‘Right.’ Alex fiddled with the peak of his cap, pulling it down and throwing his pale-blue eyes into shadow. ‘Well, then.’
Seeing him start to move back towards the dinghy, Kate darted forwards and grabbed his hand. ‘Where are you going?’ she said.
‘Back to the boat,’ he replied, as if that much was obvious. ‘To give you some time. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Well, then. You know where to find me when you’re done thinking.’
‘Please don’t be like this.’ Kate was close to tears now, but she let go of his hand. ‘I want to explain. This thing with me and James, it’s complicated. I need to allow myself time to digest what he just said to me. At the moment, I feel so angry with him, with the whole bloody situation, but I owe it to him to at least think it through.’
‘This James is the same man you told me about? The same guy who humiliated you, made you feel worthless, left you broken-hearted?’
‘He did do all those things,’ she agreed. ‘But he’s also the man I spent eight years with, the man I wanted to marry and have a family with, the person I came to Croatia for.’
‘What do you mean?’ Alex looked puzzled.
‘I thought if I disappeared, went missing for a while, that he would realise how much he missed me, how much he still loved me.’
Alex flinched as if she’d spat the words at him, his hand tightening on the dinghy line.
‘And I’m guessing your plan worked?’
Kate could only nod.
Alex looked down at his bare feet, his face contorting.
‘I don’t want to fall out with you,’ Kate pleaded. ‘I care about you and I hate . . . this,’ she said, throwing up her hands in exasperation.
Digging in his pocket, Alex extracted a silver coin. The way he threw it up and caught it each time was so nonchalant, so utterly untroubled, that Kate wanted to snatch it out of the air and hurl it into the water. She knew it wasn’t fair of her to be angry with him, that he’d done nothing but be kind to her, but this pretence he was putting on was infuriating.
‘You shouldn’t care about me,’ he said flatly, watching the coin rather than her. ‘Nothing good ever came of anyone who cared about me.’
‘Now you’re talking in riddles,’ she said despairingly. ‘I do care about you – of course I do. That’s why I’m confused. James is a big part of my life, I thought he was going to be my future. Then I met you and . . . well, everything changed. I love who I am with you, I do,’ she said earnestly, seeing a flicker of hope transform his features. ‘But I also know next to nothing about you. If you could just open up to me or share a bit more . . . I want this to feel real.’
‘You know me,’ he said, his voice unsteady.
‘No, I don’t.’
Kate waited until he looked at her before continuing.
‘All I know is that your name is Alex and that you maybe, once upon a time, lived in the west of England. I know you like fishing and that you build things from wood and carry that bloody coin around like some sort of good-luck charm. I know you’re angry with me right now, but most of the time you’re angrier at yourself, or with the world at large, and I don’t know why. I don’t know your last name, or who your parents are, if you have any siblings or what you wanted to be when you were growing up. And I want to know it all, Alex, but you won’t let me. Why won’t you let me in?’
Kate had been speaking so quickly that she’d run out of breath. Now she wanted more than anything to gather the words back, to try and make sense of everything she’d said to him. The outburst had come from nowhere, but it must have been gathering pace in her subconscious for a while. Alex had obviously realised the same thing; he looked sad now rather than disgruntled, and Kate longed to draw him against her, to listen while he explained, to heal any wounds he might have – but she could not summon up the strength required.
‘I’m sorry. I should go,’ she said, stopping as he reached for her hand, his fingers squeezing hers for the briefest moment. His face was a mask, the pale-blue eyes she’d lost herself in so often now blank and unreadable. Taking back her hand, she turned to leave.
‘Kate.’
‘Yes?’
He looked at her then, really looked. There was a moment when it seemed like Alex was about to let her in. Then his face shuttered, and it was gone.
‘Nothing. You’re right. You should go.’
Biting back a sob, Kate turned away and headed slowly back up the slope away from him. Such were her mixed feelings of shame and confusion that she barely registered the faces of those she passed on her way along the coastal path.
