Thirteen

In the end, I managed to convince Nathan to hire a proper tour guide. I could show him a good time (I said with a wink) but not the places where the Germans had built their first bunker on British soil. I’d found it was much easier to admit not knowing much about my island’s history after he’d had my dick in his mouth.

But I agreed to go home, at least for the three weeks he’d be there. Luke was ecstatic and had already made plans for us to go fishing and do a couple of the west coast walking trails. Gideon was in Italy again, and fromthere,he’dbegoingbacktoLondon–where I was still welcome to come visit him if I was at a loose end (I hadn’t gone over Christmas after all – and Deveraux was still under renovation.)

It would be a different kind of summer without Gideon or Deveraux, and after the second-year exams I’d just emerged from – the hardest and most stressful of my life – I was looking forward to going home.

I was looking forward to showing Nathan my home.

For the last few years, home had felt like a memory I didn’t want. A series of reminders of something I wanted back so intensely that it was painful. But those reminders had followed me onto Oxford, too, and that was because Cas didn’t live in a place, he lived inside me.

But as I headed home that summer, Cas was barely even on my mind.

I got home on a Thursday night, the last week in June, and sensed the atmosphere between Beth and Luke the moment I stepped inside the cottage. Luke had picked me up at the airport, his mood light and animated, but which disappeared the second he walked through the door. Beth was at the dining table on her laptop, surrounded by piles of paper and with her phone in her hand, glancing between both screens. I knew she’d got a big promotion at work in April, and it was more demanding of her time and attention than her middle management sales job had ever been before.

“He’s home, Beth,” Luke said when Beth didn’t look up from her phone. His voice was strangely cold. Not a tone I’d ever heard him use on her before. I looked at him, but he was turned and peering into the fridge.

“Hey,” she said, standing to throw her arms around me for a quick hug.

“Alright? Still working?” I gestured at the table.

“End of the month performance.” Beth sighed. “There’s a management meeting tomorrow.”

“I see.” I gave her an apologetic look.

“You hungry, Judey?” Luke was asking as he took something out of the fridge that looked like leftovers.

“I’m okay, actually, had a burger at the airport.”

I wanted to get out of the kitchen, where the air felt precarious and tense. Upstairs, I made a half-hearted attempt at unpacking before giving up and lying down on my bed. Nathan was arriving on Monday evening; he was currently packing up the flat in Oxford, and the last of his boxes were being picked up on Monday morning to be shipped back to New York.

He wasn’t a great texter. He preferred to talk on the phone, which I, expressly, did not, but I dialled his number anyway, and he answered on the fourth ring.

“Hey, you,” he said. “How was your propeller flight across the channel?”

“Loud. Creaky. Very bumpy.”

“Fuck,” he groaned.

I’d discovered about a week prior that he hated flying. So much so that he’d only been back to New York once in two years, and that was because his favourite aunt had died. He’d considered not going home for this either, but there was a reading of a will he’d had to be present for after. He’d planned to take the ferry across to Jersey until I told him it was a ten-hour journey. The plane was an hour. ‘Yes, but not a real plane’, he’d argued. I’d then shown him a picture of the plane’s engine, which seemed to relax him a little.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “They don’t even fly that high, so if it comes down in the sea, it won’t make too much of a splash.”

“I’m hanging up on you now.”

“I’m joking,” I laughed. “It was fine. Smoothest hour I’ve ever spent in the air.”

“Okay, I’m going to choose to believe that.”

He told me about the dinner he had with some of the faculty the following night, which he was quietly dreading. He didn’t socialise much with the rest of the department, I knew. They’d been stand-offish with him when he’d first arrived: he was convinced they saw him as a young American upstart with nothing to commend him but a shiny statuette. The fact he wasn’t even thirty yet only made it worse.

“They’ll be bricking it. The loss of the hot, prodigious Oscar–winning lecturer is going to be quite the loss to the teaching body,” I said. “Speaking of which, did you remember to pack it?”

“It’s already gone. Wait a minute, you said hot.”

“You know I think you’re hot.”

“Yeah, but I worried it was because I was your professor. And since I haven’t technically been that for two whole days...”

“I think technically you’re still my professor until the last day of term, which is Saturday, so...”

“Oh, you’re right, which means Monday you’ll be seeing me man to man for the first time.”

