The Things I Know(42)

Hitch clapped and squealed. ‘She loves you! She loves you!’

The words left her mouth like a song and Grayson looked up at her. There was a beat of quiet while he straightened to face her and the morning sun lit him from behind like a halo. Hitch captured the image like a photograph and stored it in her mind, there for perfect recall when she was walking alone down by the river or driving the lanes in the dark.

‘Does she?’ he blinked.

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I think she does.’

The two stared at each other in silence for a moment or two.

‘I think I’m going to miss you, Grayson.’ She spoke softly, her throat tight with emotion.

He nodded. ‘Me too.’

‘I feel as if I’ve been in a clothes dryer and everything is a bit upside down and my stomach is churning, and I like it, but I don’t know what happens next and that feels scary.’ She bit her lip, hoping he might take the initiative, clear a path for the future. His words when they came left her cloaked in disappointment.

‘I’ve written my address and number on a piece of paper and left it by the side of the bed. If you need anything, if you want to come and visit or if you’re ever passing . . .’

She gave a nasal laugh of derision. ‘If I’m ever passing? Okay. I don’t even go into Bristol, so that isn’t going to happen, is it? But thank you.’ She wasn’t sure if leaving his address was an invitation or a kind dismissal.

‘I guess I could . . . I could come back and—’

‘When?’ She jumped in, thankful for the bolt of optimism that fired through her, thinking that to make a date gave them a foundation on which they could build.

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed with a look of confusion. ‘I have to go to work and—’

‘It’s okay, Grayson. I get it. Maybe it would only make it harder, having to say goodbye again – or worse, making a plan that you can’t stick to. I mean, it’s a bit crazy, isn’t it? I’ve only known you for a couple of days and it’s been nice, so nice. I can’t tell you how low I was until you arrived.’ She paused. ‘But maybe now it’s time to get back on with real life again.’

I can say this easily enough, but my heart is aching and the words cut my throat like glass . . . I want you to want me. I want you to say you want me! I feel desperate at the thought that this is all we’ve got! I want more, Grayson – I want more of you!

‘Do you mean that?’ His breath came quickly and he looked pained.

‘Well, of course I mean that! I don’t want you to make a promise you can’t keep and I don’t want to think we’re heading in one direction when we might be heading in another. That’s not fair on you or me.’ She stared at him, cursing the tears that gathered at the back of her throat.

‘You’re such a good person, Thomasina. And I don’t want to make you a promise I can’t keep, no matter how much I want to.’

She folded her arms across her chest, as if this stance could deflect the verbal blows of disappointment. ‘I like your honesty and the fact that you never tell a lie. And I don’t regret anything.’ She spoke with a wobble to her voice. It was important he knew this, as again the picture of them on the riverbank in the moonlight sprang into her mind.

‘I don’t regret anything either, quite the opposite. I don’t only think you’re a good person, I also think you’re smart and beautiful.’

‘God, Grayson, you don’t see me how other people do!’ she said, laughing.

He stared at her. ‘Well, that’s good. I don’t want anyone to see you how I do because they might just be slicker than me, less weird, and that means you might choose to be with them. Someone who knows how to dress and stuff.’

‘Someone who understands the offside rule?’ she joked painfully, trying to raise a smile.

‘Exactly.’

With the back of her hand, she wiped the tears that had finally found their way to the surface. ‘I don’t feel as if I get to choose anything right now.’

‘I guess not,’ he said softly, ‘but it’s not that straightforward, is it? It’s life. It’s geography and it’s circumstance and, until I can figure all that out . . .’

He let this hang, but she took little comfort from the thin sliver of hope he cast in her direction.

‘Or until I can figure all that out . . .’ she said, matching his sentiment, reminding him that this was a two-way thing, tired of the feeling that her parents steered her own ship of fate, as surely as if they were on the high seas in a boat crafted from the timbers that held up the roof of the farm. It was, she realised, maybe about time she became the captain of her own vessel, forged her own future. After all, if she was, as Grayson said, a good person, smart and beautiful, what was to stop her?

‘Can I ask you to do something?’ he said, with a catch to his voice.

‘What?’

He held her gaze and reached for both of her hands. ‘Tell people not to call you Hitch – tell them your name is Thomasina.’

‘Why?’ She freed one hand to swipe the tears defiantly from the top of her cheekbone with her fingertips and then placed her fingers back in his palm.

‘Because it’s important.’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘But it’s not important, Grayson, not really.’