Chapter 23
“The only way is up,” said Ajay as they stood at the bottom of the fairy-tale tower. He motioned that she should go first.
“That sounds like a pep talk,” she replied, looking back at him once before starting to climb the wooden spiral staircase.
“Maybe it is.”
She puffed as she climbed. These steps were harder on the thighs than the wide, shallow staircase at Coopers it can’t have been too hard to feel inspired in a place like this.”
“Yeah,” Casey agreed. She didn’t know if the Elizabethan walls had absorbed the essence of Vita, but she could swear that they were exuding inspiration, and she in turn was soaking it in.
Possibility swelled inside her like waves on the ocean.
Was it some alchemy, Ajay’s presence mixed with this place?
She turned to him and observed him for a few seconds as he bent at the knees and squinted to read the titles on the nearest bookshelf. “What made you choose here?” she asked.
He straightened and turned to face her. “I wanted to take you somewhere that was just for you,” he said, and shrugged. “Writing is important to you. I know you brushed it off when I asked you about it, but I read your short stories. They’re good, Casey. You’re a good writer.”
She felt herself blush.
He ran his hand over the stubble at his jaw. “And I totally get why your inspiration might have got a bit stumped, so I did a bit of research on writer’s block and stuff, and there was a lot of articles about ‘filling the well,’ so I looked for places that I thought might help to…”
“Refill my well,” she finished for him, smiling.
He shrugged again and looked down at his boots. “I don’t know, maybe it was a stupid idea, but I thought perhaps I could help you find your mojo…”
“My mojo, huh? Well, consider my well filled, well and truly,” she said, and launched herself at him, catching his face between her hands and planting her mouth on his.
After a moment of stunned surprise, Ajay wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back.
His lips were soft, and when he held her tighter to him, she couldn’t resist deepening their kiss.
Fireworks were going off in her undercrackers, and she thought Other Casey must be bonkers to have brushed him off in the Seychelles glimpse.
Who wouldn’t want to spend their time kissing this man?
He tasted like hot chocolate and smelled like patchouli and oud, and she was so intoxicated by his embrace that she quite forgot that they were standing on a small platform in a drafty stairwell until she heard an embarrassed “Ahem,” and opened her eyes to see an elderly couple waiting on the stairs to get past them.
“Oh!” She giggled, breaking their kiss and gingerly wiping her mouth. “Sorry about that, we were just…”
The older man chuckled and remarked, “Oh, we know what you were just doing.”
His companion slapped his arm playfully. “Don’t embarrass them, love. We were that age once, remember.”
“I remember it well.” He winked at her in return, and the woman blushed.
“Get on with you!” she said, tutting playfully, and Casey decided that these two were her new relationship goals.
“Did you want to see the writing room?” asked Ajay, whose cheeks had turned two shades darker.
“No, dear, you carry on. We’ve seen it before,” the woman replied.
“And you seem to be enjoying it much more than we did, eh, Pauline?” the man added, and got good-naturedly shushed.
“Please excuse my husband. We’re going up to the top of the tower; the views are marvelous from up there.” To her husband, she said, “Come on, you. There’s a jacket spud in the café with my name on it after this.”
They managed to hold in their snickers until they heard the door at the top of the staircase creak open. “Um, did you want to see the views?” Ajay asked.
“Not while they’re up there.” Casey smirked. “I’d be too embarrassed to see them again.”
“Yeah, fair enough. How about we get lunch? We’ll find a table in a dark corner to hide in.”
“All right, I hear they make a mean jacket spud.” Casey raised an eyebrow at him, and he laughed and then leaned in for one slightly more chaste kiss.
—
“So, does this mean we’re dating now?” Ajay asked as he stroked her hair. She could tell he was smiling.
They were laying in her bed, beneath her thick duvet.
After lunch at Sissinghurst and a wander around the vegetable gardens, he had driven her home.
Casey had invited him into her cabin for coffee, and one thing had led to another.
She was surprised at how quickly it all came back to her; sex was apparently like riding a bike.
