Lexi
Lexi
I slump over the bar of The Anchor, reaching one hand out for the glass of red wine that Marissa is pouring me. She holds it slightly out of reach, so I have to grope around and eventually lift my head to locate it. I glower; she smiles.
“All set on the houseboat?”
“Well, I’ve stocked it with carbs, cheese and booze, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’ll do. I really am sorry about the room,” Marissa says.
I take a slug of wine and then fold over again, resting my cheek on the sticky surface of the bar top. The smell of the pub is so familiar to me: hops, frying oil, the fuzzy tang of a Hoover run over dirty carpet. It’s the smell of my childhood—my life, really. I was raised here, and here is where I’ve stayed.
“It’s all right. Not your fault that I picked this week to try out being overdramatic,” I say, flashing a tooth-baring smile at the fisherman staring at me from the other end of the bar.
You can tell the fishermen by their waterproof trousers and wrinkles. When I was a kid, they were always the worst for the hair-ruffling. Sweet little thing! they’d say to five-year-old Penny, when she started spending time here in the pub. Cute as a button! With my bowl cut, square shoulders and blockish face, I always got, Hello, little lad! This particular fisherman looks startled by my humorless grin and goes back to staring into his pint.
“Well, still, I’m sorry I scheduled my building work for the week you decided to lose your shit,” Marissa says, patting my hand.
Marissa owns The Anchor now—we sold it to her once we finally teetered close enough to bankruptcy to allow ourselves the luxury of giving up on Mum’s dream for good. I am still co-manager, but Marissa employs me these days instead of the other way around. Everyone felt sorry for me and Penny when we had to sell up and move to one of the new flats around the corner, but all I felt was relief.
Marissa is redecorating the bedrooms upstairs, which means I can’t crash here. This is unfortunate, given that I just marched out of my home with half my belongings in a duffel bag and have nowhere else to go.
Thank God the houseboat is unoccupied this week. It took me five attempts to get the combination of the key safe right, but I got there eventually.
“You need more friends,” Marissa says.
This is probably true. I’m not the loads-of-friends type, though. I have my people, all fiercely precious to me, their spots in my life hard-won. I have my family. And that’s it. I should try to make new friends, really, but that requires putting yourself out there , and—worst of all—waiting around to see if people still like you once you have.
“And a boyfriend,” Marissa says.
“What is this, the 1950s? I don’t need a boyfriend. Suffragettes died for that shit, Marissa.”
“You need something ,” Marissa counters, wiping down the Stella tap. “Other than your job. Which you don’t even like.”
“I like my job!” I protest, still face down on the bar at which I work.
“You’re only saying that because I pay you.”
“I had Mae,” I say, and I’m embarrassed to hear my voice catch on her name. “I didn’t need anything else.”
“You still have Mae, Lexi,” Marissa says softly. “Just maybe not for every minute of the day anymore.”
I lift my head and twist in my seat, my heart clenching tightly. I can’t think about this. Not seeing Mae wake up with wonky plaits every morning. Not seeing Mae padding downstairs with Harvey the bunny tucked in the crook of her elbow when she can’t sleep. Not seeing Mae for all those thoughtless little Mae moments of the day, the ones that make my life into something meaningful.
I down a few more mouthfuls of wine. Marissa watches me critically, then shoves her glasses back up on her head, catching a loop of her mousey hair so it sticks up behind them. I don’t bother telling her—she won’t care.
“I think what you really need is a distraction,” she says, then turns to scan around the pub. “There,” she says. “The man by the window with the book.”
“He sounds pretentious,” I say, without looking around.
“That was impressively judgmental, even by my standards,” Marissa says, pulling her glasses back down onto her nose again. “Though you may not be totally wrong. He’s dressed like he’s in a magazine shoot. But he’s reading a self-help book. And he’s drinking a pint of bitter. I don’t know how to add these things up. Are those trousers made of velvet ?”
Fine: I’m curious. I turn on my bar stool to look at the man sitting in the paisley armchair in the window, the one with the best view over the marina.
His outfit is what draws the eye first. He’s wearing a suit waistcoat, silky and gray, with no shirt underneath, and three fine silver necklaces lie against the triangle of his bare chest. His black velvet trousers are tucked into his boots, which are stretched out lazily under the table. Generally speaking, the only men you see in The Anchor with their trousers tucked into their boots are ramblers, and they do not look like this.
