CRAIG
CRAIG
How’d you fancy getting back on a horse today? Sebastian’s text read.
And I replied: Would bloody love to!
But I answered his message an hour late, and I lost a further half-hour waiting for Mum’s return home to relieve Christopher from my care.
I’m on my way , I send before leaving the house, waiting several minutes for a follow-up from him. When nothing else comes through, though, I set out for the farm anyway. Mum’s brought Kathryn back with her, and whether I get to ride or not, I know I’m better off escaping.
It’s Judy who comes to the door when I knock, dressed in her scrubs ready for work, black braids tamed in a coil atop her head. “Craig,” she smiles at me, opening the door only partway. Dobby’s nose pokes curiously around the obstruction of her legs. “Sebastian mentioned I might expect you.”
“Is he here?”
She shakes her head. “He left for the stables a while ago. Told me to tell you, should you happen to show, to meet him over there.”
“Oh, okay. Uh…”
“Left at the gates, right at the T-junction. Strathall Stables should be signposted second turn on the right.”
“Thanks.”
“Have fun.”
Five minutes later, I’m pulling into the stables’ car park. The sun is bright, the sky is clear, and the smell that hits me as I climb out of Roxy is an altogether heady blast of good memory. It’s been six years since I’ve been on a horse. My tenth birthday wish was to ride, and I received eight months of lessons before my dad decided that my free time would be better-spent learning piano — something I could entertain with at parties.
I find it obscenely difficult to reign in my giddiness as I head for the reception building to sign in. It’s only when I step through its door that I realise I don’t know what to sign in under. I also didn’t think to check for Sebastian’s truck outside.
The reception area appears to be little more than a storage shed, but it’s exceptionally well-organised, with riding equipment and apparel lining each of its four walls and filling labelled bins on the floor. Shelves beneath the large corner desk to my right are lined with trophies, plaques, and rosettes, some framed photos dotted in between; a till and a logbook rest alone on its surface.
A young girl perched on a stool behind lifts her head from the boot she’s cleaning and flashes me a bright smile. “Hi.”
“Hey.”
“You have a booking?” Her voice has a soft lilt. It reminds me of someone I can’t quite place. She looks just a touch on the young side to be appraising me with the brazen interest that she is, and I determinedly pretend not to notice.
“Not… exactly. I’m a guest of Sebastian. Sebastian Davis?”
“Really? Okay, sure, he’s here someplace. If you could just sign in, please,” she says, nudging the open visitor’s book toward me. “And will you be hiring anything? I can sort you out now before you head through if you like?”
I obediently pick up the pen provided and jot down my name, seeing Sebastian’s untidy scrawl two entries above. “I don’t know, to be honest.”
“Well, I can’t tell you where Sebastian is. But I’ll be right here should you need me.”
“Thank you.”
Flashing another face-splitting grin, the girl abruptly returns to her scrubbing. And I’m left to look about myself, feeling somewhat lost and sort of deflated.
Aside from the entrance at my back, there are two other doors. One is directly beside the desk, and the other is on the far wall. Figuring the nearest to most likely lead into an office, I head for the furthest, and when I’m not pulled up, I tug it open and step outside onto packed dirt.
A neat row of about a dozen stalls stands proud across from me, horse’s heads peeking out over the doors of five of them. None of the horses I can see look like Firecracker, though, and of the couple people milling about, neither is Sebastian. I delve a hand into my pocket for my phone only to find it not there — because I stupidly discarded it on the kitchen counter after he failed to text me back, and I didn’t pick it up again.
There’s a separate brick building capping off one end of the row, its double doors wide open. I decide that’s as good a place as any to check out first.
It turns out to be a good call.
Sebastian’s voice reaches me before the sight of him does, seeming to come from just inside the doors. His tone carries, but whatever he’s saying, I can’t make it out.
The voice that replies to him is female, and the instant I hear it, I realise exactly who the girl in reception reminded me of. Sebastian is with Brianna. Great.
I edge closer and peek inside at stacks upon stacks of hay, finding the two of them sat alone together on a large bale set apart from the rest, their backs to me. Dust motes dance through the sunlit air around them. I stop. They both fall quiet, and I’m almost certain they must have heard me.
Except, just as I make ready to announce myself like I’m not creeping, Brianna starts talking again, and I hold back as Sebastian wraps his arm around her shoulders.
Discomfort spikes, a sharp and unwelcome surge, when I watch his hand trail her neck into her hair in a fond caress, her head drawn down to his shoulder. His other hand reaches to clasp one of hers, and he murmurs a few hushed words as she turns her face into his neck.
Sebastian is with Brianna, and it’s not like I haven’t seen them together before — I know they’re together. But this — this is intimate.
This is wrong…
Me being here is wrong. I’m intruding on a private moment I’ve no place to witness.
