Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
ISLA
The ankle’s feeling better. I can put my weight on it now, it’s just stiff and bruised, a bit like my ego, because Kit Harding kissed me yesterday and then seemed to forget all about it.
My mental stability is, well, wobbly. I’m pretty sure the walls are closing in. I’m Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
I did think that’s what I could do. I could binge movies, ones I haven’t had a chance to watch. But there’s a couple of issues with the plan.
Maggie only has a VHS.
There is a television, with the smart device I sent to her one Christmas, but Maggie never did get WiFi.
So that’s out.
I’m trying to think of what I would be doing in New York during downtime, but I’ve come to the scary realisation that I don’t think I’ve ever had downtime, not really. Not just me. Alone. With my thoughts.
Why are there so many thoughts in my head?
Memories.
Conversations. Both real and imagined.
The stack of newspaper clippings on the mantel call to me, a bit like flicking through my own greatest hits.
Me, young and golden, innocent. Me, not so young, not so innocent, still golden.
I hold one press cutting from five years ago, when I officially parted ways with Vale.
I hold it up to the light bulb hanging within a faded purple tasselled shade.
I search the face of the woman staring back at me, seeking a glimpse of relief.
Is my smile a little wider? Are my eyes a little brighter?
The thin paper trembles in my fingers.
Was I happy?
Was I complicit?
Did I give my consent?
Nausea floods my throat and I hobble to the kitchen and gag over the sink. Skin prickling, eyes watering, I stare down the plughole. A universal sign for the state of my life. Go figure.
‘Isla?’ A gentle touch sweeps the hair from the back of my neck to the side. I jerk forward, away. ‘Isla, it’s me.’
I might not have felt his touch in over a decade, but my body remembers the calloused pads of his fingers.
‘What’s wrong?’ His hand slides down my shoulder and then he tilts my face up to his. ‘Christ, what’s happened?’ His blue gaze flashes.
‘W-what are you doing here?’ I pull away from him, and his hand drops. The last thing I need for my mental stability right now is Kit Harding in my kitchen, seeing me hurl.
‘I came to check the roof held up yesterday.’
‘All good,’ I manage.
I can’t breathe properly. My entire body is disconnected.
‘Isla…’
‘All fine here, Harding, you can go.’
A frown chisels his brows, lips tugging down. His fingers push through his tangled waves, one tendril refusing to cooperate and flopping back down.
I watch him breathe in deeply. Controlled. His eyes close.
Yep. Counting to ten. I’ve reached a new low.
When his eyes snap back open, I swear they stare straight into my soul. ‘And I wanted to say thank you for sitting with Maisie yesterday when I was on the shout.’ The shadows in his gaze flicker. ‘She likes you.’
‘And I like her, she’s a cute kid. Really cute.’
He nods. He’s clearly battling something.
‘Spit it out, Harding.’
That frown flickers back.
Then resolve settles across his features.
‘I’m sorry I kissed you yesterday. It was inappropriate.’
‘Inappropriate?’ No. This is my new low. My palms are hot. I rub them against my jeans.
‘You know. You’ve got a boyfriend, and well, I’m still…’ He can’t even say the word mourning. I witness it get stuck sideways in his throat. ‘And I just think that it’s best to keep things – you know. Straight. Clean. For Maisie’s sake.’
Shaking my head, I pinch the bridge of my nose. ‘Kit, I kissed you. And I’m not apologising for it.’
‘But you’re in a vulnerable place, and with someone else, and…’ For an intense moment, the openness of his face, the blinking innocence in his expression shows me a person I used to know. Someone I loved.
‘Kit. I’m not with Reid. You think my self-respect is so low I’d allow a man who ditched me at the first sign of trouble to come wheedling back in?’
His lips purse as he chews on the side of his mouth. ‘Not with Reid All The Muscles Usher?’
I snort a laugh, my shoulders relaxing from where I’ve been holding them up near my ears. ‘No.’
Kit nods slowly, blue gaze sweeping my face. ‘Right.’
Another nod.
‘Right,’ I reply.
The solidity of him warms the cold kitchen.
‘Why are you here?’ I ask. ‘Really?’
He looks around the room, at Maggie’s old cookbooks still left where she put them, the teapot with its knitted cosy. The clock on the wall that no longer tells the time, but cements memory.
‘I keep asking myself the same thing,’ he admits. ‘Why you’re here. Why now. Why you had to come back and—’
‘And what?’
He shakes his head. ‘You have no idea what it does to me, seeing you with Maisie. Watching her look at you like you’re some kind of miracle.’
‘She’s a sweet kid. She doesn’t know our history.’
‘But I do.’ His voice roughens. ‘I remember everything, Isla.’ The thud in my heart echoes as he pauses. ‘And I’ve tried too hard to forget.’
