Ask Another Day (Love in the Bay #2)

Chapter 1

The Signs are Favourable

‘Will I survive this?’ Holly asked out loud in the flimsy privacy of the toilet cubicle.

Turning over the grey plastic cube in her palm, she sighed in relief as the pixelated message The Signs are Favourable glowed on the green digital display.

Her relief was short-lived when it sunk in that those words were not as positive an answer as she could have received.

The rattle of the door handle pulled her away from the spiralling direction her thoughts were tempted to venture towards.

‘Sorry, just coming,’ she called out even though whoever was on the other side of the door hadn’t said anything.

Holly shoved the fortune teller back inside her swim bag before flushing the toilet.

She hadn’t actually used the toilet, but she always judged people if they left a cubicle without flushing.

That tiny cubicle had been the perfect place to hide out as she had desperately tried to smother the bubbling panic that had been building inside her.

Her faithful talisman hadn’t quite done enough to soothe her completely, but it hadn’t told her she was about to die.

She could do this.

Probably.

Shaking her head at her pessimism, she reverted to the more positive mantra of I can do this.

She repeated those four words to herself over and again as she washed her hands.

The words reverberated inside her head as she stuffed her swim bag into her locker and zipped up her robe.

The soft fabric was another barrier between her and the horrors she was about to endure.

When she got to the door her hand stilled instead of pushing it open.

‘I can do this,’ she said aloud, hoping that hearing the words out in the real world would make them true.

‘You need to push it,’ a voice muttered angrily from behind her.

Holly turned to see a middle-aged man, wearing budgie smugglers that should be illegal, standing too close behind her.

His hairy arms were crossed tightly at his chest. When she didn’t reply, he said something under his breath that she couldn’t quite make out.

But she assumed it wasn’t complimentary.

‘Seriously, can you either push the door open, or move out of the way?’ he sneered at her, finally tired of waiting.

Biting into her top lip to refrain from saying something she knew she’d regret, she stepped aside, allowing him to barge through. Now the door had swung open, Holly took her opportunity and crossed the threshold.

As she stepped out of the safety of the changing rooms, everything appeared fine; the water was still and calm in the training pool at Whitby Leisure Centre, but Holly knew it couldn’t be trusted.

Carefully, she edged towards the side bringing her closer to the water.

She wrapped her arms tightly around her robe as if it could protect her.

It was making her sweat in the humid air ,poolside, but it was worth it to not be doing this whilst also awkwardly standing in front of everyone in her tired swimsuit.

‘You OK up there?’ Owen asked, from his vantage point below her in the water. His soft voice was the balm she needed. But it still wasn’t enough to make her move any closer.

‘Actually, Owen, I think this was a bad idea. I’m just going to…

’ but before she could finish, Owen brought himself to the edge of the pool, and in a move that made Holly’s stomach flutter for all together very different reasons, he pulled himself up and out of the water in one fluid move.

Stupid Owen and his stupid chiseled chest, she groaned inwardly to herself.

‘It’s OK, Hols. I know what’s going on,’ he said as he ran a hand through his dripping wet hair.

‘You do?’

‘Yeah. Eleanor caught up with me after the raffle. Explained you’d probably be nervous because you still can’t swim.’

Holly refused to show any embarrassment at the fact Eleanor Raven had been gossiping about her, that the owner of the local bookshop had taken it upon herself to meddle in her life.

No sooner had the thought entered her mind, she dismissed it, knowing she wasn’t being fair.

Eleanor could be prickly, and fastidious at times, but she wasn’t a gossip.

She’d been there for Holly, and her brother Luke, over the years.

No, if Eleanor had chosen to speak to Owen, it would have come from a place of concern.

And she was right to interfere on this. When Holly had won these lessons in the raffle her own pub had hosted, she’d been horrified at the prospect.

She’d tried to get out of it straight away, but Owen had been so excited at the chance to reconnect with her.

They’d been friends at school, until he’d moved away after their GCSE exams. In the seventeen years he’d been away, he’d travelled the world.

And annoyingly for Holly, he was now a swim teacher.

‘It’s a bit more than that. It’s not just I can’t swim,’ she swallowed her nerves as she tried to explain, ‘it’s that I feel sick to my stomach at the prospect of even getting in the water.