Above it all is a mop of dark brown ringlets, parted in the center. He’s a lot younger than I expected when Marissa said man with book —twenty, maybe. But there’s an old-soul vibe to him. I can picture him sitting in a bar in the 1920s, wearing braces, or maybe further back still—maybe he should be leaning lackadaisically against a ballroom fireplace in Bridgerton .
I swallow. I don’t want a guy who looks like that. If I’m going to distract myself, I want someone I feel comfortable with. Someone average.
“He’s basically a teenager,” I say, turning back to Marissa.
Marissa squints at him. “Oh yeah, he is kind of young. The biceps threw me off.”
Despite myself, I glance back over my shoulder. He’s shifted, and now I can see the front cover of his book. I almost laugh. Surviving Modern Love . It’s a dating guide that’s everywhere at the moment—Penny’s been trying to get me to read it for weeks. It’s aimed at desperate women who suddenly feel their biological clock has started ticking, aka me—not at twenty-year-old boys who look as if they might front a reasonably successful pop-rock band. If pop-rock is still a thing.
He looks up and meets my eyes. A shiver runs over me like a bird skimming the water. The corner of his lip lifts in a curious smile, drawing a faint dip in his cheek.
I snap back to Marissa. My heart is suddenly thrumming.
“I believe I just witnessed a moment ,” Marissa drawls. “Eyes meeting, sparks flying, et cetera.”
“You witnessed a man wondering why the two women at the bar are openly staring at his trousers.”
“That boy is not unaccustomed to being stared at,” Marissa says, examining him again over her glasses. “You don’t dress like that to fit in. Hang on, Penny’s calling me,” she says, checking her phone.
“Don’t answer.”
Marissa cuts me a look.
“You’ll have to lie when she asks whether I’m OK,” I say. “You hate lying.”
She rolls her eyes, but lets the call ring out, then frowns at her phone.
“ Gack ,” she says. Marissa’s favorite non–swear word—she used to swear like a sailor, but with Mae around all the time, she had to adapt. “Take the bar, would you? I need to call a supplier.”
I assess how drunk I am. Medium drunk. Perfectly acceptable here at The Anchor.
“Sure,” I say, already sliding off the stool.
By the time I’m behind the bar, grabbing my apron and securing it at my waist, the book-reading velvet-wearing twenty-something is walking over. I shoot a venomous look at Marissa, who smiles smugly at me over her shoulder as she heads to the door. She has coordinated this beautifully. Call a supplier, my arse. She just saw he’d need a new drink and wanted me behind the taps before he got to the bar.
“I thought you hated lying!” I shout at her as she opens the door.
“Doesn’t mean I’m bad at it!” she yells back.
And just like that, he’s right there in front of me.
“Hey, can I get you a drink?” he says, tilting his head.
He’s taller than I thought he might be when I was checking him out at his table, and he speaks quietly, leaning his forearms on the bar as he looks at me. He’s got heavy eyebrows, almost too heavy for the delicate lines of his face; he’s the sort of handsome that only works in certain lights, but when it works, it’s stunning.
“I think that’s my line,” I say.
He pauses, thinking. “Huh,” he says, glancing back at the paisley armchair. “When I was sitting there thinking about what to say…you were not the bartender.”
I press my lips together to hold back a smile. I hope he can’t tell how much he’s surprised me. I know I should have the confidence to think a man like this would fall over himself to buy me a drink, but I don’t, not anymore. I am painfully conscious of my roots showing, and the fact that I’ve probably owned the leather jacket I’m wearing since he was in primary school.
Then there’s the dogged misery in my chest. The sense of loss. Maybe the issue isn’t that I’m thirty-one, it’s that I feel about one hundred.
“Well, things change,” I say. “What can I get you?”
“Uh,” he says, “a large gin and tonic?”
I reach for a clean glass. He watches me, a slight frown gathering between his eyebrows. Marissa’s right: he doesn’t quite add up. I’d say he’s the artistic loner type, a bit brooding, a bit lost. A hot emo kid born in the wrong decade. But that really doesn’t mesh with the shiny self-help book in his hand.
He catches where I’m looking. “You read it?” he asks.
“Nope. Any good?”
“A lot of people seem to think so,” he says, turning it to look over the back cover. “Says here it’s ‘the answer to our prayers: a guide to finding authentic connection within the confining artifices of modernity.’?”
I raise my eyebrows. “And what do you think?”
