Colton smiled.
“I think he’ll . . . I think he’ll do well, don’t you?”
Flora nodded.
“I don’t think he’s cut out to be a farmer.”
“I agree,” said Colton.
“AHEM!”
Outside the building, on the lawn leading down to the sea, a small stage had been erected, surrounded by more braziers. It could be better, Flora thought, but it could be worse. She could see it being used for weddings when the weather was nice enough.
Gathered around it, she thought, was all of Mure. Old teachers, old friends who’d stayed, old friends who’d left and were visiting. The butcher, the postwoman, the milkman, the boys from the farmers’ club, and the old men from the bowling. The Norse festival committee and the Fair Isle knitters, who took work on when that island was too busy. She recognized them all, and even the ones she didn’t know personally she saw the faces repeated, saw pale green eyes like hers. All of them looking at her, judging her for going away.
And the face that wasn’t there. Suddenly Flora thought she was going to cry. To collapse, to not be able to dance at all. Her mother had never missed one of her performances—even if, she realized now, it meant leaving the boys alone, leaving Fintan stuck behind doing something—who even knew what? Playing shinty when he didn’t want to? Forced to sink or swim with the bigger boys?
She felt a pang of guilt, followed by an even bigger flash of sadness for the gap in the crowd. Oh God, she missed her mum so much. Even though she’d thought that dancing was embarrassing and stupid and pointless when she was a teenager, she’d known, always, how much it had pleased her mother that she did it; that she was good at it, won competitions and rosettes and cups, none of which she’d even glanced at, simply left behind to gather dust in the bedroom she had never thought of.
She blinked back the tears.
“You okay?” came a voice. She turned round to see Charlie at her elbow. He was wearing a simple outfit—a loose shirt with leather lacing, a muted hunting tartan rather than a formal one. He looked like a man who was born to wear it, which of course he was.
“Oh yes, I’m fine,” she said. “Hi.”
“You look worried.”
She frowned.
“Do you go around telling people to cheer up, it’ll never happen?”
“Oh,” said Charlie, his normal laid-back composure disturbed. “No. Not usually.”
“Sorry,” said Flora, wiping her eyes quickly. “I was just . . . lost in thought.”
“Okay,” said Charlie. He paused. “Are you missing your mum?”
She glanced up at him, struck by the gentle kindness of his words, just as the pipes skirled up into “The Bonnie Wife of Fairlie”, and she was borne along on the tide with the other girls, streaming out past the smoke and the crowds, and completely caught up.
Flora realized she’d forgotten, over the last years of being a comfortable student, then a commuting office drone, how much she’d lost. She’d forgotten how much she loved to dance, especially to live music, which moved in and out of her every pore. She fell completely into it, lost herself to the intricate trails of the sword dance as they jumped and kicked in perfect synchronization, her head whipping past long after the rest of her body had moved; her hair, as ever, starting to fall out of its bun, the pale color reflected in the firelight as the crowd clapped and whistled, and the girls moved, faster and faster, in and out of each other, never stopping, as the music sped up and the flames leaped higher; and Joel, who had arrived late, feeling unusually out of place, mounted the steps from the soft gray lapping water, herons taking off on his approach, and stood at the lit-up entrance of the garden just in time to see her.
She turned her head then, although she wasn’t looking at him, her pale skin reflecting in the firelight, in the happy faces of the onlookers, deep in concentration in the middle of a step, and then she was gone, twirled back into the dance, leaving just an impression of herself behind, her now loose hair darting behind her, and Joel caught himself. And realized. And cursed profoundly.
Because he couldn’t understand how he had never noticed this bewitching girl before, this strange foreign creature; and he was utterly annoyed at recognizing something he now realized he’d known for a while, and his fist curled slightly in irritation.
He didn’t want to . . . Well. For starters, she wasn’t remotely his type. His type very rarely wore kilts and danced through a night that wasn’t dark, on an island that wasn’t anything like or anywhere near any place he’d ever been before, a place moreover that felt itself practically like a dream, with its crags, and birds, and endless seas and ageless people who looked at you from the depths of knowing where they were rooted and where they belonged and always had.
This wasn’t for him. This wasn’t what he wanted. He couldn’t risk everything. Everything he’d fought so hard for, every piece of armor he’d built around himself.
The music skirled faster and faster, the clapping louder and louder.
Joel was not a man given to introspection. He had never found it remotely helpful in his circumstances. And he didn’t want to do it now. It was self-preservation. And it was important. He couldn’t . . . He’d managed for over three decades on his own. He thought about what Dr. Philippoussis would say. “There’s more to life than work.”
And Joel would counter with all the men he knew—and they were mostly men—who did nothing else; who did get married but left their families miserable and lonely to dedicate themselves to the constant distraction work bestowed.
He needed that. It had saved him. Families and personal relationships could not save him. Not in his experience.
He blinked and vowed to find some cute barmaid, someone, something to distract him.
He looked up again, just as she twirled round and saw him, suddenly, for the first time, and her color peaked as she caught his eye and, completely involuntarily, a huge smile spread across his face, and for once in his life, he found he had lost his cool completely.
Joel couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been on his phone making a deal, or chasing a client, or taking a meeting, or chatting up a hot girl in a bar just to prove to himself that he could, or pushing himself beyond his limit at a triathlon . . .