Chapter 20
LYRA
Roker by Sunset
‘So you had a crush on me, huh?’
‘Shut up,’ I tell him as we stand near the receding tide. ‘I only said that so you didn’t have to get all embarrassed listening to yourself sing.’
‘Yeah, right, Lyra.’ He rocks his shoulder into mine.
‘Go on, tell me. Did you back your school books with my face? Cut my head out of posters and sleep with it under your pillow? Kiss my face before you went to sleep at night?’
It wasn’t quite that bad but I did fall asleep listening to his songs on repeat. ‘I was lying, obviously.’
‘Aha. Sure you were.’
Urgh. ‘I’m so pleased the arrogant rock star finally showed up because that down-on-your-luck routine was getting really old.’
He throws his head back, guffawing. A sight and sound that makes me freeze, mesmerised as I listen to him. Stunned by the brightness of him.
I could watch him like this as if time doesn’t exist but I’m barely able to stand on wobbly legs.
When he quietens, his eyes on my lips, the mush my mind is reduced to with him semi-naked and happy, standing inches from me, is only capable of registering that I want him to kiss me.
Desperately. The last two weeks of waiting and uncertainty are a memory my hippocampus is unable to hold on to.
‘You get a dunk for that,’ he tells me, eyes narrowing on mine.
‘In that sea?’ I point across his shoulder to the ocean, knowing that despite the sun, it will feel like diving into the arctic.
‘Yep.’
I drop my hands to my hips, life coming back into my legs and rooting me firmly to the spot. The warm, dry spot. ‘You, pink-Fiat-driving musician, think you’re brave enough for that ice box?’
He ties his red swim shorts, hands me his sunglasses, and walks to the edge of the water with confidence, but as soon as his feet connect with the North Sea, he recoils.
‘Fuck me, it’s freezing!’ he shouts, running back to our towel and jumping up and down on the spot.
It’s my turn to guffaw. ‘Big baby. You call yourself a northerner?’
‘I lived in the south for a long time,’ he protests.
Shaking my head, I slip off my own sunglasses and set down both pairs on the sand.
I unbutton my shorts, one… button… at… a…
time. Then slide the cut-off denim down my legs with the kind of brazenness I didn’t know I had in me.
I soak up the way his eyes hungrily roam my legs – bare but for my hot-pink bikini – ridiculously turned on.
He’s lost in me now, the way I am drowned by his proximity every time he’s near me.
I let my shirt fall down my arms and I bask in the subtle parting of his lips as he takes in my boobs, teased together by the bikini I stopped to buy on my way to the beach.
Then I stride into the water as if it’s the Indian Ocean, throwing a mental high-five to my inner Aphrodite.
‘You’re fucking crazy,’ he tells me.
Over my shoulder, I call back, ‘Where’s my rock god now?’
And where the hell did that performance just come from, girlie?
The temperature of the water is a necessary cool off because I feel like I’m going to combust if I spend one more second around Guy Walker without him making a move on me.
Bravery or stupidity, I’m not sure which, causes me to dive under the water – it’s not excruciating once you’re in. I touch the sandy bottom, then push up, letting my head fall back, the water sweeping my hair from my face as I break the surface.
And he’s here, standing taller than me, reaching his arms around my waist, wide pupils and crooked smile. ‘Say that again,’ he says. ‘Tell me I’m yours.’
My lips curve up. ‘My rock god?’
He moves his face closer to mine, holding my waist harder against him, our skin sliding together as the ocean drains between us.
And finally… his lips meet mine. Finally, my hands are free to explore his naked body, my tongue invited to taste his.
When he scoops me up, wrapping my thighs around him, there’s no side tables or ornaments or Dad sleeping upstairs.
There’s just us. Him and me, kissing in the vastness of the sea, where nothing else can touch us.
I feel him grow beneath me and groan into his mouth, holding his face in my hands, craving more of him even as we’re locked together.
As if seven years of lust I’ve had boxed away have been unleashed.
I’m back there, That Night, free and hopeful.
Excited. And today, I’m fuelled by the kind of desperate desire no one before Guy has evoked in me.
I pull back from him because I need to know if he’s here with me, and I’m greeted to the kind of smile he seems to rarely give.
‘Are you going to ignore me for a fortnight now?’ I ask, tongue-in-cheek.
‘Where did that sweet girl in summer dresses go, eh?’
I nip the end of his nose between my teeth. ‘What can I say, you bring out a bad side of me.’
He presses his forehead to mine and I indulge in the feel of his biceps, holding me up as if I weigh nothing. ‘Good. I’m better equipped to handle a bad girl.’
‘Kiss me like that again.’
He makes a move to do just that, but our mouths collide too eagerly and I knock him off balance. He staggers back, his feet losing grip in the sand and tumbling us both back into the water.
We’re in hysterics when we splash back to standing, chest high in the water. ‘That was smooth, Guy Walker. Cool as ice.’
‘Well, it’s probably a good thing because I need something to cool me off before I get out of this water.’
The reminder of his want is enough to heat me through, until we walk out of the water, replace our sunglasses, and I’m shivering.
Guy wraps a large beach towel around us and kisses me again, sweeter this time. ‘It looks like the others are packing up,’ he tells me.
He’s right. Much further up the beach, Dave and Trev are dismantling the barbeque. The ladies seem to be tidying away.
‘Do you want to go with them?’ I ask, hoping I already know the answer.
He takes hold of my chin and tells me, ‘I don’t want to be anywhere other than here. Will you stay for a while?’
