Is long and narrow, like a train carriage.
The light is languid here, and paints strips of gold upon the counters and the floor.
He filled it once with small dreams: two bodies sliding past each other, arms around his waist, a chin on his shoulder as he cooks.
Sometimes other fantasies, more urgent, less domestic ones, of being pressed against the pantry door or hoisted onto the washing machine to be taken in a rush of heat and need, as sweet as the scent of the herbs—coriander, thyme, and parsley—blooming on the windowsill.
The next morning, I was woken by the rumbling of engines, and when I pulled back my curtains I saw the street was covered by a thin layer of shining water. I dragged on some trousers and hurried downstairs, but the worst of the flooding hadn’t reached me yet. The edges of my sandbags were barely damp. I called work to tell them I wouldn’t be in, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one. The road closures had apparently turned central Oxford into a ghost town. The truth is, the English live for mildly extreme weather conditions. We are, after all, a nation who will call an inch of snow a snowpocalypse. And no matter how much you love what you do, there’s something irresistible about stolen days.
It was cold in my house, without any heating, but I wrapped myself in a jumper, a cardigan, and a blanket, and curled up cosily in my study. I was working on a first edition of The Flora of Ashton-Under-Lyne and District, as compiled by the Ashton-under-Lyne Linnæan Botanical Society, including a list of the mosses of the district by Mr. J. Whitehead of Oldham. I’d found it in the bargain box of a charity shop, the front board partially detached and only a fragment of the spine still intact. The shop assistant had let me take it away for ninety-nine pence, somewhat bewildered that I would want it at all.
I’ve been so fortunate that my life has allowed me to make my hobby my job, but it has never stopped being my hobby. Something Marius understood easily enough when it came to art—but he never saw the art in this, nor the deep, quiet pleasure of it. His nature was to create newly beautiful things, and mine to restore lost ones.
Sometimes I wonder what will happen when someone comes to archive me. What a peculiar library they will find. Roscoe’s Wandering in South Wales (1845, cloth binding), The Survey Atlas of Scotland (1912, J.G. Bartholomew, large folio, maroon cloth binding), A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (date unknown, William Sherlock, brown leather stitched binding), Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, of the King’s Theatre, and Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Vol. I (1862, half-leather binding with marbled end pieces). All these forgotten books I have found and tended and made whole again.
I’d already removed most of the rotten spine linings of Flora, and now I set about replacing them with Japanese paper, fixing everything in place with wheat starch paste. Then I carefully reattached the boards with aerocotton, and created an oxford hollow out of acid-free kraft paper to provide more support. It was not how it had originally been bound, but it would make the spine more flexible and less likely to split when the book was opened.
When I looked up again, I had a crick in my neck, it was the middle of the afternoon, and somebody was knocking on my door. I hurried to open it and found Adam waiting there, holding a pair of wellies.
“Ta-da!”
I looked at them. They were not prepossessing. Battered and tattered and mud-streaked.
Adam’s smile slipped a little. “The more I think about this, the less it seems like a present and the more it seems like an insult. Um. Do you want my spare boots? They’re clean. Ish. And you’d be able to walk through flood water like a pro.”
“I’ve never met anybody who had one pair of wellies, let alone a spare.”
“I’m special.” He said it so dryly, but what I thought was: yes.
“It’s very kind of you,” I babbled, in an attack of nonsensical politeness, “b-but I really can’t. W-what if you need them?”
“Actually they’re my spare spares. These live in my car. I’ve got more at home.” He waved them temptingly, and I didn’t really know how to refuse such a bizarre—and thoughtful—gift.
“Th-th—” Fuck. Seriously. Fuck. I practiced. I didn’t deserve to have thank you messing with me. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “No problem.”
“How’s the f-flooding?” I asked.
“Eh. Happening, which I was honestly hoping to prevent, but we’ll see how it goes. Look, um . . .” He gave me an odd, rather intent look I couldn’t read. “Can I ask you something?”
Surprised, I answered without even thinking about it. “Yes?”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me your name yesterday?”
Ah.
He pushed his hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “I mean, it’s fine. It’s just, normally when one human—let’s call him Human A—gives his name to a second human—let’s call him Human B—Human B is generally moved to reciprocate.”
I stared at him helplessly. While idiot fucking idiot resounded through my head like hammer blows.
“It’s just a thing, not an obligation.” He shrugged. “But I think I’d like to know. I’d really like to know. If you want to tell me.”
