Chapter Twenty-Four
Glass Houses
‘Okay, top three favourite glass books?’ said Harri.
They had closed the doors behind them and were crunching slowly across dry white stones, taking in the long, red-brick raised beds topped with soil from which twisted the gnarled limbs of grape vines bursting with tight purple buds that spread out across the wall and up into the glazed roof.
‘Glass books?’ Annie repeated.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Gee, okay. Let me think for a minute.’ Annie made her way along the path between the planted beds. Melons and gourds had been trained to clamber up wire supports suspended from the glasshouse’s ceiling. They were still small but had the look of vigorous seedlings bursting with strength for their long sprint to the ceiling.
‘There’s uh…’ She swam a hand in the air, thinking. ‘The Bront?s’ Glass Town , of course.’
‘Ooh, nice one!’
‘And the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sequel?’
‘ The Great Glass Elevator? ’ Harri tried.
‘I never read it though.’
‘Then it doesn’t count,’ smirked Harri.
‘I read The Glass Blowers by Daphne du Maurier last summer. That definitely counts!’
‘Yep.’
‘And…’
Harri folded his arms in triumph, lifting his chin.
‘ Cinderella ,’ she said, defeating him.
‘I’ll allow it.’
More easy smiles, boots softly scuffing stones, amid the rich green new-life smell that only happens in temperate greenhouses this time of year.
‘This must be what Minty was on about,’ Harri said, stopping in the middle of the greenhouse where, on a plastic potting tray with raised sides, lay stacked coir pots next to a mound of fresh black compost, two trowels and unopened tomato seed packets.
‘Gardener’s Delight,’ read Annie, lifting one of the packets as she came close to Harri’s side. ‘Go ahead,’ she urged him. ‘Get sowing.’
‘You can do one for my Mam, if you want?’ said Harri, laying down the picnic basket. ‘I’ll take it home to her for you.’
Someone, Harri assumed it was Leonid, Izaak’s gardener husband, had left a notice with neatly written instructions which they followed now, working together to fill two pots, pressing two tiny tomato pips into the soft compost before covering it and adding a fine sprinkling of water from a little plastic can. Harri read aloud the rest of Leonid’s sign.
‘Shortly after their introduction to Europe, tomatoes were given the name love apples due to their aphrodisiacal properties. Did you know that?’
‘Can’t say I did,’ Annie replied. ‘But we should totally bring back the name love apples. Much cuter than tomatoes.’
‘There we are. Something to remember our trip by,’ said Harri, tamping the compost down like it was coffee grounds. ‘I’ll send you pictures when they’ve grown, our little babies.’
Annie, he noticed, wasn’t saying anything now, and she’d withdrawn a little.
He wiped the soil from his hands. ‘Did you know,’ he began, ‘I wasn’t assigned to our flatshare at Aber? Not at first.’
This made her swing her head to look at him.
‘It’s true. I was meant to be sharing a private flat with three rugby lads in the town.’
‘No way?’
‘But Dad thought I’d end up boozing away my degree if I stayed with them.’
‘He was probably right.’
Harri played offended, hand clutched to his chest, to make her laugh.
‘So I asked to be transferred to campus and…’ Harri shrugged at the serendipity of it all.
‘And there I was,’ said Annie.
‘And there you were.’
‘So we might never have met if it wasn’t for your dad’s total lack of faith in you.’ She quirked a brow.
‘Only you could get away with saying that.’
She laughed again, pushing away from the potting bench and opening the basket at Harri’s feet, drawing out a bottle of peach tea that she shook before opening.
‘You’re lucky I like you,’ Harri said. She took a drink then handed him the bottle.
How he wished she was easier to read. Less closed off, always trying to be a one-woman island taking on the world alone. Now she was rummaging in the basket, taking out the sandwiches.
‘What are they?’ Harri asked.
Annie inspected the package, taking off the wrapping, quickly whipping her eyes to his when she realised. ‘PB and J!’
‘Your national dish,’ he joked.
Annie showed him the heart-shaped white bread sandwiches, nice and big, made from two fat slices. She tore the heart in two and handed him half, smiling wickedly the whole time, doing it to annoy him.
