Читать книгу Letting You Go - Anouska Knight - Страница 10

‘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. Not yet.’

‘Alex, he can punch me all he likes if it makes him feel better. It won’t change anything.’

‘I know. I just … don’t want you to say anything that …’

‘But I want to. I want to say it to him. I love you, Foster.’

‘I love you too.’ She really did. It was the only certainty. But Finn’s expression had already changed.

He cut her a smile and nodded softly to himself. ‘I know you do, Foster. You just don’t want anyone to know it.’