I drew in a breath that seemed to last forever, and let it out again in a rush of words. “No, well, of course, I absolutely would have told you my name b-bu-but . . . but you see . . . I . . . I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
“It’s classified.” I paused. “By the government.”
“I see.”
“I had to make an application for dispensation today. Otherwise, I would have had to . . . to . . . you know . . . kill you.”
He nodded gravely. “Did the dispensation go through?”
“I managed to fast-track it, yes.”
“And?”
“Um . . . it’s . . .” I lined up the letters one by one, dreading the d and the w that had lately decided to trouble me, but determined that I wouldn’t stumble, I wouldn’t fucking stumble over my own fucking name. “Edwin. Edwin Tully.”
He leaned in, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his breath. “I won’t tell a soul.”
It was hard to think. He smelled clean, like the rain, and it had been a long time since someone had looked at me the way he did. Or, perhaps, since I’d let anyone. And maybe it was just kindness, but if I didn’t have the courage to find out, then that was all it would ever be. Kindness, and a pair of wellies. “Are . . . are you stopping for the night?”
“We’re here 24-7, remember?” He grinned and mock-saluted. “Protect and serve.”
“Yes, b-but you can’t be here 24-7.”
“I’m not. But right now it’s all hands to the pumps, and I want to keep monitoring the river.”
Courage. Middle English, from the Old French: corage.
“How about after? You could . . . come round. If you wanted. Or w-will you be too tired?”
“Too tired to see you? Never, Edwin. I’d love to.” Oh my name, my name, it sounded so different when he said it. “It’ll be late though? Maybe ten?”
“It’s a d-d-d-d-da-da-da—” Fuck. “—I’ll see you then.”
“See you then.”
I closed the door and went back to my books.
It was actually after ten when Adam finally arrived, but I hadn’t minded waiting for him. It was waiting with a purpose, with an outcome, and it felt different. It was a waiting that danced with me, and on my skin.
My hallway was a little bit small for him, and he had shed his wellies and waders and his high-visibility jacket, coming to me in shabby jeans and a green cotton shirt. And, suddenly, he was not ridiculous at all, this bold and rough-cut man, gilded by candlelight.
“Can I get you anything? Tea or coffee? There’s Horlicks.”
He looked impressed. “Camping stove?”
“Tea-lights-and-oven-tray arrangement.” I cleared my throat modestly. “MacGyver-like.”
“Oh, petal. Cuppa cha would be grand.”
He sounded desperately grateful, and it seemed a pathetic offering after the day he’d probably had, but I was glad there was something I could do.
Something I could give.
It’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. Someone to make tea for. To know how they like to drink it, and share some pieces of time with them at the end of long days, and short ones, good days and bad, and everything in between.
The dining room adjoined the kitchen, so I left him there while I brought my pre-simmered saucepan of water back to the boil. There was half a loaf left, from when I’d baked the day before yesterday, and it was still soft and fragrant, so I sliced it, buttered it, and brought it through with the tea.
Adam was standing in front of one of my bookshelves, running a torch across the spines. “Interesting collection.”
“Oh, I d-don’t read them.” I reached for a book at random, sliding The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1877, green cloth binding, gilt title) from among its fellows and offering it. “Riveting stuff.”
“So, what, you just have them?”
“I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know how to explain. “I f-find them in charity shops, and I repair them, and I give them back. Sometimes I keep them if they have stories.”
His hands moved gently over Orchids, and I shivered slightly. “What about this one?”
“It was severely water damaged, among other things, so I had to bleach and de-acidify all the pages, and rebind it. It took me months.”
“It’s incredible work, Edwin.”
Oh my. His long fingers tracing the gilt lettering on the spine. His touch so careful, and so certain. The way the fabric would warm beneath his palms.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
I panicked. “Um. Tea?”
He put the book away, and we sat down together at the dining room table. It felt a little odd, somehow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had someone in my house.
The table itself I had come across by chance at a farmhouse sale, and I’d bought it immediately, to Marius’s confusion. It was nothing special, but in its simplicity I had imagined it easily in this bright, equally simple room. I had thought it might become the heart of something. But when I sorted through my memories, I found none. Which left only now, and Adam, who took his tea with lots of sugar and lots of milk, and sat there all arms and elbows, entirely at ease. “This bread is gradeley.”
“It’s w-what, sorry?”
“Really good,” he explained with his mouth full of it.