He pauses at the question, tilting his head the other way. There’s something a little dreamy about his eyes, almost a sleepiness; it’s strangely sexy, as if I’m seeing him just after he’s woken up.
“I think it’s a big pile of bollocks,” he says lightly.
I have to bite back another smile. “Nine fifty,” I say, pushing the gin and tonic with lime toward him.
If I hadn’t already known he lived down south from his accent, I’d have got it from his face now—he looks briefly staggered to have got a double for less than a tenner. He taps his phone to the card reader and then pushes the drink back toward me.
“It’s for you,” he says. “How’d I do?”
I consider it. I do like a gin and tonic. “Not bad,” I say, reaching for it.
His face melts into its first proper smile. His front teeth are slightly crooked, touching each other like crossed fingers; he bites down on his smile before it’s fully grown.
“Can I ask your name?” he says.
I force my gaze away, across the pub, noting the regulars—Barney, Hazzer, the woman who always orders double shots of whisky. I can’t decide if I want them to come over and save me from this conversation or stay where they are.
“It’s Lexi,” I say eventually, because I can’t think of a good reason not to answer.
“I’m Zeke. Ezekiel Ravenhill. Full name in case you want to stalk me.” He taps Surviving Modern Love . “It says here that before ‘progressing with an individual,’ you should have researched each other on every available social media platform. It’s in the section on the advantages of modernity.”
I stare at the book in horror. “Fucking hell, really?” I look up at him. “Is that what people do?” I just about swallow back the nowadays , narrowly avoiding sounding eighty-five.
“Well, not me,” he says. “I’m not online.”
“Really? No social media at all?”
I find this unfathomable—I’m absolutely addicted to Instagram. Sometimes I don’t even notice myself opening the app, I’m just there, scrolling through everyone else’s lives, getting progressively, predictably sadder.
“It’s just not for me.” He shrugs, settling on a stool. “This book says you’ve got to embrace that stuff if you want to survive, so…I guess I’m a dying breed.”
He looks genuinely sad as he says this, which strikes me as odd—I am finding it hard to believe that a man like this needs advice from a self-help book. He is very assured in how he watches me, for instance, very smooth. Even when I’m not looking at him, I can feel his light, warm gaze taking me in.
I don’t like being looked at, generally. It’s easy when I’m with Mae—nobody looks at you twice if you’ve got a kid with you, as if you’ve entered some other category of personhood where you’re always the supporting act. The same thing happens when you’re the bartender, actually: you’re part of the background. It suits me perfectly.
Then Zeke’s eyes shift away from me as he looks around the pub. And to my surprise, I find I want his gaze back again.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m getting a weird case of déjà vu. Did this place use to have blue carpet?”
“Yeah, actually.” We changed it after Mum died. A big revamp that we didn’t yet realize we couldn’t afford. “Have you been here before?”
“A while back, yeah. My dad used to live on a houseboat in the marina, so I was in Gilmouth a lot as a little kid. I’ve only been back once since I was thirteen, though—to sell his boat when he died.”
“Oh,” I say, a little startled. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. I bought it back again yesterday.”
“Oh, right,” I say, trying to keep up.
“That’s why I’m here. Buying back my dead dad’s old boat, five years on. I’ve got two days off work and a whole big plan to put the past to rest and, like…sort my head out.” He shakes his curls, as if he’s trying to get water out of his ears, and gives me a rueful smile. “It’s all part of my quarter-life crisis, according to my brother.”
I think about the fact that I have just moved into my best friend’s houseboat on the sly, with one holdall and two bags of food from Tesco, and I wonder if Zeke and I have more in common than I thought.
“So you know The Anchor?” I ask.
Those hazy eyes resettle on mine. They’re light brown, almost amber.
“Dad never brought me here as a kid,” he says. “But I might’ve been in when I came up to sell the boat. This bar feels familiar. You don’t, though, and I feel like…I’d remember you. Were you working here in…” He glances aside as he tries to figure out the date. “Summer 2019?”
I think about it. I wasn’t, actually. I spent that summer staying in a caravan in Devon with a baby-faced man named Theo, who I’d hoped was the love of my life. He got Lexi forever tattooed on his pasty upper arm, a rare act of rebelliousness that didn’t suit him at all; I think it was because his ex had told him she liked men with tattoos. Even then, I’d had the sense not to get Theo forever —he’d accused me of commitment-phobia, but turns out I was just right. When I informed Theo that I planned to stay home and help my best friend raise her child, he left so fast he didn’t even take his beloved Nintendo Switch.