His gaze reaches mine, baleful, broken, but worse than those is the guilt shadowed there.
‘You remembered me, even after you were married.’
His stare, straight into my soul, fractures me wide open.
My tongue tingles with dryness. My breath is caught, snagged in my throat. ‘You told me to go, Kit.’
‘I thought you’d come back.’ For a moment that stormy gaze drops, and suddenly it all clicks into place. He doesn’t just hate me for being the girl who left and never came back. He hates himself more for not forgetting her, even when his life had moved on.
‘And I thought you’d follow me. I so wanted you with me.’ I blink, too fast. ‘But you just waved me off like it was the end of our normal summer, like I wasn’t heading out into the unknown. Alone. Always, alone. Little Isla Quinn, Nobody’s Girl.’
Bile claws up my throat. I can’t breathe. Can’t talk. He grabs my hand and holds it against his chest.
Something flickers across his face – pain so raw it makes my chest ache in response.
‘After all this time, after everything,’ he says roughly, ‘I look at you, and I hate that you make me care. That even when you were gone, you were still here.’ He presses my hand, still held in his against his chest.
The admission hangs in the air between us, raw and honest and terrifying.
‘I never stopped,’ I whisper. ‘Caring. Loving you.’
Those last words just slip out, but they are nothing more than floodgates holding back the tide.
‘I fell in love with you when I was eight years old. You were the highlight of my life, my whole year, not just my summers. That day, when we left the audition with Marcus Vale, you held my hand the whole way home, and all I dreamed of was for you to ask me to stay. To tell me that you loved me enough to want me for who I was, there and then in that moment.’
His gaze shutters, one long blink.
‘But I didn’t.’
I let out a dry snort. ‘No, Kit. You didn’t.’ I don’t know whether to admit the next bit, whether it will gain us anything, or just make it worse, but I’m halfway there with some truths I haven’t even allowed myself to think for years, and I don’t think I can stop now.
‘I was going to come back.’ A swallow. A memory long buried.
‘I had a filming break while they went through the first rushes in the London studio.’ My hand is still pressed against his chest, but I’m not sure if it’s me placing it there or him holding it.
‘I missed you and it hurt so bad. I wanted to come back and tell you. Wanted to come back and tell you that we were more than a summer thing, that I wanted us to be forever.’
‘But you didn’t?’
I shake my head, and a tear rolls with the motion. ‘I told you the other night. Maggie came to London…’ The heartbreak is there all over again. The crack in my heart that weakened me.
‘And she told you I’d met Jess.’ He sighs the words.
I nod. Can’t, won’t, meet his gaze.
‘And now?’ His voice is a whisper.
My voice wavers. ‘None of this was what I wanted. Everything is in free fall.’
‘So you ran away.’
‘I came to the only place I’ve ever felt at home,’ I correct him. The words surprise me as much as him. ‘I didn’t plan to. But…’ I don’t know how to express the longing I had for this place. The salt in the air, the sand in my toes, the safety of the old Cornish walls.
‘For how long?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I answer honestly.
‘Right.’ He nods slow, rubs at his jaw. ‘I’d better go.’
I wave my fingers. ‘Off you go.’
‘Isla…’
‘No. Leave. Please.’
He turns, my stomach aches, and I watch him walk to the back door, my hand clutching Maggie’s old work surface behind me.
Once the door is closed, I turn and lean over the counter, heaving in a breath that sticks against my ribs and aches down low.
This place is wrecking me more than Hollywood ever did. Or maybe it’s all of it, the glitter of fame that you don’t know is shards of glass until it kisses your skin. The current of Sea Salt Bay that drags you and rolls you over and over until you no longer know which way is up.
I should go to London. Coming here was a mistake. What was I thinking?
‘Isla?’
My shoulders shudder but I hold in the tide that’s building inside me. Back straight, chin lifted, smile for the camera. ‘Kit, please.’
‘Come over.’ He’s standing in the kitchen doorway, the breeze from the clear blue sky lifting his dark waves.
‘What?’
‘This afternoon, come over. Maisie would love it.’
I snort a laugh. ‘Really.’
‘Yeah.’ There’s a pause, and then he steps over the threshold, a steady beat in the closing of the space between us. ‘She would.’
I’m searching his face for what he wants. The memory of his kiss is all over me. I should say no. Kissing Kit Harding is officially off the Isla Quinn Recovery Plan.
‘Sure.’ My chest curves with the echo of my breath. ‘I’d love it too.’
He holds my gaze for just one moment, and then he turns and is gone.
I raise my hand to knock, then hesitate. It’s not too late to turn around. To offer some lame excuse about not feeling well. To avoid whatever’s waiting on the other side of this door.
I knock.