Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
falling never felt so good
Max
Dylan climbs into bed with me the next morning. I pull her against my side, not even flinching when her cold hands press against
my bare chest, because her touch is the defibrillator that keeps this feeble organ going. ‘Morning, Tiny.’
‘I had to wear socks in bed,’ she whispers into my neck. I missed you, she means.
‘Maybe you should start doing that more often.’
Her nose skims my throat when she shakes her head. ‘No way. I have you.’
I wonder if she can translate my pulse, pounding out its message in Morse code. I want to feel your feet between my calves every night. I want to warm up your side of the mattress before you get in bed.
I wish I fit into your plans. I wish I could give you that family you deserve. I wish staying like this was enough.
‘Yeah,’ I say instead, swallowing down the emotion that’s threatening to broach the surface. ‘You do.’
I press a kiss to her hair and pretend I’m someone else, someone who can keep her.
I pretend a lot, over our final few days.
We all go foraging and rowing and rock pooling, and one day while we’re coasteering again, we spot seal pups from a distance,
and Dylan’s so happy I get the urge to google if you can have baby seals as pets, just to see that joy light up her face again.
When we’re too exhausted to move, we play board games and UNO and the Mayweathers teach us card tricks I’ll never be able
to remember.
Within our cabin walls, Dylan and I soak up every second. We laugh and we bicker and we fuck, and all of it is better than
it’s ever been with anyone else, and I’m too scared to blink, because it feels like every time I do, another entire day has
passed.
I want to scoop the sand around us back into an hourglass to prolong this, but instead, the last grains spill through my fingers
too quickly, and on our last day I blink and open my eyes to late-afternoon sunlight on the beach. One final pizza party,
just like that first night. Bertie’s in charge of the music, the sun’s giving us a display to make up for all our recent overcast
skies, and at the water’s edge, Jude barks photography orders to Arun. I feel a swell of pride for how much he’s improved,
and I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of his work.
Golden light hits the side of Dylan’s face while she talks to Toby on the sand. She’s wearing the same leggings and long sleeves
she travelled to Wales in, and it strikes me with a jarring sense of déjà vu, until she unties my hoodie from her waist and
pulls it on, and it turns into a warm feeling behind my sternum.
The minutes pass while I chat with Fiona, and I diagnose the uneasy feeling in my stomach, the reason my knee won’t stop tapping,
why I’m chewing on my nails like I haven’t done in years. I’ve spent almost a decade travelling thousands of miles from my
family, away from everything I know, but I’ve never had this before.
A few metres away, and I’m homesick.
‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ Fiona asks, catching where my gaze has gone.
‘The loveliest,’ I reply, voice hoarse. I don’t tell her that when Dylan’s finding me on the other side of the mattress at three in the morning and opens her eyes for one bleary, moonlit second, she’s so beautiful that my adrenaline spikes, and whatever sleep I’d almost found becomes even more evasive.
‘Greg and I met on holiday too, you know. I was in Vegas for a friend’s hen do, and he was there for his brother’s stag.’
I notice the too. Like Dylan and I are a duo, the same way she and Greg are. ‘What happened?’
The lines by her eyes deepen when she smiles. ‘Our groups met at a pool party, and we realised that someone knew someone else
through a mutual friend, and we all ended up mingling for the rest of the week. I spent most of the time dancing badly and
drinking radioactive alcohol.’ I laugh and she adds, ‘It definitely wasn’t love at first sight, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘I thought he needed to let loose a bit, and he thought I was a drunken fool.’ She shrugs. ‘I mean, I was. But I won him round eventually, and we stayed in touch when we got back to England. That was thirty-five years ago, and
we’re still going strong.’
Thirty-five years to love someone. If only.
I don’t get to respond, because Greg approaches and puts his hand out for her to take. ‘May I have this dance?’
She flashes me a grin over her shoulder, and I take the opportunity to go to Dylan.
‘You’ll figure it out,’ she says to Toby, not even looking to verify who’s slid an arm around her waist to move her. I bend
to grab an alcohol-free beer from the cooler box, and when I straighten, Toby offers her the smallest smile.
Dylan presses the quickest kiss to my jaw and I pat her hip affectionately in response, an instinctive give and take that
reminds me of the way the waves and the sand work in tandem.
Toby zips his raincoat up to his chin with a grimace. ‘I might take some photos over by the rock pools while everyone else
is occupied.’
