Chapter Four #2
His gaze travelled to the corner of the room where a chrome and canvas designer chair was artfully positioned.
It was all strange angles and sharp edges and the moment I’d seen it featured in a high-end magazine, I’d known I had to have it.
The price tag had made my eyes water back then – it still did – but I’d maxed out my credit card to buy it.
‘Cool chair,’ Rhys said, making his way towards it. I shook my head.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I said with a rueful expression. ‘I think it might have been modelled on a rack the Spanish Inquisitors used for torture.’
The rich tones of Rhys’s laughter filled my lounge, and I truly couldn’t remember the last times these walls had heard that sound.
‘If it’s so uncomfortable, why did you buy it?’
‘Because it looks great and all the top designers who I follow were raving about it.’
I felt naked under the scrutiny of his eyes, knowing my reply had revealed far more about how I lived than I’d ever intended. Thankfully he seemed to sense my vulnerability and changed the topic.
‘So how does a person find a flat like this?’
I gave a half-embarrassed shrug. ‘Well, it helps if you happen to be an estate agent. When the good listings pop up, you nab them for yourself.’
‘Perhaps the next time one does, I should ask you to hold it for me.’
‘Are you thinking of moving?’
Please don’t be about to leave the area.
Please don’t be engaged to a supermodel.
Please don’t be a mind-reader.
The last was perhaps the most important, because one glimpse of the ridiculous thoughts cycling through my head would have had any sane man running for the hills.
‘I’ve been considering buying for a while,’ Rhys eventually replied, as though the answer had taken time to pin down. ‘I’m renting right now, but I’ve always owned. It’s starting to feel like the right time to do so again.’
There was a look in his eyes that took him away from me and my flat to somewhere else altogether. Intuition suggested his answer had something to do with the cryptic comments I’d overheard between him and Olly.
‘How about some tea?’ I asked. ‘Unless you fancy a beer or something stronger?’
‘Probably best to steer clear of alcohol, after everything that’s happened.’
It was a sensible answer, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling that he was gently retreating from that delicious romcom moment we’d shared on the doorstep.
He was steering us back into the friend zone, and even though friends might be conspicuously thin on the ground in my life right now, it still wasn’t somewhere I wanted us to go.
‘Milk and sugar?’ I asked, pasting a cheery smile over my disappointment.
‘Please.’
I took one last glance at him as I left the lounge and really wished I hadn’t. He’d already pulled his mobile from his pocket and was keying in a number.
The soundproofing in my flat wasn’t great.
I knew exactly when the couple in the flat downstairs were running their washing machine, flushing the loo, or having sex, so hearing what was being said in my lounge was hard to avoid.
As I waited for the kettle to boil, I turned on both taps full blast and instructed Alexa to increase the volume of the music currently playing.
I had no desire to inadvertently eavesdrop on Rhys’s private conversation, even though I was practically combusting with curiosity to know who he was calling.
Despite the distracting background soundtrack, I could still hear the low rumble of his voice. The words weren’t clear, but I could pick up on the emotion behind them. He sounded agitated.
The tea was made and beginning to cool, and yet it didn’t feel right to barge into the lounge and interrupt his privacy. Scared of what you might hear? Old Ellie was becoming a proper nuisance, and it was getting increasingly hard to shut her up.
‘Would you like a biscuit with your tea?’ I called out in a carrying, sing-song voice when I decided I’d hidden out in the kitchen for long enough.
I’d given him advance warning of my reappearance, and yet Rhys still looked startled when I rejoined him.
I smiled as though I wasn’t perfectly aware I’d walked in during the middle of an awkward conversation and placed the mugs on a low table beside my highly impractical white sofa that I never sat on without a throw.
‘Just message and let me know when I can call,’ he said into his mobile. His voice sounded a thousand times wearier than it had earlier.
He looked up, splitting his attention between the phone call and me. ‘No thanks,’ he mouthed in reply to my offer of a biscuit, which was just as well as I didn’t have any in the flat. He gestured towards his phone and mimed another word, ‘Sorry.’
I gave a don’t worry about it shrug and pointed to the door, to indicate I’d leave him to finish his conversation in private.
He shook his head and reached for my forearm to stall me.
I jolted. The touch of his hand set off fireworks inside my nervous system.
While I couldn’t remember exactly how it had felt when the lightning had struck, it surely couldn’t have been more electrifying than this?
