Monday August 11th 2025 #2
Felt a little unsettled by how much he got it. Am often unsettled by Jones. He’s just…distracting. Find myself feeling jittery around him.
“Well then. We both want the same thing. We just need to sort the sleeping situation,” I said.
“We do.”
“There’s nowhere else available.”
“No.”
Silence. Stalemate.
“This is getting us nowhere. I’m going to go shower,” he said.
Felt like I should say, You can’t, it’s my shower, but didn’t. And now he’s in there, using up all the hot water. Am even more hyperaware of him than normal, knowing he’s showering just on the other side of that door.
Things are prickly. Worryingly so. Our alliance is precarious.
Without it, there’s the risk he’ll try to oust me and keep the stables and the job for himself, and I’m not in a strong position here.
I don’t know that he didn’t get the job fair and square.
If he starts kicking up trouble with Rosie and Marly, it might be curtains for me, and the very thought of having to head back to the mainland…
Not an option. Ugh, I’m crying again! Am doing so much better, am genuinely happier than I have been in so long, but I’m feeling so much stuff.
Sad! Guilty! Ashamed! Joyful! Maybe now that I’ve finally started being honest with myself about how I feel, I can’t bloody stop?
It’s so annoying—how can I leave the past behind when it keeps sneaking up on me like this?
Just want to be Charlie, the Charlie I’m finding here, and mustn’t let this business with Jones get in the way.
But also have nowhere else to stay.
We’re stuck. Am going to ring Rosie. Marly is quite straight-talking, no bullshit—Jones’s sort of person. Think I’ll click better with Rosie, who believes things happen for a reason, an idea that basically got me here.
Very positive conversation with Rosie. She was quite sympathetic to our plight—think she considers the Charlies mix-up to be her fault, which it might be, to be honest. She is lovely but absolutely radiates benevolent incompetence, and I have no other workable theories for how the hell this has happened, aside from Jones being some sort of scheming liar, but if he is one, he does a very good job of pretending not to be.
Anyway, we’re getting a door put on the walk-in wardrobe.
“A door,” Jones said, when we reconvened at the farm shop later.
The plan was for us to give the place a deep clean after closing.
I’d turned up in dungarees and rubber gloves; felt irrationally irritated to find him in the same clothes he’d been in for the staff meeting earlier.
Jeans, plaid shirt. Just made me feel like he wasn’t taking any of this stuff seriously.
He stared at me across the shop floor with those shadowy gray-blue eyes. This man does not mind a bit of eye contact.
“And as soon as there’s a spare room at the B&B, one of us will get first dibs,” I continued, setting to work on the shop windowsills. Outside the darkening sky was flecked with silver drizzle. “Do you want to scrub the front door?”
“I thought I’d fix up the roof first. Is anyone moving on from the B&B soon?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. It was immensely satisfying to discover a lovely Cotswold green color under the grubbiness covering the paintwork. “Rosie said nobody plans to leave anytime soon. But she said it’s all very casual, and people do come and go a bit…”
“Right. Great. So for now, we’re getting a door.”
“Look, I don’t want to share with you, either. I’m trying to be positive.”
“Yes,” Jones said, and there was that tone again. “I can tell.”
He headed out of the shop door, leaving it open behind him. His tendency to walk out midconversation was also extremely irritating.
“Are we done, then, or…”
“No?” he said, from outside. “I’m just getting the ladder.”
I scrubbed harder and raised my voice so he could still hear me.
“You know, if the living situation bothers you and you want to leave, you’re really welcome to.”
“Am I?” he drawled. “Thanks.”
Heard him clanking around outside with the ladder. I peered out of the window I was cleaning. He was carrying a fresh sheet of corrugated iron. Where the hell did he get that from? And when? He’s barely left my sight for the last three days.
“If the walk-in wardrobe doesn’t suit you, I mean,” I pushed, “you don’t have to stay.”
He paused at the window, looking in at me through the rain-stained glass.
“Who says I’m getting the wardrobe? Why do you get the bedroom?”
This was just how we’d done things so far. When he’d turned up at ten p.m. I’d already set up in the bedroom, and we’d made him a bed from sofa cushions in the wardrobe, then he’d stayed there again on nights two and three…
“I’d like the bedroom,” he said. “We should flip for it.”
Met his steady eyes through the glass. He has crow’s-feet that suggest he liked to laugh once, though I’ve barely seen him crack a smile since we got here.
We could flip for the bedroom. But then, I thought, I might lose. There had to be a better way.
“Here we are again, with the risk avoidance, hmm,” he said, moving away again. “Would you rather alternate?”
I mulled it over.
“Each of us gets one week in the bedroom, one week in the wardrobe, on and off,” he continued. “We could make the wardrobe more habitable, I imagine. A single bed, take out the shelving to create more floor space…”
He was up the ladder now. I heard a soft grunt as he shifted the corrugated iron. After a moment, I leaned forward to get a look through the window, my cheek almost pressed to the glass.
“Are you wearing a tool belt?” I asked, slightly shocked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where and when did you get that?”
“It’s Rog’s.”
