Page 48 of Secrets of Starshine
He takes off his hat, runs his hands over his hair, and stares at the sky for a moment. When he looks back down at me, he suddenly grins and laughs. The big, booming laugh that I now know so well.
“Wow,” he says, pulling my coat together to keep me warm. “That was unexpected. I feel like I should apologise…”
“Please don’t,” I respond, smiling up at him. “Because then I’ll feel like you regret it, and then I’ll possibly die of embarrassment. It was…just a kiss.”
Even as I murmur the words I don’t quite believe them. That wasn’t just a kiss – that was some kind of interstellar event, and my insides are still churning around in the aftermath.
He raises his eyebrows, and replies: “If you say so. I suspect we might both have had a drink. And it’s New Year, when crazy things happen. If you want to wake up tomorrow and pretend this never happened, I’ll completely understand.”
Being honest, I have no concept of how I will feel in the morning – I am barely coping with the way I feel now. To cover up my confusion, I lean down and pick up the plastic box, hearing the crowns and necklaces rattle around inside.
I push it towards him, and reply: “Well. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.”
NINETEEN
I am standing at the top of a hill that looks murderously steep. It is covered with snow, and more is lightly falling on our heads as we all gaze down the slope.
“What’s it called again?” I ask, staring down in horror. “Blabbington Hill?”
“Bibbington,” replies Connie, grinning at me through the snow. “It’s Anglo-Saxon for ‘Sudden and Violent Death’, I think.”
I glare at her, knowing that she is winding me up. Hoping that she is, anyway. For some reason, I have allowed myself to be persuaded to take part in what I am told is a firm and sacred Starshine Cove tradition – sledding down this bloody terrifying hillside.
I enjoy a nice long walk, and a dance, and have occasionally been known to run for a bus – but I am not a naturally sporty or outdoorsy kind of woman. Team sports are my idea of hell – I remain scarred by high school experiences that by rights I should have forgotten – and I’m highly unlikely to ever pop up on your timeline asking for donations towards my marathon-run fundraiser. I’m fit for function – and my function is standing up and doing hair, and lying down watching TV, and sometimes in the middle doing household chores. Where it usuallyisn’tis at the top of what looks like the kind of ski-slope James Bond might chase a bad guy down.
There are a lot of us here, and we were ferried up in a few Land Rover rides by Ged, the farmer’s son who I met a while ago during the pop-up salon. Ged looks a bit like the Jolly Green Giant off the sweetcorn tins, except with blonde hair, and he drives like a lunatic. Or someone from the countryside, who can say? Connie, wisely, brought herself and her kids in her own car, and looks a lot less rattled than I do. We were dropped off in a little lay-by, then made a small trek through some woods to this place. The place of sudden and violent death.
“Are you sure this is a tradition?” I ask, frowning. “Or are you just having me on?”
“Why would you ever think such a thing?” she replies, holding her hands to her chest as though hurt. “And honestly, it’d be a pretty elaborate joke, wouldn’t it? Getting everyone up here with their sleds?”
There are, to be fair, quite a number of us milling around by this stage. As well as Connie and her three, I see Ella and Jake, the Betties, Matt who works behind the bar at the inn, Trevor the Druid, and quite a few familiar faces from Christmas dinner.
The sleds are as much of a mixed bag as the people – some look shiny and semi-professional, the kind that David Beckham would use if he was here. I spot one that has a steering wheel and looks like a little jet ski; others are battered and made of plastic, being dragged along by ropes. Some are round and look like an upturned dustbin lid. Some people, including the Betties, just have big baking trays. I’m really not sure that this whole affair has gone through a rigorous health and safety assessment.
I have been provided with a spare – because yes, this is the kind of place where people have spare sleds, just in case anyone has a sledding emergency. It is a large plastic one, sturdy, and bright yellow – which will come in handy for when the air ambulance has to hover above and spot me, I suppose. Sam has George’s, which is an old-fashioned wooden model, as George has declared that his sledding days are over. I suppose knocking ninety must come with some advantages.
Sam is off with the other young folk, looking faintly ridiculous in a gaudy purple ski-suit that he has also borrowed, complete with goggles. I see him snapping pictures of himself posing with the sled, and wonder if there’ll be a whole new strand to his latest stories – the “Après-Sled Collection”.
Personally, I’ll just be relieved if there is an après – especially if it involves fully functioning limbs and all my digits.
“Honestly, you’ll be fine,” Connie continues, laughing at my expression. “We genuinely do it every year when there’s snow, and sometimes when there’s just mud, though that gets a bit messy. Nobody has ever been hurt, I promise you.”
“But what about the bottom? It looks to me like there are some trees there – what if someone, and by someone I mean me, hits one of them, going full pelt?”
She points to little plastic handle things at the side of the sled, and says: “These are brakes, and you can slow yourself down with your feet a bit as well. But you’ll find that the slope evens out at the bottom, and there’s a plateau before the treeline. I mean, look around you – there are people here with toddlers! Nobody would do it if it was that dangerous – I know we’re on the wacky side here, but we’re not complete psychopaths!”
As I take in the small crowd, I see a few of the ladies from the hair-do day, along with their excited-looking little ones. Ha, I think, it’s all right for kids – they know no fear. I am a bit mollified by her words, though, and give her a little nod. Meltdown over, I tell myself – or at least in public. Inside I will probably be melting down for the whole experience.
It is late afternoon, and the sun is shining weakly down, glimmering off the white sheen of the hill and the snow-draped boughs of the trees around us. I have been promised hot chocolate and cake after this, which is possibly the only reason I agreed.
That and the fact that by lunch time, I was feeling restless, and keen to find something to do. I had a blissful night’s sleep once I finally settled, full of warm and fuzzy dreams, and woke up after eleven with a smile on my face. This, of course, might have had something to do with that kiss the night before – and while I was still in that hazy half-awake stage, semi-conscious, I could almost still feel it on my lips.
But as soon as I emerged into an eyes-wide-open state, all the little niggles started to rush in and nibble at me like mental piranha fish feasting on my brain. What will happen when I see him again? Will it be awkward? Will he avoid me? Will we lose our friendship? Will I have to leave Starshine because I’m just too mortified to be around him?
What if he doesn’t avoid me? What if he asks me out on a date, or asks me to marry him? What if he’s completely forgotten about it? What if it never even happened, and it was in fact all a dream? What if, what if, what if? I feel like a teenaged girl, and not in a good way.
Noodling around the cottage didn’t help much, because I still couldn’t concentrate on anything normal, like reading or watching a movie, or even on eating the bacon butties that I made – which is as much of a New Year’s tradition as Sam and I have.
