“But change is a slow process,” Gilly said. “Homophobia has been ingrained into you for the last nearly thirty years – you’re bound to resort back to it at first. I always feel that it’s not your first thought about something that defines you – it’s the second. The first is a knee-jerk reaction – the second is what you’ve taught yourself to think. So if the first is prejudiced, but the second is acceptance, the second is your true reaction, and the true measure of yourself. Do you see what I mean?”
“I do,” Saskia had sniffed.
“And I forgive you,” Lydia said. “I forgave you the moment you first apologised. The remorse was pouring down your face. You can’t fake regret like that.”
It was just a shame that Saskia was unable to forgive herself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kivi
Kivi couldn’t sleep.
She went through phases of this. Had done ever since the situation with Gareth and Drew. Most nights, she was asleep practically as soon as her head hit the pillow, but now and again her mind would spin too fast, putting sleep out of the question.
Tonight was one of those nights.
It seemed that she had been wrong about Saskia after all. Her little eating foibles had all but disappeared. Over the last week, since they’d visited the caterers, she’d seemed a bit brighter. Gone out for daily walks along the beach, even on the days her work took her out in her car for interviews or research. She had started to engage with other guests, even making friends with elderly Mr O’Leary and interviewing him about his childhood in 1940s Ireland for some article or another. And empty plates had returned to the kitchen at almost every meal. It was immensely gratifying for Kivi to see.Thank God I was wrong. Everything seems fine.
Of course, Saskia’s new ebullience only increased Kivi’s attraction to her. Which was most annoying. Kivi had neverbefore desired aguestin that way. Sure, she’d felt it before for Lillia, so it wasn’t new to her, but it was unwelcome. What were the chances of Saskia being attracted to women? Especially having mentioned male exes. Not to mention the fact that she was both a guest and, in a sense, a kind of colleague. She was proving to be a very useful sounding board for the wedding, but if they were to start a relationship, that could all be put at risk.
None of that seemed to be stopping Kivi’s feelings, though.
That night, when it hit two o’clock and she was still wide awake, Kivi snapped on her light, sat up and felt for her slippers. She wasn’t going to be sleeping any time soon. She might as well get up and kill off a few brain cells with her laptop instead.
But instead of opening a streaming site or her online eBook reader, she found herself Googling Saskia Saltmarshe. She presumed that was her professional name, and immediately the search engine popped up with countless results.
The first was a website. A very professional, glossy, sleek-looking website that Kivi contrasted with her own outdated, clunky one for the guest house. Perhaps, if she still couldn’t sleep later, she could start planning a re-do of it. She clicked through the various pages – for inspiration, she told herself, although her eyes lingered longer on the pictures than she would have liked to admit. The slide-show of pictures on the home page were clearly from a photoshoot. Close-ups of Saskia’s eyes, of her at a laptop looking corporate, of standing with her hands on her hips looking defiant. In the latter, her red hair glowed like a beacon, her lipstick-clad lips were pursed, and like with their trip to the caterers last week, she was wearing pink. Kivi had a vague idea that redheads wearing pink wasno-buenoin fashion. It was just like fiery Saskia to stick a metaphorical two fingers up at that. Out of nowhere, Kivi’s body responded with a flutter.Oh, for God’s sake.
Saskia had clearly had a busy career.Chicamagazine had a whole page on her, rammed full of her articles, to the extent that Kivi had to stop scrolling because all the titles were making her eyes ache.She selected one at random, something about kitten heels and everything that was wrong with them, and flicked her eyes through it, but the topic failed to catch her.
She had better luck when she clicked off theChicawebsite altogether and found a more recent article from last year. This was clearly after Saskia had decided to go freelance, because her tone seemed more… raw. More authentic. More like the Saskia she knew. This article was about celebrity weddings – ironic, since she was now planning the wedding of Eulalia Gray’sdaughter. Peppered with dry wit and sarcasm, giving celebrity couples a veritable roasting for their wedding choices while making it abundantly clear that she held no actual malice whatsoever, Kivi found herself chuckling at them.She claims to know nothing about weddings, but she actually knows more than she thinks.
What else have I yet to discover about her?