“Right, but…” I trailed off. It was good that he was fixing the roof. I do not know how to fix a roof. But as annoying as it had been when he’d rocked up seemingly unprepared for a deep clean, it was actually more annoying that he was now doing something extremely useful involving tools and…skills.
Skills I very much do not have.
Also, the jeans and plaid shirt were so much hotter with the tool belt addition.
“I’m open to alternating,” I said in a raised voice, trying to get back on topic as he banged around on the roof above me. “We could add some plants, some soft lighting…It could work in the short term.”
“Good. We’re getting somewhere.”
He climbed down the ladder again and wandered off, presumably to pick up some more accessories from whatever Mary Poppins bag he was getting all this shit from. By the time he returned—with a box of nails, of course—I’d done the front two windows and the barn door.
“Nice work,” he said, raising his eyebrows slightly as he stepped into the shop again. He lifted his gaze from the doorframe to me. Bam, eye contact.
Felt flustered. Everything Jones says and does is kind of intense, I think that’s what I’ve been trying to put my finger on.
And with him around all the time, it gets a bit stressful.
Even the way he talks has an intensity to it—his voice is low and soft, like someone who might read you a bedtime audiobook.
The sort of voice that makes you do a lovely little shiver.
We kept working for the next hour or two, mopping the floor three times over and clearing the rubbish around the barn.
We didn’t talk much, but I always knew exactly where he was.
We’d had our first argument, reached our first agreement, and now we were officially working together.
There was an air of “keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer” about the whole thing.
As the sky turned navy outside the windows, I thought about what I wanted from my life here: this unique place, this supportive community, this prepackaged fresh start, as Jones called it. I didn’t have to lose any of it because of this man. He didn’t have to be the enemy.
Turned to look at him after a good twenty minutes of mopping in total silence. “Shall we just go to the pub for a drink?”
He stared at me, full bin bag in one hand, brush in the other. Realization dawned.
“Oh, God, sorry, not the pub,” I said, cheeks going hot. “Sorry!”
“You can say ‘pub’ in front of me,” Jones said, with slight amusement. “I’m not operating under the illusion that pubs don’t exist.”
“No, but…Sorry. Why don’t we go for a walk or something?”
“You want to go for a walk with me?” He held my gaze, his own unreadable.
“I want to have a conversation with you where we’re not all…snippy. I want to chat.”
“Chat.”
“Yes! Like you did with Rosie and Marly. Why not? We need to work together now, don’t we? Shouldn’t we try to get along?”
At last, he looked away from me. Felt my shoulders drop slightly, as though he’d physically let me go.
“I’m not here to make friends,” he said, hefting the bin bag over his shoulder.
“Oh, I’m sorry, are we on The Bachelor?” I pretended to peer out at the empty fields.
“It’s nothing personal. But I don’t want to chat. Or walk. Or pub. I just want to keep myself to myself.”
“But…we’re managing the farm shop together. We live together. We don’t even have a door between our bedrooms, currently,” I said, baffled. “I’m really not sure how you’re going to do that.”
“Me neither,” he said, slipping a hammer into his tool belt and heading back inside. “But for now, I think we should just try to pretend we each have the stables and the shop to ourselves.”
So…that’s what we did. We kept cleaning—separately—until it got too dark to work, and then I announced I was going home, and he headed back, too, walking along the track behind me.
We weren’t close enough to be walking together, but we definitely weren’t far enough apart to be not together, either. And neither of us said a word.
Every time I glanced over my shoulder, he’d look away, fixing his gaze on the skyline.
I tried to do the same, and act like there wasn’t a bigger, maler, grumpier Charlie Jones on my tail, but even when I picked up the pace to drop him, he kept sneaking into my brain anyway.
I’d alternate between rageful made-up conversations with him (“If you think freezing me out will make me go back to the mainland, you’ve got another think coming, mister!
”) and accidentally dwelling on the sight of him with the tool belt strapped around his hips.
Isn’t it annoying when someone is hotter than they deserve to be?
There was a moment when we got back to the stables, though—hardly avoidable, really, unless I’d slammed the door in his face on my way in. He murmured a low “thank you” as he moved on through to get himself a glass of water. First time he’d spoken to me in hours.
I stayed in the entrance as he braced himself at the kitchen sink, knocking back a whole glassful, back muscles bunched beneath that plaid shirt. He met my eyes as he turned to place the glass above the dishwasher. Clink.
He swiped the pad of his thumb across his bottom lip, and a tiny shiver moved through me.
Jones takes up more space than he has a right to. More air, more attention, more of everything. When he’s a few steps away, it feels like he’s closer, and when he’s close, he might as well be in my head. This island is tiny and this house is tiny and he seems to fill every corner of it.
Anyway, now I’m writing in the kitchen while he’s in the walk-in wardrobe.
Am trying to act as though I’m here on my own, like he said.
But I can hear him moving around. Can hear the low swish of him pulling his jumper off over his head, the slight sigh as he settles back on the bed, the quiet tap of his keys on his laptop keyboard.
How the hell am I meant to pretend this man isn’t here when it feels like he’s bloody everywhere?