Page 55 of Hard Tail
“Lunch?” I asked, poking my head around the door of the back room.
Matt had already packed up for the day and was looking at his phone with a puzzled frown. “Yeah… I think that wine last night must’ve been stronger than I thought—there’s a load of text messages here marked “read” I don’t even remember seeing.”
My stomach flipped. “Ah.” I cleared my throat as Matt looked at me guilelessly. “I may have accidentally looked at some of your messages. Sorry.” I tried to smile, but judging from Matt’s expression, it wasn’t an Oscar-winning attempt. “Don’t suppose you’d believe I mistook your phone for mine?”
“Did you?”
“Er, no.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I swear I won’t do it again. I was just worried Pr—Steve might turn up at Jay’s, and the phone was just sitting there, and a text came through, and before I knew it, I was checking the messages. I’m really sorry. It was—well, I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Okay,” Matt mumbled. I felt like a total arse. He looked up. “It’s not that I mind you seeing them, really… It’s just, Steve used to do that sometimes. You know, the jealous thing—sometimes he got it into his head I was seeing another bloke.”
God, I was an idiot. “I’m an idiot. Matt, I swear to you on…on Jay’s leg, that I won’t ever do it again. I’m really sorry.”
Matt gave a weak smile. “You know, you could apologise for England. It’s okay,” he said earnestly. “I know you only did it because of Steve.” He shoved both hands in his pockets. “Guess I did the right thing leaving him.”
“God, yes!” It burst out of me with possibly inappropriate force.
“Thanks,” Matt said. “For, you know, supporting me and all.” He wrapped his arms around himself, as if he’d like a hug. I wished, more than anything, I could give him one.
So to speak. “Don’t be daft,” I said briskly. “Of course I’m supporting you. What kind of a b—of a friend would I be if I didn’t?” I crossed my fingers behind my back that Matt wouldn’t have noticed the slip.Not your boyfriend yet, Knight, and he might never be.“So, er, where do you fancy going for lunch? Pub again?”
“Are you busy this afternoon?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Why, did you have something in mind?”
“Well… I just sort of thought, you haven’t been to the beach since you’ve been down here, have you? So I thought maybe, if you want, we could grab some stuff from Asda and head off down to the coast for a picnic?”
“Sounds great.” I felt ridiculously happy at this firm evidence he wasn’t mad at me for reading his text messages. “Do you want to drive, or take the bikes?”
“Depends how hungry you are—it’s a fair way, getting on for ten miles, and we’ve got to shop first.”
“Maybe we’ll go the lazy route for once, then,” I said as my stomach rumbled in horror.
We grabbed a few things from the supermarket—all right, Matt grabbed a few things while I pushed the trolley—and set off down the A326 in Matt’s Ford Focus, because the BMW just didn’t seem like a seaside sort of car. We bypassed Marchwood and Hythe, then skirted the edge of the oil refinery at Fawley, a cyberpunk forest of chimneys belching out (hopefully clean) smoke and steam into the air next to Southampton Water. One or two showed flickering flames on top, like candles from a giant’s birthday cake.
“Russell works there,” Matt commented, nodding in that general direction. “He’s a chemical engineer.”
“Oh?” I said intelligently. “How do you know those two—is it from, um, gay bars? Or just from the shop?”
“Bit of both, really—saw them in the pubs and recognised them when they came in to buy stuff, so we sort of got talking. It’s great, what they have together,” he added a bit wistfully.
I nodded, gazing out of the window as Matt turned off the main road, leaving the chimneys of progress behind us and heading once more into the countryside. Open fields soon gave way to housing developments and local shops; then we were out of the town and back into the country again. The lane narrowed and became enclosed by trees, their dappled shade producing a sort of strobe effect with the June sunshine. With the view obscured, it was my nose more than my eyes that told me when we passed a pig farm.
“Nearly there now,” Matt said, and all of a sudden, we rounded a curve in the road, and I could see the sun glinting off the sea ahead of us. We parked in a car park right on the sea front, overlooking a narrow shingle beach.
I breathed in deeply as I got out of the car. The air smelled like summer, and everything looked naggingly familiar. I did a slow turn, taking in the grassy parkland, the line of straggly evergreens, and across the water, the low, misty shape that had to be the Isle of Wight. “You know, I think my gran and grandad used to bring me down here,” I said with dawning wonder. “Grandad used to skim stones across the water, but I was always rubbish at it. But then, I can’t have been more than ten. And Gran used to pack a picnic…” I turned to Matt, a huge smile on my face. “I can’t believe you brought me here—I didn’t even know I remembered it until now.”
Matt answered my smile with one of his own, and my heart stuttered, my whole body filling with warmth that had nothing to do with the sunshine. We stood there for a moment, and maybe I just imagined it, but Matt seemed to hold his breath while I struggled to find the words to tell him how I felt… But no—it was too soon. I had to speak to Adam first. It was the only decent way to do things. I swallowed. “How about that picnic, then?” I asked in a voice gone husky.
It was as if Matt woke from a trance. He started and shook himself. “Yeah—course. I’ll get the stuff.”
We sat on the shingle looking out to sea, eating sandwiches Matt made up there and then using rye bread, Roquefort cheese, smoked salmon and guacamole in various indescribably delicious combinations. We had the place almost to ourselves—just the occasional old couple strolling past, or shrieking children too young for school, who quickly dragged their young mums off to the playground. Boats sailed past and gulls cried out mournfully, probably because we refused to share our sandwiches with them.
“You get windsurfers here, at the weekend,” Matt said. “Ever tried that?”
“No, but it always looks like fun. You?”
Matt laughed. “Who, me? You know what I’m like—I tried it once, but I spent more time falling off the board than I did on it.”
