Page 53 of Fireworks
“Aye. It’s not a bad view.” Warren leaned beside her, his elbow grazing hers atop the wooden slat and gaze locked on the side of her face. His proximity sent a bolt of lightning travelling up her arm and all the way down to her toes. She wanted to be angry at him for all of his condescending fuss earlier, but she felt too free to feel anything but grateful. How had he known that this was what she’d needed, even if she hadn’t herself?
How did healwaysseem to know?
“It’s beautiful. Reminds me how small we are.” Main Street was nothing more than a thread of colour in the distance: proof that her world wouldn’t end when she returned later without the book bus. There was a comfort in realising that, to the animals that grazed in the fields and the people who might come here to build the house behind them, her daily struggles meant nothing. The wild shrubs kept flowering and the burnedbuilding would be replaced, and life, hard as it was, found ways to carry on over all sorts of obstacles. She might have been stuck now, but maybe she was just waiting for her scaffolding, her petals, her season. She could be patient. She could try again in the morning.
“Physically, maybe, but you have the ferocity of a giant.” Warren’s lip quirked, words pulling her from all of her ruminating. She was glad for it. She wanted to be present, for once. Wanted to notice the way his hair had formed a kink from the sweat of his workout, and how his T-shirt sifted in the breeze. Wanted to notice his eyes on her, always on her.
She laughed, the small sound lost to the open space. Grass tickled her ankles, the smell of soil making her lungs feel fuller. “Believe me, I’m not usually so bad. You bring it out of me.”
“I’ve noticed.” God, he was handsome, head ducked and palms pressed into the fence, looking up at her through his lashes.
She edged closer to him, craning her neck to gaze over one shoulder at the house behind. “I didn’t know they were rebuilding the old farmhouse. It burned down a long time ago. I was too young to remember much, but it’s been empty since, as far as I know.”
He propped his black running shoe on the bottom slat, expression unreadable. “Aye, it has.”
“Sorry. I thought you were new to Belbarrow, otherwise I wouldn’t have been rambling on.”
“Don’t apologise. I like your rambling.”
Something unrecognisable crashed like waves against her ribs. She always felt like the least interesting person in the room, but not with him.
“Well, it’s your turn now. How did you find this place?”
“I lived out this way until I was a teenager, then moved to Inverness.”
“Oh.” There was so much she didn’t know about him, still. So much she wanted to find out.
As she opened her mouth to ask him, he spoke first: “Anyway, that’s not why I brought you here.”
“Then why did you?”
“To get out all this anger you talked about.” He tugged her towards the centre of the hill, where their view wasn’t shrouded by foliage. Climbing on the fence, he hiked one leg over and then the other to land on the opposite side, where the hill stretched towards a craggy drop into the fields below.
“C’mon. Doesn’t work properly if you’re not near the edge.”
“Are we not going to get in trouble?” She looked around again, like somebody would be waiting to tell her off.
Warren snorted, hand outstretched. “For a minute, why don’t you stop caring about everyone else? Trust me, firecracker. Just once.”
So she did, climbing up the fence slats to take his hand. His palm was calloused, huge compared to her own, and she wasn’t sure if it made her feel safe or endangered.
Safe, she thought when his thumb rubbed over her knuckles.Safer than it ever should.
As she crossed over, he helped her down by the waist onto shaky legs, thumb digging into the crease of her hip and leaving her electrified all over again.
He gasped suddenly. “Oh, no. Someone’s coming!”
Eiley’s stomach dropped, and she whipped around – to find nobody there. She slapped him playfully as he laughed, husky and guttural, at her expense. “Not funny.”
“No, just fucking adorable.”
That word usually made her feel like a child, but from him, spoken in that low, syrupy voice, perhaps she wanted to be adored.
They trod closer to the edge of the hill, stopping when the grass was replaced by rough rock and the wind began to whip harder. The overcast sky surrounded them on all sides, the clouds closer than Belbarrow. Sun rays beamed through, lighting a patch of green-gold moorland in the distance, and she felt like she was discovering the world all over again. Seeing how it worked from above instead of below.
“What now?”
“Now, we shout,” he answered as though it was simple, and then cupped his hand around his mouth to bellow into the wind: “Life is a beautiful, steaming bag of shite!”
