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“You’ve got so many skills, is all.” I gesture around us. “And I heard someone at the wedding say that you made a whole new playground at the school out of nothing.”
“A Forest School space,” he corrects me quietly, but those shutters lift and he smiles when I keep listing everything else I’ve noticed.
“You aren’t just a school groundsman, even if you are pretty handy with a…” I sketch the shape of that wicked blade he used to slice through willow before twisting it into leafy circles.
“A bramble cutter.”
“Yeah, that. Plus, you used to run nature courses, didn’t you, and you know your way around farming.” Plenty of people came up to him last night while I was sketching, wanting to book him in for harvesting duties that he had to turn down, his schedule full already. “You’re in demand and have a lot of local contacts.” Anyone who watched him pull this wedding celebration together out of nothing would guess that. “So why?—”
“Do I live here between jobs? It’s free.” He says that as if it is a complete answer. Maybe it is, but he offers more, and I’m done listening to this still-sleepy softness. “I’m saving up.” He doesn’t say what for. I don’t ask because he follows it with something perhaps he didn’t mean to say aloud. “While I still can.” This comes out much faster. “Because I rely on seasonal work. Spend it all now and there won’t be enough for later. I know that’s not exactly the definition of successful.”
He lays back, so I go up on my elbow to see a different kind of shuttering, the type I’ve seen from kids before drawing what they didn’t choose to leave behind them but had to. So many of my little artists blamed themselves for the chaos that led them tomy project. Shame travelled with them, because here’s the thing about kids—they’re brave little fuckers who’ll hide their worries from their families until they have an outlet.
Provide that for them with paper and pens or crayons and with other kids to share with, and boom, that shame has no place to hide. They can let it out, and I can redraw it for them.
I want to redraw Hayden now.
He doesn’t let me. He shifts again, adding a few more inches of distance, and I’ve thoughtfuck thatonce already. Fuck this right in the eye too, because someone who goes all out to help strangers for no payment or need for kudos can’t have anything to be ashamed of, so I move with him.
I also document how the sheet slips lower, and the shadows of leaves fall across his torso like when I drew him wearing a crown and ivy. All he wears now is a reminder of what those kids carried, and fuck that too. “I’m not judging,” I promise. “It isn’t like I’ve got a place of my own.”
“I could have my own place.” He meets my eye. “I have had plenty of times before. Rented locally. And I said that Marc and Stefan keep offering me a room. Saying no meant they could let the cottage out. Farming isn’t easy. Starting a wedding business wasn’t either. They need the income, and me renting anywhere else would be a lot of cash that I could...”
I take a guess, remembering something else he said while I sketched wedding guests and we chatted about everything and nothing. “Spend on your sisters? Or on more fast fashion and Taylor Swift tickets?”
He actually laughs, and that’s a great sound. He also meets my eyes, and that’s even better. I’ve left a picture I drew for him back at the stables to find when I’m long gone. Now I wish I could take another stab at adding everything that means I can’t resist this impulse.
I kiss him.
He kisses me back, closed mouthed but soft, and that’s what is missing from my drawing. Thisnot a long-term kinda personis as soft as butter. On the inside, I mean. He’s plenty hard in other places that I roll against now, and we get off again, slow and unhurried, because there are hours left on my clock, right?
That meeting might as well be forever away while his hand wraps me. It could be years off when we get so hot and sweaty we need to make use of that shower he built for honeymooners. And if washing each other led to getting off for a third time, that was all good to hurry.
Time still rushes, and in no time at all I’m waiting at a station where I can’t avoid that I don’t have anything new to present to that agent.
It is almost the very last minute.
I’d hate myself if I wasn’t making the most of a final kiss with Hayden that comes with another quiet rumble that I barely hear over the sound of the station announcement. The next arrival will be the train to Paddington. I need to be on it.
“Good luck today, Rae.” He takes a step back. “Hope you get everything you want.”
“I’m gonna ask for it.” It’s so worth tagging this on. “You should too, Hayden. Ask for what you want, as well. You deserve something for you.” And that means I get to carry the surprised shift in his expression onto the train with me.
I’ve got work to do now, no way to ignore this deadline any longer, but I still prop up my phone, get out my sketchbook, and draw who I left on that station and who I won’t see again.
Cornwall blurs outside the train window as I sketch moorland as rugged as him. Towns and fields fly by too. The train must pass a music festival, I guess. Tents cram close together, and I add them to this drawing, only not exactly. These aren’t music festival tents or the nylon jungle I left across theChannel. I recreate the neat rows I last saw on a different child’s journey, one found buried under a school foundation.
Then I look up, watching the trail of an airplane flying high above the southwest of England.
Who knows why that comes out on my page as a Spitfire trailing smoke over Hayden—it wasn’t his life journey on that fragile postwar scroll, was it? It is him I draw again now, a giant extending a hand to a ghost, a wraith, to a vague outline of a child with hopes and dreams who washed up in this country after?—
I add flames to that Spitfire. Draw more around a blazing forest that caught fire the last time the world marched together against Nazis, which has nothing to do with the kids I’ve worked with in France.
Only…
Something clicks for me then, and yeah, I’ve often cursed myself for being scattered, but these moments of clarity? This intense hyper-focus? They almost make it worth saying no to the prescription medication that could save me from playing fast and loose with deadlines.
I flip back several pages, leafing through miniature hero after hero. That agent’s instruction repeats in time with the clack of wheels against the train tracks.
