Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
S weat dripped down Bryan’s neck and beaded along his hairline, but it felt good to be working under the bright Barra sun. He’d gone soft in his ten years on Islay , spending more hours indoors with the master distiller than working either his muscles or his hands.
Being up here on the same roof he helped shingle right before he left the only home he’d ever known, the last days he spent with his grandfather—it brought everything full circle in an emotional way he hadn’t anticipated. Probably didn’t help that he wasn’t sleeping.
He’d left his tablet in the kitchen deliberately so he wouldn’t stay up all night reading, but he couldn’t stop thinking about an awkward fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her abuela and was worried no one would attend her quinceanera. How much of Gracie Rios was hidden within the pages of her book?
Reading it felt like spying, in a way, like nosing through his older sister’s diary. Which was ridiculous. The book was published—it had won an award for Christ’s sake. Loads of people had read it before him. That was sort of the point.
But still. It felt too personal.
He should’ve spent the whole night locked in his room pouring over his business plan instead of hovering like a creep in the living room, just in case she emerged from what Wesley called her authorial fever. But what if she needed something? He wanted her to know about the grocery shop he’d done, about the cheese straws and other snacks, to know it was him and not Cait who’d seen to it. Why exactly did he care?
He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He was just on the verge of drowning in worry and doubt, and he knew her own skittish nature would make her sharp and blunt at the same time. Every encounter seemed to send Grace straight into self-preservation mode, and her cutting wit with just a dash of meanness could pull him out of himself. He craved it, Christ help him.
He wanted to fight with her.
Or, perhaps more accurately, he wanted her to have a go at him, to take him down a peg or two. He deserved it for leaving Eòghann and his grandad, Ma and Teàrlach and his little sister, El —and Cait , who’d married, had kids, and divorced all without a little brother to lean on. He honestly deserved every insult any of them could hurl, but Grace was a stranger. It didn’t sting as much when she gave him what for.
Things had started off well enough trading innocent barbs over cheese straws, but then for some reason he told her about his plans and Alec , and she’d gone all soft—and how was that any help? He needed her to voice the insecurities in his head, to make him defend himself, not to be on his side.
“Your dear old granda’ll be spinning in his grave, he will,” Ellis Stewart , a third cousin on the Buchanan side, hollered up at Bryan , perfectly willing to put him in his place if Grace wouldn’t.
“If he could do that, then he’d be a zombie, and he wouldn’t give a toss about this house because zombies don’t have brains!” Lùcas yelled down at the old man.
“You watch your mouth, young Lùcas , or your father will hear about it from me. You’d do well to mind the company you keep.”
Lùc shook his head at the old man and turned back to his work.
“You should’ve stayed gone and let the tourists have it if you’re hell-bent on destroying the old place,” Bryan’s other neighbor, Nellie Combe , agreed, with a shrill yip from her little black terrier for punctuation.
“Just going to let them take the piss?” Lùcas asked with a sigh.
“What’s the difference? I argue my grandad had an eco-warrior’s heart, and they’ll retort that his heart was for the island first and for the home his own grandad constructed after that.”
“You could just growl and look scary.”
Bryan rolled his eyes, involuntarily grumbling deep in his throat.
“Exactly like that,” Lùcas agreed.
“Shut yer yap and lift,” Bryan told him, picking up one end of the solar panel and backing up the ladder when his cousin took up the other end.
“It really doesn’t bother you?” Lùcas asked, his face contorted with frustration.
“Does it you? Thought you were the antihero.”
The boy attempted to shrug, bobbling his end of the panel, and Bryan’s heart leaped into his throat, but Lùc recovered and neither of them dropped it.
“Don’t. Ever . Do that. Again .”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be better,” he snapped, his father’s words tripping off his tongue before he could stop them. “ Shite .” He winced. “ I apologize, Lùc . Maybe it does get to me a little.”
“Don’t be sorry, be better,” Lùcas parroted back with a grin. “ Why do they care so much what you do, if it’s not hurting them?” he asked quietly.
Bryan thought back to his conversation with Grace the night before, to warm brown eyes and honesty in the kitchen.
He hadn’t expected to be welcomed home with open arms, but he supposed maybe he’d hurt the whole community, leaving the MacNeils to fret over yet another faraway son, leaving his mother to worry, his little sister to grow up without a brother. Leaving his father to bury his grandfather, then inheriting the old house despite not being there to say goodbye.
The thing was, before he left, Bryan didn’t think the island particularly wanted him or would miss him in the slightest when he was gone. As a whole, they’d rejected what little he had to offer. In turn, he’d rejected all of them too, never looking back at the neighbor whose yard work would be left undone without Bryan there to trim the hedges or water the plants, never pausing to consider the recycling project he’d started in primary school and maintained through graduation or the younger cousins he wasn’t around to lead on adventures as Alec and Eòghann had done for him.
The MacNeils and Buchanans were knit into the fabric of the community like the weaving of tartan or Eòghann’s old, worn sweater. The family might forgive, but the town apparently wouldn’t be so quick to forget. They probably wouldn’t rally behind anything he did now he was home.