“Oh.” I squirmed beneath his praise. I’d started baking the year after Marius left. It had been a way to pass the time, but I’d grown used to it. Even become quite good at it. And the house felt different when it was full of the scent of warm bread. “I s-sometimes make elderflower wine as well. Not always quite s-so s-suc . . .” Urgh. I groped for another word, but some piece of long-surrendered stubbornness rose up inside me, and I wouldn’t let go. “. . . suc-cessfully.”
“Do you pick your own elderflowers?”
“Of course. It’s the best part.” Rambling the lanes and the meadows with the freshly risen sun warm at my back. My arms full of creamy blossoms, gold-flecked with pollen and heavy with the scent of summer.
“There’s lots in the hedgerows near my village. Do you have a wicker basket?”
“And a gingham dress.”
He laughed, and suddenly summer did not seem so very remote. “I hope you take care not to stray from the path in the wild woods.”
“Oh, I’m not scared of the Big Bad Wolf.”
“Is that so?” His eyes met mine across the table. Such plain eyes—just brown, unremarkable—but so full of steady light. Like finding the deepest heart of a flame.
“My grandmother w-was horrible, so if a wolf had come along and eaten her, I’d p-probably have jumped into his arms.”
He tilted his head in that curious way of his. “You had an evil grandmother? That sounds . . . so wrong.”
“Not really evil. She was the s-sort of woman you would call formidable. I d-don’t do very well around formidable people.”
“Who does? It’s hard to like someone when they care more about how they come across than making you feel comfortable.”
“She lived through the Blitz when nearly everyone she knew . . . um . . . didn’t. So you c-can see why.” I adopted the “We Can Do It” pose. “‘We didn’t beat Jerry b-by st-stammering at him.’” I waited, like a poor stand-up comic, for laughter. But when it didn’t come, I felt . . . touched. Oddly liberated from the social responsibility to make light of things like that. “She used to tell me, ‘S-spit it out boy.’ I d-don’t think she meant to be cruel, but I didn’t like it.” It had always seemed like such an ugly idea. My words reduced to nothing but phlegm.
Adam was frowning rather fiercely. “Your parents never said anything?”
“I didn’t ask them. I was too scared they . . . um . . . agreed with her. And I didn’t want to make my mother do the ‘he’s very sensitive’ speech because I could tell my father didn’t like it.”
“Aww, petal.” I normally flinched from sympathy—that crooked, cater-cousin to pity—but I didn’t mind this: Adam’s unfussy comfort. Understanding offered for its own sake. “My gran was textbook,” he went on. “Like she’d gone on a perfect gran course. Her house always smelled of cakes. She took us to the park on Sunday afternoons. Used to let us watch whatever we wanted on telly while she knitted.” He sighed. “It gets harder, of course, when you grow up. Get interested in engineering instead of ducks and Ludo. You sort of run out of things to talk about, so there’s love and memories, but nothing new to build.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” I blurted out with awkward passion. “The way the end of life can take you back to the beginning. I . . . I’m really looking forward to b-being a grandfather.”
“You’d be a good one.” Adam helped himself to the last slice of bread and devoured it with gratifying enthusiasm, at one point uttering a noise that I could have sworn was a genuine nom. “And you’ve already got the baking down.”
His pleasure unravelled me just a little. “It’s . . . just . . . a thing I do sometimes.”
“Like your books?”
“W-well, that’s also my job. I’m a conservator at the Bodleian.”
“I was going to ask—” another of his grins, “—but I thought it might be classified again. I would have guessed librarian or possibly doctor, because of your hands.”
“My hands?”
“Yeah.” And to my surprise, he blushed. “They’re . . . It’s the way you . . . the way you hold them, maybe.” I stared at my hands, half-expecting to see whatever it was he saw. But no, they were just the same, nothing magical or special about them. “But, anyway, I was at least half right.”
“S-since I’m neither a doctor nor a librarian, you’re not any f-fraction of right.”
He gave me a look, soft and full of mirth. “You’re a book surgeon.”
And I laughed because it was so sweet to simply talk like this and be surprising and surprised. “I s-suppose I’ll give you that. W-what about you?”
“I’m a civil engineer. I’ve spent the last few years working with the council on the flood risk management strategy.” He shoved a wayward flop of hair away from his eyes, and I caught the gleam of a streak of butter at the base of his thumb. God. “And, as you can see from the massive-arse flood we’re in the middle of having, I’ve been doing a great job.”
It didn’t suit him, this touch of bitterness, and I wanted to suck it from him like venom from a wound. Or maybe I just wanted to put my mouth on him. Taste the fire of his skin. “It’s a lot better than it was before.”
