Chapter 1
Okay, so the thing about Blackstone Falls is that it is categorically, objectively, measurably too small.
I knew this before I moved back here. I know it now. I knew it in the way you know something when you’re making a decision you have mostly already made, and the knowledge is sort of decorative, not functional. Like... yes, small town, yes, everyone knows everyone, yes, this will be fine. I will simply exercise self-control and personal growth and pretend to be a woman who has her life together.
I do not have my life together.
I have my hair together, which is purple currently and extremely perfect. I have my tights together, which are the stripey ones that Candy says make me look like I’ve escaped from a children’s television programme, and I say make me look excellent. I have approximately three-quarters of my life together if you’re being generous and probably more like sixty per cent on a bad day, and the point is...
The point is him.
The point has been him for eight months, and I would very much like it to stop being him.
Candy, my best friend and current employer, pours me a second glass of wine before I’ve finished the first one. Which is either a kindness or a warning, and with Candy it’s usually both.
“You’re fine?” She looks at me suspiciously.
“I am,” I repeat.
“You’ve said fine four times.”
“It’s a good word.”
“Bubbles,” she says in warning. She only ever calls me Bubbles; everyone does. I’ve been Bubbles since I was seven years old because of an unfortunate incident with a bubble machine at my cousin’s birthday party that I am not going to get into right now. "You don’t have to be fine.”
“I’m aware,” I said. “I’m choosing fine. Fine is my choice. Fine is what I’ve decided.”
She gave me the look. Candy has this look, right, where she just looks at you, and somehow looking contains an entire paragraph of things she is not saying because she knows you’ll get there eventually and because she has the patience of an absolute saint, and it is the most annoying look in the world and I love her completely.
We have a wonderful evening, and she is kind enough to allow me the lies I tell myself.
Her boyfriend picks her up on his motorbike, and they wave goodbye as they ride off into the night. I smile at their retreating forms, happy that they found each other. Candy needed somebody like Bear.
Outside is cold, and I am warm from the wine, and the night has that quality it gets after a good evening with a good person. Like the world has rounded off its corners slightly, like everything is a bit more manageable than it was three hours ago.
I have my bag on my shoulder. I have my walk home ahead of me. My legs know the way. My brain is doing a pleasant nothing, something I am rarely afforded. Usually, my mind is a constant noise of thoughts ricocheting off one another.
I take three steps down the pavement.
“Margaret.”
Oh no.
Oh absolutely, categorically, completely no.
I keep walking.
“Margaret.”
That voice. That specific, unhurried, never-once-raised voice that somehow travels at precisely the same volume regardless of distance. Like it has some kind of built-in targeting system that only works on me, which is an incredibly arrogant design feature and I resent it entirely.
I turn around.
I know. I know. I said I was walking. I was walking. My body made a different decision, and my body and I are going to have words later, in private, about teamwork and consistency and the fact that we had a plan.
Dagger is outside Lexis, leaning against the wall as though he belongs there. Which he does. Which is the problem. Which is one of approximately nine hundred problems with this situation, starting with his greying temples and ending with the way he’s looking at me right now.
He is always looking at me like that.
I have spent eight months developing a comprehensive immunity to being looked at like that.
The immunity does not work. The immunity is a lie I tell myself The immunity has the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.
“Good evening,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say.
He pushes off the wall. Easy and unhurried. He crosses to me in the way he moves through most spaces, like he has already decided where he’s going, and the space is just catching up. He stops close. Not touching. Just close.
The warmth of him arrives, and my nervous system does its thing immediately. Before I’ve even properly registered that he’s stopped moving, some ancient, deeply inconvenient biological response says yep, that’s him, noted, here we go, and I take a step back. My shoulder blades find the wall of the building behind me, and I have been outmanoeuvred by a pavement.
He doesn’t press in. He doesn’t need to. He just stands there in the loose easy shape of a man who has all the time in the world, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, close enough that looking straight ahead means looking at his chest, and my heart is going at a speed that has absolutely nothing to do with the wine.
I am furious about this.
“Don’t call me that,” I snap.
“How long?” he says.
I look up at him. “What?”
“How long are you planning on ignoring me for?”
“I’m not ignoring you,” I retort too quickly.
He looks at me.
“I’m in the same postcode as you,” I say. “I serve your friends coffee. I see you regularly. That’s not ignoring, that’s-”
“You haven’t looked directly at me in eight months,” he says. “You know where I am in a room before you walk in. You adjust your route based on where I’m sitting.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “That’s not not ignoring me. That’s ignoring me with your full attention.”
I open my mouth.
I close it.
The absolute nerve. The completely characteristic, totally unsurprising, absolutely infuriating nerve of this man to stand here on this pavement and be right about things, calmly, whilst standing close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, and my traitorous nervous system is staging what can only be described as a full mutiny.
“I need space,” I say.
“Eight months is a lot of space.”
“I have a lot of feelings.”
“I know,” he says, and his voice drops slightly, the low register I have a documented and humiliating physical response to. “That’s what I’d like to talk about.”
“Well I wouldn’t,” I snap, pushing at his chest to get some physical space. “I’m going home. Don’t-” I point at him, which probably undermines the authority of the statement somewhat. “Don’t Margaret me. Don’t do the sexy ass voice. Don’t stand here being all-” I gesture, somewhat vaguely, at all of him. “All of this. I’m going home.”
“How long, Margaret,” he says again, quiet and even, like we’re having a completely reasonable conversation and I am not currently gesturing at him on a pavement at half ten at night.
“I don’t know,” I say, which is the first true thing I’ve said since I turned around.
Something moves across his face. Not triumph. Something quieter than that. He looks at me for a moment, and then he steps back, giving me the space he always gives me, the space he has always given me without making me feel bad for needing it, which is one of the nine hundred problems, actually, one of the biggest ones.
“Goodnight,” he says. Not Margaret this time.
He didn’t say Margaret that last time. Just goodnight. Just that.
I don’t know why that’s worse.
I walk home slightly faster than strictly necessary, and I think about absolutely nothing the whole way, which is a lie, which is the biggest lie I’ve told today, and I’ve told a few.
