Page 42 of All Summer Long

‘You basically just spoke another language,’ Alice laughed, laying his food in front of him still on the paper and sitting down opposite him to the same. ‘Biscuits with dinner? That’s every kind of wrong.’

He shook his head. ‘You’d get it if you tried it. Heaven on a plate.’

Alice didn’t reply. They both knew that he wouldn’t be taking her for meat and three anytime in the future. They had only here, and now, and fish and chips straight from the paper. She watched him eat as she poured the fizz.

‘This is good,’ he said, squeezing a heavy dose of ketchup onto the paper, warming her insides with his praise even though all she’d done to make dinner was queue up for it.

‘Your British fans would probably die on the spot if they could see you right now,’ she said, and the shift in his expression from relaxed to guarded happened in an instant, just as it had earlier when she’d asked him to bring his guitar.

‘Good job they can’t then,’ he said, shutting her down.

The problem was that Alice knew from experience that rug-sweeping emotional problems was an approach that didn’t work. It might, for a while, but you ended up eventually with a hump beneath the carpet that you’d keep tripping on until you sorted it out, and if you left it there for too long you might just fall and break your neck. She’d allowed herself to use that approach over the last year of her marriage to Brad, and she was still trying to stamp the stubborn kinks out of that particular damn rug.

They ate slowly, making small talk, luxuriating in the simplicity of each other’s company, and Alice avoided saying the things that were on her mind until she’d screwed up the discarded food wrappers and Robinson had refilled their glasses. Darkness had blanketed the woods, turning the fairy-lit tree house even more fairytale.

‘I like this dress on you,’ Robinson said, running his finger beneath the slender strap as they curled up together on the loveseat she’d placed on the balcony for prospective residents to stargaze.

She smiled and kissed his fingers, resting her head back on his outstretched arm.

‘Stars are out,’ she said, her eyes picking out the great bear and the little bear nestled beside it. She’d spent countless nights as a child studying the skies flat on her back beside her dad, some of the most precious memories she had.

He followed suit and tipped his head back too. ‘Same stars, even on the flipside of the world.’

‘There are some things you just can’t outrun,’ she said, turning her head towards him.

Robinson sighed. ‘Out with it, Goldilocks. There’s something on your mind. Tell me what it is.’

Alice sat up with her feet tucked beneath her, her body angled towards his. She nodded slowly, unsure how even to say the things in her mind, and unwilling to break the easy comfort of the time they shared together.

‘It’s this place,’ she looked around the wood. ‘And us,’ she added, ‘and you.’

‘That’s three pretty big things,’ he said. ‘Start at the beginning. This place. You mean the manor?’

Alice nodded. ‘I love Borne, Robinson. I love the village, the people, and the manor. When Brad left he left me with very few alternatives to packing up and leaving too. I couldn’t keep up payments on a place like this, so I made the choice to rent it out rather than lose it. Everything is only just making it, I cross my fingers before I open bills and hope the bank manager doesn’t send for me. I feel like I’m trying to hang on to the stars, running in high heels; I go to sleep scared tomorrow will be the day I realise I’m going to lose it all.’

Robinson rubbed her shoulder absently. ‘I know how it feels to lose almost everything you love, Alice. I envy you for still loving the place you call home. It’s good that you still have that, even if you’re having to share it temporarily with a reclusive cowboy.’

She laughed softly. ‘I’m glad you’re here. When I advertised for someone to rent the manor, I never imagined that someone like you would come.’

‘Someone like me?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know how much better you’ve made things for me,’ she said, her fingers rubbing back and forth over the collar of his shirt. ‘I’m not lonely any more, and I don’t spend my time obsessing over what or who I’ve lost. You’re kind of curing me of loving Brad McBride, and for that I’ll be forever grateful to the cowboy who came to stay.’

His green eyes glittered in the reflected lights wound over their heads.

‘Backatcha, pretty face. I didn’t count on you, either.’

‘It’s all make-believe, though, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘At the end of the summer you’ll go home, and I’ll still be here, and I have to find a way to stay here afterwards.’

‘I guess I hadn’t thought so far ahead for you,’ he said. ‘Will you rent the manor out again?’

Alice sipped her wine and shook her head. ‘Pretty as it is, I can’t stay in that caravan for ever, Robinson.’

‘I see that.’

‘So no, I don’t think I’ll look for someone else to rent the manor after you …’ It suddenly felt hard to say ‘after you leave’, so she let the sentence hang in the air. ‘That’s why I’ve renovated the tree house.’

He frowned, not seeing the picture, and Alice haltingly told him about her plans for the glampsite. She gathered confidence as she described how the boathouse looked in her dreams, and the stunning location she’d decided on for the yurt down by the stream, and the sheltered glade at the far end of the woods that she planned to turn into a book nook complete with a gauzy day bed and a little library of books she’d been amassing from charity stores and table sales. Five or six different places people could come and stay in the beauty of Borne woods, more eventually. Hopefully. If the stars aligned and she could string things out financially for long enough to get everything in place by the time he left. She was well aware that her plan had its holes, that it was pulled together from hope and stardust and desperation.

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