Page 71 of Carry Me Home

She’s looking at me. I’m looking at her. The noise fades. Her lips are parted. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright and wide and there – right there, present, seeing me, and for one beat the air between us is not the air between friends.

Someone wolf-whistles. Nina blinks. The moment fractures.

She lets go, steps back, turns to Brynn. ‘I need another drink. A strong one. Something that’ll make me forget I just did that in public.’

She’s gone. Back to the booth, back to Brynn, back to the safety of the crowd. I stand at the microphone for half a second longer than I should, the cheering still going, the pub still loud, and across the room Cara is sitting very still with her drink in her hand and her eyes on me and an expression on her face that I recognise because I wear it every day.

She’s watching someone she wants choose someone else. In real time. In front of everyone.

I go back to the booth. I sit down. I pick up my drink.

‘You were good up there,’ Cara says. Her voice is light. Even. The cost of it is invisible to everyone except me.

‘Thanks.’

‘You looked happy.’

‘I was.’

A pause. She doesn’t say with her. She doesn’t have to.

The walk home is quiet.

The heat has finally cracked – not completely, but enough that the night air feels almost cool, the first real breath in weeks. The village is dark, everyone either at the pub or long since asleep.

Cara walks beside me, our footsteps on the cobblestones.

‘I need to tell you something,’ she says.

‘Okay.’

‘I didn’t come here just to visit.’ She keeps her eyes on the road. ‘I came because I’ve been thinking about you. About us. About whether we made a mistake, letting distance decide for us.’

‘Cara—’

‘Let me finish.’ She stops walking. I stop too. The harbour is behind us, the moonlight on the water, the flat ahead. ‘I know you love her. I’ve known it since the day you first said her name. But she’s had eleven years to see you, Tom. Eleven years.’ She meets my eyes. ‘I see you. I’ve always seen you.’

The words settle between us. The harbour makes its quiet sounds. A boat creaks at its mooring.

She reaches out and takes my hand.

Her fingers are warm and certain. Not tentative – Cara doesn’t do tentative. She holds my hand the way she holds everything: directly, with her whole self, no apology. And the truth is – it feels good. Her hand in mine. The warmth of it. The simplicity of being wanted by someone who is standing right here, saying it out loud, not hiding behind fuchsias and fairy lights and a decade of silence.

‘You don’t have to decide anything tonight,’ she says. ‘I just wanted you to know. That there’s someone here who sees you. Who isn’t going to make you wait another eleven years for a thing that might never come.’

She squeezes once. Lets go.

We walk the rest of the way in silence. At the flat, she goes to her room and I go to mine, and I lie in the dark, and the ceiling looks the same as it always does, and nothing has changed and everything has.

Two things, replaying on a loop behind my eyes:

Nina’s face. Inches from mine. Her hands on my shoulders, her laugh still vibrating against my chest, that beat where the air between us changed and she was right there and then she wasn’t.

Cara’s hand. Warm and certain. I see you.

One is a question I’ve been asking for eleven years that has never been answered.

The other is an answer to a question I haven’t let myself ask.