‘But you still gave up your time,’ Sam said reasonably. ‘And you might enjoy a visit to the Oak. As you’ve probably noticed, it’s had a bit of a facelift. The new menu is great.’
‘But I didn’t win it fair and square,’ Amy argued, her voice brittle and petulant. Thank God Meg and little Pearl– whose behaviour at this moment was decidedly more mature than Amy’s– were already sloping off in the direction of the pub.
‘Fine,’ Sam said, striding towards her stall with purpose. ‘I’ll buy one of your biscuits and then you will have won.’
‘They’re no longer for sale,’ Amy said churlishly.
Sam was standing opposite her now, on the other side of the trestle table– its red-and-white checked cloth covered in chocolate smears and cookie crumbs.
‘Have you gone mad?’ he said quietly. ‘Just give me a bloody biscuit and let’s stop this. People are looking.’
‘Only because you decided to play Prince Charming,’ Amy hissed at him, irrationally angry. ‘I mean it, I amnotselling you a cookie.’
‘Amy,’ Sam sighed, picking up the pink Tupperware container she’d put the last few biscuits in, ‘I was genuinely trying to be nice when I said you could have the dinner.’
‘Bullshit,’ Amy said. ‘You just love that everyone around herethinksyou’re nice. This was a chance to look magnanimous– to be the lord whose largesse knows no bounds. To show off in front of—’
She almost said ‘your daughter’, but stopped herself. It would have been cheap to bring a child into this stupid squabble– and it would have made Amy look as if she’d been snooping, trying to find out about his life.Thatwouldn’t do at all.
As she tried to master herself, Amy thought she saw something like hurt shadow Sam’s sunlit features. Next time she let herself glance at him, though, he just looked pissed off.
‘Amy.I can’t help the family I was born into, but you know as well as I do that I try my best not to let it define me,’ he said in a low, heated tone that made her skin prickle. ‘Generally my philosophy is that what other people think of me is none of my business– but you seem determined tomakeit my business. To prove publicly how much you dislike me, even though we’ve not seen one another in more than ten years.’
‘I—’ Amy started, but the words died in her throat. His righteous anger, plus the presence of a child he might well have fathered, combined to make her question how complete a picture she had of adult Sam, despite her instinct that he’d barely changed since their teenage years.
For a moment, they simply stared at one another. Thankfully, most of their fellow villagers– including Nisha, Grace and Ken– were making their way back towards the bridge or meandering in the direction of the Oak. Amy guessed that, from a distance, it must look as though she and Sam were having a cosy tête-à-tête rather than furiously bickering in hushed tones.
‘Now,’ Sam said, ‘I’m going to take a biscuit and leave you a two-pound coin in exchange, and then you can get your pub voucher from Barb and we can both go home.’
‘No,’ Amy said, insistent for no reason she could clearly define. ‘Give– me– that– box.’
She lunged for it, pulling it back towards her across the table. Sam instinctively drew it in the opposite direction and Amy yanked at it again. They were suddenly engaged in a Tupperware tug of war, which Amy knew on some fundamental (yet conveniently ignorable) level was utterly insane.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Sam seethed.
She was, and she knew it.
‘No,youare,’ Amy retorted. ‘This is … bullying. This istheft!’
‘For the love of God,’ Sam sighed, his fingertips still firmly stuck to the plastic. ‘It’s not theft if I want to pay you for the bloody thing!’
‘Your money’s no good here,’ Amy announced tartly. ‘No doubtthat’sa phrase you’ve never heard before.’
‘Honestly, you’d be surprised,’ Sam said darkly. He leaned forward a little and tried to extract the cookie box from Amy’s grip, pulling it down and towards himself just as she heaved it in the opposite direction.
What happened next was like something from a comedy sketch show. Sam lost his footing on the uneven cobbles beneath his feet, accidentally throwing his weight too far across the already wobbly table– and as Amy pulled the container away from him, he came with it.
At the same time, Amy lost her grip on the Tupperware and fell forward, towards Sam, as it flew out of her hands. Their combined weight collapsed the trestle table, folding it in on itself so that for a few seconds they were sandwiched together, pressed up against one another until the hinge snapped and its two halves flopped to the ground. It was long enough for Amy to get a faceful of the skin between his shoulder and his jaw– and to notice he smelled the same as he had that day in the shop: warm and deep, but fresh as well.
They landed in a heap of soon-to-be bruised limbs, covered in crumbs from the gingham tablecloth, which was now lying beneath them like a picnic blanket.
‘Shit,’ Sam said. ‘Amy, are you okay? I am so, so sorry.’
‘I think I’m all right,’ she said as she scrambled to free herself from the wreckage. Sam was already on his feet, and when he offered her a hand up she wasn’t too proud to accept it.
His expression was pained. Mortified, even. His obviously sincere regret bothered Amy, so she said, ‘It was my fault, too.’
‘Oh it wasdefinitelyyour fault, too,’ he replied. He dropped her hand, then. ‘I’m still sorry, though. I should have known better than to argue with you … We never were any good at just letting things go. I hope you’re not hurt?’
