Chapter Twenty-Three

The following evening I went round to Cal’s flat and caught him leaving for the farm. ‘I need a favour.’

‘Oh?’ He stuck his head out through the window of the Micra. ‘You’d better jump in then and tell me about it on the way. It’s good timing, actually. I need to shift that bloody goat again.’

‘Why don’t you employ someone to do it?’

‘Because I’ve got you, and you need a favour.’ I climbed into the car and sat on a pile of magazines. Cal looked at me sideways. ‘So. How are you?’

I had the lie lined up on my lips ready. The ‘oh, I’m fine’ that was working so well for Katie, but once his cool gaze landed on me, the lie failed. ‘Pretty shitty, actually.’

‘Uh-huh? Feel like talking about it?’

‘I’m angry, Cal.’ Until now I hadn’t even been sure how I felt, but now I knew. ‘I’m angry that I’ve been duped and that I fell for it. I should have known.’

‘Why?’

‘What?’

‘Why “should” you have known? Did he approach you wearing an I’m-a-fraud badge and covered in lipstick marks?’

I laughed. ‘Of course not.’

‘Well, then. Stop beating yourself up about it. He’s clever, he’s good looking and he thinks on his feet. There’s no way you could have sussed him.’

‘Maybe, but I still should have known. Good-looking men don’t exactly fall for me, you know.’

‘Perhaps they do, but you’re so worried about throwing up on them that you step over and make a beeline for the boring ones. Now, what’s this favour you need?’

‘It’s this.’ I held up Luke’s laptop. ‘I want you to hack it for me.’

‘Ssshhhhh. Willow!’

‘Who’s going to overhear – a traffic warden hell-bent on industrial espionage?’

‘Even so. Whose is it? His?’

I smiled. ‘Hack it and you’ll find out.’

Cal rubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks and then grinned. ‘Go on then, I could do with the practice. Been a long time since I had a personal. What are we looking for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Even better, a full-file job. It’ll be just like old times.’

‘I don’t want to know what you used to get up to.’

Again the sideways look. ‘Ah, you do really. You want to know everything about me. And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you anyway.’

‘Shut up and drive.’

The white house had a kind of dejected air about it when we arrived, like a puppy tied to railings. The fields looked unkempt and there was a corner of guttering coming away from one edge of the roof. Cal sighed as we went into the kitchen, and opened the windows to let out the overcooked air. ‘It’s going to kill me to sell, but … Since Great-Aunt Mary died, there’s so much stuff I can’t do around the place.’

‘You could pay someone to do things like the guttering though.’ I looked out of the window to the paddock. ‘And look after Winnie.’

‘I can’t have anyone stomping around. Not with the tech I’ve got going on out in the barn. Too risky. Besides it’s a lonely old house, especially in the winter. I don’t want to be camped out here. Shit, I’ve just thought, you’re not going to want it now, are you? Now that … I mean, sorry, I’ll shut up now.’

My fingers gripped around the edge of the kitchen table and I felt the solidity, the permanence of it, the safe security of the four walls. ‘I want to live here.’ I dug my nails into the wood. ‘I’ve still got my dreams, Cal. They weren’t all dependent on marrying Luke. With the money from the council I’ll have enough to live on for a while until I get some sort of business up and running, even after I’ve bought the place. So, I’ll be poor, but I’ll have my own roof and my own land and I can always grow food and if the electricity gets cut off, I’ll go to bed early.’

‘And the loneliness?’

‘I’ll get a cat.’

Cal nodded slowly. ‘That should deal with the mouse shit in the larder problem. Good call.’

‘And besides, you’d still be around, wouldn’t you? With the barn and all.’

Cal turned away from me, fiddling with the Aga plates. ‘I don’t know. I might have to shift somewhere else. Security.’

The bruise that was my heart gave a little twitch. ‘Oh,’ I said damply. ‘Oh.’

‘Okay then.’ I knew Cal was getting into work mode when he fixed his hair back away from his face like this. ‘Pass me the laptop. Let me see what I’m doing.’

I handed the case over without speaking. As he took it, our fingers brushed and I felt it, as though he were wearing acid gloves. ‘I’ll go and see to Winnie then, shall I?’