“That’s the price for leaving I guess.”
“Nah,” Lùcas disagreed. “ It’s the price for coming back,” and if that wasn’t the most astute thing Bryan had ever heard, he didn’t know what was.
They fell into a companionable silence after that, working quickly and efficiently to mount the remaining panels. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a little disappointed Grace stayed inside writing all morning instead of coming out to complain about the noise or threaten to shove a hammer up his arse.
“What’s next?” Lùcas asked when they finished up in the early afternoon without having stopped for a break.
“Next I watch a lot of instructional videos about connecting the wiring and transferring the electrical,” Bryan replied.
His cousin’s eyes went wide.
“Joking. I apprenticed with a guy in Glasgow before Islay . Come back next week with a s-sledgehammer.”
“Aye?” the boy asked, breaking into a grin.
“Looks good,” a voice said, and they both turned to find Wesley Teal standing behind them, squinting up at the roof a safe distance from the ladder, tall and willowy and perpetually windswept.
“You think?” Lùcas asked hopefully, and she laughed.
“I don’t know. I imagine so.”
She was still wearing Eòghann’s jumper with the hole in the sleeve.
“My Great Auntie Eilidh could likely mend that,” Bryan told her. Hell , for all he knew, she’d been the one who knit it for Eòghann in the first place. He’d received a similar cream-colored jumper in the mail his first Christmas in Glasgow .
“I’ll take you to her house,” Lùcas offered. “ It’s not far. See you next week then, cuz?”
“Don’t be late, or I’ll dock your wage.”
“You’re not paying me,” the lad shouted back, leading Wesley off to Great Auntie Eilidh’s without a backward glance.
* * *
After a quick shower, Bryan emerged feeling almost human, only to find his humanity alive and well and stirring itself to attention at the sight of Grace leaning against the kitchen counter wearing leggings and a t-shirt with Librarians Have Tighter Buns emblazoned on the back. He froze in the doorway, and she must have sensed him watching her, because she prac-tically jumped back a step with a guilty expression on her face.
On the counter before her lay his open tablet. His humanity instantly shrank to nothing, as his heart rate sped up like it might explode.
“You left it open,” she said, clearing a rasp from her throat.
“Did I ?” Since he hadn’t taken it to bed with him, he’d continued reading her novel this morning with his coffee and porridge. Then he’d gone to pour coffee in a travel mug for Wesley’s ramble, and Lùcas had tapped on the back door, and he’d been itching to read more ever since.
He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. Could he explain it away? Turn it into some kind of joke?
“Why?” she asked, looking genuinely perplexed. “ You don’t even like me. You hate books.”
She said the last part as though a person disliking books was far less fathomable than a person disliking her, and it made him sort of want to beat the living daylights out of whomever had made her feel that way—including himself.
“You won a… Printz ,” he said weakly.
“Do you even know what a Printz is?”
“Googled it.”
“So you’re just, what, Ryan ? Reading my novel—which is for young adults, by the way—so you can justify hating it on a more personal level?”
“Rios…”
She lifted her chin. “ Go on then. Tell me everything that’s wrong and immature about it.”
“You’re wrong and immature about it,” he blurted in frustration.
“What?”
What?
He shook his head. “ Rios … I’m reading it ’cause I wanted to know…”
“Know…?”
He gestured at her. He wanted to know her. “ What moves kids to write letters,” he tried again. She looked completely confused. He wasn’t making any sense. “ I think it’s… bloody brilliant,” he admitted, hating the way he stumbled over his words.
She took another step back, away from him, waiting for the but , because he’d really done a number on her with his careless words in the airport.
“What happened to books are terrible for the environment ? What happened to YA is for adults who don ’ t want to grow up ?”
Christ, he’d been an arrogant douche, but he didn’t think he’d said that. “ I didn’t?—”
“You insinuated it.”
“It’s an ebook,” he answered feebly. “ No trees were harmed in the making.”
She just kept staring at him with this look of betrayal, like she couldn’t quite decide whether to stab him or cry.
He sighed. “ You ought to know by now I’m full of… shite. I mean, I do care about the environment, obviously, but… I was stressed.”
“So was I .”
“I was in fight or flight, and… I chose fight. I didn’t know you were a damn author when I lashed out with the first words to enter my mind.”
Say you ’ re sorry , he told himself, and for some reason he could hear it in his mother’s voice from his childhood. Say you ’ re sorry , except those S ’s never had come easily.
“Does it help?” she asked, throwing him off balance once more. “ The dyslexic font?”
Bryan felt the color drain from his face, right down into his stomach, her words like a record scratch across his brain.
She must have noticed because she scrambled to explain. “ I’ve thought about asking for a line in my contract requiring a dyslexic font print edition, but I wasn’t sure how much it really helped.”
He swallowed. He started to say, Sometimes , and then he started to say, A bit, but he settled for, “ Aye .”
No one knew about his dyslexia, except apparently his cousin the librarian, Lùc’s sister Jenny . Growing up, most of his family and teachers had assumed he was slow at best, lazy at worst. It wasn’t until an acting coach on the mainland casually mentioned the connection between dyslexia and stammering that he had any kind of name for his condition, and what good was validation when it came a lifetime too late?
