‘Give me an hour,’ said the hot butcher in a low Scottish burr as I sheepishly handed the empty tray back across the counter. ‘I’ve got an order coming in, there should be enough to pull together the same again, give or take.’
‘Amazing. Thanks, mate, you’re a life-saver,’ Joe replied, handing him the other trays of meat to go back in the fridge while I hovered behind him, an anxious mess of deep bows and prayer hands.
‘Mostly scared of her mother,’ the butcher countered. ‘She’s a very exacting woman. Last month, she returned a chicken because the legs were different sizes.’
They both gave me a look, as though I was the one who went around judging chickens on their appearance.
‘He shouldn’t have skipped leg day?’ I offered.
Neither of them laughed. Harsh but fair.
‘We’ll leave you to it,’ Joe said, catching my wrist in his massive hand and leading me back out of the shop.
‘What are we supposed to do for the next hour?’
Joe flashed his eyebrows and I exhaled an unimpressed huff.
‘All right then, we’ve got two other options,’ he replied. ‘We can either stand here and argue for another sixty minutes or we can go for a walk. Lady’s choice.’
‘Walk where?’ I asked, turning in a circle and seeing nothing but green. ‘The pub is too far away and I don’t think we’d be able to kill much time at the post office.’
‘You know you can put that back in the car,’ he said, nodding at the tote bag on my shoulder. ‘It’s not going to disappear again.’
‘No way. It doesn’t leave my sight.’ I was holding onto it so tightly, the sharp edges of the hardback book dug deep into my ribs. ‘What if I leave it in the car and the car gets stolen? Or it gets so hot in there, my computer explodes? Or—’
‘Sixty minutes of arguing it is,’ Joe declared happily. ‘Not what I would’ve chosen but—’
‘Fine, we’ll walk!’ I muttered. ‘Even though there’s nothing to walk to.’
‘Are you joking?’ He strolled ahead of me on the narrow footpath and waved his hands around at my alleged nothingness. ‘Maybe I’ve spent too long living in cities but this is beautiful. It’s called the countryside, Sophie, you don’t have to do anything, you just exist in it. Appreciate it for what it is.’
‘Oh, god, you’re one of them,’ I groaned, clutching the straps of my bag.
‘One of who?’
‘One of those awful city people who only leave London twice a year and think it’s hilarious to say things like “Ahh, fresh country air” every time they smell manure.’
‘There’s nothing like a bit of cow shit to clear out the lungs,’ Joe said, inhaling deeply until the buttons on his shirt began to strain across the chest. ‘Like it or not, you’re stuck with me until Braveheart back there can replace the chicken you dropped, and unless I’m very much mistaken,youowemea favour.’
‘And this is how you want to cash it in?’ I looked out across the patchwork quilt of fields that rolled off into the horizon. ‘On an unplanned rambling expedition?’
‘You say unplanned rambling expedition, I say spontaneous outdoor adventure.’
‘And what if I don’t want to go on a spontaneous outdoor adventure?’
‘It’s too hot to sit in the car but you’re welcome to wait outside the butcher’s like a badly behaved Labrador,’ he replied helpfully. ‘Or you can stop being a brat, get your arse over here and come with me.’
‘I’m not being a brat,’ I argued, even though I definitely was. I couldn’t help it, he had an uncanny ability to bring out the absolute worst in me. In fact, he seemed to have a direct line to all my baser instincts, something that became painfully clear as I watched him hop up onto the wall, his khaki-coloured trousers pulling taut across his backside as he went. And on top of that, he was impossible to read. One minute he was all slick charm and double entendres, the next he could almost pass for a decent human being. There was no way to know which one was the real Joe and I wasn’t about to risk my sanity to find out simply because he had a spectacular arse.
Objectively speaking.
‘There’s an ice cream van parked over there,’ he called, pointing off down the field as I ventured overtowards the wall. ‘Hurry up if you’re coming, I want a Mr Whippy.’
‘It better be proper ice cream or we’re not having it,’ I shouted back. ‘Those soft serve machines are full of bacteria.’
‘That must be what makes it so tasty.’
My legs wobbled as I clambered up the wall, tote bag banging against my hip, old stone scratching against my jeans. Once I was positioned on top, one leg dangling on either side, I saw that the drop down to the field was far greater than from the street.