‘Mmm.’ I’d lost him. Everything about Cal changed when he had a computer on his mind. Even his face became different, his eyes unblinking, his mouth a tight line of concentration. I watched him for a moment, the way his flexible fingers removed the black casing from the laptop as matter-of-factly as if he were peeling a banana, the shifting of the machine so that his less-strong arm didn’t take all the weight. There it was again, flittering across the back of my mind, the flash of acknowledgement that he really was a very sexy man – and then he looked up and caught me looking. ‘Go on. Bugger off and see to that goat.’

He’d seen me watching. Seen the desire and longing spread across my face and dismissed it. I took a deep breath and left the room, holding the feeling until I cleared the yard, when I had to spit it into a gorse bush while Winnie watched and sneered.

But at least her close attention made her easy to catch. I moved her into the field by the house and let her loose. By the time this manoeuvre was completed, and I’d finished the swearing and cussing and my face had returned to a colour not associated with emergency situations, Cal was in the barn with the laptop connected to the big computer.

‘Any ideas?’ he asked as I poked my head cautiously round the door. ‘About passwords? Anything he might use? I’ve tried your name and got nothing. Sorry,’ he added.

‘What about Dee-Dee?’ My teeth were so clenched when I said her name that I could hear my jaw cracking.

Cal tapped away at his keyboard. ‘Hey, yeah. That’s got one file. Hmmm, nothing much there, few letters. What kind of guy types his love letters, hey? Oh. Sorry. Again. Keep forgetting.’

‘I don’t care if he’s been writing erotic letters to an entire women’s prison.’

‘But there’s nothing in there we could use, it’s all’ – his attention passed from me for a second – ‘pretty hot, actually. Quite heavy. Is he really into all that bondage and repression stuff? Sorry, sorry, any other password potentials?’

I couldn’t think of any.

‘I’ll have to bring up the big guns then. He’s working behind a firewall, so I can’t piggyback a virus in to rewrite the passwords. Besides, he’d know then that someone had got at his files. So …’ He tapped away. ‘I’ll run a decryption program. That should break it. Let’s face it, this is a guy who uses his birthday as a phone code. He’s not exactly security conscious, our man.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s ever thought anyone would want to break in.’

‘Everyone should have security systems. You never know. There. We’ll leave that to run a while. Do you fancy a glass of wine?’ One of the boxes in the barn turned out to be a chiller unit, stacked with everything one might want, from Coke to champagne. Cal pulled a bottle of white wine out without even looking.

‘Very smooth.’ I accepted a glass.

‘It’s regular party time in here sometimes. The team and I, when we finish a job, we often have a drink together.’

‘Together?’

‘Figuratively speaking. Like the dress, by the way. Did it not come in your size?’

Had I dressed up to go and see Cal? What do you think? The dress in question was turquoise, halter backed and short skirted. It showed off my brown legs and arms and made my shoulders look slim and elegant. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

A long glance. ‘Nothing. What there is of it, is fine. And, just for the record, what there is of you is fine, too.’ He raised his glass to me and smiled, but I could no more tell what he was thinking than I could read Greek. His eyes said he wanted me. But hadn’t he told me, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t? Was I reading things wrong here?

‘Do you ever get lonely, Cal? You seem quite happy on your own, but sometimes you look as if …’ Where the hell had that come from? I looked at the glass of wine in surprise, almost as if it had spoken. ‘Blimey, this is strong.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, I think it is. Bloody hell, I’ve only had one, all right, one and three quarters of a glass and I’m already talking bollocks.’

‘I meant, I’m lonely all the time, Willow. Goes with the territory, really. I can’t talk to people properly in case it comes out what I do, which would mean gangs might try to get at me. I always have to be on my guard. I never know who I can trust. Are you ready for another story?’

He refilled my glass and led me out of the barn and through the yard to the house, where the air was cooler now. ‘Three years ago I met Hannah. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the palindromic nature of her name which attracted me. She was bright, funny, pretty – not, in fact, unlike yourself in a lot of ways, with the same sparky kind of personality. Quick, you know the sort of thing I mean? Anyway, I’d got a job writing software, she worked with kids at a play scheme, after-school clubs and such and we were happy, I thought. She didn’t seem to mind the war wound. At least she never said.’

There was a deliberately bland expression on his face, and he avoided meeting my eye. He carried on speaking as though talking to his glass.

‘She moved in with me. I lived up on Petergate then. Nice flat, but too many stairs. I loved her. Loved her, but couldn’t talk to her. She didn’t … she wouldn’t have understood the implications, thought that the computers were just … She loved me anyway, even if I was a bit secretive.’

