not two-man? If he’d said man , she’d have snapped at him that she was as capable as any man, and then she’d have been stuck spending her day doing more manual labor instead of the job she came here to finish.
“It’s late,” he muttered, shoving off from his leaning perch. “ Wouldn’t want to drop one of those panels on a council member.”
Grace snorted. “ As a renter, I better not be held accountable if you do.”
“Och, I’ll tell them it was all your idea so they let me off.”
She scowled at him, but he winked at her, and god damn that should be illegal.
“Night, Rios ,” he murmured, and wandered back to his room, leaving her in a bit of a tangled tizzy.