I snorted at this. “Man to man?”

“Yes, what? It will be.” He was laughing, too. I could hear him settling, as though getting into bed or stretching his body out on the grey sofa of his living room. “Have you been thinking about it?” he asked, voice low and rough.

It had been almost six weeks since the night we first kissed, and we still hadn’t had sex. It had been everything except sex, and he’d never pushed or pressured for anything more. Though I could tell how much he wanted it, he’d never done anything to make me feel uncomfortable.

I’d told him that aside from my high school girlfriend (this he’d found unsurprising and very cute), there’d been one other person I’d been serious about. He understood that this person had taken some part of me I wasn’t sure I would ever get back.

But patience had its limits. And I was reaching my own: I wanted him. We’d discussed preferences, what I did and didn’t think I could do, what he was able to teach me. Everything, he’d whispered one night. We’ll find out what you like and what you don’t, and we’ll work everything out together. Please don’t worry, baby.

And there was that. The nickname.

It seemed ridiculous to me that I could be anyone’s ‘baby’. And yet, when he said it in that lazy American accent, I didn’t feel ridiculous. It made my cheeks heat whenever he said it, but I didn’t hate it. Not at all. I liked how it made me feel. I liked how Nathan made me feel.

“Have you?” he asked again.

“I’ve thought about it, yeah,” I admitted. “But can we wait until I see you to talk about it?” I didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. Not because I was embarrassed, but because talking like this over the phone, especially while lying here, was too close to a reminder of what I’d once had with someone else. And I was thinking about him less and less each day that went by. Nathan had begun filling some of the empty spaces he’d left behind.

“Sure, we can, baby,” he said easily. “Everything okay? How’s your sister?”

“She’s okay, busy with work, I guess. But Luke’s glad I’m home.”

“Are you going to tell him about me?”

Nathan knew that Luke knew I was into men. And I’d wondered about how to tell Luke – whether to tell Luke – that one of my professors was coming to the island for three weeks, and that I was going to be spending a lot of time with him. I considered leaving the professor part out and just saying he was someone I’d met in Oxford, without any specifics, but it felt too much like lying.

“Would you be okay with that?”

“Of course, I would. I’d like to meet him if you’d want that.”

That idea filled me with a thin thread of horror. Luke and Nathan face to face, man to man, trying to have a conversation. About what? Luke didn’t watch pretentious films, didn’t read, didn’t know anything about New York. And Nathan knew nothing about gardening or the natural world and hated action films. But then I remembered that Cas and Luke had gotten on very well despite all of the reasons they shouldn’t have. Everyone liked Luke, and Luke liked most people.

“Let’s see how the telling him I’m seeing my professor goes down first.”

“Ex-professor.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing.”

“It will be on Saturday.”

On Saturday night, Luke invited me out to the pub. It was one of those warm summer nights when the air felt baked and fragrant and the birds were lazing in trees too tired to fly. We walked down the long drive to the bus stop and took the bus down towards the beach.

Luke’s local was the friendly little gastro pub that sat halfway down the main road to the beach. The manager was a client of his, and he brought over two pints on the house after we’d found a table outside in a shaded section of the beer garden.

“Can’t beat it,” Luke said as he wiped the foam from the head away from his lip.

He looked older, I thought. Lines dug deeper into the weathered grooves of his forehead and sides of his eyes, new lines that hadn’t been there when I saw him at Christmas. He was still handsome though, suntanned skin bright against the dark of his hair.

“It’s good,” I agreed.

The beer was satisfying, cool and fizzing against my dry throat. I normally went for something stronger – I was normally trying to get drunk – but the last few months, I’d been drinking far less to get drunk and more to enjoy the warm mellowing it offered to my muscles. A glass after dinner with Nathan, a single, cool beer as I read in my dorm. Maybe I was growing up.

The silence swelled between us, and I knew it would be as good a time as any to tell him about Nathan. But Luke spoke first, ripping out the ground from beneath my feet as he did.

“So Judey, I wasn’t sure the best way to do this, to tell you this, but I figured it was best to just come out and say it.” He took a large deep breath, resigned and tired sounding. When he met my eye, I could see his own shimmering with something I recognised. Pain. Heartache. “Beth and I, well we’re gonna be getting a divorce.”