Chapter 11 Cherry
Cherry
On Monday, Cherry showered and dressed and applied some light make-up.
She was about to head downstairs to grab a coffee when she noticed Sean’s bedroom door was open.
Moving to the doorway, she scanned the room.
This was the first time she’d seen it properly, everything else being a quick glimpse in the passing.
The room was spacious with smoky blue walls, oak floorboards, a jute rug and an expansive window framing the ocean.
Scottish landscapes were represented in hanging artwork.
Books, framed photos and a couple of plants filled the shelves along the back wall, and two vintage surfboards reclined in the corner.
A large king-size bed commanded the centre of the space.
Cherry stepped into the room, closed her eyes and inhaled the scent – clean, fresh wood, salty sea air and hints of a warm oakiness that she recognised as her husband.
The bed was made – badly, but made. She smiled. Dale had never made the bed which, for a grown man, was pathetic.
Perching on the edge of the bed, she ran her hands over the rumpled cotton of the light charcoal-coloured duvet and imagined Sean sleeping here.
Did he sleep well? There was nothing to suggest that he didn’t.
Just a lamp by the bed, a curled set of earphones and a selection of books – commercial thrillers and some well-thumbed on Motor Neurone Disease.
The pain he must have gone through hoping to understand it, to fix it. I wish the outcome had been different.
This could have been her room, too. Their room.
The place they shared as husband and wife.
Heat coiled deep in Cherry’s core as she imagined Sean’s weight pinning her down, him moving inside her.
What was that beautiful face like when he was thick and hard and chasing release?
Would he growl as he rode her? Grunt with every possessive thrust?
Talk filth about how much he loved fucking her? Loved her.
She bet he would. All of it.
Reaching for the pillow nearest the bedside cabinet, Cherry pulled it to her chest and sunk her face into it.
Moaned at the intoxicating smell of her husband.
What the hell was he doing to her? She’d never met a man who made her crazy like this, where the merest scent of the pillow he slept on sent a tsunami of hormones through her. She groaned into the cotton.
‘Fuck, Seany, I want you so bad.’
You could have him. Phone him up now and ask him to come home from work.
I can’t. I can’t do no-strings with Sean. And strings would be a tangled mess. I need to take a cold shower and get a hold of myself.
Cherry extricated herself from the pillow and returned it to its place on the bed. Time to get clean and to give herself the release she so badly needed.
An hour later, Cherry was rapping her fingers on the kitchen table and chewing her gum hard. ‘Come on.’ She took her impatience out on the computer screen. ‘We don’t all have all day.’
This wasn’t strictly true; she had all the time in the world, but even playing four low-stakes poker games concurrently wasn’t enough of a distraction.
After the games, she dealt with a few emails about the charity tournament, one of which involved flagging up Dale – a regular on the pro-am circuit but unwanted at this event. Then she printed off some home-made flyers for the village.
The clock on her laptop told that it was nearly noon.
The morning had disappeared faster than the sun had burned off the coastal haar enrobing the village.
She jumped up. It was a crime to sit at a computer when the Scottish sun was shining.
Why not take a walk along the beach, grab a coffee and explore? Make a sandwich to eat in the park.
As she was pulling ingredients from the fridge, another idea hit Cherry. She could make Sean a sandwich and take it to him. It was time she saw the cooperage. And a ‘madly in love’ wife turning up with a packed lunch would be great for his pride.
While bacon sizzled furiously in the frying pan, she swiped butter across the inside of a pillowy morning roll.
Slicing a generous amount of lettuce and cutting four cherry tomatoes, she layered the sandwich.
It might be more lettuce and tomato with bacon giving a guest appearance, but Sean had said he was trying to eat healthily.
Sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper and popped into a brown paper bag, alongside the tournament flyers, Cherry pulled on a baseball cap, laced up her trainers and made her way into the village to surprise her unsuspecting husband.
Along the way, she stopped in with her flyers at as many businesses as possible.
Everyone – from the butcher to the florist, to the fish and chip shop – was happy to take some.
Many mentioned Jimmy Butler’s name when they saw funds were being raised for MND.
‘Incredible man,’ they said. ‘Left a gaping hole in the community.’
‘Which of his sons is organising this?’ someone asked.
When she said it was Sean and that she was his wife, the welcome was even warmer.
