Chapter 36
Jodi Castle
The cabins were a curious mix of chintz and old-world charm.
The outsides blended into the surrounding farmland, the verdant roofs housing the same meadow flowers as the grass underfoot.
Inside the wood was brightly painted in earthenwear colours, but the furnishings were all plain wood, benches, tables, and chairs of the kind Victorian children sat on at school.
A large grandfather clock stood in one corner, and a rustic shelf hung between two windows housed a row of delicate china teacups and saucers.
It looked like the sort of abode a spinster hippy aunt would occupy, alongside her two lesbian lovers and their pet cockatiel.
“Three rooms,” Jez said, lowering his overnight bag from his shoulder.
Jodi dropped her bag too, and released the cats from their carrier, while the rest of the guys raced ahead to claim rooms. She didn’t feel she had a right to stake a claim on any of the spaces.
Obviously, she’d be expected to bunk in with Nash.
They were a couple. The booking had been made on that assumption.
Except with everything so fraught, she was tempted to about turn and get back on the bus.
Stay there for the night. Heck, if that’d been an actual option, she wouldn’t be standing here.
Jez curled a hand around her shoulder. “I don’t mind sharing if you need a—”
Nash swaggered into the lounge. “There’s no bathroom. Only shared facilities in a bathhouse in the main house somewhere.”
“Sauna time,” Balin yelled from inside one of the rooms where a lot of creaking and groaning of the wood seemed to be taking place.
Lee stuck his head out of a doorway, “Yo, Curtains,” he addressed Nash, who was regarding her with his lips pursed.
“Are you joining us, or sparing us the sight of your twig-like physique?”
Jez gave her shoulder another squeeze, then brushed past her fiancé and claimed the last unoccupied room.
Jodi wasn’t good with silences. She didn’t know what to do with silences.
Silences in her life were indicative of solitude, not discord.
Arguments resolved themselves into slammed doors and revved car engines, and hurtling along roads at speed, the car stereo volume turned up loud enough to batter even the most egregious hurts into submission.
They weren’t prolonged measures of time, demarked by the ticking of clocks, nor tallies of offences.
They weren’t a familiar part of the relationship she and Nash had.
Usually, he blew hot and loud, stormed off and came back sweeter. Eager to paper over the issue and move on. Based on that schema, things ought to have been right again between them the morning they’d left Bergen.
“You can take the bed, if you like,” he said.
She peered at him awkwardly, “What will you do?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” His voice remained soft, conciliatory. “Pitch a tent on the roof.”
She had a tent. Maybe she ought to do that. Pitch it, that is, not necessarily on the roof. Why hadn’t she thought to retrieve it before the tour bus left?
“I’m not serious, Jo. God, you take everything so literally. I’ll be sleeping next to you, obviously.”
Obviously, like they were the same couple they’d been this time three days ago.
He cocked an eyebrow, turning his statement into a question. He’d extended the olive branch, now it was up to her to accept it.
“It’s a nice big bed. We won’t have to squish up like in the bunk.”
Like he hadn’t spent the last two nights on the banquette, and the one before it in Balin’s hotel room bathtub.
Her call. All she had to do was agree, and everything would be right again.
She wouldn’t have to worry about breaking up with her boys or losing her home and overwintering on the streets with three cats again.
So why was it so difficult to say yes? Why did it feel as if she was throwing herself off a ledge by doing so?
Reconciliation meant she got to keep her life intact. That was good. For fuck’s sake, that was good. This was exactly the outcome she’d been praying for.
“Great,” she croaked, forcing the word out around the boulder in her throat. Then said it again, attempting to inject positivity into her tone. It was the right thing to do. The only sensible choice. “Which room is it?”
“Straight down the hall. The door facing you.” She bent to pick up her bag, but Nash caught the carry strap and swung it over his shoulder. He stuck out his free hand, indicating she should go ahead.
The room was painted an odd shade of pink, somewhere between cinder rose and salmon.
In contrast, the insets of the shutters and all the cabinet doors were shamrock green and stencilled with traditional rosemaling.
The bed was made up with a patchwork quilt.
An iron stove sat centrally along the wall that housed the door they’d entered through, and a rocking chair occupied the corner by the window.