My stealthy retreat, however, is not as successful as my entrance. In taking a backward step, I smack my elbow off the door frame and bite down hard on my bottom lip to stifle my hiss.
Brianna whirls around. “What…?” And there’s a heartbeat of startled silence before her wide eyes catch on me. “Sebastian, what’s he doing here?”
“I, uh,” I start.
“Craig?”
It’s the deep frown knitting Sebastian’s brow when he turns — like he can fathom no explanation for my presence — that unglues my feet from the floor and gets me moving.
“Craig,” he calls after me.
I pick up my pace, shoving through the door back into reception with unnecessary force.
“Whoa! Leave it on its hinges, would ya?” Brianna’s sister bolts up off her stool, almost dropping the boot. “Can you not find him? He definitely hasn’t been through here.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I shrug her off, passing right on by the desk. “I shouldn’t’ve come.”
“Hey, wait.” She looks about ready to lunge for me as I reach for the door to escape. “Have you checked the paddock?”
“No.”
“Give me a sec, and I’ll give Bree a call. She likely knows where he is.”
“No. Thanks.”
It seems that Sebastian’s aware of a shortcut, though, because when I make it to the car park, I find him standing at Roxy’s side. The sun burnishes his copper hair as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, a corner of his mouth ticked crookedly. I could almost believe he’s feeling uneasy, too—if I didn’t know better.
“Craig,” he says again, only that, and then folds his arms across his chest. His goddamn frown remains.
I grind to a halt several strides away. “You invited me here, Bas.”
“I’m aware.”
“Really? Looked like it!”
“I was close to giving up on you showing.”
“Lucky you had a fall-back, then, huh?”
“That’s not…” He blinks at me. “I’m lost. What’s this about?”
“You didn’t tell me that Brianna would be here, too.”
“I didn’t think to mention it. Brianna’s always here. This is her family’s place.”
“If I’d’ve known, I wouldn’t have fucking come.”
“If you’d known what?” His affected ignorance is really pissing me off.
“That I would be accompanying you on a date!”
The bastard’s mouth then twitches with the blatant beginnings of a smirk, but he wisely suppresses it. As if I don’t feel plenty stupid enough already, blindsided and duped. I turn my head away and spot the front end of his truck poking out from behind a horse trailer a short way further along.
“Today is not a date, Craig. Not in any way, shape, or form. Trust me. I just wanted to ride and thought you might be up for it too.”
“Right,” I scoff. “And your girlfriend? Sure she knows that? Because she didn’t exactly look as though she expect—”
“Bree’s not my girlfriend anymore.”
“—What?”
“We broke up.”
“What?”
“Almost two weeks ago now.”
“But then…” I gesture vaguely in the direction of the building they were so very recently canoodling in.
“Nope. She’s been feeling a little down, and I still care about her. That’s all that was.”
Oh.
Almost two weeks. These past two weeks, when he and I have spent time together pretty much daily. A fortnight throughout which Brianna’s complete absence from hasn’t once caused me to pause for thought. At least, not since…
Oh.
“The day of the gig?” I guess, catching on at last.
“The day I took full leave of my senses,” he nods, uncrossing his arms.
The snap that wasn’t about me, my stomach knots itself unbearably tight, that had shifted something indefinable between us, nonetheless. I prickle at the memory of his breath on my face and flex my fingers against his phantom touch.
A sound behind me has his gaze flicking past my shoulder, but he doesn’t appear concerned by whatever it is, so I don’t bother to look for myself.
“Oh good. You found each other!” Brianna’s sister calls out. “Nice car.”
Sebastian raises a hand in response, “Hey, Georgie,” and then starts toward me, smooth as glass. “Okay?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say, except I don’t especially sound it, and I’m sure as hell not feeling it, watching his smirk break free.
“So can we go do what we came for, now?”
Something random Ashleigh said to us at dinner one evening last week now makes a sudden and awful kind of sense: “A full gallery exhibition could be made of all the stuff you two don’t say.”
I should have left him unchallenged. “This was a bad idea.”
He freezes mid-step, and I take my chance to dodge past him for Roxy. “Seriously, Craig?”
Fumbling my key to open the driver’s door, I slide in behind the wheel as he swerves back around on me.
“Just when we were starting to get somewhere, for fuck’s sake!”
But that’s exactly it, because: “Where?” I throw back at him. “Where is it you’re aiming for us to get?” It’s beginning to feel a whole lot like someplace I really shouldn’t go. “It’s a mistake, Bas. All of it.”
And, shit , I’ve been reckless… again.
For all I know, there could be malevolent eyes spying on me from somewhere right now; there could be condemning eyes reading the text exchange on my phone, so carelessly left out on the kitchen bench. Or Alex might even choose today to break his silence and call me, giving away the lie of my whereabouts.
