“Ha,” she said.
She peeled off her damp top, realizing as she did so that this was an unusually tricky maneuver to pull off in broad daylight without having spent the preceding hours in a bar. Particularly when her brain was shrieking, “It’s HIM! It’s HIM!” at her in a panicky high-pitched voice, and another voice was going, “You’re in your mum’s kitchen! It’s your mum’s kitchen,” and trying not to look at her school photo hanging on the wall above the mantelpiece.
Then he simply leaned forward and kissed her again, and for a moment she couldn’t think of anything else at all.
Her skin was exactly as he had imagined it: pale as milk, white as the sky outside. It was flawless, unutterably lovely. He wanted every inch of it, wanted to see the clouds reflected in those pale, dreamy eyes, to let her hair tumble down her back. His eyes searched her face hungrily, drinking it in.
She pulled back then. All she wanted to see was him, but suddenly the room around her was full of ghosts. No, that wasn’t it. In this strange half-light of the encroaching storm, it felt like she and Joel were the ghosts. That all around them real, normal family life was going on: people shouting and arguing, and playing the fiddle, and looking for homework, and drying muddy boots by the range; she could almost feel them walking through her. She blinked, overwhelmed by the sensations, both past and present.
“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, I am so sorry.”
Joel sat back immediately as Flora felt around for her damp shirt. He held up his hands.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s not that. It’s not you.”
“What’s up?” said Joel, resting his forehead on his hand as he leaned on the coffee table. “Fuck, I want you. I want you so much.” He gently traced the shape of her face. “I shouldn’t have . . . Sorry. I stepped over a line.”
“Oh God, no,” she said, bright pink—how he would have loved to bring that blush to her another way. She stared at the floor. “Sorry.”
He shook himself, and leaned forward.
“It’s okay, Flora.” He tucked her hair behind her ears. “It’s okay.”
He smiled at her, slightly wolfishly.
“Although I will say it’s a shame. It’s one of the very few things I’m any good at.”
Flora’s heart lurched. She couldn’t believe that something she’d dreamed of for so long, lain awake thinking about, was here. And she couldn’t do it. She wanted to cry.
He held out his hands to her.
“Do you want me to go?”
She shook her head fiercely.
“Do you want me to stay and not do anything? Not move?”
She shook her head again. He smiled.
“Do you want me to stay and do other things?”
She nodded, feeling shamed.
“But I can’t,” she said regretfully. “It’s not right. Not here. And you’re my boss.”
He smiled again.
“You know,” he said, reaching out for her, “you know it’s all right to ask for what you want?”
“I do want that,” she whispered, and a tear slid gently down her cheek. “Oh, Joel,” she said. “I’m sorry. I think . . . Oh God. It’s like there’s a hole in me. Since my mum died. I thought I was fine. And now I come back and I’m not remotely fine. And I can’t even . . . It’s like there’s something missing. Even with you.”
“What do you mean, ‘even with me’?” said Joel. “Am I that awful?”
“No,” said Flora, desperate not to give away how long she’d wanted him, completely twisted up inside because she was making such a mess of it.
He sat up on the old kitchen rocking chair and pulled her into his lap. There were two faded tartan blankets on the back of the sofa, and he tugged them over and wrapped them round the pair of them. He just needed to hold her close, not think of anything else.
“What is it?” he whispered.
The tears Flora knew were waiting, so close to the surface, started to pour down her face.
“Oh God,” she said. “It’s . . . coming back here. It’s been so hard.”
Joel frowned.
“I thought you were having a good time.”
“I know, but . . .”
He thought back.
“You didn’t look pleased. That first day.”
“I didn’t think you noticed me.”
“I didn’t,” he said, with some of the clipped Joel she knew so well. “But I caught a sense of . . . reluctance.”
Flora sighed.
“When my mum died,” she said, “there was a big funeral. Everybody came.”
It hurt her to think of it, even now. It had been a beautiful day. The chapel was small, on a little raised hillock, next to the ruined abbey overlooking the bay. It was more ancient than anyone could conceive of, one of the first signs of Christianity on an island that had older allegiances: to Thor and Odin, and before them, to green men and fertility goddesses and the Lughnasa gods of the equinox, and before them, even, who knew?
It was a plain building, with a cross in the churchyard to honor the war dead, the carved names repeated—Macbeths and Fergussons and MacLeods predominated; inside were unadorned pews and hymnals, and little decoration, for the church of the northern islands was austere and preached hard work and no showiness.
As ever, you could see the weather coming in for miles across the long, flat beach, with the mainland just a line in the distance; and the black clouds that pounded up in the lower reaches of the sky were soon overtaken by a line of blue poking through here and there, until finally the entire sky cleared, and a cool white light shone brightly through the plain glass windows of the little chapel.
It had been full to the brim, of course. Everyone was there. Fields had been left to look after themselves, shops untended for an hour or so as people came to say farewell to Annie MacKenzie, née Sigursdottir, who was born and lived on Mure her entire life, whose grandparents had spoken Norn, who had brought up three sons, none of whom, unusually, had left the island—and a flibbertigibbet daughter, of course, who raised a few whispers as she went past: not married, you know, not settled, down there in that London, goodness knows what she was getting up to, probably thought herself too good for Mure these days.
Flora was inured to it, truly, and didn’t really listen, instead accepting the kind wishes expressed about her mum, nodding gratefully, and thanking people for coming.