Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
KIT
“Tell me again. Why am I sitting in a damp shed and looking at ducks?”
I kept my focus on the wetland, which lay under a dank, grey sky. “It’s called a hide, and those ducks are mainly water rail and common sandpiper.”
“Why do you do this? I don’t get it.” The binoculars I’d lent Alex clattered onto the rough wooden ledge. He stretched and yawned loudly, earning an irritated throaty cough from the old guy sitting further along the bench. “We could have stayed in bed all day and had degenerate, filthy sex. Again.”
The old boy spluttered and dropped his Thermos, spilling tea over a pile of what smelt like fish paste sandwiches. “Do you mind? Bloody outrageous,” he rasped.
“Come on.” I got up and tugged Alex by the arm. I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or shrivel up as Alex gave the man a lazy smile and a salacious wink.
“That’ll give the old fucker something to chew on other than those gross sandwiches which were stinking out the shed. Hide. Whatever,” he said once we were outside. “Or maybe that stench was his wrinkled old body?” He looked at me and grinned, and I couldn’t help laughing.
“I think this is the first, and last, time I bring you bird watching. Muddy paths and the great outdoors aren’t really your thing, are they?
” It was a freezing cold day, grey and misty, so perhaps it wasn’t the best introduction to one of my favourite hobbies.
He’d also been right about the ducks, there were more of them than anything else, and we could have seen them in any park rather than driving out beyond the far edges of the city.
An arm snaked around my waist and pulled me in tight.
“You might not have turned me into a bird watcher, but that anorak you’re wearing is doing all kinds of naughty things to me. Bet you’re wearing thermal underwear, too. God, I think I’m gonna come.”
He tugged me towards him and nuzzled into my neck, making loud, slurpy noises as he tickled me.
“Get off!” I gasped, laughing so hard my knees began to buckle. He caught me before I could fall and hugged me tight. His hand found mine, and our fingers laced together.
“And are you?” he asked, a big grin on his face.
“Am I what?”
“Wearing thermals.” He started to laugh and I tried to glare at him but I couldn’t keep my face straight. “Oh, yeah. Sexy thermals. Up close and personal with your—”
“You’re weird.” I tried to give him a shove, but he tugged me in closer and landed a kiss on my cheek.
It was a couple of weeks since what I privately called our first time together.
Christ, just thinking about it caused my heart rate to pick up and sweat to break out over my skin.
Our first, but not the only time. I’d quickly worked out that fast, furious fucking was Alex’s short cut to stress relief, and I was very happy to be his human stress ball.
Something else I’d worked out was that there was a pattern to Alex’s need: it was always after he’d been in close quarters with Kelvin.
My shoulders tensed. I flexed the muscles, a conscious effort to loosen them.
That man had no place here, not when it was just me and Alex.
I glanced up at him, and smiled. It was good to hear him laugh, to see him playful, everything that held him tight thrown aside if only for a few hours. We settled into an easy silence and when he spoke it was almost wistful.
“This is nice, being out in the open. No crowds. Just the sky and fields and the lake. Makes a change from… well, everything, really.”
He was looking up into the grey sky, watching a couple of birds wheeling high above, his lips parted as all his attention followed their rise and fall.
As Alex watched the birds, I watched him.
It was his moment, and his alone, to get lost in and to let his thoughts fly free.
The birds disappeared behind some far off trees, and he turned to me, and smiled.
“Did you mention there’s a good café here?”
“Yep. It serves the best coffee and cake on the reserve.”
Alex laughed. “Now you’re talking.”
As we trudged along, hand in hand, we swung our arms backwards and forwards, the way kids do, both of us loose and relaxed. It was why I’d wanted to get him to the reserve. I was a big believer in nature’s power to calm, and I’d known instinctively that’s what he’d needed.
Over the last few days I’d mostly stayed over at his, in bed long before he got home from which ever club or bar he’d spent the night working in.
I was normally a deep sleeper, but it was as though I’d become attuned to his arrival, waking up as soon as the key was in the door, feeling the tension in his muscles as he climbed into bed with me.
Sex was a good stress buster, but the night before he’d been more wound up, more edgy, than normal.
He hadn’t said why, and some tingle in the depths of my lizard brain had told me not to push.
When I’d made the suggestion about visiting the reserve, I’d expected him to say no because he was always so sharp, so urban, it was hard to imagine him any place other than in the midst of the city, but he’d said yes with no hesitation.
I cast a glance at him, and the tight pull in my gut made me want to eat more than cake.
In a Barbour jacket and heavy boots, he looked like the centre spread of Hot Countryman Monthly. Not that Hot Countryman Monthly existed but looking at Alex, it damn well should have.