She had forgotten just how nice it could be—sex, that was, not riding a bike, although she enjoyed that too.
Ajay was an attentive lover. When she had warned him that it had been a long while since she’d been intimate with anyone, he had taken his time to make her feel cherished and relaxed.
Now, she lay wholly satisfied with her head resting on Ajay’s chest, one arm slung lazily across him.
The room was chilly; the heating had yet to come on, but inside the bed everything was warm and soft—apart from Ajay’s abs, which were surprisingly firm.
“Would you like us to be dating?” she asked tentatively.
“I would. I really like you, Casey, but I know that you have your reasons for staying single, so I will take this at whatever pace you need.”
Her heart rate picked up a little, not with fear but rather with hope, a feeling she’d shelved a long time ago.
Ajay lightly ran his fingers up and down her bare arm.
She didn’t know him well, it was true, but she knew enough of him to feel confident that he wasn’t the sort of person to hurt someone for his own selfish gain.
She leaned up on her elbow to look at him and smiled. “How are you even real?”
He grinned boyishly. “Is that a yes?”
Where’s the harm? she wondered. In a couple of weeks, the meme would be gone and so would this version of her life. If ever there was a time to take chances, it was now, when any disasters would be soon erased. It felt liberating. “It’s a yes.”
“I feel honored, Ms. Smith.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You should. I’m a catch.”
With one swift movement he shifted so that she was beneath him, and he had settled himself comfortably between her legs.
He leaned up on his forearms, gazing down at her, and she felt her body respond to him, reveling in the weight and heat of him.
“You are a catch, Casey Smith,” he said, his voice rough with desire, “and I have no intention of letting you go.”
—
At just after five o’clock that evening, they stepped outside her cabin and into the cold, hair still wet from the shower, Ajay dressed in the clothes he’d picked her up in that morning, Casey decked out for comfort in her old university hoodie and a pair of checked pajama bottoms. She shivered as the wind whipped up around them and crossed her arms over herself.
She thought she could feel her wet hair freezing solid in the chilly air.
“I’m sorry that I have to leave,” said Ajay, pulling her to him. “I like to be there to cook for Jared when I can. Left to his own devices, he’d live off pot noodles and cheese and onion crisps. Vern left a butternut squash for us in the wood store this morning; I thought I’d make a hearty soup.”
“Sounds delicious,” she said, thinking, And he cooks? “Vern’s such a sweetheart.”
“You could join us?” he offered.
“Thank you, but I’m going to spend some quality time with my journal, strike while the iron’s hot and all that.”
He smiled. “Sounds like a plan.” Then cupping her face with his hands he added, “You’ve got this,” and kissed her.
A dull, repetitive thumping sound caused them to break apart. At the other end of the dark garden, inside Nate’s house, Conner and Ellory were jumping up and down at the French doors, laughing and pointing and pummeling their fists against the glass.
“Aww, man.” Casey laughed. “We’ve been busted.”
Ajay sniggered and turned his face toward the cabin, embarrassed. Nate came into view and opened the door. “Sorry!” he called. “Don’t mind them. As you were!” He pulled the door closed and tucked a child under each arm before walking away from the windows.
“No secrets in your family, huh?” Ajay smirked.
“Not living this close,” Casey agreed. She walked him to the garden gate and then went gratefully back into her cabin.
Pulling out her journal, she picked a black fine-liner pen out of her pen pot and settled down at her desk.
She didn’t have a plan—didn’t want to frighten her skittish muse off by being precious about it—she simply began with no expectations of where her pen might take her.
For the first time in a very long while, the words flowed out of her onto the page, rather than being extracted like wood splinters from skin.
Maybe it was a day spent walking in the footsteps of great writers past, or maybe it was an afternoon of good sex with a handsome man.
Perhaps in opening herself up and allowing herself to be vulnerable with Ajay, she had freed up her words.
All she knew was that she wrote ten pages that evening.
Most surprising of all was that when she finally put her pen down and stretched out her cramping fingers, the one person that she couldn’t wait to tell was Margo.