“Look,” I said. “This. Us. As in, the job mix-up. It’shardto trust you—don’t you feel the same about me? I can’t work out why you’re here, ultimately, and without that, I—” I pushed my wet hair back. “It’s just averyweird coincidence.”
She looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers together. They were white with cold. I wanted to pull her into me again and warm her up. It was such an odd impulse, right there in the middle of a conversation about how hard it is to trust her. I’ve never wanted to hold someone I’ve known so little—not like that, anyway, not the way I wanted to hold Charlie.
“So what’s your explanation for it all?” she said eventually. Her voice was trembling, too—we might have moved on from the kiss, technically speaking, but we were both still vibrating with it.
I thought about her question. I’ve thought about this a lot.
“I can’t figure it out. But I can’t shake the thought that the job was mine and you tried to take it for yourself. You got a copy of the acceptance letter somehow, saw an opportunity…”
“I’ve thought the same about you, obviously. That you’re pretending you got the letter.”
She hadn’t looked at me since the kiss. She stared out at the steady, endless rain.
“I was surprised when you arrived. If I was stealing the job from you, I would have expected you,” I said.
“Same goes for me.”
Shehadlooked surprised when we met. Shocked, actually, with her scratched-up legs and her sweet blue dress, staring at me open-mouthed.
“I’ve been choosing to believe it was a mix-up between Rosie and Marly,” she said. “I find it makes me less annoyed about having you around.”
It was refreshing to talk this way, with a stripped-back version of Charlie, who was honest about wanting me gone.
“Whenever you’re with Rosie and Marly, you act like you’re happy to share this job and everything else with me. But I know you’re not. Why has it taken this”—I meant the rain, the rock, not the kiss, but as I said it, the meaning shifted—“for us to finally have a proper honest conversation about it? Why are you always being so”—I couldn’t think of a kinder word for what I wanted to say—“fake?”
“Iamhappy to share,” she said, as if catching herself. “I am. It’s fine. I can handle you.”
Her eyes flicked to mine for the tiniest moment, a glance through her eyelashes. I swallowed, caught off-balance—she’s gorgeous, she just kissed me, Ialwayslove her eyes on me—but I kept pushing. I was getting close to something real.
“I think you’re nice to me in the hope I’ll be nice back,” I said. “Because otherwise, I might try to work out how you got this job. I might want to know what game you’re really playing.”
“You make me sound like some kind of evil mastermind. I’m almost flattered.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“Me neither,” she said quietly.
She turned her head and looked at me properly at last. The eye contact sent a lightning bolt through me, the same way the kiss had. What is it about this woman? When she’s not with me, I think about her; when she is, I can’t look away. And yet she’s still such a mystery to me. No matter how much I stare, I never get more than a glimpse.
“For what it’s worth, I’m not putting on some fake persona because I’m a job-stealing con artist. If I’m being fake, it’s”—she huffed a laugh—“wishful thinking, I guess. I wanted to be someone new when I came here. Someone better. Broderie dress, high ponytail, competent, independent.” She went still, as though something had struck her. “The sort of woman who could do it on her own.” She laughed suddenly. “God, I’m such a joke.”
“Do what on her own?”
“Never mind.” She squinted out into the darkness. “Come on. I think the rain is getting a little lighter out there.”
“It’s definitely not. Don’t stop talking now. I like you like this.”
“What, angry?”
“Open. Candid.”
“You’re very emotionally aware for a man.”
“You know, that’s the second time someone has told me that today.”
I really thought I’d been doing quite well at the gruff and unapproachable thing. I guess not.
Charlie was quiet for a while, but she made no further movement to step out into the rain.