“What are you staring at?” He looked down at me, with the intense focus of his that always made me weak at the knees.
“Nothing,” I mumbled, as I pushed through the door of the café, heat flushing my skin that had nothing to do with the sudden warmth.
Armed with cake and hot drinks, we headed to a table overlooking the muddy shored lake that formed the core of the reserve.
“You know, I think I do get why you like this so much.” Alex gazed out over the mist shrouded water.
“Yep, it really is all about the cake and hot chocolate.” I took a bite out of a huge muffin.
Alex smiled as he turned back to me, our gazes meeting and holding.
“Always a bonus, but you know what I mean.” He returned to gazing out of the window, with its uninterrupted view, nothing but water and sky, and shifting mist which was thickening and turning to fog, forming shapes before breaking up.
It was eerie, almost ghostly. A crow landed on a post on the other side of the window, its caw at one with the wintry world, before it flew off.
“It’s the isolation,” he said quietly. “It feels like nothing and nobody can get to you.”
I’d chosen the reserve deliberately. It wasn’t the biggest or best, or the most renowned. The flat, featureless land sat in a shallow hollow and mobile signals were almost non-existent. Out here, until we were some way along the main road, nobody could reach us.
“Taking an interest in the birds and wildlife came later.” I hadn’t meant to say the words, but as Alex dragged himself back from wherever he’d been, the questions I saw in his steady gaze demanded answers. It was too late to backtrack.
“Growing up, I had the best and worst childhood. I was never in doubt about how much my mum loved me, but she had her demons. The days she spent in bed, barely eating, not having the energy or interest to get up and have a shower. Her dressing table looked like a pharmacy, with bottles of pills everywhere, which didn’t do anything other than turn her into a zombie.
I learnt to look after myself from a young age—and her too when she wasn’t well.
Depression,” I said, turning to look at Alex, the intensity of his concentration on me almost too much.
“You’re probably wondering where all this has come from and what this has to do with birding. Sorry.” Alex said nothing. He didn’t take my hand, didn’t offer any platitudes and I was grateful for that as my Mum was more than meaningless expressions of regret.
“There was a nature reserve near us. It was nothing much, just some scrubland and a silted up pond. Hardly anybody ever went there, which suited me fine. I’d go whenever I could, to get away from it all.
It was like I’d found my own little world where I could pretend the illness and the pills didn’t exist.” I paused, just for a second or so, to steel myself for what I said next.
“I was in my first year at university, when she died from pneumonia.” Until then, at that little table in the reserve café, I’d never talked about what had happened after she’d gone.
“I had to come home to clear the flat—we didn’t own it, it was rented. After the funeral I went back to the reserve for what I knew would be the last time.
“When Mum died, I never cried. There was too much to do, and only me to do it. But, as I stood on the edge of the pond, it all came out and I couldn’t stop.
I thought I was alone, but there was an old couple there I hadn’t noticed, with their binoculars and cameras.
Who knows, they might have had fish paste sandwiches.
We didn’t exchange names, and they never asked me what was wrong, they just talked about the birds they’d seen.
It was spring, so there was a lot of activity, not that I’d noticed up until then.
They encouraged me to take a look through their binoculars. Life goes on, was the hidden message.
“I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at.
I could identify a duck and a pigeon, and that was about it.
But watching calmed me down and took me to another place, if only for a little while.
” I glanced up at Alex, suddenly self-conscious at the way that locked up part of my life had all come tumbling out.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, scrubbing my hands down my face.
“I don’t know where that all came from. I’ve got a pretty screwed up background, but you already knew about that. ”
“No more than most of us.” Alex took my hands, the only time he’d touched me or spoken since I’d started telling my story. “It’s made you who you are. Without what happened, you’d have been a different person,” he said, sweeping his thumbs over the backs of my hands.
“And what’s made you who you are?” I asked the question without thought. It felt like he knew so much of me, of what and who I was beneath the skin, but how much of Alex did I really know?
His thumbs stilled. Silence pressed in us as he stared at me, and I let my own gaze drop. The sweep of his thumb resumed.
“How I came to be me is a complicated story. Some of it I’m proud of, but a lot of it I’m not. It’s just taken me a long time to admit it to myself and face up to it.”
“What is it you’re not proud of?”
He said nothing as he turned his face to gaze out at the muted winter landscape. A dull ache pressed in my chest. He was shutting me out. Perhaps he’d tell me one day, perhaps not. I went to pull my hands away, but he tightened his grip as he turned back to me.
“Not here. Come back with me and I’ll tell you what and who I am, and why. But you won’t like it, Kit. You may even hate me for it. So you need to be sure you really do want to know. Ask yourself that, and answer the question honestly.”