Chapter Nine #2
“What are you, a therapist?”
“No, but I’ve seen plenty of them. Guess it rubs off.” She tilts her head. “Nice evasion though. Top work.”
“Thank you. I’ve been practicing my whole life.” I hold out my hand. “Look. I’m sorry about last night. It was rude of me, to walk away like that. Can we try this again?”
Rowan, it turns out, isn’t the woman I expected her to be. I at least owe her an apology.
She eyes me warily. “You were a dick.”
“I was.”
“Aren’t you going to apologise for yesterday morning, too?”
“No. You were being rude.”
I withdraw my hand. There are limits.
“For the record, it is not a crime to take a phone call!”
“Rowan,” I say warningly. “Give me your hand right now. I am trying to be nice.”
“I bet that’s hard for you.”
“I’m going to count from five.”
“I am not a child.”
“Then stop acting like one. Apology rescinded in five—”
“—Fine!” She grabs my hand and shakes it brusquely, dropping it as though it burns.
“Bless the lord. Right. Nice to meet you. Angus Mackenzie. Strengths include: advanced wilderness survival, birthing calfs, avoiding questions about my feelings, and apparently pissing women called Rowan off.”
“Don’t you mean pissing women off?”
“I’ll have you know most women find me charming.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
I wait a moment. “This is the part where you introduce yourself.”
“Fine, fine.” But there’s a note of laughter in her voice.
“Rowan Turner. Unsure of why we’re handing out last names like Halloween sweets.
Hoping you’re not going to turn out to be a stalker.
My friends know where I am, by the way, so don’t get any ideas.
Uh… Strengths include: eating my bodyweight in pasta, dopamine dressing,” she indicates her appalling outfit, “and making conversations as awkward as possible.”
Rowan holds two thumbs up in demonstration.
I hate to ask, but… “What is dopamine dressing?”
She flashes me an evil smile. “I’m so glad you asked.
Dopamine dressing is when you dress for the mood you want, when you choose clothes that make you feel good, that put a smile on your face instead of following stupid fake rules of style or trend.
It’s all about colour, see.” And she gestures to herself again.
I can’t resist. “You seem to be doing a great job at it.”
“You think so?”
I nod solemnly. “Don’t think you could find a soul who’d call any of this stylish.”
She mock-gasps. “Says the man wearing boring, grey hiking trousers! At least my clothes bring me joy. What do yours give you?”
“Comfort.” I smirk. “Protection from prying eyes.”
“I said I was sorry about that!”
“Ach. I’m teasing.”
“Well, please stop.”
I hold up both of my hands. “Stopping. Right now.” But a smile still threatens my lips.
I don’t know what’s come over me. Rowan is bright.
She doesn’t think well of herself, that’s clear, and she talks too much, especially when she’s nervous, and she might be the worst dresser I’ve ever met – nothing like Violet’s elegant, understated sense of style – but sitting here with her, something sparks inside me.
Excitement. Interest. I have the sudden urge to ask her everything about herself, to hear her whole life story, beginning to end.
She’s funny and warm and surprising, and I want to sit by her light and bask in the glow.
This feeling is dangerous. It’s reaching out your hand to the coals, knowing they’ll burn you. It’s throwing yourself into too-fast waters with a hole in your boat, knowing it will drown you. It’s running off the mountain, instead of walking.
I want to do it anyway.
I gesture at her face. “Feeling better?”
She grimaces. “You saw that then?”
“Hard to miss someone looking like a sodden, crumpled tomato. No offence.”
“Oh, offence very much taken.” She tilts her head back to look at the sky. “But yeah, I am. Feeling better.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Who is this person speaking through my mouth, and what have they done with Angus?
Her lips part as if she does want to talk about it, and I get the sense, again, that she is holding something back. I can’t fault her. It’s my preferred coping mechanism too. At last, she blows out the air she’s been holding.
“What’s there to talk about? I walked in on my boyfriend less than a month after we moved in together, cheating on me in our bed.
And now I have no boyfriend, no home, and I drunkenly bought a train ticket to do this stupid walk because I thought it would be better than slinking back, and I couldn’t bear to sleep on my best friend’s sofa while she looked at me with her I-told-you-so eyes because I know she never liked him, and to top it all off, my sister is getting married in less than a week to a rich, pretentious prick and I am meant to be there supporting her in making one of the worst decisions of her life, and instead I’m sitting here, in more physical pain than I think I’ve ever been, and the only person I have to talk to is possibly the rudest man in Scotland. No offence.”
Well, that explains the tears.
“Sounds like a shit ride.”
She takes another deep breath, closing her eyes. “Yeah. It is.”
“For the record, your man’s the idiot. Not you.”
Rowan huffs a laugh. “And how’d you figure that then?”
I don’t look at her when I say it. “If you love someone, you don’t cheat on them.
You don’t go behind their back and leave them in the dark.
You work on it. You fight for it. You do everything in your power to fix it.
And if your man isn’t clever enough to see that?
Well, like I say, he’s the idiot. Not you. ”
“That’s very black and white of you. What if I wasn’t easy to talk to? What if I made it hard for him to tell me how he was feeling? What if I was too much all the time and there was no space for him to start the conversation?”
“Bullshit.”
“But—”
“If he wanted to, he would have. End of story. He chose the coward’s way out. And that’s not on you.”
The last vestiges of the sun dip below the mountains. Around us, the chirrup of insects, the distant lapping of the waves.
A crescendo of hauntingly sweet notes drifts from the campsite.
The little girl must have retrieved her violin.
She’s good, even I can tell that, and the music tugs at my chest. A key slipping into a lock that I very much do not want opened.
My heart speeds up, but even as my throat tightens, I breathe deeply, closing it down. Locking it off.
“It’s getting late.” I hoist myself to my feet. “Good luck with the walk tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
I leave her there in the dark.