It was only many hours later, when she was huddled alone in the darkness of her hostel bedroom that Kate remembered what Alex had been doing when she found him. Opening up the translator app on her phone, she typed in the name Alex had painted, a single tear falling across her cheek as she saw the result.
Okretan was the Croatian word for Nimble.
He had named his boat after her.
Chapter 43
It took Kate a while to pluck up enough courage to switch her phone back on, but when she did, she found no messages waiting. Not from James, not from Alex, not from anyone. Not even a notification telling her she’d amassed another two hundred Instagram followers on her Unexpected Items account could rouse her spirits.
What did it matter? What did any of it matter?
Opening Twitter, Kate typed #WannabeWife into the search bar and scrolled through the multitude of comments and posts until she found the original video. Every time she’d watched it, she’d done so through self-critical eyes, ripping apart everything from her choice of words to the shape of her figure, berating and trashing and condemning both herself and her actions.
Tonight, she wanted to try something different.
The footage began halfway through her attempts to call the room to attention, the scrape of the chair as she dragged it across the floor doing most of the hard work for her. A cheer rose up as Kate clambered onto it, her guests quickly fanning out into a semicircle around her, presumably anticipating a speech about how she felt to be turning the dreaded three-o.
There had been none of that, though. Nothing about her at all, in fact. Even on her thirtieth birthday, at a party arranged by her best friend to celebrate her life, Kate had deferred to James.
‘There’s a very special man here tonight,’ she said, and there was a murmuring from the crowd, followed by a few ‘awws’ as someone nudged James forward. Watching it now, Kate could see the back of Robyn’s sleek shiny head. Her friend was already making her way to the front, had sensed trouble almost as soon as Kate stood up on the chair. The first time she’d noticed this, Kate had felt ashamed. Poor Robyn, being lumbered with such a walking disaster as a best friend. This time, however, she forced herself to view the situation through Robyn’s eyes, and found nothing there but concern and affection.
The video played on.
Kate had told the room a few of the reasons why she loved James so much, only realising now that every single point she listed reflected her in a poor light. Poor long-suffering James, she had said, what a hero he is for ‘putting up with me’, ‘taking care of me’, ‘loving me despite all my many failings’. It was not so much a proposal speech as an exercise in public self-flagellation.
Searching the crowd for James, Kate saw from his side profile that he was nodding along, agreeing with her as she lauded his capabilities and called for him to be awarded some sort of medal for having endured eight years in her company.
Nodding in agreement.
Whoever was holding the camera then whispered to the person next to them.
‘What is this, the British Academy of Good Boyfriend awards?’ to which their amused neighbour replied, ‘Poor James.’
Upon hearing this for the first time, Kate had felt mortally wounded, but now she was simply annoyed. How dare they poke fun at her? It had been her party, her bar tab, her
speech. They were obnoxious imbeciles.
‘So, I should get to the point, shouldn’t I?’ said the Kate in the video, and this was met with a rumble of jeers and whoops. Everyone had known what she was going to say before she said it, and many were gleeful at the prospect of witnessing such a huge romantic gesture.
‘James,’ she began, staring down at him. Kate knew that her eyes had been watering at this point, that her knees had trembled, and her heart had felt like a trapped bird, but on the screen in front of her now, she appeared calm and composed – determined even.
‘You know I love you,’ she went on. ‘More than anyone and anything else in this world. All I want in my future is to be with you, for the two of us to be together for the rest of our lives.’
The room had fallen silent now; only the faint sounds of the pub downstairs were audible.
‘James Frederick Clifford Morrison – will you marry me?’
The person filming gasped in unison with the assembled guests. James’s face turned to stone. Kate, up on her podium, continued to smile.
The heckles began.
‘Start with an easy one!’, ‘Go on, Jimbo – don’t leave her hanging!’, ‘Say yes! Say yes! Say yes!’
