Day Eighteen Sober #2
It got larger very quickly. I breathed out in relief as I realized a very wet, very angry Charlie Jones was approaching me at speed across the rocks.
She was soaking and still wearing the overpacked rucksack she’d put on that morning for the hiking trip she’d been going on about for days.
“You! You!” she said, the minute she saw me. “Just the person I wanted to see!”
In her sports leggings, with her hair dripping wet and her eyes flashing, she looked like a totally different person.
“Are you all right?” I asked, swiping the rain out of my eyes and scanning her over. “Did you actually swim off the rock and back to land?”
I thought of her on the night of the pig, eyes bright as she speed-read information about pig management while walking backward around the shop. There was so much more grit to Charlie than anybody realized. Maybe even her.
“Don’t play innocent with me. I know you sent me out here to scare me. Try Pouque Rock, you said! I told you when I left that I planned to watch the sunset here.”
I tried to interrupt, but she kept going.
“And not once did you mention any tides! Not once did you bring up the fact that I’d be cut off from land as the heavens opened…”
She turned her face up to the sky. Even in the grainy evening light I could see the flush of anger on her chest and neck.
“Do you really think I wanted you stuck there in the dark on your own?” I asked, slightly appalled. I know I’ve been keeping Charlie at a distance since we met, maybe being a little terse…but have I really given her reason to think that badly of me?
“I think you’re a standard entitled man who is used to getting what you want, and this new life of yours hasn’t gone quite how you hoped it would, and—”
This time I didn’t let her keep going. I don’t often get angry, but I did then. “You think I always get what I want? You think I wanted to be a sad old lonely drunk? Is that what you think?”
The rain was getting thicker and harder. I was already drenched through.
“I think you don’t want me here, and you found an opportunity to scare me back to the mainland.”
“That’s just bullshit. If I wanted to get rid of you, I wouldn’t do it by recommending a hiking route. Come on, we need to get out of the rain,” I said, striding off in the vague direction of home.
I was a little lost, to be honest. I hadn’t ever walked those trails in low light before, and everything looked a bit different. But I couldn’t go that far wrong, could I? There was the sea, so that ruled that direction out, and any other route would get me back to the farm eventually.
“Oh, so you had something else planned?” Charlie called from behind me. “What were you going to do, poison my morning coffee? Set another pig on me?”
“I saved you from the pig, remember?”
“I did not need saving! And the farm is the other way!” she yelled.
She was jogging to keep up with me, the rain falling hard enough that it blurred my vision and I could taste it on my tongue.
“I’m not trying to go back to the farm!” I lied.
I spotted the island lighthouse perched on the cliff edge ahead of us—defunct right now, its light out of service, but still, somewhere dry to wait out the rain.
“Oh, sure, because why would we want to go—”
“There, the lighthouse!” I said, pointing. “We need somewhere to shelter.”
The lighthouse’s whitewashed walls looked gray and ghostly.
Charlie was holding her hood over her hair now, other arm shielding her eyes as the rain came down in torrents.
I started to run, and she did, too, jostling past me to overtake.
I sped up alongside her, and then we were squeezing between sodden bushes and scrambling up wet rocks shoulder to shoulder, and at some point, one of us started to laugh.
Was it me who started it, or Charlie? I honestly can’t remember, but it all seemed so ridiculous—the two of us, grown adults, soaked to the skin, racing to reach the lighthouse, yelling at each other about pigs and sunsets.
I was so wet. And I really wanted to get to the lighthouse before her.
I personally think I’ve been very mature about sharing my job, lodgings, name and life with this woman, but at that particular moment, I didn’t feel mature at all.
I wanted to win.
We both broke into a sprint as the ground leveled out.
When we reached the concrete platform around the lighthouse, neither of us slowed, racing for the shelter under the lighthouse balcony.
I touched the wall first, and then Charlie collided with me just as I turned to lean against the stone.
She came at me with enough impact to knock me back into the wall.
The next few moments happened so quickly I still can’t untangle it all. Soaked cold skin, hot breath, both of us still half laughing—and my body pressed to the wall, Charlie trying to find her balance…
Her face tipped up. My hand found her waist, to steady her, I guess, or maybe not, because once I had a grip on her I didn’t want to steady her at all.
