Alex hit the button on her phone and listened to the most recent of Jem’s voicemails. Jem’s words reached up over Alex’s collarbone, conquering the silence of the cubicle, pressing in on her with the same cold claustrophobia as the swimming pool.
Mum’s sick … suspected stroke … need to come home.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.
Alex held her breath as if she were still in the pool and hit redial. She waited – Mum’s sick … Mum’s sick … with each impatient second.
‘Alex?’
‘Jem! What happened? Is she OK?’
Everything around Alex had faded into oblivion. Jem was talking in whispers. ‘I’m not supposed to have my phone on. We don’t really know yet for sure. Malcolm Sinclair found her. At St Cuthbert’s. In the churchyard. Alex, I … I can’t …’
‘Slow down, Jem! Where is she now? Where’s Dad?’
‘Kerring General. We’re here now.’
Jem wasn’t a crier, even when she was a kid. When Robbie Rushton stuck a drumstick through her spokes and Jem had flown straight over her handlebars she hadn’t cried, she’d pinned Robbie to the ground instead and given him a dead arm. A whole week had gone by before anyone had realised Jem had fractured that wrist, the same one she’d used to punch Robbie with. But Jem’s voice was wavering now. This alone made Alex want to cry immediately. She clamped a hand over her mouth in case.
‘They’re all over her, Alex. They said time was the most critical thing but Malcolm got her here really quickly. We’re so lucky he was in the churchyard, Al.’
Suspected stroke. The words swirled in Alex’s ears like trapped water. Blythe didn’t like a fuss. To be bundled into Malcolm Sinclair’s police car and rushed anywhere would have been beyond mortifying for her. ‘She’s going to be OK, isn’t she, Jem?’
There was a flurry of activity in Jem’s background, Alex strained to make any of it out.
‘You know Mum … tough as Dad’s old boots.’ But Jem had hesitated.
Alex looked at the scant belongings she had with her. The urge was there – keys, coat, get home to Mum – and then the inevitable thought.
Dad.
Alex forced herself not to think about what she would say if she went back up there. She could already hear the first whispers in her head … This was always going to happen, Alex, eventually. You knew that. Because every one of Dill’s birthdays without him had been one too many, and there was only so much quiet heartbreak the human body could take, even her mum’s.
No. She couldn’t go up there. It would be better for everyone if she didn’t. One less thing for them all.
‘Alex, are you still there?’
Alex took in a deep breath, just to remind her lungs that they still could. ‘I’m here.’
Jem sniffed. ‘Alex?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You need to come home.’
‘You need to come home.’
Alex inhaled, deep and steady, filling her lungs with as much of his delicious scent as possible.
‘I don’t want to hide behind a phone, Foster. I want to do this properly. Show him how serious we are, about doing things right.’
Anyone would think Finn was going to ask for her hand in marriage. They were a cool billion light years from that. Well, maybe they could just make it out of their teens first, at least.
Alex watched the candlelight dancing over the far wall, laying soft shadows over the edge of Finn’s face. They’d synchronised, his naked torso rising with breath as hers gave its own away. Rise and fall, the movement subtle like a gentle tide, so slight and easy it felt as if she might not need oxygen at all any more. He was enough.
Finn had a look of curious wonder in his eyes, a need finally met. Perhaps it was just the play of the light over his face, but Alex felt that way too, as if she’d made it to where she was always supposed to have been. She thought she’d be embarrassed, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world, to lie here beside him now, skin cool and sticky from their first adventure of each other. She never wanted to move again, her body wasn’t finished nuzzling in the glorious afterglow of what they’d finally just done. What she already needed to do again.
‘I missed you, Foster.’
Alex held back the goofy grin trying to make its way over her face, as if too sudden a moment might make it all disappear again like an illusion. ‘I missed you too, Finn.’
His face was close enough to her that she could see tiny flecks of hazel in the green of his irises, the contours where laughter had left its footprint in the lines beside his eyes. Finn ran his fingertips from Alex’s hip along her naked spine and began trailing delicate circular shapes over her shoulders. Alex felt her goose-pimples rise to greet him. Finn had found her again. He’d come all this way and he’d found her.
Alex reached her fingers to tease a lock of hair behind his ear. She’d been so buried in her coursework she hadn’t noticed the sudden arrival of winter in the city, not until she’d watched it walk in on the ends of his hair. She’d opened the secured door of her student halls and there he was, waiting under a tree, pearls of new snow clinging to the same long layers he’d worn through college. Nearly two hundred miles and he’d been standing there as if the end of the earth wouldn’t be too far.
‘Your mum told me how to find you,’ he’d said. And that was it, the snowflake that tipped the avalanche.
It was a perfect crisp November night and they’d spent it, some of it, talking through the year they’d spent adrift while the Old Girl had carried on flowing and the world had carried on turning. And now here they were, naked and blissfully fatigued in a single bed in a pokey little bedroom in a student house a million miles away from Eilidh Falls. And it was perfect.
Blythe had given Finn the address. Alex sent a quiet thank you out into the snowy darkness and hoped her mum would somehow feel it and think of Alex and Finn right then. Blythe was a sucker for a good love story; she’d probably compared theirs to the kind of love all of Blythe’s favourite operas were made from. Of adversity and triumph and explosions of something precious happening between two people. Luminous and powerful, darling! She would say. Love as beautiful and terrifying as a bolt of lightning!
Finn propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What are you thinking about?’
Alex’s hand naturally migrated to the hardness of his stomach. The grin got the better of her as soon as she opened her mouth. ‘Lightning.’
Finn’s mouth gave in to a smile too. He was still beautiful; the tiny scar Ted’s wedding band had left over the bridge of his nose hadn’t changed him. A monster had risen in Alex’s dad that night. Thankfully, none of them had ever seen it since.
Alex didn’t see Finn’s head furrow. ‘OK, so what are you thinking about now?’
She didn’t want to let any more thoughts of her dad in. ‘Nothing,’ Alex replied but she already knew it was too late. She stroked Finn’s side. A futile gesture, as if she was trying to tame a piece of her coursework before the clay hardened and left her with something incomplete, misshapen.
‘Let me tell him, Alex.’
‘No.