“Aye,” he repeated, his throat thick and tight. “ It helps.”
She nodded, but the awkwardness had fully settled over them, like a cat, unwilling to be shifted. And somehow it felt up to Bryan to shift it.
“It’s lovely, by the way. You’re insanely talented?—”
“Insane, maybe.”
“Talented. I’m no great reader—obviously—never was. Maybe if I’d had this as a kid, I would’ve been.”
She swallowed, her eyes going a little bit soft, and he needed them to stay hard and wary because the softness did funny things to his chest.
“If only I could do it a second time,” she muttered.
“?’Course you can.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“What, ’cause of the romance?” Pointing to the tablet he said, “ You’ve ten different kinds of love in this novel, you know that right?”
“Not romantic love. It was never supposed to be about that. Sixteen -year-olds don’t know anything about love, it’s all toxic Romeo and Juliet bullshit.”
“It’s real to them.” Every single one of his heartbreaks had felt like the first and last at the time.
“It’s real until it’s not,” she said. “ I’m almost thirty years old. I’ve never been in love, not for real. But I’m going to shove that down some poor kid’s throat? With their too-big hearts and their too-raw feelings?”
Were they still talking about books?
Eòghann and Teàrlach liked to tease that Bryan had left a string of heartbreak in his wake, having slept with everyone his age he wasn’t related to, male and female alike, but the truth was more complicated. There had only been one boy on Barra he’d ever kissed, a tourist at that. The rest were unrequited.
Bisexuality—one more word he couldn’t utter because it started with a B —hadn’t made his already rocky relationship with his father any easier, and he’d had to travel to the mainland to really explore it, but it wasn’t why he’d left. No , his too-big feelings had all been tied up in paternal disappointment over his academic mediocrity and the words he couldn’t say.
Bryan’s head was spinning a little, and the moment felt heavy with meaning, too heavy for him to stay quiet like he wanted while a crocodile did death rolls in his chest.
“Then use it,” he blurted out like a shotgun as he pushed away from the counter.
“What?”
Bryan turned his back on her to make speaking easier. Slicing a loaf of bread to keep his hands busy, he imagined the knife cutting away tethers that tightened his throat and tangled his tongue. “ You don’t believe in love, and it’s holding you back. From finishing your manuscript,” he clarified. “ Use it, instead of letting it control you.”
“You’re not making sense,” Grace said.
They were the four worst words in the English language, the ones he most hated to hear.
He should’ve stayed quiet. When he lived on Barra as a child, he’d learned to stay quiet, but somewhere over the years, with his elocution lessons and his extra work on film sets, with his bartending and dram-fueled karaoke, holding his tongue had become a little less necessary. Could he relearn how? Did he want to?
“I don’t know if I can pull it off,” she whispered.
Oh.
“You absolutely can. Just like Maya and her perfect quinceanera.”
She laughed a little sadly, and he turned to hand her a piece of brown bread and butter.
“Was it based on yours?”
She stared at the slice of bread for a minute, almost debating her answer with herself.
“I didn’t have one,” she finally said, looking up to meet his gaze with her glassy eyes as she reached for the bread, her fingers skimming the sensitive skin of his wrist. “ I got into some trouble, and my papa was pretty angry. He didn’t mean it, but he shouted that we should cancel it, and I was eager to avoid everyone. So I agreed. My mom, you know, she’s white. She didn’t get it, didn’t try to talk me out of it. She assumed I’d have a big sweet-sixteen party instead. So that was that.”
“Wait, you really cancelled it?” Bryan asked without thinking.
Her brow creased.
Shite. He studied the floor. “ Diego . He came to the flat in an absolute fury. We’d been out drinking the night before to celebrate his World Cup call-up when he realized the dates. He told the gaffer he’d be late to camp, and they said if it was so urgent he go home, then he could stay there. They’d take an alternate to South Africa . He was wrecked over having to tell you. When he heard you cancelled it…”
“He thought it was because of him?”
Those glassy eyes grew glassier. Christ . “ I don’t know what he thought. I just always assumed you uninvited him.”
“Fuck,” she said. Then , “ Sorry .”
Bryan shrugged.
“I need to call him.”
“Don’t—”
“I have to.”
“Please don’t. It’s six a.m.”
“Fuck,” she said again, and this time she didn’t apologize. “ It had nothing to do with him.”
“It was a long time ago. I’m sure he knows that now.”
She shook her head.
“Do you want a drink?” he offered, because she looked like she could use one, but she shook her head.
“It’s early. Not six a.m., but early. For me.”
“A walk then? Just down the coast? I’ll point out all the things I hated leaving behind, things I came back for.”
She smiled at him then, a sad, watery sort of smile that felt like the sun peeking out after a storm to make a rainbow. Christ , she was going to be trouble.
“Views will be worth it, even though you hate me.”
“I do, it’s true.” She nodded in solemn agreement. “ But I suppose I can put up with you for a nice walk and a good view.”
And for the first time, Bryan didn’t mind being hated.