Cherry understood now what he meant about his family being like minor Scottish royalty.
And today’s reception was so much friendlier than her interaction with Shona and Elaine.
In small-town Scotland, everyone might know your business, but they also know your name. On the road, from one city to the next, no one knows your business. Or your name.
Cherry knew already which would fill her heart more. But she wasn’t used to being under the small-town microscope. The big-city lens was what she knew best.
A short time later, a quarter of a mile outside the village, on the other side from Sean’s home, she hummed a tune as she walked to Butler’s cooperage in the early afternoon sunshine, brown paper bag swinging by her side.
How strange that a few weeks ago she was sitting under the sickly lights of a casino, staring at a limp pair of cards.
Now here she was on the Kintyre peninsula, excitedly approaching her husband’s workplace with a sandwich.
Some might say it was lame to get such satisfaction from such a thing, but if this was being lame then it felt pretty good.
The first thing that struck Cherry about the cooperage yard was the sheer number of whisky barrels.
Casks were stacked in huge pyramid formations, others scattered in various states of repair.
Some appeared freshly made with their pale, clean oak; others were darker and more weathered, with dulled metal hoops.
The second thing was that it wasn’t as quaint as she had imagined. Sure, there was a mid-size rectangular stone building, with a gable roof, which might have been the original cooperage. But set back from this was a larger, steel-clad structure, most likely the industrial heart of the operation.
The smell of earthy oak, charred wood and faint whisky fumes lingered in the air.
As Cherry stood in the yard, her ears became attuned to the rhythm of the work – the ringing of metal, the low thud of mallets, voices rising and falling, the soundtrack of sweat and grit and toil. Of men working.
Her husband was one of them.
Stepping further into the yard, she moved towards the hammering, banging and bursts of shouted instructions. The testosterone was already thick in the air. Then, as she crossed over the threshold of the main building, the July heat was replaced by the cool interior of the cooperage.
The space inside was large – nearly half the size a football pitch – and a strange combination of rustic and industrial.
Whisky barrels were everywhere, and tools and machinery were scattered in what could be a random fashion but doubtless was not.
The setup meant nothing to Cherry, but she sensed that art of coopering was far more complex than one might initially think.
Men in worn-in jeans and grime-smeared t-shirts, some wearing Perspex safety shields, were hammering hoops into place, rolling barrels in plumes of steam, firing things in the searing orange heat of a kiln.
It was a hub of steady manual labour – a place of hot, sweaty men lifting seventy-kilo casks as if they weighed no more than an acorn.
She scanned the space for Sean. In an instant, she found him.
Cherry had no idea what exactly Sean was doing, but the concentration his expression held, the way the strong angles of his face were more defined than usual, suggested he was deeply focused on his work.
Was there anything more beautiful than a man concentrated on something he excelled in?
Wearing heavy industrial gloves, Sean was wielding a hefty mallet and hammering the side of a whisky barrel, the corded muscles running down his tattooed forearms flexing with effort.
Those rock-solid shoulders would be getting a hell of a workout inside his polo shirt.
She’d grab onto those during a workout with him.
Cherry was pinned to the spot. There was something about this man. She barely had the brain space to try to work out what it was. The warrior energy combined with the piercing green eyes was a lethal combination that knocked her into next week.
But without the person inside, she would have walked out of that wedding in New York alone.
Because Sean unlocked something else inside her. Unchecked a load of boxes she had checked as ‘no’ in her life.
Making rash decisions. Moving back to Scotland. Making herself vulnerable.
With his enthusiasm for life, his good-humoured energy and his emotional openness, he had her over on a barrel.
If only.
It was dangerous to think like this. If he was merely hot, it would be one thing. But he was so much more.
He was her match. In so many ways.
And this here. It underscored something else she suspected about him. A strength, a solidity, a stability. Something she’d sensed from that very first dance.
And he’d told her to act like she was madly in love with him. For two months. To help raise money for fighting the illness that had stolen his father.
Cherry did a lot of faking it in her line of work. Hours were spent disguising her inner feelings or thoughts so her opponents couldn’t work out what cards she was holding. She was skilled at pretending, adding in fake tells to throw them off the scent. It was almost second nature now.
It won her a stack of money.
But acting like she was madly in love with Sean Butler would be the easiest faking she ever had to do.
And it was nothing to do with her years of playing poker.