He looked at his torn half. ‘Thanks a lot.’ He still took a hearty bite and for a while all they did was perch on the low brick walls of the raised beds, chewing slowly, enjoying the feeling of being insulated from the winter chill beyond the thin glass.
‘It’s not easy having a daddy who’s tough on you,’ Annie said eventually, not quite out of nowhere. She’d obviously been considering something as she ate.
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ Harri said with a wry smile. ‘But you can talk about it any time.’
Annie brushed crumbs from her lap. ‘It kind of closes a person off, you know? When there’s someone in your life who’s supposed to be on your team but all they seem to care about is how others see them.’
Harri nodded slowly, listening, not wanting to spook her when she was sharing her feelings. They’d never really talked like this before, not before they made this trip to Devon.
‘And Mom,’ she went on. ‘She’s great and everything but…’
Harri already knew what she was going to say. He knew because his mum was the same. ‘But she defers to him?’ said Harri.
‘Yes! All the damn time. You know the best conversations I ever had with Mom were whispered ones behind my bedroom door?’
‘I loved Saturdays at home with Mam,’ Harri put in. ‘She’d be funny and not loud as such, but louder, and we’d watch cartoons and play games. I remember those times being really relaxed, even when I was tiny. Then at night, Dad would be back, grumping around the house, and we’d both button ourselves up again.’
Annie grabbed hold of the idea. ‘And some of us have stayed buttoned up all our lives.’
Harri thought of Jowan calling her a firecracker, but delicate underneath it all. That man noticed everything.
‘And yet you’re the most outgoing person I ever met,’ he said.
‘Only when I’m away from home. When I’m not being scrutinised, embarrassing him. Anyways,’ she sighed, ‘it’s hard to rely on anybody when you can’t trust the one person you should be able to run to when you need them. When you can’t trust them to react the way you need them to, you know?’
Harri heaved a heavy breath and screwed the lid onto the empty bottle. ‘I do know.’
‘Daddies are supposed to adore their little girls,’ Annie added.
‘I’m sure he does. How could he not? He just never figured out a way to show it.’
‘Sure. I think that’s true, but he’s had almost thirty years to figure out some way. Well, twenty-five. He kinda liked me up until I got my own opinions.’
‘He likes you now. He loves you,’ Harri reassured her. ‘He hates me!’ Glad she laughed, he carried on. ‘Dads are funny things. I always hoped one day mine would be proud of me, or even… vaguely approving. I kind of like being a barista. I’m good at it, and I don’t have any other big plans or ambitions. I don’t want to sell conservatories or anything really. To be honest,’ he thought he could risk saying it, ‘the happiest I’ve ever been is making coffees here while you’re selling books right next door.’
‘Hmm.’ She was nodding now. She seemed to be about to agree, but when she spoke she said instead, ‘What kind of people do you think we’d be if we were the apples of our daddies’ eyes?’
‘I think we’d be pretty much who we are now, don’t you?’ Harri replied.
Annie thought about it, looking away. ‘I know I’d be happier. More daring, maybe?’
Seeing her getting lost in her thoughts again he moved closer, offering her his arm around her shoulder, waiting for her nod before making contact, pulling her into a sideways hug.
‘I cannot imagine what an even more daring Annie Luna would be like! In jail most likely?’
‘See! Daddy’s right to be worried!’ She conceded a smile, and Harri pulled her gently with his arm, rocking them both.
A moment of silence passed between them for the relationships that caused pain even while they loved their fathers.
It felt okay, having talked about it, thought Harri. He rarely told anyone things like that.
Annie was still a little slumped and her body wasn’t glowing the way it could. He withdrew his arm and reached for the basket, tidying the empty wrappers away.
‘I’m glad you ended up in our flat,’ said Annie looking dead at him.
He smiled. ‘Me too.’
Harri didn’t know if it was unconscious or not, but Annie drew her bottom lip between her teeth the tiniest amount, wetting the soft pink there. To stop himself staring he stood.
‘Shall we go see these cacti Minty was on about?’
Stepping into the blast of warm air in the second tall glasshouse, next to the first, felt like walking across the hazy summer airport tarmac in Texas.
‘ This is what I’ve needed,’ Annie rejoiced, her head back, slipping her coat from her shoulders and down her arms.
‘And we’ve got the place to ourselves too,’ said Harri, taking off his steamed-up glasses and closing the door behind him. ‘Perks of off-season travel.’