‘Yes.’
He kisses me briefly again, then wraps the towel tightly around me and picks up my clothes.
‘We’re going to leave you kids to it,’ Kylie says when we make it back to the group, humour dancing in her expression. ‘That water looked hot.’
Guy flicks a towel at her and they share the joke. It was hot. Wholly hot. And I can’t wait for everyone else to leave, but it takes an age to pack them up and help them back to their cars and taxis. All the while, my craving for Guy is increasing a million-fold.
The sun is dipping lower on the horizon, so low that the wisps of cloud now decorating the sky are starting to turn shades of orange, but the air is still warm.
‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ is Kylie’s parting line, to which Guy replies, ‘We’ll have a fucking brilliant night in that case.’
It does nothing to help the inferno raging inside me.
We head back to the beach and lie on Guy’s dry towel, talking, kissing, groping, him rolling on top of me, staring into my eyes, stroking my face, pulling my hair. And once the sun sets, it feels as if the heat of the day has transferred from it to us.
Guy’s on top of me, the weight of his bottom half pressed deliciously onto my thighs, his top half supported on his forearms. ‘You can say no to this, but I live right there.’
‘Right where?’ I ask, following his pointed finger. ‘That building?’
He nods. ‘Right behind us.’
‘All day, that’s where you’ve lived?’
‘And yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.’
‘Why didn’t you say that?’
‘I didn’t want to seem presumptuous.’
‘Guy, your arse has been gyrating for the last hour, and you don’t want to seem presumptuous?’
‘When you put it like that… Grab your stuff. You’ve pulled.’
* * *
He unlocks the door to his fairly modest apartment.
A reminder that he isn’t the man who performed for tens of thousands of people just a few years ago.
It’s still baffling to me that he had it all one day and it was gone the next but, honestly, I don’t care about who he was; I care about the man I’m sinking fast with today.
Inside, he takes my beach bag and can’t wait to ditch his things either. He switches on a standing lamp in the corner of his lounge. Through the large glass windows, the beach is now in the light of dusk.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asks whilst I’m enjoying the view.
I turn to watch him moving around his kitchen and notice on top of the cupboards, a line of twenty or thirty empty bottles of alcohol.
The end of the line is the bottle of gold tequila I recognise from the night of the hen party when we first met.
The bottle he’d started drinking when we were trapped together in the lift.
He must catch my gaze because he responds to my unspoken question. ‘I don’t drink any more but those are bottles I’ve wanted to drink. Every time I’ve wanted one, I’ve poured it away and put the empty up there, to remind me that I don’t need it.’
One minute, this man is easy and simple. The next, he reminds me of a man haunted. But seeing the effort he’s gone to, pulling himself back from a place I can’t even imagine, is awe-inspiring. He’s making changes and maybe there’s a lesson there for me, too. Maybe I’m already taking his class.
‘The tequila bottle,’ I say.
‘I’d filled it with water before I got to Charlotte’s hen party. But I wanted it to be alcohol when I was afraid in the lift. When I stood in that penthouse and realised how far I’d fallen. Forced to take my clothes off to stay above the breadline.’
‘Guy…’
He shrugs. ‘It’s okay. I don’t want sympathy.
It is what it is.’ He sets down a glass of water he’s drinking and takes slow and steady steps towards me, each one making my next breath shallower.
‘I haven’t wanted to drink a bottle since I met you in that lift, Lyra, and I think, I can’t explain it yet, but that’s part of the reason I didn’t call or message you. ’
His fingers reach for my hair and he fixates on the movement of it. Then his eyes flick to mine and darken.
‘I’m glad I met you now,’ I tell him, unsure what I’m trying to share.
But some kind of understanding passes between us and when his lips meet mine, it’s slow and tender, not like the hen party, not like it was at my parents’ house, or even on the beach. It’s deeper.
His lips move from my mouth to my neck, along the sensitive skin of my collarbone, bringing pimples to my skin as if it’s never been kissed before.
He slips my shirt down my arms and I take his t-shirt off over his head, moaning when his mouth finds my breasts and his hands tug open the string tie at the back of my bikini.
‘Is this okay?’ he asks.
‘More than,’ I tell him, unable to find more words because finally… I’m getting what I want. And what I want is him. The wedding singer. The naked butler. The complicated soul. The man behind the lyrics. All of him.
Hands on his face, I pull him up to kiss his mouth because my need to taste him is overwhelming. He’s barely touched me and bright spots are already filling my vision.
Somehow, we work back towards his sofa and he lies me down, crawling on top of me. The intensity is like nothing I’ve known. Almost too much.
I place a hand on his chest, I think trying to compose myself. Trying to see straight and think straight. Not because I don’t want this. I absolutely do. But because I want to remember it if tomorrow never comes.
He’s looking at me, waiting, and for some bizarre reason, I say, ‘Before we go any further, I should probably check, you don’t have any weird cow or other barnyard animal fetishes, do you?’
That crooked smile teases his delectable lips and he whispers, ‘The only thing I’m obsessed with is you, Lyra.’
That does it. I pull him to me, our mouths connecting, my hands reaching for his shorts and helping him take them down, exposing him where I’ve felt him all evening. And seeing it, him, in the flesh, steals my breath.
He unbuttons and frees me of my shorts, then unties my bikini bottoms at each side, discarding them onto the floor, where our clothes are scattered.
I take him in, all of him, and he does the same, until at last, he works his way back to me, slides his hand between my legs, then moves his whole body over me again.