Page 1 of Carry Me Home

Chapter One

TOM

I’m aware of the knocking for some time before I do anything about it.

Not an emergency knock. Hell, I know that one. Have been jolted out of sleep by it enough times to recognise it in my bones. This is the knock of someone who knows I’m in, has a view on my current life choices, and has all the time in the world to make that view known one knuckle at a time.

My head is still pounding, but it’s been doing it since Saturday last. A whole five days of recovery, and I don’t think I can blame it on a mix of champagne and sambuca shots anymore. No, this pounding of the head is pure remorse. Literal remorse, tapped out in Morse Code into my brain. R.E.M.O.R.S.E.

Or, if I were being honest with myself:

Y.O.U. T.O.T.A.L. D.I.C.K.

I don’t want to open my eyes. If I do, it means the memories will come back, the drinks, the dancing, the hotel room, the walk of shame down to the breakfast at the hotel where all the wedding guests were clumped together.

Sophie and Stewart. Uni friends. At least they’d left for their romantic wedding night pre-even-more-romantic-honeymoon before I started standing on the tables and shaking salt into my hair, encouraging everyone to come and ‘get some tequila’.

They’d left before Cara had helped me back to the hotel room.

And. Well.

With a groan that hurts my soul down deep, I blink into the sunlight that always manages to creep stealthy fingers around the navy blackout curtains at the window.

I look at the ceiling.

The ceiling looks back.

Quarter past nine. On a Thursday. My day off from the surgery, which is a fact I’m apparently alone in respecting.

The staring contest with the ceiling carries on. I don’t particularly like to lose these. Sets the day off on the wrong trajectory. But the knocking continues.

‘It’s open,’ I shout, because it always is, because this is Sea Salt Bay and the only people who knock on my door are people who would come in regardless, and the energy required to get up and lock it is energy I don’t currently have.

There’s a bashing of cupboard doors downstairs, and in any place other than Sea Salt Bay you’d think you were being burgled. Here, you know it’s just someone who’s decided your morning requires intervention and is making themselves coffee while they’re at it.

I consider the options. Getting up. Not getting up. The distant possibility that if I stay very still, Jude Harding, who I can tell is downstairs by the tone-deaf humming and heavy couldn’t-give-a-fuck slightly uneven footsteps, will conclude I’ve died in the night and leave me to decompose in peace.

The footsteps come up the stairs.

So much for that.

He appears in the doorway holding two mugs of coffee he has made in my kitchen, looking at me with the particular expression of a man who has hauled himself out of a deep personal crisis over the last couple of months and now considers himself qualified to assess other people’s life choices.

‘It’s quarter past nine,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘On a Thursday.’

‘I know.’

‘And you’re⁠—’

‘Aware of what I’m doing, yes.’ I sit up against the headboard. ‘Some of us are choosing to embrace our day off in a horizontal position. It’s a lifestyle decision.’

He looks around the room. At the curtains, still drawn. At the book on the nightstand, face-down on the same page it’s been on for a week. At me, determinedly unbothered by his assessment.

‘Right,’ he says, and holds out the mug.