And it wasn’t just me who felt . . . whatever it was. Rhys’s eyes widened when his skin connected with mine. What the hell was happening?
‘Just turn on the news or check the internet,’ he mumbled into his phone. ‘There’ll be something about it on there. I’ve got to go,’ he said in a rush before disconnecting the call.
‘I’m really sorry about that,’ he apologised, apparently unaware that his hand was still encircling my wrist.
‘No. It’s fine. I didn’t want to intrude.’
Green eyes that had turned worryingly chilly were now growing warmer.
‘It’s your home. I think I’m the one who’s intruding.’
I took a single beat to see if I wanted to think twice before answering that and then decided that if you were going to lose your mind, there were worse ways to go.
‘Except it doesn’t feel like you are.’
Two seconds, three, and then four passed before those arresting eyes met mine.
‘No, it doesn’t, does it?’
I can’t remember which one of us suggested ordering a takeaway, but it seemed dicing with death and missing lunch gives a person an incredible appetite.
‘Does everything that’s happened today make you feel kind of . . . discombobulated?’ I asked Rhys while we were prising cardboard lids off takeaway containers.
He paused in the task of opening the crispy beef and gave me a smile that had no right to affect my pulse in the way that it did.
‘You might be the first person I’ve ever heard casually drop that word into an actual conversation.’
I gave a slightly embarrassed smile. ‘I was looking for a more appropriate one, but if there’s a better way to describe this feeling, then I must have forgotten it.’
I teetered like a lemming on a cliff edge, wondering what would happen if I proceeded, and then decided to risk it.
‘Actually, that’s not the only thing I seem to have forgotten.’
‘Really? What else can’t you remember?’
I gave him a Homer Simpson-worthy ‘D’oh?’ and we both laughed, not loudly, or even for long, but it was a welcome pressure release from a conversation that had suddenly taken a slightly darker turn.
‘Okay. Let me rephrase that,’ Rhys said, setting aside our takeaway dinner and giving me his full attention. ‘What makes you think the lightning has affected your memory?’
‘Well, aside from the numerous accounts on the internet where people reported their memory was definitely affected after being struck—’
Rhys held up a hand as though he was stopping traffic. ‘Aside from the Google “experts”.’
I bit my lip, fairly sure he’d have scoured the exact same websites I had done while waiting to be discharged from the hospital.
‘Alright. It’s not like I have amnesia, well, not like you see in the movies, where you get a bump on the head and can’t remember who you are. I know my name, I know what I do for a living, and what I ate for breakfast yesterday morning.’
‘So far, so good,’ Rhys said, leaning back against my kitchen worktop and giving me an encouraging nod.
‘It’s more the personal things that are . . . fuzzy. Like I can’t remember when or how my last serious relationship ended. For a while, I wasn’t even sure if it had.’
Rhys frowned. ‘Should I be worried that some angry ex – who isn’t an ex at all – is about to come barging in here and demand to know why I’m having dinner with his girlfriend?’
I saw what he was trying to do. He was trying to lighten the mood and talk me down from the ledge I’d unknowingly stepped on to. I realised in that moment that Rhys was probably very good in a crisis.
‘It’s more about things I should know – things about people who are important to me – that seem to have evaporated.’ My voice sounded weighty with gloom. ‘Or been electrocuted away. I can’t even remember when I last spoke to any of my friends, or took a holiday, or visited my mum.’
Rhys frowned, which surprisingly did little to diminish how extremely attractive he was looking right now. The gentle concern on his features, if anything, made him even more good-looking.
‘And you told the doctors about this?’
I nodded. ‘As well as I could explain it. But they just said to give it time. Partial memory loss isn’t unusual. Allegedly,’ I added, like a sceptical barrister in a courtroom.
‘It sounds like you’ve been given sensible advice.
This is all very recent and raw, for both of us.
’ He glanced over at the clock on my kitchen wall.
‘Ten hours ago, none of it had even happened. We weren’t in the park, or caught in the storm, or beneath that tree.
I think you’re going to have to listen to the medics on this one and give your body a chance to reset. ’
‘But what if it doesn’t, Rhys?’ Damn it, why did his name still sound so right on my tongue, like I was always meant to be saying it? ‘What if it doesn’t go back to normal? What if the lightning has done something permanent to my brain, something really bad?’