Love always,
Gully
Gully
ONE YEAR TEN MONTHS AFTER NEW ORLEANS
My mouth was dry and my heart was racing faster than it had any right to. I hadn’t seen Iris for months, not since before she started dating Theo the Twat. Theo the Twat had recently had a few difficulties obtaining credit, but that was something I didn’t know anything about, because plausible deniability and all that.
It was my twin who had the details.
I had other details I didn’t want to share, ones that were currently buried deep inside a vault in my chest. Ones I wasn’t sure what to do with or what to say about or what to decide. Inside that vault was a maelstrom only found in the harshest of storms and I knew only too well what damage a storm could do.
I stood at the door to my home, the sky granite, the sea behind me without any shade of blue.
Iris had called me to let me know she’d crossed over the bridge and was on the island, which meant she was about twenty minutes away, if she didn’t get lost.
She wouldn’t get lost. She’d travelled extensively, been to more countries than anyone else I knew, visited more cities andstayed in more hotel rooms. She wasn’t going to get lost between crossing the bridge and arriving here.
So it was a countdown.
I didn’t know what I was counting down to exactly. We had a lot to talk about, and there might be decisions made in the next few days or weeks that would change the course of both our lives and those around us.
I was also counting down to seeing her.
Iris.
The woman I’d fallen in love with one year and ten months ago.
Reading her words about how she’d fallen in love with someone else had been painful. They’d felt like daggers driving into my chest every time I’d tortured myself with rereading them, which I did because apparently I was a masochist. I’d wanted to rip Theo’s head off when she’d phoned me in the early hours of a Sunday morning to tell me what he’d said about her and Ivy. It’d taken a fuckton of willpower not to confess there and then that I was in love with her and I’d give her everything if she asked, including following her around the world because I could write from anywhere, but I hadn’t.
I hadn’t because in the year and ten months since we’d had that one night stand in New Orleans with the sounds of Mardi Gras in the background she had never said anything that hinted she wanted a repeat.
So I was here, in Puffin Bay, pining over a woman I knew would never be mine and completely unable to move on. A woman who was now asking me to have a baby with her.
Her car reached the electric gates, which opened because I’d already pre-programmed her registration in about ten monthsago when we’d last thought she might visit. It was a red SUV, splashed with mud, the hairstyle of the driver one I hadn’t seen before.
I walked down the drive to where Iris was parking, the chill of the wind fierce and foreboding, as it always was at this time of year. I’d lived here for more than five years now and I knew the tides and the winds and the skies as well as I knew myself.
We were in for a storm, but a winter one. Tomorrow we’d have rain and wind, but it would settle, and by the weekend, there would be a truce.
Iris fought with the wind for control of the car door as she opened it. I grabbed the handle and held it firm while she got out.
“Holy fuck, it’s cold.”
She wasn’t wearing a coat, understandably, because she’d spent fuck knows how many hours driving and a bigger than normal gust of wind whipped across my drive at exactly the wrong time.
“It is. Let’s get your stuff in and warm up. The fire’s set.” I went round to her boot, opening it up and pulling out two of the suitcases, full size. Iris didn’t travel light.
“This place is amazing.” She looked around the outside of the house and up at the sky, reaching into the car boot for her photography bag. “The scenery on the way in was so dramatic.” She looked at me, eyes slightly glazed, probably at the prospect of taking photographs of a new place. “I’ll drive you mad this week trying to get my bearings.”
“I can cope with that.” There’s a lot I would cope with. “I can take my laptop and find a café to write in while you do your thing.”
She shook her head, apparently no longer feeling the cold. “Oh no, I want you in these shots. You know I only really do scenery if there’s a person in it.”
This was true. Iris specialised in portraiture, but she couldn’t say no to a decent panorama.
“Let’s get inside before you freeze.” I closed the car boot. There was still stuff in there, but I’d fish it out later. I wanted her indoors so she could see the home I’d created and the views across the Strait.