He nodded. “Yeah. But better isn’t enough. Anyway, you don’t want to hear me bang on about flood prevention.”
But I did. I thought I could listen to that soft-vowelled voice talk about anything. With a quiver of unease, I realised he reminded me of Marius. Well, not Marius personally—they were nothing alike, either in person or in temperament—but of a time with Marius when words had been so magical and so precious. Each of them a small revelation. He had told me everything, in the beginning, and I had drunk him like wine, loving his boldness, his passion, his ease. He was so full of grandeur, and I have always been fearful of absurdity.
As the years passed, the things we talked about changed. In the early years of our relationship, us had been a meeting of him and me, this almost procreative togetherness—but over time, it had become its own entity again. Us and him. He had admirers and colleagues and critics of his art. With me, he had home and habit: can you pick up the milk, we need to pay the gas bill, it’s your turn to cook, don’t forget Max’s wedding. But where was I? Where had I ever been?
I tried to find a smile for Adam. “W-well, you w-wouldn’t w-want to hear me . . .” I couldn’t quite say bang on. It was so much his phrase that it would have been like taking his tongue into my mouth. “. . . going on about book conservation.”
He finished his tea and plonked the mug down next to his empty plate. “Of course I would. It’s a pleasure hearing people talk about what’s important to them.”
I liked it too. But it felt strange—I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it—to imagine myself the speaker, not the listener. Vulnerable. Yet at the same time . . . I imagined talking to Adam as Marius had once spoken to me, his dark eyes intent on mine, as I . . . oh, what, what? Stumbled out stories of broadsheets, handbills, fruit-box labels, and London transport posters? The secrets that nestled in two hundred years of Valentines: to a bachelor with fondest love. Printed in gold, Angus Thomas, 1870s.
“I d-don’t think book conservation and printed ephemera are the s-sort of things that mean much to most people.”
“Printed what?”
“Any written or printed matter that w-wasn’t supposed to be preserved. W-we have one of the most important collections in the world. Over 1.5 million items.”
“Wow.” He looked gratifyingly impressed. “I had no idea that was even a thing.”
I nodded. “It . . . it shows you the smallness and the nearness of history. The w-way a society reflects its preoccupations and prejudices in its minutiae.”
I risked a glance at Adam. He had his chin propped on his hand, and he was watching me just as I’d thought he might. As though my own minutiae had value. “Do you have favourites?” he asked.
“I love w-whatever it is I’m working on.” It was true, but also an evasion of a kind. I wanted to give him more than that. For those eyes and all his smiles, I wanted to give him everything that mattered to me. “I . . . I came across a handbill once for a sapient pig.”
He laughed. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Unlike some people I could mention—” I gave him a prim look, “—I wouldn’t do that. Toby the Sapient Pig made his debut in 1817 to great public acclaim. He even wrote his own autobiography.”
“Is it the sort of thing you could show me? Or does it live in a temperature-controlled vault or something?”
“It’s carefully stored, b-but it’s a piece of paper about a pig, not the crown jewels. It’s also been digitised, so you can find it online.”
“I think I’d like best to see it with you.”
Unexpected heat surged to the surface of my skin. Why was I blushing? He’d asked to look at ephemera, not ravish me over the bench. And that was when I realised he’d focused the conversation on me, and on my passions, so adroitly and so naturally that I’d barely noticed. I’d thought myself such an expert at listening, at fading, at creating space for others. It was power of a kind. But here I was, all overthrown by a sandbag philosopher who listened because he wanted to listen, not because he was afraid to speak.
“I’m shu-s-sh . . .” I’m sure I could manage something. But I was too flustered, and I couldn’t get it out. Not even a little bit. So I just ended up nodding frantically at him like a cartoon dog. “I need to . . .”
I gathered up the cups and plates and disappeared into the kitchen with them so I didn’t have to look at him anymore, or the crinkly red-gold hairs that danced with the freckles on his forearms.
By the time I was sane enough to return, he was leaning back in the chair, his torch illuminating the empty hook and the dusty square of wall above the chimney piece. “I really like this,” he drawled in an unconvincing BBC accent. “It’s so antiestablishment.”
I tried to laugh, but it was stuck in my throat. “I . . . My . . . my ex was an artist. He took his paintings w-w-with him w-when he left.”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m a tactless knob.”
“It’s f-fine.”
“Recent?”