He gives us a vaguely panicked look as if to confirm we won’t draw attention to his departure, then slips away. I swear I catch his gaze on Jude for a moment, but he’s looking down at his feet with a frown before I can be sure, hunched frame retreating along the sand.
Dylan and I drop on to our blanket on one side of the fire, and she lets out a contented sigh as she settles between my legs,
her back against my chest. ‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a car. Rock climbing took it out of me. We haven’t been getting anywhere
near enough sleep.’
I fail at hiding a grin. ‘Why’s that?’
She relaxes against me with a laugh, stretching her legs in front, and I’m eking out this time where she lets herself lean
on someone as much as the weather’s eking out the final dregs of summer, as if autumn hasn’t already been crisping the air
for the past week.
I hope she doesn’t forget what this feels like. I hope she stores this perfect slice of a memory somewhere safe, even when
she’s out there making memories with someone else, under some other sunset, in some other life.
‘Dylan!’ Bertie calls out as he approaches, face eager. ‘Do you want to join us for a game of beach volleyball? I need another
teammate.’
He reaches out a hand, and my shoulders tense. I don’t realise I’m expecting her to get up too, until she says, ‘I’m going
to sit this one out, sorry.’
He blinks a few times. ‘Oh. Yeah. Sure.’ His eyes meet mine and reluctantly, he asks, ‘Max?’
‘I’m gonna stay here too.’
He gives a closed-mouth smile and walks away, and Dylan’s entire body rises and falls as she heaves a sigh.
I wrap my arms around her and squeeze, bringing my mouth to her ear. ‘That’s my girl.’
‘It was the tiniest thing to say no to,’ she says quietly, but I know from the lift of her voice that she’s pleased.
‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Everything you do is impressive, as far as I’m concerned.’
After a minute or so of watching the others play volleyball while I play with her hair, she warns, ‘Sorry, it’s probably really knotty.
’ She lets out a little surprised sound when she touches the back of her head and realises what I’ve done, then eyes me over her shoulder. ‘Did you just French-plait my hair?’
While her hand is raised, I pull the hair tie from her wrist and secure the braid, particularly small on her short hair. I
drop it and pull back to admire my handiwork. ‘Cute.’
‘What’s that written on your hand?’
‘Nothing,’ I say quickly, grateful for my illegible handwriting, then take her phone from her lap and open the camera so I
can take a picture. ‘When Ava and I were, like, seven, I begged her to climb this old wall with me. She told me we’d get in
trouble but let me drag her up there anyway. She fell and hurt herself, and I was so scared she’d tell Mum that I was the
one who got her up there that we made a deal where I’d do her hair for two weeks straight.’
‘A ponytail wasn’t enough?’
‘No, it’s Ava, of course it wasn’t.’ She laughs and I lean around her to show her the photo. ‘She forced me to learn how to
do this, and apparently I’ve never forgotten.’
Dylan takes her phone back and shoves the sleeves of her jumper up, and I get the sense she’s psyching herself up to say something,
so I wait, fire crackling next to us.
‘It’d be a useful skill for if you ever have children,’ she says eventually. Each word feels like a tiptoed step.
Where her words were a little uncertain, mine are a leap out of a plane. ‘I don’t want kids.’
She turns around and our legs interlock and I wait for her to confirm another way her life is incompatible with mine, but
instead, she says, ‘Me neither.’
Something in me lights up at this revelation. She’s not who you thought, a voice says, and fuck, if it isn’t a gentle rush of hope. And somehow, it makes it harder, knowing that she wouldn’t want that from me, because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change
anything.
She rests her arms on my knees and continues, ‘That’s why my ex and I broke up, in the end. Not because of how he made me
feel. Not the things he said and did that I was stupid enough to ignore—’
‘Not stupid,’ I interject. That low-level fury that burns through me whenever she brings him up simmers in my veins. ‘Don’t say that. How he treated you was not your fault.’
‘Jude said that too.’
‘Jude’s right more often than I’d care to admit.’ I glance around to check she’s not in earshot. ‘Never tell her I said that.’
Dylan laughs, and goes on, ‘When we first met, I thought he wanted the same things I did. The house, the marriage, the life
I’d been dreaming of. And we were on the same page about kids. But the longer we were together, the more he kept bringing
up this idea that he’d be the breadwinner while I looked after our hypothetical children.’
‘And you didn’t want that?’
‘I was willing to bend myself into every other shape to fit what he wanted–and I definitely tried–but that was one thing I
just couldn’t do. So he broke up with me.’