Chapter Seven
Gabe shepherds us back to the coach with the pride of a man who considers himself personally responsible for everyone's transcendence this evening and is fairly confident he has delivered it. “Ladies and gentlemen, to the coach, please. Watch your step, watch your step.”
The group moves slowly, reluctantly, people taking one last look upward before the spell breaks. “Same seats please, ladies and gentlemen, same seats as before — yes, thank you, thank you.”
Emma is four or five rows ahead. As though she senses me register this, she turns and meets my eye. A thin current runs between us, sharp and immediate.
The coach pulls away from the mountain with a low hydraulic sigh.
Through the window, the sky is still extraordinary, still full of everything it was full of twenty minutes ago, unaffected by what happened at the edge of the clearing.
I watch it as we descend, the road winding down through the dark.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
Three images. The first two: the stars from tonight, the cluster of them, brilliant and scattered against the black. The third stops me — myself, near one of the telescopes, face tipped up, unaware of being looked at.
Below the images: I have to come clean and let you know I took this. Hopefully you like it as much as I do.
I study the photo, zooming in. I look considerably more approachable than I feel I generally am.
There is a softness to my expression I don't recognise.
My mouth rests loose and unguarded, my eyes lifted, almost curious.
As though I have forgotten to keep myself in place.
I look, if not younger, then less certain of my edges.
I type back: I do like it. Thank you for taking it.
I think about what I said to Emma. I haven't done this before.
I think about Daniel. Not with the old familiar weight of it — the deflation, the quiet endurance of a life that had stopped fitting — but with clarity. A kind, retrospective understanding of two people that were never quite right for each other and took too long to say so.
I think about home. The small island, the small law firm, the small days. The life I stepped out of for ten days and have been stepping further away from with every passing hour.
I think about the book series I’ve been enthralled in.
How my chest loosened as I read. How the stories gave me more than just images to think about in the dark.
They showed me something I hadn’t known I was missing.
The sense that what I had been carrying quietly for years was not strange or singular but simply unexamined. That there was somewhere to put it.
I think about Emma's mouth. The heat of it.
The taste of it. The deliberate certainty of it once it stopped being tentative and how I want it again.
I think about the cold air and the smell of her in it.
I think about my hands bunched in her hoodie, how they got there, and how they never moved to her face, her neck, her hair. That they wanted to.
I don't know the rules.
I'm not sure I've ever wanted to know the rules of something more.
I came here to allow myself time to think. To feel. And I am, quite remarkably, succeeding. It seems a waste to stop now.
Outside, the lights of Costa Adeje begin to appear. The coach slows as it enters the first resort area. Gabe lifts his microphone. “First stop, yes, first stop coming up. If this is where we picked you up, please make your way to the front.”
This is my stop.
I move into the aisle and make my way forward past couples sitting close in the yellow interior light, past the French man asleep against the window, his wife's hand resting on his arm with the unthinking familiarity of people who have been doing this for decades.
I look away from that and reach Emma's row.
She is already looking at me. As though she felt me coming. Her bag rests on her lap.
“I'm all-inclusive,” I say quietly. “I mean my hotel is all-inclusive. If you wanted to — there'll be drinks still. Probably.” A pause. “I just thought I'd mention it.”
Emma looks at me. Long enough that I start to think I shouldn’t have said anything. Then a smile breaks across her face, wide and delighted, reaching her eyes.
She stands and follows me to the front of the coach without a word, bag over her shoulder, as though disembarking at someone else's stop after a stargazing excursion at ten o'clock at night is a perfectly ordinary decision that requires no explanation whatsoever.
Gabe holds the door with a small nod as we leave a tip and step off. The air is soft and salted after the cold of the mountain, the streetlights casting everything in amber.
The coach door closes behind us and it pulls away.
“This way,” I say. “It’s a little walk to where I’m staying.”
Emma falls into step beside me. “Thank you for the invite,” she says.
“Where are you staying on the island?”
“Los Cristianos. It's been good, actually — enough going on to fill the days, but I've been sleeping better than I have in months. I enjoy adventure but I definitely needed some relaxation too.”
“From?”
“Work, mostly. I'm a Geography teacher at a pretty lively secondary school during the week and then I’m a personal trainer at weekends. Living in London doesn’t leave a lot of room for relaxation.”
“No,” I reply. “I imagine it doesn't.”
“What about you?”
“Law firm.”
“Ah, a lawyer.”
