Natalie hadn’t looked at her phone all evening. The realization hit her as she finished her glass. Hours. She’d been sitting in this booth for hours without once checking it. In LosAngeles that would have been impossible. In Los Angeles her phone demanded constant attention, pulsing with notifications that each carried obligation. Here it was a dead thing with nothing to say that couldn’t wait until morning or never.
The main bar had emptied to a handful of people. Trish moved behind the counter, wiping the wood, gathering glasses, cleaning the taps in the same sequence she’d done countless times before. The lights were already half-dimmed.
Emma slid out of the booth first, stretching her back with a sound close to a groan. Her arms reached overhead, lifting her blouse enough to show a strip of pale skin at her waist. Natalie looked, then looked away.
They crossed the main bar. Trish looked up from her wiping and caught Emma’s eye. Something passed between them too quickly for Natalie to read.
“Night, Trish.”
“Night. Get home safe.” Trish’s eyes moved to Natalie, and the nod she gave was warm and uncomplicated and carried nothing that required return beyond a nod of her own. “Night, Natalie.”
“Goodnight.”
And then they were outside. A few people were outside the chipper, sitting on the windowsill with a bag of chips or a burger.
As they left the village, Natalie looked up at the stars.
It was a clear night. The Milky Way stretched across the sky, surrounded by thousands more stars scattered in patterns Natalie had never learned. She’d grown up in a city where three stars meant a clear night. Here there were so many they blurred at the edges of her vision, the whole sky bright and deep.
She tilted her head back and breathed.
“Another thing you only get here?” Emma asked, stopping to look up.
“Yeah.”
They walked side by side, their footsteps falling into rhythm as they left the village of Kilvolan behind and turned down their narrow road with grass sprouting up in the middle of the lane.
Neither of them spoke.
Inside the pub, conversation had flowed easily, one story spilling into the next, the pints smoothing every transition until hours felt like minutes. But out here in the dark, the air between them had changed. Not uncomfortable. Not strained. Just different from what it had been inside, with the music and noise and other bodies around them. Out here, it was just the two of them and the road and the silence.
Natalie stumbled. Her heel caught a loose stone, and her ankle turned.
Emma’s hand closed around her forearm, steadying her. The momentum brought them shoulder to shoulder.
Emma held on a second longer than necessary, her fingers firm against Natalie’s forearm. Then she let go, her hand returning to her side.
“Alright?”
“Yeah. I guess I’m not as sober as I thought I was.”
Emma made a sound—not quite a laugh, more like an exhale.
They kept walking. Natalie’s forearm was warm where Emma had touched her. She tried to file it away with everything else from tonight—her crush on Trish, the confirmation that she was interested in women. But the warmth remained.
Natalie was so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t realized how close they were to home. Emma’s home on the right, Gran’s on the left.
“Goodnight, Natalie.” Emma’s face was half-lit by moonlight. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for inviting me. And happy three years. I’m glad I got to celebrate it with you.”
A smile. Small, genuine. Then Emma turned and opened her gate. The hinges creaked—the same sound they’d always made, as familiar to Natalie as Gran’s kitchen door. Emma’s boots found the path and carried her into the darkness of her garden.
Natalie stood still and listened.
Footsteps on gravel. The scrape of a key. A wooden door opening. Then closing.
Silence.