This place was more like a garden than a greenhouse. The entire floor was planted out and covered over with grit. Stepping stones guided visitors around the plants in meandering waves. The silvery trunk of a plant labelled ‘bougainvillea’ grew immediately by the doors and its long branches were already in shocking bloom with bright pink papery flowers. This, contrasted with the blue sky beyond the glass, gave Annie the feeling of being transported straight into summer. Even the shaggy geraniums that had sheltered here all winter were a picture of lush summer health with their red, pink and white flower heads lifting up over their strongly scented, cloud-shaped leaves.
Annie fingered the budded branches of a lemon tree in a huge terracotta urn. She couldn’t help thinking of her parents’ garden back home. Heat, red earth, cacti as big as barrels, the occasional glimpse of the shimmying tails of Great Plains skink disappearing into clumps of high grass with dry, rattling seedheads, the aerial orchids hanging down over her mother’s shady swing seat and everything scented with blousy red tea roses, a curious mix of the prairies and old England.
Nothing could erase the way she loved Amarillo, no amount of work disputes and family feuding. Not Deadbeat Dave or any number of awful senators and state officials, or those few book-banning parents. It won’t be so bad going home, she told herself, taking a deep breath of the fragrant air. Then she caught sight of something even more deeply familiar and her heart jumped. ‘Look!’ she called Harri closer. ‘Do you know what this is?’
Together they approached the great cactus standing with its arms raised, reaching up to the glass roof.
‘It looks like a kid’s drawing of a cactus,’ said Harri, putting his glasses on now the hot fog on the lenses had cleared. ‘It’s the most cactus-y cactus around.’
‘It’s a prickly pear,’ she told him. ‘They’re everywhere back home. You can eat every part of it.’
‘Not sure I’d want to,’ he said inspecting its spikes.
‘Ah,’ Annie sighed happily, turning on the spot. ‘I love it in here.’
‘Oh, look out,’ said Harri, removing his coat. ‘It’s happening. Might even have to unbutton my cardigan in a minute.’
Annie gasped in mock amazement.
Laughing, they made their way to the bench right at the centre of the glasshouse, beneath the spreading leaves of date palms.
‘What else is in there?’ Annie asked, nudging Harri’s knee with her own, indicating the basket by his feet.
He brought out the cookies; pink iced love hearts. Annie rolled her eyes but took one all the same. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say Izaak was up at the ticket kiosk telling folks the glasshouses are off limits to visitors today.’
Harri bit his cookie, peering between the leaves to glimpse outside. ‘You make a good point. It’s oddly quiet.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Annie said, taking another bite.
A low buzzing sound filled the air and a fan, mounted in the glass high above, turned, distributing warm air. Birds sang loudly from the trees at the far edges of the lawns.
‘I’ve had a really great trip,’ Annie said.
‘It’s not over yet,’ Harri quickly replied. ‘We’ve got ages left.’
Sixty-seven hours . Annie didn’t have to say it. She felt the change in the air between them. Harri held his cookie mid-way to his mouth, thinking.
‘We did a lot of cool stuff,’ he said.
‘We sure did.’ Annie thought of only one thing they’d done, late at night at Castle Lore. The prickles on her skin made her certain Harri had thought of exactly the same thing at the same moment. The memory crackled between their bodies.
She glanced aside to check. Yep, he was turning the tiniest bit pink.
‘We never did talk about it,’ Harri said suddenly.
Annie didn’t even try to play innocent. ‘I know. But, what good would it do?’
Harri lifted his shoulders, then dropped them. ‘Don’t know. Just feels like something we should… address.’
Annie took the last bite of her cookie, caution sneaking in again.
‘Because it meant something,’ Harri went on. ‘And because it definitely crossed a line.’
This would be excruciating, Annie thought, if it wasn’t Harri. If it wasn’t so intriguing a thing to think about, to unpick and inspect. What would have happened that night if they hadn’t been interrupted by William’s arrival? Annie knew exactly what. She felt her face flush hot.
‘Warm in here,’ she said, stupidly.
Harri laughed a little, but he had a serious, searching look in his eyes now. He turned his body a little towards her on the bench and dammit if her own body didn’t automatically do the same thing without her instructing it to. She looked him over.