“No, I'm an assistant to one.” I pause. “I’ve always been content there, but I never quite figured out if I wanted to do something else.”
“So, figure it out now.”
“I'm fifty.”
She nudges me, her shoulder against mine. “Still sounds very young to me.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Though I've made some rather large changes recently. I'm working through it slowly.”
She nods, doesn't push.
The resort streets are bright, music spilling from the bars we pass, couples and groups moving slowly in the late evening heat. Our arms brush as we walk and neither of us adjusts. It happens again a few steps later. And again.
I want to take her hand. It is right there, swinging at her side, and mine is right here, and the distance between them is very small and getting across it should not be complicated, but I cannot seem to make my hand do anything except hang at the end of my arm like something that has never had an opinion about anything.
Wise up, I tell myself. You are walking through the warm streets of Tenerife with a gorgeous woman. You have kissed her. Reaching for her hand should, by any reasonable measure, be considerably easier than that.
My hand continues to do nothing.
A woman is sitting at a small table outside a shop, a portfolio of henna designs open in front of her, calling out softly to people as they pass. Emma glances at the designs as we go by.
“Have you got any tattoos?” she asks.
“No. Have you?”
“One,” Emma says. “From when I was young and made decisions with great confidence and very little information.” She smiles at this, brief and wry, aimed mostly at her younger self. “It wasn’t a mistake, but I probably could have got it done somewhere better.”
I have spent a considerable part of this evening looking at Emma and have not seen a tattoo yet.
We pass a bar where the music is loud through the open doors, a rainbow flag lit above the entrance, a small cluster of people on the pavement outside.
I slow slightly, without deciding to, and look.
Emma simply matches my pace as I pick it back up, arm brushing mine, and we carry on down the street.
“So, you're a lesbian,” I say.
Emma laughs — that short, surprised one. “No.”
“Oh.” I search for the word I’m thinking of. “Are you sapphic?”
“Yes.” She is trying, clearly, not to smile too widely. “I'm bisexual.”
“Oh,” I reply, probably drawing the last vowel out too long. “Sorry I said lesbian.”
“You really don't need to apologise. Lesbians are incredible.” She has that expression again, the one that suggests she finds me considerably more amusing than I find myself. “But yeah. Bisexual.”
I look at her. She knows herself in a way I am only beginning to. And I find I am not made small by this. I am simply glad for her.
“When did you know?”
“Quite early on.” We move around a group spilling out from another bar, Emma's hand briefly at my elbow steering me clear.
“Had boyfriends growing up and then a girlfriend through university.
My mum was always open about it. She even asked me a few times if I fancied girls before I'd worked it out for myself.”
“Really?”
“I know.” She laughs. “She's very direct. Always has been.” A couple passes between us briefly and we close back together on the other side of them. “She said she noticed I always talked about this character from a show called Charmed. Do you know it?”
I shake my head.
“Well, her name was Prue and she was this powerful, badass witch. Gorgeous too. Mum said I'd pretend to be her around the house. Put on little shows. And then as I got older, I had posters in my bedroom and”— she glances at me sideways —“well, I didn't want to be her.”
“Wow,” I say. I mean it.
We stop briefly at a crossing, waiting for a moped to pass. “What about you?” she asks. “Any moments like that?”
I open my mouth. Close it. Then open it again as we start walking.
“Not quite. I didn't know certain things were an option when I was younger.
I'm only starting to put some pieces together.” I slow my pace slightly and she matches it without being asked, and in the quieter space between us, I say it.
“I'm not sure I'm bisexual. I think I might just be attracted to women.
But I'm not going to put a definitive label on myself yet.”
“That's reasonable,” she says.
“Is it?”
“Yes.” She looks at me. “You seem like you've been thinking about it for a while, actually.”
“Perhaps.”
We walk on. The street opens up, the noise of the resort softening behind us as we move towards the seafront.
Something alive moves in my chest — the thrum of having said a true thing out loud for the first time, and yet beside Emma, with the way she simply continues walking, it settles.
It doesn't feel as large as I expected. It feels, if anything, like putting something down.
“I'll have to look up this Prue character,” I tell her.
Emma's face opens into a grin. She reaches across and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear, easy and unhurried, as though she has been doing it for years.
“Message me if you do.” She holds my gaze as she says the next part.
“But be gentle with me, Cathleen. The show was basically my queer awakening.”
“I will,” I promise. And I find, walking beside her under this sky tonight, that I mean both things.