I smiled. I wanted to saturate my life with his weirdness. ‘Tim and Albert will miss you too.’
Aster’s hands flew to his mouth. ‘You called him Albert. You really do love me.’
I grinned. ‘I really, really do.’
Aster’s arms wound around me, pulling me impossibly close. ‘This is fucking incredible.’
‘Better than snowy mountains? Or the sun on the water? Or the dolphins?’ Errol piped up.
‘Yup.’ The thick thread of contentment in Aster’s voice made up for not having a clue what Errol was on about. ‘Callum is better than any snowy mountain slash hill and he’s prettier than the sparkly water and he’s way fucking sexier than any dolphin.’
I pulled back to look at him. ‘Thank you?’
Aster beamed at me. In his face, I saw my home and my future. He was everything. ‘You’re most welcome,’ he said, before tugging me into another kiss.
EPILOGUE
LUCAS
TWO MONTHS LATER
‘Look, Lukey. Can you see those teeny-weeny dots? Those will be your best friends from now on. Except for me, of course. Not even the most wondrous pygmy goat—and those fuckers are pretty wondrous—could usurp me. Would a pygmy goat save your life four times like I have? I think not. They wouldn’t even save mine once, and that was a goat I’d formed a freaking bond with. Did I tell you about when I got trapped under a boulder and Albert abandoned me?’
‘Yeah, you did.’
My words didn’t deter Aster, like I knew they wouldn’t. He babbled on about how he’d been mortally wounded after he’d purposefully tripped into a valley. The first couple of times Aster told me this story, I asked him to explain exactly what tripping purposefully looked like. The resultant demonstrations weren’t worth the damage to both my person—bruises on my cheek and chest—and property—I’d stopped buying any lamp that cost more than a fiver years ago.
Aster nattering in the background, I gazed at the approaching island and wondered—not for the first time—how I’d ended up here. I understood the literal logistics—it wasn’t like I’d fallen into a waking coma for the past two months—but between Aster barrelling into my examination room while I manipulated a golden retriever’s anal glands and stepping onto this boat, there was a step missing.
I hadn’t, at any point, actually agreed to come here.
At first, I’d been caught up in Aster’s excitement. It was impossible not to be. He’d been a different person since coming back to London. Still his distractable self, but quieter. Some of it was steadiness that came from being madly in love and being madly loved back, but some was sadness. He’d told me in a great rush about his time on the island—with far too much detail about his and Callum’s sexual exploits—and how they had fallen in love and he was returning to the island after he finished his master’s.
We’d sat and stared at each other for long seconds after Aster’s monologue, then both promptly burst into tears.
Aster living on a remote island in the back end of nowhere while I lived in London had never been the plan. We had separate lives, separate dreams, but one thing that never changed when either of us imagined our futures was our proximity to each another. His trip to Scotland was the longest we’d spent apart since Aster sat down next to me in preschool and explained at length why I should share my cookie with him.
I wasn’t sure I’d agreed to that either, but his pudgy hands had split the treat in two and we’d smiled at each other as we chewed. Best friends, instantly.
Melancholy lingered between us since Aster came home. He’d gotten everything he wanted. A dream job. A dream guy. But it came at a cost.
That’s why, after he crashed into the examination room then promptly exited when he saw where my hand was, I’d been swept up in his wild enthusiasm. He shouted through the firmly closed door that there was a vacancy for a vet on the island. He’d already applied for me. And after a recommendation from my boss that Aster had extracted through a combination of perseverance and bribery, I’d been offered the job. Which he’d accepted on my behalf.
We’d come up with our signatures together. Sometimes our ability to commit forgery was helpful. Sometimes it was not.
What followed were weeks of Aster gushing over how much I was going to love the island and shopping for an improbable amount of thermal underwear, which he said I’d thank him for when winter came. He’d enrolled me on a short course on goat care that filled my evenings.
There wasn’t a pause when I could consider if this was what I wanted. It made my best friend too happy for me to utter a word of doubt.
Mum was no help. She’d been hinting for months that it was time I moved out and spread my metaphorical wings. I thought moving hundreds of miles away would dampen her enthusiasm to oust me, but she hugged me and said how proud she was. I worried about leaving her alone, while she happily made plans to convert my bedroom into a craft studio.
Even Aster’s dad, usually the voice of reason, didn’t make a peep. Maybe because—like me—he’d been too saddened by the Aster we’d said goodbye to before he went to Scotland.He was a wreck. Jamie did a number on him. The smiling Aster we got back was too good to let go of. Harry had even been talking about how he’d always wanted to retire to a rural community.
So here I was. Sea breeze lashing my hair away from my forehead. My eyes fixed on the steadily growing mountains. A path set before me that I hadn’t planned on, but which seemed to make everyone around me ecstatically happy.
Maybe I was happy too. I wasn’t too sure about leaving London, but if the choice was between living in the city without Aster or on some random island with him, then the random island won every time.
He grabbed my hand where it clutched the boat’s railing. ‘Everyone’s come to welcome us. Lukey, you’ll get to meet the whole gang at once.’
