Page 37 of Carry Me Home

‘Gerald.’

She stares at me blankly. ‘Gerald the rabbit?’

‘Gerald the ferret. Different Gerald. I’m a vet, Nina. I know ferrets.’

‘You’re a vet who’s currently lying about ferrets to win a pub quiz.’

‘Write stoat if you want. But when we lose by one point, remember this moment.’

She writes ferret, glaring at me the whole time. Her mouth is doing what it does when she’s trying not to smile – pressed flat, corners twitching, the effort of suppression making it worse. I try not to look triumphant and fail.

The results come in. We’ve won by two points. Nina shrieks – actually shrieks, the sound cutting through the pub noise like a gull through fog – and throws her arms around me before I have time to do anything about my face.

She’s warm and close and laughing against my shoulder, and I can feel her ribs moving under my hands and the press of her collarbone against my chest and the smell of her – coffee and flowers, coconut in her hair – and my arms have come up around her automatically, muscle memory, the shape of her so familiar that my body knows it without my permission. I hold her the way I always hold her. Not too tight. Not too long.

She pulls back.

Not far. Just far enough to look at me, her face inches from mine, her eyes bright with victory. Her hands are still on my shoulders. My hands are still on her waist. The pub noise has gone somewhere far away and unhelpful.

And I think I’m crumbling inside.

‘We won,’ she says, slightly breathless.

‘We won.’

‘The ferret was right.’

‘The ferret was right.’

She’s looking at me. I’m looking at her. Her lips are parted. There’s a flush across her cheeks and her fingers have tightened on my shoulders. I can feel each one separately, five points of pressure through my T-shirt. The distance between us is nothing; it’s mere centimetres; it’s the smallest movement I’d ever have to make. One lean. That’s all. One lean and years of discipline would be gone in a second.

I don’t lean.

I never lean.

‘Drinks!’ Brynn appears at the edge of the table, proffering a tray with impeccable timing. ‘Victory drinks. Tom, you’re buying the next round because you got the Saturn question right and you were far too smug about it.’

Nina pulls back. Her hands leave my shoulders and the five points of pressure vanish and I can breathe again, which is not actually an improvement.

‘I wasn’t smug,’ I say, and my voice sounds normal, which is the greatest performance of my life because there isn’t a molecule in my body that isn’t on fire.

‘You were incredibly smug. Jude, back me up.’ Brynn clunks the tray down, slopping beer.

‘You were pretty smug,’ Jude agrees.

‘I was appropriately confident. There’s a difference.’

Nina has slid back to her side of the booth. She’s picking up her white wine, looking at Brynn, looking anywhere but at me. Her cheeks are still flushed. The space where she was is warm against my leg. She pushes her dark curls behind her ear, a quick nervous gesture I’ve seen a thousand times but not usually directed at me, and for a second her fingers hesitate at her jaw, like she’s lost the thread of what she was doing.

‘You’re my—’ she starts, turning back to me suddenly, and then stops.

There’s a vile pause while she tries to recalibrate what she was going to say and we all watch it happen. The air. The change. The pale tint that erases the flush of moments ago.

‘Peter would have loved this win,’ she finally says, and the pause lengthens.

She’s looking at the quiz scoreboard, where our names have been added to the winners’ list. Her expression is soft. Not sad exactly, but it’s the arrival of memories, of grief coming in the middle of something good, and she has to make room for both at once.

‘He knew the most random things,’ she continues. ‘Genuinely random. Although, once, and I never let him forget it, he thought the capital of Australia was Sydney. I laughed so much.’ Her voice catches on laughed – the smallest hitch, there and gone, a crack in the surface so fine I might be the only one who heard it. ‘He loved the arguing and the chips and the bit where Mr Pendleton gets angry at Bill for cheating.’