Chapter 14 #2
Cara is watching us. I catch her watching – the back-and-forth, the ease, the way Nina’s whole face opens when she’s enjoying herself. When our eyes meet, Cara’s expression is layered: fond and sad and clear-eyed. The expression of a woman who has just watched the evidence confirm the hypothesis.
She looks away first. Picks up her drink. Joins in.
That generosity costs her. I know it costs her. And I take it anyway, the way I take everything – Nina’s friendship, Cara’s patience, the village’s silence about the thing everyone can see and no one will say.
‘Karaoke!’ Tilly’s voice cuts through the noise. ‘Who’s first?’
She’s already looking at us. She has been looking at us since we walked in – Tilly, who forgets nothing, who has been running the social architecture of this village with an iron fist, and who has clearly been planning this for longer than I care to think on.
‘Tom and Nina,’ she says. Pleasantly. Inexorably. With a damn evil smile. ‘Come on. Like you used to.’
The table goes still.
Across the table, Nina’s eyes find mine.
‘That was years ago,’ she says.
‘Three years,’ Tilly agrees, with the precision of a woman who keeps count. ‘Long enough.’ She holds out a hand to Nina, palm up, the universal gesture of a woman who has already decided. ‘Song’s already chosen. Don’t make me ask again.’
‘Tilly—’
‘Nina. You know I’ll wait.’
She will. She’d wait all night. We both know it. Nina looks at me – are you going to save me from this? – and the answer is no, because Tilly is right and some things have been on hold for three years and maybe it’s time.
‘Fine,’ Nina says. ‘But I’m blaming you.’
‘You always blame me,’ I say. ‘It’s our dynamic.’
The opening bars of ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ fill the pub and Nina groans, and it’s been three years since we’ve done this, three years since I stood next to her at this microphone, and my body remembers it before my head catches up.
The first verse is mine. I take a breath and do it – badly, undoubtedly, but the crowd is cheering and Nina is grinning beside me and for a few bars it’s just noise and warmth and the simple relief of not thinking.
Then she comes in on her part. Her voice is terrible – genuinely, objectively terrible; she sings the way she parks, with confidence and no accuracy – but she’s selling it completely, one hand on her heart, the other gesturing at me with the kind of dramatic commitment that suggests she’s forgotten there are other people in the room.
She points at me for the chorus. I point back.
The whole pub is singing along, Bill loudest, and Nina is laughing so hard she can barely find the words, and my hand is on her shoulder because the choreography demanded it and her shoulder is warm and shaking with laughter and I am standing in front of everyone I know singing a song about not breaking someone’s heart and the irony is so precise it could be surgical.
The song ends. The crowd erupts. Nina takes an exaggerated bow and then her arms are around me – not the quiz night hug, not the brief celebration.
Something more. She holds on. Her face is pressed against my shoulder and she’s laughing and I can feel her ribs and her breath and the particular vibration of her joy against my chest, and my arms come up around her and I hold her the way I always hold her – carefully, precisely, exactly the right amount – except this time I close my eyes, just for a second, just briefly, and I let myself feel it without managing it.
One second. That’s all.
She pulls back. Not far. Her face is flushed and happy, inches from mine, and she’s still half-laughing, and her hands are on my shoulders – five points of pressure, the same five from quiz night – and the pub is loud and bright and I can feel every one of her fingers through my shirt.
‘That was awful,’ she says. ‘We’re never doing that again.’
‘We say that every year.’
‘This time I mean it.’
She’s looking at me. I’m looking at her. The noise fades. Her lips are parted. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright and wide and there – right there, present, seeing me, and for one beat the air between us is not the air between friends.
Someone wolf-whistles. Nina blinks. The moment fractures.
She lets go, steps back, turns to Brynn. ‘I need another drink. A strong one. Something that’ll make me forget I just did that in public.’
She’s gone. Back to the booth, back to Brynn, back to the safety of the crowd.
I stand at the microphone for half a second longer than I should, the cheering still going, the pub still loud, and across the room Cara is sitting very still with her drink in her hand and her eyes on me and an expression on her face that I recognise because I wear it every day.
She’s watching someone she wants choose someone else. In real time. In front of everyone.
I go back to the booth. I sit down. I pick up my drink.
‘You were good up there,’ Cara says. Her voice is light. Even. The cost of it is invisible to everyone except me.
‘Thanks.’
‘You looked happy.’
‘I was.’
A pause. She doesn’t say with her. She doesn’t have to.
The walk home is quiet.
The heat has finally cracked – not completely, but enough that the night air feels almost cool, the first real breath in weeks. The village is dark, everyone either at the pub or long since asleep.
Cara walks beside me, our footsteps on the cobblestones.
‘I need to tell you something,’ she says.
‘Okay.’
‘I didn’t come here just to visit.’ She keeps her eyes on the road. ‘I came because I’ve been thinking about you. About us. About whether we made a mistake, letting distance decide for us.’
‘Cara—’
‘Let me finish.’ She stops walking. I stop too.
The harbour is behind us, the moonlight on the water, the flat ahead.
‘I know you love her. I’ve known it since the day you first said her name.
But she’s had eleven years to see you, Tom.
Eleven years.’ She meets my eyes. ‘I see you. I’ve always seen you. ’
The words settle between us. The harbour makes its quiet sounds. A boat creaks at its mooring.
She reaches out and takes my hand.
Her fingers are warm and certain. Not tentative – Cara doesn’t do tentative.
She holds my hand the way she holds everything: directly, with her whole self, no apology.
And the truth is – it feels good. Her hand in mine.
The warmth of it. The simplicity of being wanted by someone who is standing right here, saying it out loud, not hiding behind fuchsias and fairy lights and a decade of silence.
‘You don’t have to decide anything tonight,’ she says. ‘I just wanted you to know. That there’s someone here who sees you. Who isn’t going to make you wait another eleven years for a thing that might never come.’
She squeezes once. Lets go.
We walk the rest of the way in silence. At the flat, she goes to her room and I go to mine, and I lie in the dark, and the ceiling looks the same as it always does, and nothing has changed and everything has.
Two things, replaying on a loop behind my eyes:
Nina’s face. Inches from mine. Her hands on my shoulders, her laugh still vibrating against my chest, that beat where the air between us changed and she was right there and then she wasn’t.
Cara’s hand. Warm and certain. I see you.
One is a question I’ve been asking for eleven years that has never been answered.
The other is an answer to a question I haven’t let myself ask.
The ceiling. The dark. The harbour sounds through the window.
I don’t sleep.