AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Look up.”
I do, standing outside the tent while wrapped in a sheet. We’re under a blanket of stars, a canopy of deep purple velvet studded with diamonds above us, and I lean back against Hayden to count their constellations. His arms are snug around me and his hold isn’t much looser when we go back to bed, where he lets out another of those deep rumbles of satisfaction.
Music drifts faintly to us, and I can’t keep this in. “How come no one’s snapped you up already?”
“Me?” It’s cute that he’s surprised. This statement is less so. “I’m not exactly a long-term kinda person, Rae. You see yourself staying in one place for good?”
I shake my head. My work is wherever the tide takes me.
His must be too. “I can’t see a future like that for me, either.”
I trace the breadth of his bare chest, and I take my time about it, in zero hurry right now to be anywhere else but here. I don’t want to head back to that wedding, nor to make a start at meeting my deadline. I’ve got a whole day left, or almost. There are hours and hours to go yet, and with Hayden wrapped around me?
Short term or not, right now that feels like ages.
I fallasleep in Cornwall but wake up in France.
That’s how it seems when the shush of the sea registers. Only I’m not behind sand dunes this morning, and this shushing is different. It’s the wind through leaves as well as the rhythmic wash of nearby waves, and I’m not alone in waking disorientated.
Hayden stretches behind me. His hand on my hip flexes, fingers tightening before his arm slides to gather me closer to him. I’m enveloped, held captive by a heavy arm, and a sleepy rumble travels through me.
It’s a contented grumble, a satisfied and gruffly wordless expression of someone almost awake and happy. His dick is just as pleased. It gives me a warm and friendly nudge of morning wood that I’m down with.
Down with?
This is the best I’ve woken up feeling for ages. I also feel it when he wakes up for real.
Hayden goes still.
That heavy arm around me lifts next, slow and careful as if it might be unwelcome. He adds an inch of distance, and fuck that.Fuck it.I’m exactly where I want to be, thank you very much for asking. And no, I haven’t woken in France this morning, butthat’s where I learned to never hurry waking. Much better to stretch out the gap between unconsciousness and the moment reality gives me my daily kick in the nuts.
I don’t have to search my gang of little artist-heroes for missing faces today.
Won’t have to scan the sea and wonder if they’re scared or sinking or?—
No.
I don’t have to do that this morning. I roll to face him instead, and find a sleep-rumpled version of someone not worried, exactly, but clouds do gather in a reminder of him baring his soul outside a chapel to a couple having their worst day ever. I have no idea why until he asks, “What time is your train?”
Train?
Here goes reality taking aim for my nuts.
My train. It leaves at eleven.
I lurch upright, scrambling through discarded clothes for my phone where—thank fuck—I find it’s only a few minutes past six. “Not for a while. Eleven. That’s ages yet. Hours and hours,” I tell him and slump back to where it’s warm and cosy. He’s up on one elbow, and there’s a lot of him to look at, so I do.
Shadows flicker. Not internal ones this time. These are cast by the sunrise through the trees around what he described as an occasional home. As temporary, like most of the work he mentioned while in the marquee. I get it. I spend most of my time with temporary people, both migrants and project workers. Only big operations like the one Reece works for last the distance.
I want mine to as well.
Needit to be permanent.
Perhaps that’s why this pops out. “Why don’t you rent somewhere?”
“Me?”
Something in his gaze shutters. Closes. Keeps me out, which isn’t what I want for this last time I’ll get to see him. I give myself a mental slap to wake the fuck up, and to try harder not to add another bruise to someone whom life has scarred already.
