Day Eighteen Sober #3
“I am happy to share,” she said, as if catching herself. “I am. It’s fine. I can handle you.”
Her eyes flicked to mine for the tiniest moment, a glance through her eyelashes. I swallowed, caught off-balance—she’s gorgeous, she just kissed me, I always love her eyes on me—but I kept pushing. I was getting close to something real.
“I think you’re nice to me in the hope I’ll be nice back,” I said. “Because otherwise, I might try to work out how you got this job. I might want to know what game you’re really playing.”
“You make me sound like some kind of evil mastermind. I’m almost flattered.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“Me neither,” she said quietly.
She turned her head and looked at me properly at last. The eye contact sent a lightning bolt through me, the same way the kiss had.
What is it about this woman? When she’s not with me, I think about her; when she is, I can’t look away.
And yet she’s still such a mystery to me.
No matter how much I stare, I never get more than a glimpse.
“For what it’s worth, I’m not putting on some fake persona because I’m a job-stealing con artist. If I’m being fake, it’s”—she huffed a laugh—“wishful thinking, I guess. I wanted to be someone new when I came here. Someone better. Broderie dress, high ponytail, competent, independent.” She went still, as though something had struck her.
“The sort of woman who could do it on her own.” She laughed suddenly. “God, I’m such a joke.”
“Do what on her own?”
“Never mind.” She squinted out into the darkness. “Come on. I think the rain is getting a little lighter out there.”
“It’s definitely not. Don’t stop talking now. I like you like this.”
“What, angry?”
“Open. Candid.”
“You’re very emotionally aware for a man.”
“You know, that’s the second time someone has told me that today.”
I really thought I’d been doing quite well at the gruff and unapproachable thing. I guess not.
Charlie was quiet for a while, but she made no further movement to step out into the rain.
“I take it back, what I said about you being someone who always gets what you want,” she said.
“I don’t think I was really talking about you, there, to be honest. I know being an addict is impossibly hard.
Losing control of your own life like that.
And getting sober…I appreciate you’re going through something tough. So I’m sorry.”
I wondered whether I should say I was sorry, too, for the kiss. But I found I wasn’t at all. So after a few minutes of silence, I said, “I’m sorry you got stranded on a very small rock in the Channel because of me.”
“Well, thanks. It wasn’t really your fault. And it was character building. I think you might’ve been right about the anxiety.”
Her neck was bared, her hair all pulled over the other shoulder. I wanted to press my lips against it. Get closer to her, get more of her. I wonder if you can become addicted to a person. I think maybe I could.
“There’s nothing wrong with having anxiety,” I told her, forcing my gaze away.
“That really does not feel true.”
“Right. No. I guess it’s not nice.”
“But then, according to you, neither am I.”
That made me laugh—her voice was so sardonic. It was pure, true Charlie, I think.
“Do you think, between the two of us, with all our baggage, we add up to about one competent farm shop manager?” Charlie asked.
The rain was actually getting a little lighter now. I could see the moon, a pale sliver above the cliffs.
“Yeah, I reckon so,” I said.
“Not if we carry on like this, though. At the moment, we redo almost everything the other person does. Yesterday you stayed thirty minutes to cash up when I’d already done it. What did you think I’d done, stolen a tenner?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Nobody can ever get the till to balance, and I don’t know what your game is.”
“There is no game, Jones,” Charlie said.
All at once she sounded exhausted. “There’s just me, trying to live my own life, and a bunch of people who can’t add up trying to count the till.
I don’t want to steal from the shop. I want it to do well.
You want it to do well. We’ve got an advantage, with two of us, and we’re wasting it because we can’t trust each other to do anything right. ”
“What do you suggest?”
“We should split our duties, for starters. And we should start communicating properly. We should have comanager meetings.”
I pointed out that we live together (a fact that she might be able to ignore but I absolutely cannot) and are together a lot of the time, so meetings surely aren’t necessary.
“But we don’t talk,” she said. “Not like this. Not properly.”
I thought, If we talked like this every night, I wouldn’t stand a fucking chance.
She squeezed the sleeve of her hoodie, sending a little stream of water onto the concrete between us. I looked down at my sodden trainers. The walk home was going to be wet and cold even if the rain eased off.
“I really don’t know how we both ended up with this job, Jones. I can promise you that,” she said.
And I believed her. For the first time, I really did.
“Maybe it was…Rosie, then, and Marly?” I said, shaking my head even as I said it. “Could they have orchestrated the whole thing? Maybe they saw that there were two applicants with the same name and figured they could have two employees for the price of one?”
“That’s crazy,” Charlie said. “For starters, only two nutters would actually stay for the job for half pay.”
“Fair point.”
“There is something about them, though,” Charlie said. “Don’t you think they ask very personal questions for employers?”
My stomach bottomed out as I thought about what I’d shared with Marly that afternoon.
“Why would they want to know personal stuff about us?” I said.
“I really don’t know. But they did totally roll with it when we both turned up. They’ve not pushed to work out which of us they actually offered the job to, not even once.”
“Why would they, when they could have two of us?”
“True. I hope it’s nothing more than friendliness. I like Rosie. Plus she said I have a lovely aura. I’ve really been clinging to that.”
I laughed, then stretched a hand out. A fat raindrop hit my palm, and then another, but it was definitely slowing. One of us said it was time to go—me, I think.
“We need to do things differently,” Charlie said quietly. “The farm shop is doing well, despite the Committee for Not Changing a Single Thing Ever—”
I snorted with laughter. Another flash of Charlie.
“—but it would be doing better still if we worked together properly.”
She was right. I’d been so focused on shutting her out that I’d refused to acknowledge it, but the best way to give myself a future here was to trust the woman beside me. You can trust someone and still keep them at a distance, right?
“How about we say that the first farm shop comanager meeting is tomorrow, in the kitchen, at seven thirty,” she said. “Nobody shall question the other person’s ‘game,’ nobody shall insinuate anybody doesn’t deserve to be here. There will be no, you know, no rain madness, no losing our heads…”
“I’m not going to kiss you in the kitchen at half past seven in the morning, Charlie,” I said, though the moment I’d said it I imagined doing it, and it didn’t actually seem ridiculous at all.
“Right, obviously. We’ll just have a sensible, adult discussion about what’s best for the shop.”
“Do you think you can trust me?” I asked her.
“I find trust a little tricky, these days,” Charlie said. “But I’ll try.”
I’m in bed now—the main room today—and we’ve lit the fire, which has warmed the whole of the stables. My skin is still tingling from the cold rain. I’ve thought a lot about everything Charlie said about the job mix-up, but I’ve thought even more about the kiss.
It’s so completely unlike me to get carried away like that. It was such a dangerous thing to do. Now I’m tense and on edge. I should be keeping my life as simple as possible right now, not kissing the woman whose life is inexplicably, inexorably tangled up with mine.
Rain madness, she called it. But if it was nothing more than a wild, unthinking moment, then why am I lying here longing for it to happen again?
Good night,
Charlie Jones