I shook my head. Which made it worse, somehow. I should have been waving it aside, telling him it didn’t matter, smiling and being insouciant (which is a word I’ve never been able to say), not standing there, struck dumb and surrounded by spaces on walls, so utterly left.
“What happened?”
He asked the question gently, eyes full of an understanding I didn’t want, and I wished I’d been more careful with what I’d said before so I could lie to him now. I imagined being able to tell him, Oh, he died, with an air of noble melancholy, and then he would be able to comfort me, and I would be brave and slightly wounded, not just someone somebody else didn’t want. It was a terrible thing to think, but I thought it.
I sat down, and folded my hands neatly in front of me on the table, and told the truth. “Nothing happened.”
He cocked his head curiously.
“He . . . f-fell out of love with me. Or didn’t love me enough. Or had never been in love with me. Or something. S-so it was over.”
“Oh, petal.” His hand covered mine in a sprawl of long fingers and chapped skin. “I’m so sorry.”
I pulled away. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Be vaguely sympathetic?”
“I d-don’t know. I don’t know how I want people to react.”
“It’s okay. Sometimes you just lose people. And it sucks.”
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. There was no hiding from him now. I was just me. Unenchanted, unenchanting me, with my bread and my books and my unfinished story. “It’s just a bit of a shock,” I said at last. “W-waking up one morning to discover you’ve been living a totally different life from the one you thought.”
His hand crept across the table again, but I slid away from it. “That doesn’t make it meaningless.”
“Yes, it does. He destroyed everything with a single secret.” Actually, I hated that word. The c was a nail, driven jagged into a wall, waiting to catch at you and tear you skinless. “And sometimes I wish he’d kept on lying. I th-thought we were happy. How is that different from being happy?”
“Well—operationally speaking—it arguably isn’t.”
“P-pardon?” I thought he might have been mocking me, but there was no trace of it on his face. As far as I could tell in the uncertain light, he looked much as he ever did: intent, thoughtful, with the promise of mirth in the curve of his mouth.
“Feelings only exist in your head. Thoughts only exist in your head. I’m not sure how you draw the line between thinking about feelings, and feeling about feelings, or even just having feelings.” He shrugged. “Basically: if you think you’re happy, you’re happy. Problem was, you thought both of you were happy, and it turned out he thought he wasn’t.”
I nodded. What could I say? Because there it was: the entire truth of my relationship distilled into a single sentence.
“And,” he went on softly, “you wouldn’t have really wanted to go on like that, would you? You wouldn’t have wanted him to stay?”
“S-sometimes when I feel very alone, I think yes, but I don’t mean it. Of c-course—” and now c’s were getting their revenge, “—I don’t. I just wish . . . there was s-something else, you know, something less . . . something more . . .”
He waited until we were both certain my words had sputtered out, before asking, “How do you mean?”
“Marius c-cried when he told me. I almost hate him for that, for not letting me make him a villain.” Oh God, what was I saying? And yet I kept talking, pouring out these poisonous things. “It w-would have been so much easier if he’d done s-something, betrayed me or cheated on me.”
“You think?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. Probably not. But it would have been the sort of ending life prepares you for. S-something loud, not something as quiet as the click of a closing door. And I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do this to you.”
“Do what?” He flashed me a grin. “Talk to me?”
“Talk to you about this.”
He eased a hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wallet. “Here.”
I caught it from the air as he tossed it over. “What’s this?”
“Thing I regret most in my life. Well, no, it’s my wallet. But open it.”
There was a creased and faded photo tucked into the inside pocket. It showed a narrow, terraced street of huddled redbrick houses set against a slate-grey sky. A woman, a boy, and two younger girls stood on a doorstep smiling in that slightly strained, squinty-eyed way that people do in the presence of a camera. It was an ordinary memory, but an intimate one. I smiled at him, just a little. “You look like the Weasleys.”
“Oi. My mam’s blonde.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, everyone says it. My sisters are carrot-heads too, and my dad was. He took that photo, but he died a few months after. Heart attack.”
I stared at him helplessly, and then at the long-limbed, orange-haired boy in the photograph, with his goofy, gap-toothed grin. “Oh.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I was nine. I don’t remember him well at all. I just remember what his absence felt like.”
He stood up a little abruptly and came round to my side of the table, leaning over me so that his warmth—and the soap-and-skin scent of him—rushed over me too. “That’s Myfanwy.” He tapped one of the tiny, redheaded girls. “And Siobhan.”
“Um?” He’d pronounced it Seeoban.
