Page 77 of Swept Away

“Have I been—have you wanted to cook this whole time, are you also really into cooking, and…”

She laughs, knocking her knee against mine. “No! I love you cooking for me. It’s not really about the food. It’s about the people. Growing up in the pub, I got to see what a place can do for bringing people together, and the weird connections that get made when you all overlap somewhere—people who’d never usually chat, all in one room. But I also saw the bad stuff. The drunks. The fights. What alcohol does.”

Her eyes flick to my stomach, and I know she’s thinking about what alcohol did to us.

“So I want to have that, but with coffee instead of booze.” Shedoes one of her frowns that’s actually a smile. Lexi language forThis is big for me and I feel kind of embarrassed and excited at the same time.

“I love that.”And I love you, I think.I love you, I love you, I love you.

But I bite it back. Too soon. Too…much. She’ll write it off as something I’m just feeling because I’m stuck with her. I know Lexi, and I know she’ll be waiting for me to leave her the minute we hit dry land. Sothat’swhen I’m going to tell her. Once we’re home, and she sees I’m not going anywhere.

“When we get back, I’ll open my cute café in Gilmouth and you’ll open your swanky restaurant in…London? I guess?” she says.

I smile, watching her look away from me. I love that we were clearly thinking about the same problem at the same time.

“The whole we-live-in-different-places thing seems kind of…” I am about to saystupid. “Kind of unimportant given what we’ve already survived, no?”

She shrugs one shoulder, the breeze catching a loose hair on her cheek. “Not really. Your life, your job, it’s all in London, and mine is where Mae is.”

“Lexi.”

“Yeah?”

“I want to be where you are. I can get work in Newcastle—I’ve got a good CV.”

When Lexi smiles, she looks as if she’s trying not to—like the smile’s growing despite her best efforts to hold it in. But right now she’s smiling as if she doesn’t see a single reason to stop, and that makes me feel amazing.

“Come on,” I say. “We’ve got an afternoon of art therapy ahead of us.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Arttherapy?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I thought this was a holiday. Are we actually just in a really elaborate kind of rehab?” she says, looking around, as if she’s checking for doctors.

I laugh, pulling her up by both hands. She stumbles into me slightly, and I relish the feeling. I love the way we’re taking things slowly—this is new for me. We’re not rushing to bed, but we both know today’s really the two of us meandering there. Every time she touches me it’s like low-key foreplay, even if she’s just tucking one of my curls behind my ear.

“We’re on a retreat,” I tell her. “It’s going to chill us out. Relax us.”

I let myself kiss her, then get drawn in a bit more than planned. We break apart slightly breathless, and I rest my forehead against hers.

“I’m a very relaxed person already,” Lexi says, deadpan. “I’m so laid back, Zeke. I’m extremely chill.”

“When I first saw you, you had your arms foldedandyour legs, like, double folded,” I say, shifting back to demonstrate the bind she’d twisted her legs into at The Anchor. “I’ve never met someone so tense.”

“In fairness, you’re not seeing me at my best.” She waves a hand to capture the whole near-deathness of everything.

“God save me when I do,” I say, pulling her in the direction of the storeroom. There’s paint in there—just dried-up scraps in the bottom of a tub, but enough to mess around with. I like the idea of seeing Lexi loosen up.

“If you’re going to ask God to save you at some point,” Lexi says dryly, “could you maybe ask Him now?”

Lexi

I paint sometimeswith Mae, but this is different. Zeke lives up to his whole “I’m creative” image by becoming immediately absorbed in a sophisticated seascape, but that’s fine; a man who wears velvet trousers can’t very wellnotbe artistic. I faff about painting a house, like I am five, and then start again on something new, a bunch of blobs and lines. It takes me a minute to realize that I’m trying to do what Zeke did when he waved his arms around to show me his brain. This ismybrain. Lots of straight lines and corners. Lots of worst-case scenarios. And, in the end, when you look at it all crowded in on the page like this: no less chaotic than Zeke’s charming smoke in the wind.

We take a brief step back into real life after this, because we discover an unopened tin of paint in the store cupboard. Zeke points out we could put this to better use, so we spend the rest of the afternoon writing SOS across the helipad and the main deck of the rig. It’s kind of sobering at first, but after a while we forget what we’re actually writing and just chat as we slop down the paint. Zeke tells me more about his family; I even talk a little about my dad,what I remember of him from my childhood, the spitting argument we had at Mum’s funeral when I cut him out of my life for good.

It’s amazing, to be honest. It’s the sort of heady, gorgeous day that you get when you let yourself believe that a wonderful man might actually want you. I haven’t stopped feeling scared or sad, but I’ve started feeling a lot of other things, too, and some of those things are louder. Joy. Hopefulness. Love, maybe, if I were the sort of person who could let myself call it that so soon.

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