She did the same, wincing at the sour-sweet tang of her drink. ‘We’ve driven each other to drink and it’s only been a few hours,’ she quipped.
The joke caught him around the middle and squeezed. He tried to laugh, but the way she peered at him showed it hadn’t worked.
‘Bad joke,’ she muttered, staring into her glass. With a deep sigh, she looked him square in the face. ‘So, what are we going to do?’ Her direct question reminded him of the friend on the other end of the chat; someone he’d sensed was as lonely as he was. That history hung between them like a suspension bridge over the chasm of things that complicated their lives.
‘I made you an invitation and I’m not going to rescind it because of a misunderstanding.’
‘Are you sure it’s okay?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’ He felt a prick of guilt. After impressing on her his need to be honest, that statement hid part of the truth. Romantic involvement with someone was out of the question for him and she’d been just as clear on that, but he had a spark of a bad idea about kissing her anyway.
‘All right then. We stick to plan A,’ she said with a nod. ‘Friends, as though nothing is different from how we expected it.’
‘Friends,’ he repeated, holding up his glass one more time.
She managed a stronger smile as she tapped her drink against his. Bracing herself, she slid down the rest of her digestivo and set down the glass with an audible tap. ‘Thank you – for everything.’
‘I will do what I can to make you comfortable,’ he promised. He would say nothing more about attraction and sparks and loneliness. Although feeling them might be bad enough.
6
She might have been all too aware that life never turned out the way she expected, but even Toni’s acceptance was stretched by where she found herself that evening as the sun projected its long rays over the rippling sea. She was in the little blue car she’d pictured from Gabri’s message, but instead of a typically Italian retro-style compact in a pastel colour, it was a new, silvery Fiat 500e, a quiet electric vehicle that hummed futuristically rather than burring around the bends in the road.
And instead of a laughing woman she could talk to all night, the driver was…thisGabri, with his hairy arms and unexpectedly intense blue eyes.
Only the view of the sea was exactly what she’d hoped for, flashing glimpses through the trees as the car weaved along the coast in the direction of Marciana Marina, half an hour away. The road seemed to float by the water, with a steep drop on one side, down to the hidden coves. On the other side was a hillside, sometimes rocky and sometimes lush with trees and bushes.
Her phone vibrated and she fetched it out to see a message from her mum, asking if she’d arrived safely. Sending back aquick affirmative, she was about to stow her phone again, when her mum replied:
And how is Gabri? Just as you expected?
That was a question she could not answer truthfully.
Exactly x
She shoved it back into her bag to ignore the lie.
The quality of the evening light, the shades of green and ochre and the parched, red earth were so unlike the golden coastline of Weymouth. It wasn’t a bad place to put down roots, but noticing the different varieties of trees, the taste of herbs in the air, made her realise how much good it would do her to see something different.
Imagine showing Cillian all this.
He wouldn’t appreciate the trees and the soil, but he would store some impressions from this place in his childhood memories and she was looking forward to watching him. By the time he arrived, she would hopefully have got to know the area enough to pass something on to him.
She would get to know what Gabri showed her of his island.
He was such a mystery, sitting next to her in the driver’s seat, whistling out of tune. She suspected he didn’t realise he was doing it. Instead of the breezy single woman Toni had pictured, here was a divorced and wary man. It now seemed obvious that, rather than simply omitting the topic of romance, they’d both actively avoided it over the period of their online acquaintance.
He navigated the route through the back streets of Marciana Marina to the forested hill on the other side, with the crowns of enormous pines rising in front of glowing silver cliffs.
‘These are the first slopes of Monte Capanne, the highest mountain on the island. It is mostly a nature reserve and ifyou come in October, we are all very busy collecting chestnuts. Although half of the people on the island in summer are tourists, there are never too many in this part.’
‘You told me about the hikes here,’ she commented as the road climbed and narrowed to little more than a concrete track. There were dwellings hidden among the trees on the hillside, marked only by small gates with house numbers tucked between the long tongues of succulents, the silver of olive trees and rhododendrons with isolated blooms, long after the flowering season. She could understand why someone who loved plants would live in a place like this.
She’d assumed Gabri had always been a florist, but he’d made a comment about his mother judging his new job and now she had so many questions.
‘Did I… How did I describe my house again?’ he asked, a faintly self-deprecating smile on his lips.
‘I think your exact words were, “It’s not the Hilton”.’
