Now wasn’t the time to delve into the myriad tiny ways her self-esteem had been corroded. Maybe one day. For now, she countered with, “Why would I assume they would?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because you’re intelligent and funny; sometimes even on purpose,” he said, smirking. “And you’re beautiful.”
Did he just say I’m beautiful?She chanced a glance at him,but he was still poring over photographs of their shared history. God, how she’d yearned for him to think her beautiful when she was a teenager.
“That’s very kind of you to say. I do recall a time when you said I reminded you of a plague victim.”
“When was that?”
“When I caught chickenpox in year eleven.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you did. You looked like an extra on one of those History Channel docudramas. You had sores everywhere, even in your eyebrows!” He sounded impressed.
“I’ve still got a scar on one of them,” she said.
“Have you?”
Ryan leaned in close, holding his phone torch above them and looking at her eyebrows. She closed her eyes against the light; he was so close she could feel his breath on her face and for a moment she was sixteen again, thinking about kissing him…
“Oh yeah!” he said, triumphantly. “I see it.”
“Excellent,” she said, dryly.
Ryan lay back against the side of the bunker. “God, remember what we were like at sixteen?”
She rememberedeverythingabout sixteen-year-old Ryan.
“We were bananas. Hard to believe your mum was expecting you at that age,” he went on.
“I know! We couldn’t even keep our bag-of-flour baby alive in year twelve Health Ed,” she replied.
“RIP Dusty Frost-Hart,” said Ryan, gravely.
“Do you remember the romper suit Aunt Cam crocheted for it?”
“It? How dare you refer to my first-born son as an ‘it.’ ”
“Dusty was a girl.”
Ryan frowned. “I don’t think so.”
“Shewould’ve survived if you hadn’t capsized the boat,” said Fred.
“I wouldn’t have capsized the boat if you hadn’t thrown a box of bait worms at me.”
“I wouldn’t have thrown worms over you if you hadn’t recoiled in absolute horror when I kissed you!”
The words just slipped out; she hadn’t meant them to. They’d never talked about that day, even though it had changed everything. She’d tried to bury her mortification as deeply as their time capsule, but her brain had a way of regurgitating her most cringeworthy moments when she least expected them. Since moving back and finding Ryan to be all manner of ruggedly Highlands gorgeous, the memory of his rebuff had been playing on a loop.
Ryan’s brow creased. “I wasn’t horrified. I just wasn’t expecting to be kissed. You took me by surprise.” He squinted away into the darkness, as though trying to see back through time. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have recoiled. Not until you’d lobbed worms at me, anyway.”
“You literally reared back like a startled horse; anyone would have thought I’d been chewing raw garlic cloves before I kissed you.”
Ryan laughed. “Did I? I don’t know why. It really wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“It was to me! It took a lot for me to do that. I didn’t just kiss any random boy, you know. I was humiliated.” She feltthe familiar embarrassment wash over her. Maybe a sinkhole would open up, and the sand would swallow her.
Ryan looked stricken. “Aww, I’m sorry, I was such a knob back then,” he said, chastising himself. “I never imagined you’d be so upset about it. And then you threw the worms, and the boat tipped over, and Dusty got waterlogged, and we never talked about it again…I guess I thought that was the end of it.”
