‘Stop!’ The tears collecting in my lower lashes finally break free.
It’s been about two weeks since the good-looking, blue-eyed barista at the café next to Seaglass started getting artistic with my coffee. He began with birds – simple seagulls flying in the sky – but my face must’ve lit up as he slid the cuptowards me because he gave me the sweetest smile and I felt his eyes on me the whole time I was paying up.
When I next went in, he drew the profile of a plump little bird on top of my latte.
‘Sparrow?’ I asked with a smile.
‘I think it might be a robin,’ he replied in an Australian accent.
‘Cute.’
From birds, he graduated to an outline of a cat, following it up with a dog.
‘You should have started with a fly and a spider,’ I joked.
He cocked his head to one side, amused but perplexed.
‘The old lady who swallowed a fly?’ I prompted. ‘You don’t remember that rhyme?’
‘Oh, yeah!’ he exclaimed, full-on grinning at me. ‘My nan used to sing it to me.’
‘Was this back in Australia?’
‘Accent give me away, did it?’ he asked, his eyes full of humour as he pushed his beach-blond hair back off his face.
Total surfer vibes.
‘Just a bit. Where are you from?’
‘Sydney.’
‘Are you here for the summer?’
‘At least. I’m on a year out, but so far I’m liking Cornwall.’ He grinned and folded his arms across his chest, an action that made his biceps pop.
I felt oddly unstable as I walked out, as though the concrete floor had turned to sand.
Yesterday, he asked me what my favourite animal was. I said a giraffe. He took a bit longer with that one and it wasn’ta complete success – he went with a face instead of a whole body and it looked more like a cow than anything – but we both had a bit of a laugh and I left saying that I couldn’t wait to see what he came up with tomorrow.
‘Something good, I promise,’ he called after me.
And lo and behold …
‘What did you do when he handed it over?’ Rach wants to know as she lays her towel out on the sand.
‘Blushed.’
‘And then what?’
‘That girl he works with burnt her hand on the panini-maker so he rushed over to help,’ I reply as she removes her Sam Fender tour T-shirt, revealing her army-green tankini top underneath.
She’s worn the death out of that tankini.
‘Go back and ask him what it is,’ she suggests as I balance my coffee cup on the sand.
‘No! It’s an elephant! Ofcourseit’s an elephant.’
I pull my yellow summer dress over my head and kick off my flip-flops, looking around for my hot-pink beach bag.
