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“Because if you don’t mind getting wet, I can show you the pool your Polish boy learned to swim in.”
14
RAE
That fucker Sol gets to the door before I can on Sunday. His greeting echoes through the studio space. So does his teasing. “Nice of you to bring Rae a present, but you know flowers or chocolates are more traditional, right?”
Hayden must be used to dealing with best-friend bullshit. He jabs straight back. “Man, that’s rough. Feel for you, Sol.”
“You feel for me?”
“Yeah, if no one ever showed you a good time in a wetsuit.”
In a wetsuit?
I turn to find out that’s exactly what Hayden has brought with him. It’s folded over one of those corded forearms I just lost an hour to drawing. He must have come straight from whichever farm he’s spent the weekend at working. He’s tired. I can see it, and I itch to find the same shadowed shade amongst the pencils littering my cave of a workspace. I’d smudge it under his eyes in the latest drawing in my sketchbook. I’d need to find a warmer shade to speckle his hair with fragments of whatever his work today has thrown at him like confetti.
He raises a hand to his chin, where stubble has already thickened, as if he’s checking it for more of the burrs that clung there when I first met him. That’s a clue I must be staring. Sol gives me another clue by covering his smile with a hand and rolling his eyes before leaving us to it with a final unasked-for comment.
“Have fun getting wet and slippery.”
And we do, even if none of this outing goes as I expected.
For a start, we don’t leave in Hayden’s Land Rover. One of his friends from that wedding-venue farm is waiting for us in the car park in his own vehicle.
Marc’s handshake is firm. Today’s bright light finds auburn embers in hair darker than his little brother’s bright red. “Good to see you again, Rae.” He drives us out to the moors, only instead of taking the turnoff leading to the encampment, he keeps going uphill, the whole while chatting shit with Hayden like Sol does with me.
“You sure you should swim so soon after eating, Hayd?” Marc meets my eyes in his rearview mirror as the vehicle climbs higher, and his gaze twinkles as he directs this at me. “Stefan’s mum brought lunch out to us in the fields. You should have seen the number of pasties and scones Hayden packed away. He’s gonna get cramp for sure. Hope you know how to save him from drowning.”
And like with Sol earlier, Hayden doesn’t take any of Marc’s shit either. “It’s sweet you’re so worried. There’s no need. I already tested Rae’s mouth-to-mouth skills.”
Once Marc stops laughing, he pulls up at the top of the hill in a pub car park, and we get changed behind his vehicle where I echo what Hayden told him. “I’ve got mouth-to-mouth skills?”
Hayden pulls off a dusty shirt and replaces it with a wetsuit that strains over his chest and shoulders. “You’ve got some. But you know what they say.” His kiss is quick. Rough. Salty with aday’s hard work. It’s also fucking delicious. He slips on wetsuit boots, and tells me, “Practice makes progress.”
I like this version of him.
Yes, he’s tired, I can see that. But he’s also excited, and that’s a good look on him.
No. Not agoodlook.
It’s a great one.
I can’t stop staring, and Marc notices. “Ha!” He pokes Hayden in the ribs. “That’s exactly how you look whenever you get a text from a certain someone lately. Sorry the honeymoon tent isn’t free again until November. How about I book you two in then?”
Hayden flushes. “How about you shut the fuck up?”
“Charming.” Marc laughs as he leaves, but Iamcharmed by the thought of repeating a star-filled night that I’ll never forget. That I’ll always remember, and have drawn several times already when I should have been sketching another subject. So charmed that it makes me slow to realise Marc has taken our clothes with him. My phone too.
“Wait. Where’s he going with our stuff?”
“Back to Glynn Harber. He’ll leave everything at the bridge there.”
That doesn’t really answer how we’ll get from wherever this pool is and then back to the school. I don’t waste time asking. I catch up with him at a gap in the car park wall, where the view stops me.Stuns me.Means that I can barely breathe around this much beauty.
The moors fall away, steep and sudden, then flare out like a shaken blanket. So many shades of green and gold spread out below us with a thick silver seam sewn through the moorland’s middle.
A river.