My hand slid around her waist, fingers splayed across her lower back.
Her eyes were on my lips. She breathed out once, sharply, and I recognized the sound from when I’d had her underneath me against the farm shop wall.
It had been sexy then, but now it was unbearable.
I pulled her against me.
And fuck. I don’t know. My other hand was on the back of her neck, snagging in the wetness of her hair, and then it was happening, I was kissing her, she was kissing me, both of us so drenched our lips were slick and messy and then—
She pulled back with a gasp.
“Oh my God,” she said, chest heaving. “What?”
Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was just the fact it’d been a while. Or maybe it was Charlie, this new real one, rain washed and impossibly tempting with her clothes slicked to her skin. But I wasn’t thinking, What the hell did I do that for? I was thinking, Why am I not still kissing you?
“I don’t…know,” I said.
I was breathless, too. I still had one hand on her, on her waist. It hadn’t felt right just to let her go.
She took another step away, out of my grasp, far enough that the rain hit her. She shrieked and ducked back under the shelter of the balcony again.
“OK,” she said, pressing her back to the wall beside me. “Right. OK. That was…I don’t quite…”
“No. Me neither,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Sorry. I think we lost our heads for a second there.”
“Right. Rain madness. Shall we just pretend that didn’t happen?”
“That sounds”—completely impossible, I thought—“like a good idea,” I said.
I was coming back to the real world again. The world where it’s incredibly weird for me to grab Charlie by the waist and kiss her in the pouring rain.
Funny, because it didn’t feel weird at all.
Charlie tipped her head back and closed her eyes.
With her hair sodden, she had pushed that heavy fringe back off her face, and it totally changed her—I could see the arch of her eyebrows, and the little worried frown between them.
She still looked beautiful, but in a different way.
Less guarded, more human. I found that I very badly wanted to touch her again. I took a steadying breath.
“I really wasn’t trying to murder you, you know,” I said. “With the rock. And the hike.”
“Well, that was maybe a little dramatic. But you don’t trust me.”
The rain was a sheet of solid gray, heavy enough that it splashed our feet as it hit the concrete.
I was still so shaken. I’ve never had a kiss like that.
Not just the intensity of it, but the way it genuinely seemed to come from nowhere.
I didn’t think it through even slightly.
I was doing it before any thinking had even started. That’s just not…me.
“Look,” I said. “This. Us. As in, the job mix-up. It’s hard to trust you—don’t you feel the same about me? I can’t work out why you’re here, ultimately, and without that, I—” I pushed my wet hair back. “It’s just a very weird coincidence.”
She looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers together.
They were white with cold. I wanted to pull her into me again and warm her up.
It was such an odd impulse, right there in the middle of a conversation about how hard it is to trust her.
I’ve never wanted to hold someone I’ve known so little—not like that, anyway, not the way I wanted to hold Charlie.
“So what’s your explanation for it all?” she said eventually. Her voice was trembling, too—we might have moved on from the kiss, technically speaking, but we were both still vibrating with it.
I thought about her question. I’ve thought about this a lot.
“I can’t figure it out. But I can’t shake the thought that the job was mine and you tried to take it for yourself. You got a copy of the acceptance letter somehow, saw an opportunity…”
“I’ve thought the same about you, obviously. That you’re pretending you got the letter.”
She hadn’t looked at me since the kiss. She stared out at the steady, endless rain.
“I was surprised when you arrived. If I was stealing the job from you, I would have expected you,” I said.
“Same goes for me.”
She had looked surprised when we met. Shocked, actually, with her scratched-up legs and her sweet blue dress, staring at me open-mouthed.
“I’ve been choosing to believe it was a mix-up between Rosie and Marly,” she said. “I find it makes me less annoyed about having you around.”
It was refreshing to talk this way, with a stripped-back version of Charlie, who was honest about wanting me gone.
“Whenever you’re with Rosie and Marly, you act like you’re happy to share this job and everything else with me.
But I know you’re not. Why has it taken this”—I meant the rain, the rock, not the kiss, but as I said it, the meaning shifted—“for us to finally have a proper honest conversation about it? Why are you always being so”—I couldn’t think of a kinder word for what I wanted to say—“fake?”