He turned slightly, grinning, his lips almost brushing the edge of my cheek. “Yeah, she hated her name. Said it was stupid and spelled wrong. So we used to call her Seeoban to take the mick, but it stuck.”
“I’m . . . s-sorry about your father. It must have been hard growing up without him.”
“Probably hardest on Mam, to be honest. She was the one stuck trying to bring up a family on her own. She worked three jobs until I turned sixteen and could lend a hand.”
I couldn’t help myself, I leaned against him, just a little, just enough to soak up some of his heat and some of his strength, the heart he had opened to me when I’d shown him the wounds on mine. “But you said . . . it was the thing you regretted.”
“No, that’s Seeoban. She doesn’t speak to me anymore.”
“But why?”
To my surprise, he shifted beside me, leaning too, so our bodies found their own equilibrium, places where we touched and were touched at the same time. “I . . . fucked up a lot, when I was growing up. I thought I was the man of the family or some bullshit like that. Felt I had to take responsibility.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Maybe. But love, immaturity, and fear make you a shitty substitute father.” He spoke matter-of-factly and without self-pity, but I ached for him a little. The boy who had made mistakes, and the man who lived with them. “Miffy just got her head down, got scholarships, got out of Stoke. She’s a barrister now, lives in London. Mum and I see her pretty often. She seems happy. Sorted.”
“So you must have done something right.”
“God, I tried.” Old sorrow broke in his voice. “I tried so hard. Probably too hard. I just keep thinking if I’d done something differently, if I’d been a bit older, or less bewildered by the hole in my family, maybe Seeoban . . . Oh, it’s daft, I know it’s daft.”
“No . . . um . . . dafter than me trying to f-find the reason Marius left me.”
I felt him nod, his hair whispering against the edge of my cheek. “People take their successes with them, which is absolutely the way it should be. But it does tend to leave you with the bad stuff. It’s not like I sit around late at night congratulating myself that Miffy is having a good life. I sit around fretting about whatever I did or didn’t do that failed Seeoban so bloody terribly.”
I glanced again at the photograph, at the other girl, who had turned away at the last possible moment, so she was just a blur of white and red, a candle flame caught by the breeze. “Where is she now?”
“Last time I saw her, I was dragging her to rehab for something like the fifth time.” He shrugged, and it rippled through both of us. “I like to imagine she got clean and she’s living somewhere with some family of her own. Or whatever it is that would make her happy.”
“Adam—” I said, my voice tight with urgency and my desperate need to be heard, “—you know it’s not your fault, don’t you? You’re no more responsible for the bad stuff than the good. People make choices.”
“Yeah, I know. People make choices, and sometimes they just leave. And, afterwards, we gather up our hearts, pick up our lives, do the best we can with them, and see what comes.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I like to manage waterways. Stop people flooding. It makes me feel useful.”
I smiled back at him, just the same, just as certain and uncertain. “I like to look after books and papers.”
His eyes held mine. “People come as well as go, you know.”
And that was when I . . . I looked away, blushing and cowardly and wordless. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand him or want what he was so gently offering, it was simply that my heart was a craven animal, balking now, instinctively, at the very last.
I didn’t want to be left again.
After a moment or two, the silence turning thick and stale around us, Adam cleared his throat and stepped away from me, taking all his warmth, and the promise of fitted-together bodies. “It’s, uh, late. I should probably be heading off.”
“Do you live nearby?” I heard myself asking idiotically.
“Deddington?” And when I gave him a blank look, added, “It’s about half an hour’s drive to the north. It’s nice. I mean, murder-village name aside. But I’m actually staying at the Travelodge at the moment. Because the life of a civil engineer is a glamorous one.”
He ran a hand through his hair, fire falling wildly through his fingers, and I stared, hopeless and envious, wondering how it would feel against my fingers. And while I was staring, he turned and vanished into the hallway. I heard the rustle of fabric and the scrape of a zipper as he pulled on his coat.
“Thanks for having me round,” he called out. “Sorry for giving you This Is My Life.”
The last two days whirled through my mind. Adam and his sandbags and his game theory. His hand on my elbow. His freckles and his smile. My books. Mrs. P. Marius. Seeoban.
And now.
Which was already too late because the door was shut, and Adam was gone.
The quiet settled like dust.
Ridiculous scenarios flashed through my mind: rushing after him into the night, no words needed as we kissed in the pouring rain.
But I didn’t move.
I let him leave.
My choice, this time.