Chapter 11 #2
He sighed. ‘I know. I know. It’s just that – och, no.
Never mind.’ Lachlan clearly made an enormous effort to turn around a descending mood.
‘I like it when you try to beat positivity into me. Stops me feeling as though I’m the only one in charge around here.
’ The grin he gave me now was slightly weak, but he was trying.
‘The only one in charge around here is our good earl out there.’ I squeezed as much water out of his shirt as I could and draped it with the others, concealed behind an upturned crate.
‘I can relax with you.’
I wasn’t sure how I was meant to take that. ‘You know you don’t have to pretend to the others either,’ I said carefully, wiping my red and stinging hands down myself. ‘We’re getting a handle on life here. We’re managing.’
‘But we shouldn’t.’ He spoke softly but the words had a force behind them. ‘We mustn’t settle, Pax. I’m fighting here to keep the urge to go home. If we lose focus and give in then…’ He tailed off and shrugged. ‘I’m afraid and I’m struggling,’ he said. ‘And you’re keeping me afloat.’
I couldn’t look at him now. This was all getting way too psychological for me, so I stared into the bucket, where a slight scum on the surface told me that our clothes had been very overdue for that wash.
‘Can I have a sluice in the bucket? I really need a good hot shower for, oh, about a week, but a bit of a wash will do.’ Lachlan hauled the conversational supertanker back onto its normal course again and stopped my contemplation of the filthy water.
I handed over the bucket. ‘Knock yourself out. But please wait for me to get clear first.’
‘In case the sight of my gorgeous nakedness inflames your desire and you are overcome with the urge to ravish me?’ Lachlan gave me a huge grin of assumed innocence. The effort it took him must have been almost superhuman and something inside me ached for him.
‘It’s more that these jeans take ages to dry out if they get wet, so I don’t want to get splashed,’ I said, keeping up the mood because I didn’t want to let him slide back into that awful resignation.
It dawned on me that I really did like Lachlan.
Not in a ‘forced together so we have to get on’ way, and not in a ‘not had sex for a while so any decent-looking man will do’ way either.
But him letting me see his vulnerability was very attractive.
Jack had been invulnerable. Or, at least, he’d cruised through life without ever having a problem that couldn’t be got over by throwing money at it, or jettisoning his girlfriend.
He’d been superficial and I was realising that I’d never really known him.
Here, with Lachlan laying his fears and worries bare – it all felt more real.
‘A disappointing reaction.’
‘I’m going out to… err… look for the others.’ I began backing away as Lachlan peeled the jumper off again.
‘Thank you.’
He was undoing his trousers and I fled out of the room and up the staircase. We had confided in each other and I’d cried all over him, but that didn’t mean I was ready for full-frontal nudity.
It was only when I got outside that I realised he probably wasn’t going to take all of his clothes off and that I had overreacted somewhat.
But now it was too late and I couldn’t go back and apologise.
Besides, he might well have decided to go for broke since I wasn’t there, and I could feel my cheeks getting hot at the idea of bursting in, and him completely naked.
There was a teeny frisson of imagination around the edges of that thought which made me raise my eyebrows at myself and rush to find a distraction.
There wasn’t that much distraction to be had.
I tried Jeannie first. She was in her cottage standing over the central hearth and stirring something that smelled medicinal.
The door stood open to let what little light these early winter days held illuminate the earthen floor and the fire flickered in the draught.
Jeannie wrapped her hands in cloth and picked up one of the big stones that built the hearth, dropping it with a splash and sizzle into the liquid.
I wanted to go over and look into the pot, but the little black dog was lying in the doorway and it growled at me without raising its head from its paws, so I left them alone and wandered off.
Two men were talking over the back of one of the small cows.
I watched them for a while, half contrasting their skinny frames and bumps of muscle to Lachlan’s body.
Then I realised what I was doing and snatched my mind back.
Lachlan was a well-fed twenty-first-century man with access to a gym.
These men looked underfed and their bodies were corded with muscles built despite desperately poor nutrition and no knowledge of essential vitamins.
When one man rucked up his kilt to reveal a half-healed gash that ran from his knee to his groin, I realised they were comparing scars and turned away, ashamed of myself.
This was not the pretty version of the eighteenth century that we’d been fed at school, or the battle-hardened bravery that Dad held to so firmly.
This was real people, doing real things and just trying not to die.
I wished more books showed us that reality, rather than the romance-washed and sanitised cosmetic ‘twenty-first-century people playing in the mud’ kind.
I watched Fergus hug his son and wondered at the frailty of life here. Men and women loved, children were loved, but it could all be snatched away in the beat of a heart or the cut of a knife. It made me want to cry for them all.
It also made me even more determined to get home.