Page 113 of Snow Falls Over Starry Cove

I look around but can barely see beyond the halo of light that the lamp is casting around the bed. There’s a table and two chairs. And what looks like a sea chest. In the far corner, there’s another source of light – a hearth. And in the hearth is a crackling fire. Next to the fire is a pile of wood.

‘Thank you, Jago, for saving my life.’

‘Yeah, well, Saint Piran owes me big time.’

Jago rises to poke at the fire and in the semi-darkness, I can clearly see the sinews in his lean, muscular body. He turns to look at me.

‘You alright?’

‘I’m fine,’ I assure.

Well, maybe a tiny bit exhausted, but much better than I thought I’d be, lying at the bottom of the sea.

‘You may well be now, but in a few minutes the shock is going to set in,’ he says as he pulls out a pot with a chain for a handle and some cans of food, which he unceremoniously empties into a pot with a plop.

He places it on the fire, off to one side, next to his soaking jeans, rubbing his hands on his naked thighs. I look away as my own thighs begin to tremble.

‘Here,’ he says softly, moving close and wrapping another blanket around me.

‘Tha-thank you,’ I whisper as my teeth begin to chatter. And not just from the cold.

‘Sit up,’ he orders as, kneeling at my feet, he begins to rub my calves briskly. ‘I’m not being fresh – it’s just to get your circulation going again,’ he assures, as if the idea of him touching me for any other reason was out of this world.

Just imagine, Jago Moon, lifetime seadog and playboy, actually being interested in boring, burned-out but chilled-to-the-bone secondary school teacher Emmie Weaver. As if. He’s already covered that part. He’s not into relationships. Sex, yes, and loads of, thank you very much. But relationships? Pass.

Not that I’m attracted to him, of course. We have absolutely nothing in common, from our backgrounds to our ambitions to our lifestyles. Absolutely zilch. I mean, really, after we’re done with all the sparring and brownie-point scoring, what will the two of us possibly talk about? Well, it looks like I’m finally about to find out. Because it seems we’ll be stuck together now for a while. At least until the storm is over.

‘What is this place?’

‘It’s just a fisherman’s shack,’ he says as he bends to tend to the fire. ‘We all keep it stocked with cans of food and firewood, so we’ll be OK.’

‘But how are we going to get back? We’ve lost our boats…’

He looks up at me from the pile of logs as slow, shy flames lick at the twigs.

‘The boats are gone. But the shack is strong. It’s withstood many a storm like this one. I think it’ll endure one more.’

I wish I had his confidence. The wind has died, but the rain is still beating down on the slate roof like it wants to take it apart stone by stone.

‘Emmie,’ he whispers, ‘you’re shaking. Come here…’

‘I’m OK,’ I mumble before a violent shudder takes me and he returns to my side to wrap an arm around me.

I clear my dry throat. ‘How, uhm, long do you think until the storm is over?’

He looks up at me, the firelight reflected in his eyes. And not only that. For a moment, I could swear I saw a flicker of… something in there. Tenderness? Kindness? Or is he just exhausted like me, with no will to bicker?

‘Come the morning, they’ll be here for us. This is the first place they’ll try before they give us up for dead and start checking for our bodies in the various inlets.’

I swallow. ‘Does… does it happen often?’

‘That people drown in a storm? Yeah. Mostly stupid tourists who don’t know any better.’

I flinch and pull back.

‘I didn’t mean you. You’re kind of one of us now,’ he says, looking up at me again.

From here I can see the top of his bare shoulders – something you don’t see often for a man this height. Numb with stupor, I watch as his large, powerful fingers rub my skin briskly again, and ask myself had circumstances been different, would he be touching me at all? Would he have been gentle? At times, although rare, he does seem to slip into a softer, quieter mode. I often wondered about him. What his past as a neglected child had been like and how he was before that major but mysterious event that ruined his life had occurred. Had he been a happy youngster, with lots of friends and laughs?

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