‘Harri,’ she began, not quite sure where she was going with this, she only knew that she couldn’t have what she wanted. ‘I’m going home on Saturday, and I have a bunch of stuff to do when I get there.’
‘You could come back, come see me in Wales? Or I could meet you somewhere in the spring? Where’s halfway between Wales and Texas? The Malvinas?’ He was lost in thought, and looking a little desperate, throwing out potential destinations. ‘Newfoundland? Canada? I have no clue!’ He was getting agitated, his eyes wild.
‘Harri? Harri!’ she stopped him. ‘I don’t even know where I’ll be, come springtime.’
Harri drew himself to a pause, thinking, before exhaling hard, his posture crumpling. ‘Me neither,’ he admitted. Annie couldn’t know it, but Harri thought of his cases back at the shop, containing almost everything he owned. He could go on anywhere from this little spot by the sea, it occurred to him, if only there was somewhere waiting for him where he was welcome, where he might thrive rather than just survive, like he’d been doing for years now.
For a moment, a troubling little pathway in Annie’s brain was telling her that Harri might end up back in the flat with Paisley but she didn’t want to say it out loud. She’d returned the last of his stuff to his parents’ place, hadn’t she? That must represent real ‘getting closure’ stuff for Paisley, mustn’t it?
‘That night at the castle… It’s not as though we’re like…’ she stumbled over the words, ‘…boyfriend and girlfriend, or anything.’ She tried to force laughter into it but it came out sounding glib and weak.
Harri mirrored her. ‘ Pfft! It’s not like we’re walking down the aisle or anything.’
Annie tried to be vehement in her agreement. ‘It was just… chemicals firing in our brains, what with the… novelty of it all,’ she said.
‘And loneliness,’ Harri added. ‘Plus, there was a fair amount of booze involved.’
‘Exactly!’ Annie pounced on this. ‘And those are a dangerous mix. They can make a person crazy.’
Harri seemed to be running with it too. ‘Right. Right,’ he was nodding. ‘It’s not very respectful is it?’
‘What? Getting hot for each other just because we’re in a strange place?’
‘Yeah, just because we’re thrown together like this,’ he said.
Annie drew her head back, a little humbled. ‘Oh! Like I could be anybody and you’d feel the same?’
‘Would I?’
‘Yes! Definitely,’ she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Probably. It’s lazy, and not respectful, and it’s… predictable! A man and a woman, best friends, they take a vacation…’
‘In, basically, book heaven,’ Harri added.
‘Right, and it’s so beautiful here and it’s winter and it’s cosy.’
‘We’re bound to get stupid ideas?’ he said, very much like it was a question.
‘My point exactly. I’m glad we stopped when we did, before it got… silly.’
‘And now we should stop thinking about each other in that way?’ Harri said blankly.
Annie felt an uncomfortable nudge at her heart. She didn’t know how she’d stop thinking about Harri. At night, alone in her room, he was all she could think about. ‘Right,’ she said.
This brought silence, followed by yet more silence. Annie noticed she was wringing her hands and shoved them down by her thighs in tight fists to stop herself.
‘Or…’ Harri said.
‘Yes?’ She practically jumped at this. ‘I’m so glad there’s an or.’
‘Or maybe…’ Harri was flushing pink now, the spots below his eyes were positively red. ‘Maybe the problem isn’t that we should stop thinking about each other… in that way. Maybe the problem is we should really, really think about each other like that.’
‘Huh?’ Annie felt herself untethering, at risk of letting go the last vestiges of common sense she’d been clinging to.
‘Maybe,’ Harri went on, ‘we need to get any… residual attraction out of our systems?’
Annie blinked abruptly. ‘When you say residual attraction like that, it kind of makes me want to throw up.’ She registered the tiniest flash of disappointment in Harri’s eyes. ‘Hold up. When you say get it out of our systems , you mean…?’
Harri didn’t say a word, only looking back at her frankly, making a ‘why not’ kind of gesture.
‘Is that what you want?’ she asked, her pulse quickening.
‘Is it what you want?’
‘What if it ruined literally everything?’ she said, her voice little more than a gasp.
‘Well, we kind of almost… you know, at the castle library the other night and it didn’t ruin everything . We’re still best buds, you just said so yourself. So…’ He shrugged, somewhat casually, but she could see through his calm exterior.
