Chapter Twenty
Alex
If he’s honest, Alex would have to say that he isn’t sure how they each make it to their own beds that night without so much as a kiss.
They linger in the kitchen, making unnecessary post-dinner tea.
Jess teases him about Cassandra, seemingly as reluctant as he is to go their separate ways.
But they get there, eventually. He lies awake for a while, thinking of her on the other side of the house, wondering what she wears to bed, whether she sleeps on her side or her back, if she always reads or journals before she falls asleep.
He imagines she has a whole night-time routine, imagines her going through it – mildly distracted, he hopes, by thoughts of the day they’ve spent together, by thoughts, perhaps, of his own bedtime routine.
Eventually, he falls asleep, dreams the kind of dreams he will never admit to in public.
When he wakes up, he throws on his trusty Durham University Boat Club sweatshirt and some socks and pads through to the kitchen.
Jess is up already, swinging in the dark wooden rocking chair, sipping a tea and looking out of the window into the depressing British greyness, seemingly mesmerised by a squirrel jumping from branch to branch.
Her mind is a mystery to him – and he is enjoying exploring it, though so far, he realises, he is only paddling in its shallowest edges.
‘Morning,’ she says, but she doesn’t turn her head. It’s as if she doesn’t want to miss a second of the squirrel’s dance.
‘Morning. I take it you’re a squirrel fan?’
‘Of course,’ she says, and this time she does turn to him, her smile lighting up her whole face, the whole room. ‘How could you not be?’
‘Indeed,’ he says, despite his bafflement. He does not say, Aren’t they just rats with fluffy tails and good PR? He does not say, You know there are squirrels in London, too? She is having what seems to be almost a sacred moment, with the squirrel, and he doesn’t want to ruin it for her.
‘I made a pot of tea,’ she says. ‘There’s enough for you too.’
There’s a crocheted tea cosy on the pot.
He hasn’t seen one of those in a long time.
It strikes him as incongruous that Nathan would have one at all, let alone a spare one for this Airbnb.
All these years being friends, and he didn’t know Nathan was the type to have a tea cosy.
Then again, he also wouldn’t have had him pegged as a matchmaker.
Surely that can’t be what this whole co-authorship is about?
Surely Jess has it wrong about Nathan sending the two of them to Godalming to – what were her words … her exact phrase – to fall in love?
‘That’s thoughtful of you,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
He pours his tea and they sip, the silence punctuated only by their slurps. She is watching the squirrel; he is watching her watch it. It feels like something he could do for a long time. Her enjoyment is mesmerising, beautiful. She is mesmerising, beautiful.
Get yourself together, he tells himself. You are here to do a task, not to fall in love.
As if reading his thoughts, she drags her eyes away from the window.
‘We should probably get to work.’
‘We’ll move the table,’ he finds himself saying. ‘So that you can watch the garden creatures at the same time.’
‘I’d love that,’ she says. ‘You’re not just a pretty face after all.’
He knows it’s an expression, that people say this to each other jokingly, regardless of the state of their faces. But he takes it as a compliment nonetheless. She thinks he has a pretty face. That will do nicely.
‘Neither are you,’ he says.
She looks at him quizzically, perhaps wondering what has triggered this admission. Not knowing that her palpable joy is winsome, contagious. ‘Thank you?’
They work all morning, following the groove they set yesterday.
Outside, the clouds grow darker and then rain begins to drum on the windows.
Page by page, Alex and Jess discuss the descriptions and the plot.
They brainstorm other ways the story can unfold, the characters that need a more substantial role.
Alex is beginning to think he can trust Jess to write those missing pages, or at least to sketch them out and write a first draft they can then polish together.
She’s smarter than he ever gave her credit for.
He tries not to let himself be distracted by how attractive he finds her mind at work.
They skip lunch, fill up on the rapidly dwindling supply of flapjacks.
And then, the rain slows and stops. The sun’s weak efforts produce what seems to be a miracle: a rainbow.
And apparently Jess can’t take it anymore. She puts her pen down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, really just a clearing of the throat. ‘But I have to go outside. It’s just so pretty out there.’
‘Of course,’ Alex says. ‘You’ve more than earned a break.’
She looks at him as if trying to figure out what is wrong with his sentence. Then she gets it. It’s the pronoun he’s used: the you.
‘You’re coming too, though, aren’t you?’ He doesn’t want Jess to judge him. And he definitely doesn’t want to disappoint her.
‘It’s not that,’ he says, improvising. It’s warm and cosy indoors. Outdoors, there’ll be puddles, and the kind of damp that will chill him to the bone. ‘It’s footwear. I’ve only got my trainers with me, and they’re not very waterproof.’
In his defence, he thought they’d spend their entire time indoors, huddled over a manuscript.
But he should have thought about going out for dinner, should have thought more about needing some alone time, some fresh air.
Should have thought, perhaps, if he hadn’t been in denial, about romantic walks.
After more rummaging, she finds some wellies for him.
They are ridiculously big, but he doesn’t want to draw attention to his embarrassingly small feet, to what the smallness of his feet might imply.
He will slosh around in them and pray for blisters to form only after they’re safely back in the comfort and warmth of the cottage.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’
It takes them a few tries to yank the door open, but they make it out.
And he has to admit, the rainbow is pretty.
Jess’s cheeks are flushed from the cold or from pleasure, or both, and she looks beautiful, too.
‘See?’ she says, pointing out a puddle where the rainbow is reflected.
She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. ‘Aren’t you glad you came out?’
With her hand in his, it’s hard to argue with that.