“Nope,” I say. “That was a rare summer off.” My only summer off, actually.
“Knew it,” Zeke says. “You’re too beautiful to forget.”
That makes me snort a laugh.
“You think I’m joking?”
“I think you’ve used that very cheesy line before.”
“I mean it. You’re really beautiful.”
“I’m not. But thanks.”
He pauses; I get the sense I’ve thrown him slightly.
“Sorry, what do you mean, I’m not but thanks ?”
My head is a bit fuzzy from the wine, and my body wants to twist away from his compliments—I can’t bear the way they make me feel. I shovel through the tub of ice to loosen it up.
“So, Zeke Ravenhill, who has all the smooth lines,” I say, taking a savage stab at a particularly large lump of ice, “how am I meant to know you’re not a total arsehole if you’re not stalkable on social media?”
He looks back to Surviving Modern Love ; I think he’s weighing up whether to allow me the change of subject.
“Not sure my Instagram would be advertising the red flags, if I had it,” he says eventually, running his hand across the front cover. “But it’s a good question. If you want, we could, like, ring my mum?”
I chuck the shovel back into the tub and try to stand still, folding my arms. I’m a bit jittery. I’ve not felt this way around a man for so long; I’d forgotten the electric, zingy excitement of just flirting with someone.
“What would she say?” I ask.
He smiles slightly. “She’d probably say I’m a puzzle. That’s what she usually says. ‘You know, Ezekiel is a bit of an odd one out. But he means well, and when he realizes his potential he could really make something of himself,’ et cetera. The sorts of things you say about your least successful child.”
I lean back against the counter behind me. I wonder if he realizes how revealing that was, and how much more attractive it is than the chat-up lines—I have always had a soft spot for slightly broken people. I think again about Marissa’s suggestion, that I just need a distraction, and I feel a whisper of the woman I was before: the woman who would never look at any guy and think he was too good for her.
“Is she right? Do you mean well?” I ask him.
“I do lots of things well,” he says, poker-faced, but teasing.
Normally, when a guy chats me up, there’s a pressure to the conversation, as though every word exchanged ups the expectation, but Zeke just seems as if he’s…playing. It’s confusing.
“Are you flirting with me because you want to have sex with me?” I ask, looking him right in the face.
I can’t read Zeke’s reaction. I expected him to seem startled, but he just looks down for a moment, as if he’s gathering himself, or perhaps deliberating.
“I’m flirting with you because I think you seem interesting, and beautiful,” he says lightly, looking up at me again. “And maybe kind of…”
Don’t say sad . Don’t say lonely .
“Bored?”
I blink.
“But is that what you want, Lexi?” His voice drops slightly, and my stomach turns over. “Is that what you’re looking for?”
I open my mouth to say yes, but at the last moment I find myself blurting, “I’m thirty-one.”
“OK,” Zeke says, unperturbed. “I’m a Pisces.” And then, at my unimpressed expression: “Are we not sharing facts about ourselves? Is that not the game?”
I snort. “You look about twenty. It would be weird. You’re too young.”
“I’m twenty-three. Not too young. Just right,” he says, with a new, cheeky smile that draws a dimple in his left cheek.
The very thought of a night with this stranger who is eight years younger than me feels decadent and forbidden, but I don’t have an early-morning wake-up to think of now. I don’t have a little person to get home for—Mae is with Penny and Ryan. She’s got everyone she needs.
“I want one night,” I find myself saying. “One night of stupid, reckless fun. I want to get drunk and enjoy myself.”
He tilts his head to the side. “I can give you that.”
Heat unfurls in my belly like a rope snaking loose.
“When do you get off?” he asks, his voice steady. “Have a drink with me. Properly,” he says, eyes flicking to the gin and tonic I’ve barely sipped while I’ve been busying myself behind the bar.
“I’m not actually working, officially. So…I’m free as soon as Marissa walks back through that door.”
My gaze shifts toward the pub entrance. He turns slowly, exaggeratedly, and watches the door, too, shooting the occasional hot, amused glance over his shoulder at me. We wait. There’s a low pulse beating through me now. I can’t remember the last time I did something like this. Something irresponsible. Something spontaneous.
The door opens. My hand is already on my apron, fingers shaking a little as I untie its ribbons.
“Where are we going?” Zeke says, as I move around the bar toward him.
“Nowhere,” I tell him. “This is Gilmouth. You want a drink, there’s nowhere else to go.”