AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Or is that hesitation?
I pause. “You want to see it?”
He must do. Rae lights the way with his phone, that blue-white beam slicing every shadow. “Just try and fucking stop me.” This is softer from him. “Everything you’ve loved so far has knocked my socks off. The sunset here. The view over the sea.” His hold tightens on my hand. “Just so you know, you set the bar, so I’ve got high expectations.” He matches me step for step until a new view stops him, and again, I wish I had even a scrap of artistic talent. I’d capture this surprise, this slow smile that is so different from all his others.
He slides his phone away while washed by the last feathering flames of tonight’s sunset. It reaches through the gap in the tree line I cut to reveal a sea view, and it touches the tips of his hair, which glows like the very first time I saw him. I don’t see a single trace of Marc now, and it has only taken an intense weekend to make that difference.
There’s no hiding who I want to share this spot with.
It’s Rae.
And it’s Rae who grabs my hand and hauls me straight for a tent that plenty of honeymooners have used but also feels like a version of home to me.
“I sometimes stay here between jobs if Marc and Stefan don’t have bookings. To be fair, they’re always trying to get me to stay in one of their farm cottages. I just… I prefer this. Reminds me of when I retrained. Of when I became a forestry apprentice.”
“You lived under canvas?”
“In summer. Or in a cabin through the winters, right in the middle of a forest with an old hand who took no bullshit. Loved it.” And him. Aleksander taught me almost everything I know about woodland management, and his forest was the one place in the world where it felt like no fingers pointed. “I could breathe there.”
I lead him inside, turn on the lamps, and take in his reaction. Here is proof if I ever needed any that he’s spent enough time under canvas to appreciate what a good life boils down to. Rae lists what other people might see as basics. “A stove.” He moves on, fingertips tracing the edge of a copper basin that I traded gardening work for. “And running water?”
“Bottled. There’s a foot pump. And a shower behind the tent along with a wood-fired hot tub.”
He next eyes the soft glow from the string of lights above us. “Solar?”
I nod. “I rigged up enough panels so they’ll run everything I need and last all night long instead of fading.”
“Nice.”
What is really nice is not having to explain why me only having this place on a very part-time basis and an old Land Rover are all I’ve got to show for a man closing in on his thirties. But those stories Rae shared both yesterday and today havepainted their own picture of someone who hasn’t settled down either.
I don’t know his reasons, just that he’s darted from short-term projects like he darted from subject to subject this evening while sketching. That only makes his sudden switch to focussed even more apparent.
His gaze sweeps in another slow circle, which I guess means he’s locking my bolthole away to draw when his time here is over.
Tomorrow.
Maybe that’s why he stops looking around and heads straight for the bed. He presses on the mattress. “Real.” That’s the opposite of how it feels to see him lose his suit jacket, strip off his shirt, and unfasten his belt.
The lamps pick up where the last of the sun left off, lighting the stark difference between black chest hair and pale skin where the sun hasn’t tanned it. He’s another outdoors person, like me. That farmer’s tan proves it. He’s practical too, like when he asks, “You got everything we need here?”
Thank fuck for newlyweds. This tent being kitted out for their first nights means I can nod even though I’ve never brought anyone else here for this. Now I’m glad I kept my short-term flings with tourists to their holiday rentals, because Rae holds out a hand to me like he did by a dance floor.
A soldier got to him first then.
This time, I won’t let anything get between us.
7
RAE
Hayden has hidden talents. I thought that the first time after seeing those big hands twist willow into a dainty circlet. I thought it for a second time after he pulled together the kind of planning I can never manage to start, let alone see through, no matter how many times Sol tried to corral the bucking bronco of my attention at college.
Tonight, Hayden proves he has a whole other string to his bow, and not only for making weddings happen, because this isn’t only a place for honeymoon happy endings. It’s a home away from home that he’s made out of almost nothing, one that he’s traded favours to furnish. I’ve seen that happen in camps. That’s where I first watched people from different nations swap a meal for minutes of mobile data or exchange bedding for a chance to search for news of family.
Hayden has traded carpentry and plumbing for his manual labour. Traded his muscle for warmth in winter, and I don’t know why that stove keeps catching my eye. It doesn’t glow right now, yet that’s what I see in my mind’s eye—a cherry-red glow,and a big man with snow in his hair, crouching to feed it with kindling that he cut with his great big?—
I yank at my belt, warm all over despite that stove being unlit. I’m already on fire and in a hurry to get this party started. “Why are you still dressed?”