Eerily, it began to rock itself as they moved into the room.
“Good, eh?”
“Yes.” She thought she’d rather be camped on the roof right now.
Nash made to lower her bag to the bed but paused with it still dangling an inch above. “Where do you want this?”
“Anywhere, I guess.”
“Right side or left?” He nodded at the bed. They hadn’t shared a double bed often enough to have assigned definite sides.
“Which do you want?”
“I don’t mind as long as you’re in it with me.”
Like he’d missed her.
Heck, maybe he had.
He finally put down her bag on a nearby chair, then he was coming towards her, arms open wide, expression all reconciliatory.
She was outside of herself as he put his arms around her. Not really present in her body, more like a dust mote circulating in the air beside them.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the last few days.
We shouldn’t let one mistake wreck us.” He rested his chin on the top of her head.
“I’m not going to pretend I haven’t been mad at you.
I’ve been fucking furious, but it’d be a mistake to call quits on us over one dumb decision.
We’re good together, Jo-Jo. Much too good to let it fall apart. You and me, we complement one another.”
Did they? Well, in so much as they took on opposite, but not oppositional roles.
“Say something. You’re alarming me being this quiet. You’re never this quiet. You can’t really be mad at me for being hurt.”
“I’m not mad at you.” Not for that.
The fact they were still hugging made it easier to lie than if he’d been looking her in the face.
“You’re not? That’s good. We need to put this behind us. What do you say we spend tonight together just the two of us? We could go out for a meal, or order in. Maybe do something fun. What do you think? What would you like to do?”
“Are you coming with us or not?” Balin stuck his head around the door. On seeing them locked together in an embrace, he gave her a thumbs up and a grin, and mouthed, “Stability restored.” Then, “So?”
“Don’t think so, mate,” Nash replied. “Think Jo-Jo and I are going to do stuff, just the two of us.”
“’kay. Right.”
“Are they not coming?” she heard Lee ask Balin. He sounded surprised.
“Sloppy make up time. Let’s go, Quilly, you’re coming too. They don’t need any eavesdropping gooseberries.”
The three of them left, ushering in another uncomfortable silence the groaning joints of the lodge failed to fill.
Nash eventually stepped back, breaking their close embrace in favour of a looser hold on one another. He clasped her hands. Raised her knuckles to her lips. “What do you want to do? Dinner? Go out, order in?”
“I’m not really hungry yet, and I don’t really want to leave the cats.
” It’d be wrong to dump them in a new place and run out the door.
They needed time to settle. She needed time to settle.
She hadn’t set up their litter tray or anything yet.
She wandered back into the living area, intent on that task.
It gave her hands something to focus on.
Less chance of them relocating random objects that way.
Nash followed along. Even helped squeeze food out of a pouch and distracted Flugwhump from eating it all before Mel and Zar had even seen it by tossing his catnip-infused toy mice around.
They acquired drinks. Maybe resorting to booze wasn’t the best plan, but the craft beers were waiting for them there on the table, alongside an artisanal loaf, brown cheese, and chocolates.
And drinking at least filled the void.
After days of stewing and imagined conversations—okay, confrontations—she didn’t know what to say.
Shouldn’t they be confessing their sins and seeking apologies?
Rehashing the events wasn’t something she was eager to do, not considering the guilt she was carrying over where it had led her, but simultaneously, not talking it through felt like moving forwards with grenades in her pockets, and who knew when one of them would accidentally snag the pin.
“Balin said you were sick.”
Nash tapped the bottle against his lips, then lowered it to the table. “Yeah, I was.”
“Because of what...what we did?”
He lifted the bottle, took another long draw. Then wiped his hand over his lips. “I forgive you, okay. Let’s just move on.”
“Are you saying we should just forget—”
“Yeah, exactly that.”
Jodi scratched at the bottle label and began systematically peeling it from the glass. “Okay, but—”
“There’s no but, Jo. Okay, so that night shouldn’t have happened, but that doesn’t mean we have to let it define us.”
“—you’re still touring with Black Halo.” Thus, Rock Giant would still be a permanent fixture in their lives for the next seven-ish months. There’d be no way of avoiding him, and God help her, she wasn’t even sure that she wanted to.