‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this.’
‘It’s nothing bad,’ he said, shuffling from foot to foot. ‘Why would it be?’
He looked so crestfallen at my reaction I felt a stab of guilt. ‘Sorry, of course it isn’t.’ I looked up at him. ‘So, are you going to tell me what it is?’
‘In a minute.’ He turned and headed into the house and I followed him, mystified. I glanced into the living room as we passed, and checked round the kitchen as we entered, but there was no sign of anything untoward.
‘You need to go and get changed,’ Greg said, turning to face me.
‘What into?’
‘Something warm.’
I frowned. ‘Okay.’
‘I’ll wait here for you,’ he said.
Taking that as my cue to leave, I headed upstairs to get dressed.
‘Will this do?’ I said as I re-entered the kitchen. There was a cool box on the worktop, but Greg was nowhere to be seen. I reached over to lift the lid.
‘No peeking!’ Greg’s voice made me jump and I leaped back guiltily. He grabbed the cool box by its handle and hoisted it over his shoulder. ‘Ready?’ He held out his other hand and I grabbed it, enjoying the familiar warmth of his palm.
‘I guess so.’
We made our way out of the house and I climbed into the passenger seat of the car as Greg put the picnic box in the boot. As we drove, I tried to work out where we were going. The houses thinned, dwindling to nothing, and the landscape opened up, the sky expanding above us like a giant umbrella. Rain spattered on the windscreen and the wipers squeaked it away every few seconds, the rhythm soothing. We were in deep countryside now, the lanes narrowing, although no-one else seemed mad enough to be out in this weather. I turned the heater up and the mist cleared from the bottom of my window. I pressed my forehead against it and watched the bare trees whip past like stickmen keeping guard.
Finally, Greg turned down a narrow track. It was full of potholes and it felt as though my brain was rattling around in my head as we inched along, branches brushing the side of the car. The raindrops had turned to fat, pillowy splodges now and the wipers sped up, sweeping them away frantically. The trees had closed in on us, ominous, threatening, as though trying to stop us from going any further. We trundled on regardless.
The rain had slowed to almost nothing by the time we rounded a bend and the canopy of trees opened up before us, revealing a stony sky and a darker lake, the sky reflected back angrily in its choppy waters. The clouds hung threateningly close to the treetops as Greg pulled up in front of a scruffy shack with grime-smeared windows, its wooden slats painted a faded pale blue.
‘Ta-da!’ he said, cutting the engine.
I looked round, confused.
‘Where are we?’ I said. I’d lived here most of my life but I’d never seen this lake before.
He shuffled round in his seat to face me and took my hands. His felt warm.
‘Do you remember when we used to go rowing on the lake, back in Nottingham? Way back in the olden days, when we first met?’
I smiled. ‘Of course. It was our thing. Although you rowed and I talked, mainly.’
He grinned. ‘That’s true. But I never minded.’ He swallowed and looked down, then back up to meet my eye. ‘The thing is, I loved you even then. Well, you know that.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The point is, for me, those were some of my favourite times. When it was just you and me, and no-one else could get to us. I wanted those hours, those days, to go on forever.’
He squeezed my hands gently.
‘I wanted to recreate that feeling. I wanted…’ He stopped, and when he spoke again there was a tremble in his voice that hadn’t been there before. ‘I wanted you to remember how much you loved me. Love me.’ He dropped his gaze to the floor and I felt something inside me melt at his vulnerability.
‘I do love you,’ I whispered.
He seemed to flinch, as though he could detect something in my words that wasn’t quite sincere, and pulled his hands away.
‘Anyway, I know the weather isn’t quite up to the long summer days when we used to do this, but I thought we could take a boat out, just the two of us.’
I looked out at the rough water, which churned and rolled against the bitter winter wind, and shivered. ‘In this?’