Since what happened at school,’ she added quickly.

Anyone who knew her better would probably have thought this was to do with her late sister-in-law.

Losing Hannah because of an ill-fated decision to go into the sea after her dog, had deepened Holly’s fear of the water, but it hadn’t been the cause.

‘Hols, this is perfect!’ He beamed at her as he swept his wet blonde curls from his face.

‘Perfect?’ she repeated back; confusion pulling her to the present and away from the painful memories of the past.

‘This will be great for my business. If I can teach you to swim, I can teach anyone.’

For a second, Holly’s fears of the water were forgotten as she processed the insult Owen had most definitely levelled at her.

On seeing her less than impressed expression at his declaration, he added quickly, ‘Sorry. That came out wrong. I mean that this will really test my teaching skills. And if you’ll let me, I’d be honored to teach you to swim. ’

Holly chewed on the inside of her cheek. She had to give it to him, he knew how to dig himself out of a hole. And besides, he was too cute to stay annoyed at.

‘You really think you can? Mr Fincham said I was unteachable.’

Owen brought a hand to his bare chest in mock outrage, ‘I am offended you would compare me to that neanderthal. Hols, you most definitely are not unteachable. We need to take it slow, find the right approach.’

He smiled at her then, and Holly forgot they were talking about swimming lessons when she replied, ‘I’d like that.’

‘We don’t even need to get in the water today. Let’s sit and take in what everyone around us is doing. And next lesson, we’ll just focus on getting your feet in - nothing else,’ he added, responding to the look that had swept across Holly’s face.

They sat there together for the rest of her lesson, with Owen filling her in on everything he’d been up to since he’d moved away.

‘It’s been good to catch up with you, Hols,’ he said as she moved towards the changing rooms twenty minutes later.

He kept calling her that - Hols. During the course of their lesson, she realised she liked it.

The nickname made her feel like a teenager again, it reminded her of the times he’d shout it down the school corridors to get her attention.

One memory in particular pushed its way to the front; she’d come to his rescue once, lending him her calculator for a test, and he’d chased her down the corridor afterwards, picked her up and spun her in his arms declaring she was a star.

Then he’d started serenading her with the namesake song.

She’d thumped him playfully and insisted to be put down, but had secretly loved the attention.

Owen was like that with all the girls at school.

He was a shameless, if not harmless flirt.

But when his attention had swung her way, she’d always made the most of it.

‘How about it then?’ Owen dragged Holly out of those pleasant memories - life had been so much easier at sixteen.

‘Sorry? How about what?’ God she must have looked like such an idiot, she thought, as she scrabbled to piece together what he might be asking her.

‘Dinner, next week? You can show me where’s good to go around here now.’

‘Dinner? With you?’ her lips stumbled over the words.

‘Yes, Hols. You know dinner… a meal you can eat alone or,’ he gestured between them and her eyes tracked the movement, ‘with someone else.’

He raised his eyebrows in question.

Holly’s eyes grew wide, alarm coursing through her. And, instead of responding like a normal person, she scrambled for the door and mumbled out an incoherent reply.

‘Sorry,’ she said as she regained her faculties to speak coherently, ‘I just realised what time it is. I need to get back to Eleanor’s to pick up Natalie’. She rushed off into the sanctuary of the changing rooms without a backwards glance, wishing the ground would swallow her up.

*

Outside The Book Nook, two hours later, Holly had managed to work herself up into a frenzy as she waited for Rose and her brother to get back from wherever they’d taken themselves off to.

Pacing the pavement was keeping her distracted, but it wasn’t helping to prevent her spiral.

Each step seemed to send a message to her brain that her world was imploding.

Holly had lied to Owen. Eleanor had already agreed to look after Natalie, her three year old daughter, for the day.

They had a whole schedule of reading and baking madeleines mapped out.

But it had been the perfect excuse to get away from him, and his distractingly beautiful chest, as quickly as possible.

Her spiral had also caused her to question her little fortune teller - it had told her the signs were favourable.

But this didn’t feel in any way favourable.

Yes, she’d survived the lesson physically. Metaphorically though? She wasn’t sure.