“I did not need saving! And the farm is the other way!” she yelled.
She was jogging to keep up with me, the rain falling hard enough that it blurred my vision and I could taste it on my tongue.
“I’m not trying to go back to the farm!” I lied.
I spotted the island lighthouse perched on the cliff edge ahead of us—defunct right now, its light out of service, but still, somewhere dry to wait out the rain.
“Oh, sure, because why would we want to go—”
“There, the lighthouse!” I said, pointing. “We need somewhere to shelter.”
The lighthouse’s whitewashed walls looked gray and ghostly. Charlie was holding her hood over her hair now, other arm shielding her eyes as the rain came down in torrents. I started to run, and she did, too, jostling past me to overtake. I sped up alongside her, and then we were squeezing between sodden bushes and scrambling up wet rocks shoulder to shoulder, and at some point, one of us started to laugh.
Was it me who started it, or Charlie? I honestly can’t remember, but it all seemed so ridiculous—the two of us, grown adults, soaked to the skin, racing to reach the lighthouse, yelling at each other about pigs and sunsets. I wassowet. And Ireallywanted to get to the lighthouse before her. I personally think I’ve been very mature about sharing my job, lodgings, name and life with this woman, but at that particular moment, I didn’t feel mature at all.
I wanted towin.
We both broke into a sprint as the ground leveled out. When we reached the concrete platform around the lighthouse, neither of us slowed, racing for the shelter under the lighthouse balcony. I touched the wall first, and then Charlie collided with me just as I turned to lean against the stone. She came at me with enough impact to knock me back into the wall.
The next few moments happened so quickly I still can’t untangle it all. Soaked cold skin, hot breath, both of us still half laughing—and my body pressed to the wall, Charlie trying to find her balance…
Her face tipped up. My hand found her waist, to steady her, I guess, or maybe not, because once I had a grip on her I didn’t want to steady her at all. My hand slid around her waist, fingers splayed across her lower back. Her eyes were on my lips. She breathed out once, sharply, and I recognized the sound from when I’d had her underneath me against the farm shop wall. It had been sexy then, but now it was unbearable.
I pulled her against me.
And fuck. I don’t know. My other hand was on the back of her neck, snagging in the wetness of her hair, and then it was happening, I was kissing her, she was kissing me, both of us so drenched our lips were slick and messy and then—
She pulled back with a gasp.
“Oh my God,” she said, chest heaving. “What?”
Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was just the fact it’d been a while. Or maybe it was Charlie, this new real one, rain washed and impossibly tempting with her clothes slicked to her skin. But I wasn’t thinking,What the hell did I do that for?I was thinking,Why am I not still kissing you?
“I don’t…know,” I said.
I was breathless, too. I still had one hand on her, on her waist. It hadn’t felt right just to let her go.
She took another step away, out of my grasp, far enough that the rain hit her. She shrieked and ducked back under the shelter of the balcony again.
“OK,” she said, pressing her back to the wall beside me. “Right. OK. That was…I don’t quite…”
“No. Me neither,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Sorry. I think we lost our heads for a second there.”
“Right. Rain madness. Shall we just pretend that didn’t happen?”
“That sounds”—completely impossible, I thought—“like a good idea,” I said.
I was coming back to the real world again. The world where it’s incredibly weird for me to grab Charlie by the waist and kiss her in the pouring rain.
Funny, because it didn’tfeelweird at all.
Charlie tipped her head back and closed her eyes. With her hair sodden, she had pushed that heavy fringe back off her face, and it totally changed her—I could see the arch of her eyebrows, and the little worried frown between them. She still looked beautiful, but in a different way. Less guarded, more human. I found that I very badly wanted to touch her again. I took a steadying breath.
“I really wasn’t trying to murder you, you know,” I said. “With the rock. And the hike.”
“Well, that was maybe a little dramatic. But you don’t trust me.”
The rain was a sheet of solid gray, heavy enough that it splashed our feet as it hit the concrete. I was still so shaken. I’veneverhad a kiss like that. Not just the intensity of it, but the way it genuinely seemed to come from nowhere. I didn’t think it through even slightly. I was doing it before any thinking had even started. That’s just not…me.