Now he did look at me. It was a look that dared me to pity him.

‘One day I got in and she’d gone. Left to go and live with someone she’d met at work. I thought the only people she met at work were under the age of fifteen but apparently not. I never found out. She left me a note saying that she couldn’t cope with me not talking to her properly. We’d lasted a year, and I hadn’t realised anything was wrong, so I decided …’ he tailed off, coughed, and took another mouthful of his wine. ‘I promised myself, I wouldn’t deal with anyone I couldn’t trust enough to tell. That I wouldn’t have a relationship again until – wow, that makes it sound like the women are queuing up for me, doesn’t it?’ A dark, hollow sort of laugh. ‘I tried a bit of online dating,’ he continued, staring down at the table, picking at a split in the wood. ‘Turns out you can’t code your way out of a disability. Soon as I mentioned a problem with stairs – voom – I was out of there. So I threw myself into running the team and setting up my own business.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It even sounded inadequate as I said it. But, can you think of anything to say in this situation?

An inclination of his head, either acceptance of my sympathy or dismissal of it, I wasn’t really sure.

‘I think you’re gorgeous.’

A half-laugh. ‘Thanks for that.’

‘Katie thinks you’re gorgeous, too. And Ash likes you. Which you should take as a massive endorsement because Ash usually only likes shiny things and Benedict Cumberbatch, so. You know. We can’t all be wrong, can we?’

‘Unfortunately. I’m a geeky guy with a weak arm and a leg that won’t do as it’s told. No social graces. I’m shy, I’m awkward and I stutter when I don’t know people. It’s not exactly the way to sweep women off their feet.’

‘And you’re funny and kind, and you have the most fabulous eyes I’ve ever seen.’

‘I’m nothing like Luke, you know. The only six pack I possess is out there, in the cooler.’

‘Luke is a first-class bastard.’

‘But one you’ve fancied for ten years. You’re only finding me attractive because I’m skinny and dark and introverted, and he’s hurt you so badly that you don’t want anyone who reminds you of him, even obliquely.’

‘That’s therapy talk. You can’t presume to tell me who I find attractive and why. I’m not thinking of Luke at all.’ I let Cal refill my glass again, feeling our knees bump against each other as he carelessly leaned across the table. It was true, Luke and all his treacherous deceits were far, far away. From horizon to horizon all I could see was Cal’s huge, dark eyes and sculpted face, pencilled with stubble and lined with remembered pain.

‘Do you know something?’ He lowered his gaze to stare at the cracks in the flagstone floor. ‘Right now, right now I don’t care why you want me. I want you, so much, and, Christ, I haven’t been with anyone for two years and if you don’t stop looking at me like that, then it’s all going to be over in the next five seconds.’

‘I thought you didn’t.’

‘Willow, I want you so much I can hardly move.’

‘Cal.’

‘I know it’s probably going to end badly – this is me, setting myself up for failure again before I’ve even got started – but I just want you to know that I’m ready for it. You don’t have to regard anything we might do in the next – I’d say, hour or so, being on the generous side – you don’t have to think I think it means anything. But you’re hurting and I can make it stop for however long, and I would do anything to stop you hurting.’ Eyes met mine and locked on.

‘I won’t. I want you.’

‘For now. But “for now” is enough. For now.’ He held his hand out to me, I took it and his fingers closed around mine, pulling me to my feet. Still without speaking, he led me up the wonky staircase, slowly, hesitantly, across the landing and into the beamed bedroom, where the sun arched onto the bare boards, painting the walls a dying scarlet and flame. For a moment we stood in the middle of the room, hand in hand, staring at each other, waiting, both of us trying to ride the moment and not spoil anything by moving too fast.

At last, when the tension between us was stretched so tight that I could hardly breathe, he reached out and touched my face. Time exploded into crazy freeze-frame moments, his lips against my neck, my fingers tangled in his hair, hands beneath clothes. That second when we’d undressed each other and stood naked as the sun slipped beneath the eaves and put a blanket of shadow on the floor. We lay, whispering in the ghostlight, wondering at one another’s bodies, touching, exploring, mouths and hands and eyes and then, finally, locking together, rocking and sliding and eventually cascading into lip-biting chaos until we both fell, satisfied.

And it was much, much longer than an hour.