Shutting myself in, safe behind the tinted windows, I see Georgie through my rearview mirror. She is standing half-in and half-out of the reception door, staring with open bewilderment.
Sebastian, however, has suddenly disappeared from view.
I barely have a chance to wonder about it before Roxy’s passenger door is flung open, and he slips in beside me. “This is not what you blatantly think it is, Craig.”
“Get out.”
“No.” He tugs the door closed.
“Please!”
His head shakes. “If you’re not going to ride, then I’ll come with you for a drive.”
“I can’t —”
“Sure you can. You’re a very accomplished driver.”
“I need to get home.”
“Fine. Come on, then.”
Another glance in the mirror shows no sign of Georgie now, but that doesn’t mean she’s not still watching. My hand feels clammy around the car key, its ridges biting into my palm. I make no move to raise it toward the ignition. Instead, I throw my door wide and bolt back out.
He reaches for me a beat too late and misses by the nearest margin. “You have no idea how bone-sick I am of you —”
Whatever else he says is lost in the door’s slam as I break away. By the time I reach the edge of the car park, I’m running.
I have no clue where I’m headed—turning left at the stable’s entrance—only that there didn’t feel like space enough inside Roxy for both of us to share. Trees line either side of the single-lane road, and grazing horses are glimpsed in the open fields behind them.
“The farm is a better use of your time,” Sebastian’s voice pounds against my back far sooner and far closer than expected, “than the pub or the pit. And your brother agrees.”
His words are enough to jar me to an instant halt. I spin to find him rapidly closing a six-metre gap. “Alex?”
“The baby, too, probably.” He slows.
“You’ve spoken to Alex?”
“Most recently last night, yeah.”
“Why?”
“He called me.”
My head’s shaking. “Why?”
“Because, surprisingly enough, he gives a damn.”
But there’s no sense in what he’s saying. Alex has wholly and actively cut me off since the gig, and not even Christopher has been enough to sway him. Ashleigh’s tried and failed to talk him around. That he has Sebastian’s number at all has me stumped, never mind that he’s calling it. “Last I checked, you wanted to bounce your fist off Al’s face.”
“That was before I discovered our mutual interest in decking you.”
“That’s what you’re chasing me for?”
“Sadly, no.” He stops in front of me and hooks his thumbs into the belt loops of his trousers, either to reassure me or to keep himself in check; I’m not sure which. “But, hey, so long as you know I want to — ever more so by the second — it’s the thought that counts, right?”
I choose not to validate his jibe by acknowledging it, and I purposefully do not hold his stare. I refuse to let him know just how raw this latest revelation of his burns. A car approaches along the road, and I track it past us. The Peugeot’s elderly driver doesn’t even look our way, disappearing around another bend behind me. “We’re done here, Bas.”
Sebastian takes one step closer. “You have to take a stand for yourself somewhere along the line, you know?” His eyes bore into me, probing. “Something has to give.”
My gaze flicks beyond him, measuring the distance I’ve so rashly put between Roxy and myself. The familiar shape of her key, a scalding brand within my fist.
A second step and the stubble shading his jaw distracts my focus. “I can’t force you to continue helping me, obviously, and I can’t offer to pay you. But,” he goes on, “up until whatever the hell this is about, I thought we’d reached an understanding. You’re a hard worker, Craig, and you enjoy it. There’s no reason for that to end.”
Except, there is.
“We’re friends, yeah, and —”
And it’s at that precise moment something inside me does indeed give. Catastrophically. “You were supposed to be safe!”
“What?”
“Unattainable. I wasn’t supposed to have a fucking chance!”
He’s prepared for my move this time, though, bodily obstructing the dodge I attempt to make by him. Hand seizing my elbow hard, the breath is slammed from my lungs at the stricken look on his face. “I am. You don’t.”
Then the remaining space between us is suddenly gone.
My mouth crashes against his, a savage press of lips. I feel him tense on impact, feel his grip on me tightening as my teeth inadvertently nip into tender flesh, and hear a deep, guttural sound that could be from him or from me, maybe the both of us. He tastes like salt and smells like earth, and it literally hurts the way my pulse jackhammers at the scrape of his bristle on my skin. I don’t think about closing my eyes. I’m not thinking at all.
If Sebastian really needed the reason for why what we have has to end, this is it.
Yet, he doesn’t resist me. He doesn’t release me or pull back, and when his tongue skims mine, I’m the one tearing away. I jerk myself free of him so violently it’s a miracle I don’t dislocate my arm.
I stare at him.
He stares at me. And my heart stutters to a stop as his lips — his kiss-moistened lips — kick up in that contemptuous way they too often do. “What now, Craig?”
The blood leaves my face so fast the world tilts.