Chapter One #2
Carla tsked, eyeing the orange tape blocking the entrance with distaste. “Looks like we’re not getting to the island tonight.”
Oh no. Another clap of thunder ricocheted across the sky. With it, Faye imagined an explosion coming from her stomach, coating the inside of Carla’s car and killing them both.
Her breathing quickened, pressure building in her chest. What was she thinking, coming here? She was hundreds of miles away from home, from her dads. She couldn’t handle this by herself. She couldn’t handle anything. A dizzying wave passed over her as her lungs squeezed. Tightened.
Suddenly, she was back between the thin sheets of her hospital bed.
She groaned, confused by the monotonous beeps.
The sharp bite of needles under her skin.
Feeding tubes growing off her arms like roots.
A new pain throbbed in her abdomen. She blinked her heavy eyelids open to find her dads’ sympathetic faces lit by the obnoxiously white clinical lights.
“Shush, flower. It’s okay.” David cupped his warm hands over hers, his lip quivering, glasses perched at the end of his nose. “You’re going to be fine. You had to have emergency surgery.”
Surgery?
She turned to Lukas, hoping to find the punchline on the curl of his lips as they let her in on the joke. But as she breathed in the stench of hospital disinfectant, a sharp stab of pain almost made her vomit, and he hurried away to fetch a nurse from the station.
Faye flinched as a hand touched her shoulder. She blinked, and the white walls of the hospital dissolved before her, replaced by Carla’s concerned dark eyes. The howl of the wind outside blew away the lingering memory, but her chest still heaved with panic.
“Faye.” Carla’s eyebrows pinched together, and she pushed the sunglasses up her face, resting them on her head. “Are you okay?”
She hated how her lip wobbled. She should’ve stayed home, curled up in the safety of her bed, doing crossword puzzles while Gilmore Girls played in the background. Who was she kidding?
“I need to use the bathroom,” she said instead, a habit formed after her operation. Checking put her at ease, even if the constant reminder of her ostomy exhausted her.
Confusion passed over Carla’s features, and Faye hated it.
She hated how the illusion was shattered.
She wasn’t carefree and young or brave and fearless like the women she admired.
She couldn’t crush the patriarchy like the suffragettes or pave the way like Marsha P.
Johnson. She was plain Faye Donovan, a woman whose own body couldn’t even function properly.
Carla plucked her phone from the dashboard. “Let me make a call. We’ll be at the hotel quick as a wink.”
“Hotel?”
She flashed Faye a big grin as she put the phone to her ear. “Two minutes away and very close to the port.”
Before Faye could breathe with relief, Carla jumped to life. After a quick conversation, she dropped her phone in her lap and started to drive again. The sky darkened around them, streetlights illuminating the chaos outside. Trees battled to stay upright, losing leaves to the relentless wind.
Carla came to an abrupt stop outside a terrace of white buildings with cracks running up the plaster. A lone sock squirmed like a fish, caught in the iron balconies connecting the upper floors together, while the red neon “Raul’s” sign hanging above the door blinked steadily, rocking in the wind.
Faye’s heart kicked up a notch. Carla wanted her to stay here? It didn’t look like a hotel, more like an underground den.
Accepting she had no other choice than to trust her, she followed Carla through the black door and into a cramped hallway. A turquoise-and-orange geometric carpet assaulted her eyes, clashing with the yellow wall paint.
Carla rang the tinny bell on the tiny wooden reception desk. Moments later, a man entered through a swing door, his face brightening when he spotted Carla. Rough stubble coated his chin, his black hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of his head.
He greeted Carla in Portuguese, then glanced at Faye and switched to English, which offended her a little. But after a full day of travel, screaming toddlers, crowds, and stoma worries, she was too anxious and exhausted to care.
“I like your hair tied back, Carla,” Raul commented as he slid Faye’s room key over the desk.
“I like yours, too.” Carla played with her ponytail. “It’s the dog’s bollocks, I hear.”
She glanced over her shoulder, encouraging Faye to join, but Faye folded in on herself.
Witnessing their painfully obvious crushes made her want to bury her head in the reception desk’s plant pot.
It’d been a long day, and she could almost taste the solitude of her room.
She fidgeted from foot to foot, eager to be alone.
After a few more uncomfortable exchanges, Raul winked at the two of them and disappeared into the bar. Finally.
Carla helped Faye carry her luggage into the lift, the cramped space and creaky mechanical chains not doing anything for Faye’s frayed nerves. At the top, she bid Faye a cheery goodbye, arranging to pick her up early in the morning once the port had reopened. But that was a worry for tomorrow.
Exhausted, Faye lugged her suitcase through the wooden door of her room, almost collapsing with relief as it closed behind her.
She’d made it. Well, kind of.
She dumped her luggage on the single bed and flicked on the antique wall-lights, bathing the small space in warmth. A poky wooden drawer had been crammed in next to a desk, but it was clean, and something about the room’s minimalist decor brought a sense of comfort.
Faye emptied her bag in the cramped bathroom, struggling in the tiny space, then changed out of her aeroplane clothes and into her loose pyjama bottoms. The faded orange carpet scratched at her feet as she unpacked her essentials, but she was too tired to care.
Her earlier optimism had been swept away with the gusts of wind.
She caught her reflection in the long mirror beside the door and frowned. She still wasn’t used to it. The bulge at her abdomen. How the bag pushed back against her clothing. How nothing she wore ever truly hid it. She always knew it was there—but at least the ugly red protrusion wasn’t visible.