She remembered the sensations of his mouth upon her. His breathing ragged, the insistent, assured way he’d made his way over her skin with his lips. She gulped. ‘What if we do, you know… and it’s… moreish?’
The burst of laughter from Harri drew out her own, and they both folded over and cackled, letting the tension lift.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said, swinging her elbow towards his arm but making sure to miss. ‘What if we really… clicked. What then?’
‘Annie Luna, are you asking me what if we had amazing sex and we both properly liked it?’
This version of Harri, forthright and bold and rosy-cheeked, was all new to her. Her brain lit upon an image of him laying his weight down upon her in her big white bed, his eyes alight like they were now. She whipped her gaze away from his, scuffing her boots on the gravel, taking a breath.
‘When you put it like that it sounds stupid,’ she told the ground. ‘But you know what I’m getting at. I have to leave in…’ She didn’t want him to know she’d calculated their remaining time, or that she was counting it down in secret. ‘…a day or two, and I don’t want to fly home feeling sad.’
‘Because you can’t have any more of this?’ Harri grinned, sweeping his hands down his cardigan. He’d done it to make her laugh, but it was also kind of hot. ‘If it’d help at all,’ he was saying, ‘I could always try to be less good. Don’t know if I can, but I’d give it a go.’
She slapped his arm and they both laughed, but the tension was hard to deal with. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she told him.
‘No, you’re right, it is ridiculous.’ He said this so primly, and in the strongest Welsh accent, like he was telling himself off, it made her laugh again.
‘ Argh! And it’s infuriating!’ she said, pulling her body tight. ‘We can’t just… do it.’ The space between them felt suddenly wider. How had it been so easy in the library?
‘In the library, we’d been drinking,’ she told herself aloud. ‘And on empty stomachs too, like total amateurs. And it was after dark and there were candles and a roaring fire and… it was a big old gothic castle for Christ’s sakes.’
‘And now it’s a Wednesday lunchtime and we’ve got book inventory to be getting on with back at the shop?’ Harri added, not without a sorry frown.
‘Exactly. The moment has passed.’ Yet, as the words left her lips she knew that if he just reached for her and kissed her, right that second, with no time for thinking or words or awkwardness, she’d kiss him right back.
But she was stuck fast. Nothing could induce her to lean closer or meet his eyes in the lustful way she had by the glowing hearth of the castle library.
She could feel his eyes on the side of her face.
‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘It’d be weirdly… planned? Right?’
‘Exactly. It would be artificial.’ She glimpsed at him long enough to catch his face fall like he knew it’d be absolutely real and not one bit artificial.
‘Artificial’s not what I meant,’ she corrected herself. ‘I mean it would be too forced. Too premeditated and too much like an experiment. It should be easier than this, without all the toing and froing and should we, shouldn’t we ? And it’d have happened already, years ago, if it was meant to happen.’
‘I hear you.’ Harri was making to move now, brushing away cookie crumbs. ‘We’re probably way too sober anyway.’
‘Yep,’ she said, half-heartedly.
‘Yep,’ he echoed.
He picked up the basket with an exaggerated sigh. ‘Pity, though.’
‘I’ll live with it,’ Annie said dryly, smiling, trying to convince herself she’d said all the right things to protect their friendship, to protect herself. It made her sad though, but what exactly had he just offered her? A night of ‘getting it out of our systems’? That wasn’t what she wanted.
‘So… now what?’ he said, the very last whisper of any possibility of them spending the evening with their skin touching skin, mouth upon mouth, hidden away under white bedsheets upstairs in the bookshop, sharing something experimental, just to see if there was magic there, dissolved away in the air like the smoke from an extinguished candle.
Annie shrugged. ‘There’s a drinks kiosk at the convenience store. Cup of tea?’
‘All right.’ He got to his feet, looking down at her with quirking lips. ‘So… just to clarify…’ he pulled her to her feet, quickly dropping her hands once they were eye to eye, ‘…it’s two cups of hot tea and not passionate sex? I forget what we decided?’
She dug at him with her elbow, laughing once more. ‘Milk, no sugar.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said, as they made for the glasshouse door, carrying their two tiny seeds in their pots. ‘Just making sure.’