Page 113 of Pull Me Under

‘No one’s coming. Everyone’s gone home.’

‘Jude—’

He kisses me. I forget what I was going to say until footsteps echo, looming closer.

We spring apart so fast I nearly fall over. Jude catches my arm, steadies me, and we’re both breathing hard when Tom rounds the corner.

He stops. Looks at us. At Jude’s flushed face, my dishevelled hair, the foot of space between us that screams guilty.

‘Forgot my torch,’ Tom says mildly. ‘Left it in the kit room.’

‘Right,’ Jude says. ‘We were just⁠—’

‘Discussing training,’ I supply. ‘Schedules. Very boring.’

Tom’s expression doesn’t change. ‘Must have been riveting. You both look very … flushed.’

‘It’s warm,’ Jude says.

‘It’s April.’

Silence. It’s a silence that says, I know exactly what I interrupted and I’m choosing not to comment.

‘Well,’ Tom says eventually. ‘I’ll just get my torch, then.’

He walks past us into the station. Doesn’t look back.

Jude exhales. ‘That was close.’

‘Too close.’ I push off the wall, start smoothing my hair. ‘We can’t keep doing this. Not here.’

‘I know.’

‘If he tells someone⁠—’

‘He won’t. Tom’s not like that.’

But the thrill is curdling now. Less like excitement and more like shame.

Chapter Twenty-Three

JUDE

Friday morning in Brynn’s cottage. That golden hour when the light comes through the salt-crusted windows and turns everything soft.

She doesn’t know I’m watching.

She’s at the workbench in the corner of the kitchen – if you can call it a kitchen, if you can call that disaster of chipped Formica and temperamental plumbing a room where food gets made. There’s a carburettor in front of her, or maybe a fuel pump, either way, she’s taking it apart with the focus of a surgeon.

Grease on her fingers. Coffee forgotten at her elbow, gone cold an hour ago. Hair escaping its ponytail, one strand stuck to her cheek.

She’s humming. Doesn’t know she’s doing it. Some song I don’t recognise, tuneless and wandering.

I could watch her for ever.

‘You’re staring, Harding.’

Busted. So maybe she does know I’m watching.