A year ago, when Faye was curled up in her bed, begging her dads for more pain medication, she’d thought she’d do anything to treat her Crohn’s disease.
But this… Having an ostomy wasn’t what she’d had in mind.
How could she expect someone to want to be with her when she couldn’t stand her own reflection in the mirror?
Her phone jumped to life on the desk, the group chat buzzing with messages. Faye pulled them up, smiling at her dads’ names on the screen.
Lukas: Told you you’d be fine! Enjoy yourself
And don’t stay hidden in your room
Faye shook her head, nibbling at her lip. The way her dad knew she would hole up in the hotel irked her.
David: Just got out of class. Proud of you, sweetie. Send us some pictures when you get a chance. Miss you so much already xxx
Lukas: That’s 50p for the excessive emoji jar
David: Five isn’t excessive
Lukas: You said five cats were too many
David: The limit does not exist!!
Faye chuckled, scrolling through their conversation as they danced around Mean Girls references and came to the conclusion that having five cats wasn’t much different from having four.
Faye: I love you both so much.
And of course, the more cats, the merrier
She closed the app, taking in the four fluffy bundles curled together on her lock screen.
Biscuit, Mochi, Angus, and Taco had helped her through the last few months, too, comforting her in that powerful way only animals could.
She loved animals; animals were more trustworthy than people.
That was one of the reasons she’d studied to become an ecologist. She wanted to protect them.
To make a difference where it would matter.
Now, she couldn’t even do that. She’d had so much time off work that she’d had to move back in with her parents. Any sense of achievement had been overshadowed by her ruptured bowel.
That’s where the Sandy Springs course came in. No more feeling sorry for herself or locking herself away. She needed that enigma, needed to push herself. Not just for her sake, but for her dads. She’d put them through enough.
She blew out a breath, forcing herself to meet her gaze in the mirror. If she wanted that special quality, to be one of the enigma women, she needed to stay out of her comfort zone. She couldn’t let her dads down already.
After swapping her pyjamas for light blue jeans and giving her make-up a top-up, she grabbed her rucksack and headed down to the bar.
She could show her face, do a few sudokus, and then head back upstairs.
No biggie. If it was terrible and creepy, she was only a lift away from the comfort of her bed.
She couldn’t stay up too late anyway, because Carla was picking her up in the morning.
Her escape plan gave her enough courage to push open the bar door.
Like the rest of the hotel, the room had a cosy, snug feel. Pine-scented candles flickered on the tables, Portuguese music playing low through the speakers. Apart from three men chatting casually in the corner with Raul and another woman nursing a wine at the bar, it was quiet.
Faye approached, catching the eye of the impeccably dressed woman.
Her dark chocolate eyes skimmed over Faye in a way that heated her cheeks.
She was maybe late-thirties, with short blonde hair curled around her face, one side tucked behind her ear to reveal several hoop earrings and two sparkling studs.
A fashionable burnt-orange pantsuit fitted her body perfectly.
Faye found it hard to look away. When she realised she’d been staring, she swallowed and uttered her best “Boa noite”, with a nod.
The woman’s lips lifted, and Faye followed the movement of her mouth. “Boa noite.” Her rich voice wrapped around Faye like liquid gold.
Raul approached with a big grin, scratching at his stubble. “What can I get for you?”
Faye forced her gaze on him and ordered a non-alcoholic beer that she didn’t really want. Ever since her surgery, carbonated drinks made her bloated and embarrassingly gassy, but she needed something to sip on to calm her nerves, and she didn’t know what else to get.
She took a seat on the worn—but surprisingly comfy—chair in the opposite corner to the men, almost spilling her beer. Wiping her clammy hands on her trousers, she forced her attention to the gold-framed paintings hanging on the walls. Anything to distract herself from the woman at the bar.
“Right. Sudoku,” she whispered to herself, clicking her pen and opening her book to the half-completed page she’d started on the plane. But the numbers danced on the paper, failing to hold her focus.
She tipped back the bottle, letting the ice-cold drink soothe her throat. But it couldn’t stop her heart from thumping in her chest.
In her peripheral vision, Faye swore that the dark gaze had turned in her direction.
The heat in her cheeks spread lower, curling in her belly.
The woman oozed confidence in the way she was combing her with her stare, as though she didn’t mind whether Faye noticed or not.
Strong women were definitely a weakness of Faye’s, prompting the decade-old question: did she want to be them or be under them?
Her attention snapped back to the woman like an elastic band.
The way her blonde hair curled and curved in short, textured waves around her face, as if it’d been effortlessly styled.
Her carved cheekbones and smooth porcelain skin.
Then that curved mouth that Faye wanted to trace with her fingertips.
Definitely the latter, then.
She bounced her leg, distracted, and dug her pen into the paper, creating a deep groove.
It’d been a long time since her body had reacted like this.
Dating with a chronic illness seemed impossible.
Especially after her last attempt at dating ended with her being ghosted.
The combination of long distance and intense Crohn’s flare-ups meant it was only a matter of time before her ex, Molly, had got fed up.
Now, dating with her stoma just seemed even more of an impossibility.
A sour feeling twisted through her gut. Oh… That’s why that woman is looking at me. Her hand drifted to her stomach. Maybe she hadn’t hidden her bag as well as she thought she had. Why else would an attractive woman be paying her attention?
Movement caused Faye to raise her head. The woman’s delicate ringed fingers were playing with the stem of her glass. Then she raised it for a sip and stood. She was leaving.
Guess that’s that, then.
Disappointment crept up Faye’s spine, but when those long, elegant legs strode past the exit, her chest tightened.
The woman was heading straight towards her.