It seemed that Saskia had been hard at work over the last year or so, because there were tons of freelance articles out there. Some were as recent as the last couple of weeks – clearly ones that had been published since Saskia had been staying at Sandy Dunes. The thought that soon, articles that she hadwrittenwhile at Sandy Dunes would adorn the Internet, made Kivi’s heart unexpectedly warm. Just like the pictures she had shared recently on her Instagram account – one of the beach, one of Lygate shopping centre, a couple of various meals or snacks she had had recently. One was Kivi’s.I helped these happen!
That warmth was addictive. It made her sure that given half a chance, this crush on Saskia would develop into something deeper and harder to shake off. Saskia was scheduled to leavein just under four weeks. Kivi couldn’t afford to fall for her, for crying out loud.
Not all of her brain agreed with that, though. Particularly not the part responsible for controlling her mouse. Because quite without conscious input from her brain, she found herself going back to the very start of the search engine’s results, and clicking on ‘images’. Suddenly, her laptop screen was full of Saskia.
“Oh, God,” Kivi murmured. Seeing the beautiful face repeated again and again, in varying states of fierceness, happiness or coldness, was a metaphorical assault on her body. A fire began to burn in her stomach, quite a different kind of warmth to the one she had just been feeling, and it quickly moved to a location slightly lower. Kivi continued scrolling. Pictures of Saskia receiving awards. Pictures of Saskia giving speeches, standing at a lectern looking as if there was no other place on Earth she would rather be. Pictures of Saskiagivingan award, if the caption of the picture from Sheffield University was anything to go by. In this one, Saskia actually looked rather gaunt, smiling as if it was something she was forced to do rather than from actual joy. The picture was from the middle of winter 2018, a season that Kivi recalled in particular as being a bad one weather-wise. Perhaps Saskia had been recovering from a cold or something like that.
As the images went on, they got more and more vague. Soon, half the pictures weren’t evenofSaskia. Most were of other redheads, the Internet algorithm perhaps clutching at straws having not expected her to scroll down this far. The ones that were of Saskia were older and more obscure – another one from Sheffield, clearly where Saskia had been to uni. This one was of Saskia with a man who had similar red hair and sharp features.Her brother!She had mentioned being a twin at one point the other week, and Kivi had forgotten to ask her more about it.
Then came the one Kivi had been waiting for without even realising it. Her eyes moved past it at first, not even realising it was her, then her heart skipped a beat. It was a selfie of a young girl with long red hair, taken sideways on, masked with some blue-ish purple-ish filter that probably explained why Kivi hadn’t identified her straight away. Saskia was probably only about thirteen or fourteen in the picture, which put it at around the mid-2000s. The Twitter account associated with it was under the username ‘sassy_sassy_s’, which just fit. Perhaps ‘Sassy’ was a childhood nickname, or perhaps it was just Saskia’s very accurate self-description. Wanting to know more about this young version, Kivi clicked on it. To her surprise, the account loaded with no problems.
As she had expected, the last post from this account was from 2008. Saskia was born in 1992, according to the Internet, making her fifteen or sixteen in this last post. The bio read ‘Sassy and don’t care if you don’t like it, if you don’t like it then look away, your loss’.Blunt and honest!The cockiness of a teenager. The final post was something about Ruthie Henshall onDancing On Ice,a TV show that Kivi had never managed to get into anyway. But she scrolled further back, and soon she was intrigued. Half of the posts were funny, fluffy, light-hearted stuff, tagging friends and sharing jokes that probably made sense to them at the time. And then others were surprisingly political. She’d posted something about how anti-monarchists should live under a dictatorship – ‘they’d come running straight back with their tails between their legs’. She loathed the Prime Minister the UK had had at the time – ‘a war-loving leftist prat with no sense of the real world’, she’d written in one scathing post.
And then the one that made Kivi’s heart sink.
‘They say‘hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation’is going to be illegal, right? They never heard of free speech and having opinions? smh’
Interesting. What else do you have to say about sexual orientation, hmm?
She didn’t have to wait long to find out.
‘Just walked past two lesbos flaunting their lesbianism – disgusting’