Whoever had attempted to start a chant had quickly trailed off, realising perhaps sooner than Kate herself that this proposal was not going to end well.
Wiping the tears from her cheeks now, Kate studied her small hopeful form, feeling not frustration or distaste but pity. Sorrow for a woman who had put her heart on the line and seen it torn asunder.
The video continued to roll, capturing the moment Robyn stormed through in rescue, Kate almost falling off the chair and James, surrounded by his friends, laughing nervously and wiping his brow.
‘How embarrassing,’ said a voice, and the screen went black.
Kate lowered her phone. She was no longer crying. After all, she knew how this story ended. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Twitter users who had shared and viewed and laughed over this most hopeful of beginnings, she could say with confidence that the woman in the video was not ‘sad’, ‘desperate’, ‘deluded’ or ‘pathetic’. In the weeks since she’d become the thing she feared the most – a public failure – Kate had found her passion. She had crafted and created, turned trash into treasure, called out her fears and faced her anxieties head-on. The love she’d thought was treacherous had endured, and she’d welcomed it, trusted it, believed that she deserved it – but most importantly of all, Kate had somehow learnt to love herself.
And that, she now knew, was the only thing that really mattered.
Chapter 44
It was two days before Kate saw Alex again.
Two days of composing messages she then deleted and of wandering along the coastline hoping to see his boat. Torn between her guilt at having run to him in the wake of her conversation with James and frustration at his refusal to open up when asked, she’d concluded in the end that it was probably best to wait for him to reappear in his own time.
She’d not contacted James, nor heard from him. They were back where they’d been all those weeks ago – in a stalemate. Kate was still processing how she felt about his unexpected proclamation, but she’d at least realised now that it was not going to be a simple case of resetting the clock. Things between them had changed. She had changed.
Alex did not send a message or call, he simply reappeared. Kate came out of the coffee shop to find him leaning against the opposite wall, his red ‘Croatia’ cap pulled down and his hands buried deep in his pockets. When he saw her, he tried for a smile, and Kate did not hesitate to smile back.
‘Hey, stranger,’ she said, walking towards him with her arms folded. She and Lovro had been painting walls today, and Kate’s dark-red curls were peppered with fine white splatters.
‘Hey,’ he said, meeting her gaze. ‘Are you free for half an hour or so?’
Instead of heading down into the hub of the old town, Alex led her through the cobbled backstreets until they reached a wide, open pathway halfway up the hillside. An untended churchyard lay below them, its monuments overgrown with ivy and wildflowers, and a small herd of nanny goats grazed in a dilapidated paddock above. Toby had warned her that rain would be on the way soon, but there was not so much as a hint of that today. The sky beyond the rust-coloured rooftops was a dense, impenetrable blue, the heat rough and dry.
Alex crossed to the rough stone wall separating the path from the undergrowth and rested his elbows on the top, his eyes focused ahead towards the horizon. After a moment, Kate went to stand beside him, waiting in silence while he gathered his thoughts.
‘I owe you an apology,’ he said. ‘For the way I was the other day. It was wrong and I shouldn’t have been so short with you.’
Kate forced the words ‘it was all my fault’ back down and merely nodded instead.
‘Truth is, I haven’t met anyone like you for a long time,’ he said.
‘Like me?’
‘Someone I like. Someone I care about.’
‘Oh.’
Kate edged closer to him, feeling him relax a fraction.
‘When you told me that your ex had been back in touch, I wanted to be there to help, to comfort you, but I convinced myself that it was easier to walk away.’
‘I should never have gone running to you right after I spoke to him,’ Kate said. ‘That was unfair. I know that now and I’m sorry.’
‘I thought you might have gone,’ he muttered. ‘Flown back home to be with him – but you haven’t.’
‘No.’ Kate smiled. ‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m glad.’ Alex turned to face her. ‘I might have missed you a bit if you had.’
