Page 6 of Swept Away

Then there’s the dogged misery in my chest. The sense of loss. Maybe the issue isn’t that I’m thirty-one, it’s that I feel about one hundred.

“Well, things change,” I say. “What can I get you?”

“Uh,” he says, “a large gin and tonic?”

I reach for a clean glass. He watches me, a slight frown gathering between his eyebrows. Marissa’s right: he doesn’t quite add up. I’d say he’s the artistic loner type, a bit brooding, a bit lost. A hot emo kid born in the wrong decade. But thatreallydoesn’t mesh with the shiny self-help book in his hand.

He catches where I’m looking. “You read it?” he asks.

“Nope. Any good?”

“A lot of people seem to think so,” he says, turning it to look over the back cover. “Says here it’s ‘the answer to our prayers: a guide to finding authentic connection within the confining artifices of modernity.’ ”

I raise my eyebrows. “And what do you think?”

He pauses at the question, tilting his head the other way. There’s something a little dreamy about his eyes, almost a sleepiness; it’s strangely sexy, as if I’m seeing him just after he’s woken up.

“I think it’s a big pile of bollocks,” he says lightly.

I have to bite back another smile. “Nine fifty,” I say, pushing the gin and tonic with lime toward him.

If I hadn’t already known he lived down south from his accent, I’d have got it from his face now—he looks briefly staggered to have got a double for less than a tenner. He taps his phone to the card reader and then pushes the drink back toward me.

“It’s for you,” he says. “How’d I do?”

I consider it. I do like a gin and tonic. “Not bad,” I say, reaching for it.

His face melts into its first proper smile. His front teeth are slightly crooked, touching each other like crossed fingers; he bites down on his smile before it’s fully grown.

“Can I ask your name?” he says.

I force my gaze away, across the pub, noting the regulars—Barney, Hazzer, the woman who always orders double shots of whisky. I can’t decide if I want them to come over and save me from this conversation or stay where they are.

“It’s Lexi,” I say eventually, because I can’t think of a good reason not to answer.

“I’m Zeke. Ezekiel Ravenhill. Full name in case you want to stalk me.” He tapsSurviving Modern Love. “It says here that before ‘progressing with an individual,’ you should have researched each other on every available social media platform. It’s in the section on the advantages of modernity.”

I stare at the book in horror. “Fucking hell, really?” I look up at him. “Is that what people do?” I just about swallow back thenowadays, narrowly avoiding sounding eighty-five.

“Well, not me,” he says. “I’m not online.”

“Really? No social media at all?”

I find this unfathomable—I’m absolutely addicted to Instagram. Sometimes I don’t even notice myself opening the app, I’m justthere, scrolling through everyone else’s lives, getting progressively, predictably sadder.

“It’s just not for me.” He shrugs, settling on a stool. “This book says you’ve got to embrace that stuff if you want to survive, so…I guess I’m a dying breed.”

He looks genuinely sad as he says this, which strikes me as odd—I am finding it hard to believe that a man like this needs advice from a self-help book. He is very assured in how he watches me, for instance, very smooth. Even when I’m not looking at him, I can feel his light, warm gaze taking me in.

I don’t like being looked at, generally. It’s easy when I’m with Mae—nobody looks at you twice if you’ve got a kid with you, as if you’ve entered some other category of personhood where you’re always the supporting act. The same thing happens when you’re the bartender, actually: you’re part of the background. It suits me perfectly.

Then Zeke’s eyes shift away from me as he looks around the pub. And to my surprise, I find I want his gaze back again.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m getting a weird case of déjà vu. Did this place use to have blue carpet?”

“Yeah, actually.” We changed it after Mum died. A big revamp that we didn’t yet realize we couldn’t afford. “Have you been here before?”

“A while back, yeah. My dad used to live on a houseboat in the marina, so I was in Gilmouth a lot as a little kid. I’ve only been back once since I was thirteen, though—to sell his boat when he died.”

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