‘Just a bit?’
‘Quite a big bit. A Lovro pizza slice-sized bit.’
‘That much?’ Kate widened her eyes. ‘Now you’re just flattering me.’
Alex stretched out a little finger and stroked it against hers. The lightest of touches, it caught the air in the back of Kate’s throat. She could hear the insistent beat of her heart; feel the heated tiptoe of desire – or was it appeasement? Relief that he still wanted her.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said,’ he told her. ‘About wanting to know things about me, needing more from me than I have given you so far.’
‘I do, but—’
Alex turned back to gaze at the view. ‘You were right to ask,’ he said, shaking his head as she went to disagree. ‘I do want to be honest with you, but it’s hard for me. Trusting people never has come easily, not since I was a child. I grew up feeling let down by a lot of the people around me.’
‘By your family?’ she guessed, but Alex shook his head. ‘No – they were great.’
Did his use of the past tense mean they were no longer alive?
‘You’ve probably wondered why I stage these disappearing acts every so often,’ he went on. ‘The thing is, you see, I get overwhelmed from time to time. I fall into this darkness and I can’t always get myself out of it again – not easily anyway. Sometimes, the only way to see and think clearly again is to be by myself for a while. I don’t want to be a burden, see?’
Kate took his hand. ‘You’re not a burden.’
‘You say that,’ he replied, not meeting her eyes. ‘But you haven’t seen me at my worst, on my very darkest days. I’ve always been this way; always had to survive on an endless cycle of highs and lows. It’s like a bloody fairground ride that I can never get off. When I feel at my lowest ebb, the only thing I can do is wait it out and it’s better I do that alone. There’s no pressure then, see? Nobody there to witness it. I hate the thought of that.’
Kate’s heart went out to him. ‘But you shouldn’t have to cope with that alone,’ she said. ‘And if you’ve never let anyone in, then how do you know that it wouldn’t be better with someone else there?’
‘I did try,’ he tempered. ‘A very long time ago. But all I felt was guilty, and that only made it harder to deal with.’
‘I understan
d,’ Kate told him truthfully. How much of her own anxiety had she kept hidden? How often during times of stress had she struggled to sleep, struggled to think straight, struggled to breathe?
Alex listened in silence as she explained this, confessing a truth of her own in exchange for a fragment of his. They were so similar, the two of them, so tied up in knots by the idea of causing anyone concern. But while Alex was still blaming himself, Kate had begun to recognise the need to be more accepting of herself. She would help Alex do the same, just as he had shown her how to master her fears.
‘Why don’t we agree to be that person for each other?’ she said, sliding a timid arm around his back. ‘Someone we can rely on to never judge us, however much we mess up?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice muffled by her hair. ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’
‘But you can try.’
Kate could feel the steady beat of his heart as she leant against him, read the vulnerability in his pale eyes as he looked at her.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I can try.’
Kate pulled him gently around until they were standing face to face and reaching up, removed his cap.
‘I used to think that tall, clean-shaven men were my type,’ she said lightly. ‘Shows how little I knew.’
‘Hey,’ he scolded gently. ‘You’d better not be mocking the dreads.’
‘Always,’ she retorted cheerfully. ‘And the beard, too, for that matter. I continue to live in hope of you shaving it off.’
‘Does it scratch you?’ Alex pulled back.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But it would be nice to see more of your face. It’s one of my favourites.’
‘Only one of?’
‘Stop baiting me for compliments.’
Laughing, Alex bent his head to kiss her, gently at first but then with an urgency that turned her limbs molten. Kate was all at once overcome by a delicious, insistent warmth. She felt a thrumming pulse begin to beat below her belly button and arched herself against him, needing to feel the solidness of his body, the confirmation of his desire, the wonderfully simple yet undeniable yearning they each had for the other.
The Getaway: A holiday romance for 2021 - perfect summer escapism! Page 26
