Chapter 9

ROWAN

He stays until morning.

I don't expect to like that, not after the last time I woke in a hotel room unaware of what would surface. I don't need to worry today. I'm as sure as I can be that Liam's phone stayed in the pocket of his shorts, which are halfway across the room when its ringing wakes us. He has to get out of bed to retrieve it.

"Shit." He scrubs at thick, dark stubble. "Matt's about to head home." His kiss is quick and rough. His touch to my face is gentler, like his promise. "I'd buy you breakfast, only he's?—"

"Your best friend."

"I was going to say that he's a massive twat who will sulk forever if I don't have a last surf with him, but yeah, let's go with your version. He is my best friend." Liam's back is to the morning sunlight, but I'm not sure that accounts for him looking this shadowed. "One of them, anyway."

He's naked, his cock right there, and I have to roll onto my belly to hide what imagining us going further than we did last night does to me.

Liam's fixated on something different.

The sheets have slipped enough that he spots my ink. He gets on his knees behind me, pulling the sheet down further to trace wings and sooty ashes, and I wait for laughter or questions. All I get is more of that stubbly roughness when he presses a kiss somewhere I usually keep covered. Then he's gone, and the bed shifts, and he's busy tugging on last night's clothes. The mattress shifts again when he sits beside me. "Smash it in September, yeah?"

I wish.

I also want to give him my number, but if the teacher I met yesterday had a card for Liam's expression right now, I don't know how it would be labelled. Not when he cradles his phone for a long moment, a tooth digging into his lip, before his jaw clenches and he moves as if to stand. "Right." He glances at the door. "I should?—"

I catch his hand before he can get up. "Where will you be?"

"In September?" He threads our fingers together, which is grounding, and it's intense how much I prefer that to waking up to an empty room and a hazy headache. "York, probably. Combine work with seeing my parents and checking in with my specialist." He touches the side of his head, his ear to be specific. "Blast damage. Tinnitus. Comes and goes for some people. Mostly comes at me, to be honest." He says that last tiredly.

"What does it sound like?"

"Like a never-fucking-ending racket. Like being inside a washing machine while some wanker rings bells and blows whistles."

I wonder if that's why he didn't hear me shouting for him last night.

He inhales deeply. "I'm thinking about taking on a local project before moving on, only…" With his back to the window again, he's haloed. He also trails a finger across my bare stomach, sketching I don't know what there.

He said he had to go.

His friend is waiting for him.

He still draws a slow and swirling pattern that has no structure and, for a warm and golden moment, we're both caught in early sunlight. He doodles in slow-motion and, like the design he paints on my skin with a single finger, I don't want this to be over.

Any of it.

He winces as if he hears me think that, and he's a man of few words, so I return to his last statement to ask my own one-word question. "Only?"

"Only now? Since getting discharged from the army?" He shrugs, and fuck past-me for only seeing steel in him at first, for only noticing all that square-jawed roughness. His answer sounds so fragile. "I don't tend to work on projects tied to rebuilds. My usual projects are all short term and solitary, not like seeing a project through from start to finish with my old crew. Demolition is my thing, my expertise, so I'm never needed long term."

I really wish that I could trust my own judgement when it comes to reading people. I risk getting it wrong again by saying, "I needed you yesterday. So did that lamb. Hope it's doing okay."

He smiles then, and wow.

Wow.

I won't let myself forget this second glimpse of him so happy. "Daft beggar," he murmurs—and I am—but Liam doesn't mean me. He says, "I tracked down the farmer. Told him he might want to check it out. And check the rest of the fence as well, so it can't play any more stupid games on the coast road."

"See? That lamb needed you too."

He shrugs but his smile flickers, back to a ghost of that briefly wide one, and that's what stays with me when he leaves.

I watch him go from the window, leaning out to keep him in view, and if I overbalance and have to clutch the window frame to keep from tipping headfirst, isn't that on-brand for me?

Liam stops at the mouth of the alley and pulls out his phone, and for a moment, I think he's spotted that I almost won my first stupid prize of the morning. He's swallowed by alleyway shadows before I can tell for sure if he noticed, and maybe it's good that he'll be long gone from here if I get the chance to come back in September.

I'd only tip headfirst for him as well.

I almost giveup on getting that promised interview callback. I also give up on trying to figure out what to do. If Mum were here, I'd check in on whether ringing Luke Lawson myself was assertive or way too pushy. I'm not feeling either, to be honest, still too caught up with different feelings that draw me back, over and over, to a window I've left open.

Maybe that's why I expect to hear Liam's voice when my phone rings, which makes no sense. There hadn't been any point in us swapping numbers, had there?

Someone else speaks. "Is that Rowan Byrn?" I recognise these clipped tones. It's Luke Lawson, as promised, and suddenly I'm the opposite of pushy or assertive. In fact, I'm voiceless. Or almost. I manage to croak out, "Yes?" And here I go, making another great first impression—the mirror in this hotel bedroom reflects me looking as worried as his little boy had been on a bridge above a sandpit.

Thankfully, it doesn't faze his father, who simply says, "Good. Tell me, Rowan, are you still in Cornwall?"

"Yes?" I could slap myself for sounding uncertain. He'll be looking for confident student teachers, won't he? That's what I aim to convey next. "I'm definitely right here in Porthperrin. In a pub." I hold the phone away, mouthing a silent shit. "Not because I'm drinking. I don't. Drink alcohol, I mean." Fuck my life.

"Well." He pauses. "That's good to know."

He goes on to tell me where to meet him, and my hotel room mirror reflects confusion. "Wait. You don't want me to come back to the school?" Is that because he's already made all of his September appointments, and there's no point in me returning?

He gives a different reason. "I just dropped my son off at a friend's house for a playdate. I'm closer to you than to Glynn Harber, so why don't we split the difference? I can meet you halfway at an open garden. My daughter can play and we can chat there."

Part of me is convinced this is still a brush-off. I can't help peppering him with questions. "Because you've already chosen a candidate?" Shit. "Or because I still stand a chance, but you want to hear me play first? And then what? Then you'll give me a definitive answer?"

His next pause draws out, and I regret being such a slave to needing the world to be certain. Did that all come across as desperate?

Maybe not. Luke Lawson only asks, "That's important to you, Rowan? Things being definite and clear-cut? You operate best when you know what comes next?"

Like getting to see which notes come next in a piece of music?

"Yes."

But what about improvising? That's always the best fun.

"Er... No?"

I close my eyes. At least this is unambiguous. "I'm a little bit stressed that us having a chat may actually mean you aren't going to interview me." I swallow. "Or that you've already spoken with my last teaching placement."

His clipped tone softens. "I imagine telling you not to worry is pointless, so let me be clear about this. Can you hear me, Rowan?"

I move away from an open window where seagulls cry like I want to. I'm such a bad-news baby. "Yes."

"Good," he repeats. "Because I've spoken with the last person you taught alongside and yes, I'm still very much looking forward to talking with you. You already sailed through the practical part of the interview process. Today we'll talk about whether my school suits you."

He also sends me a pin to a location that takes me along the same winding coast road as yesterday, and like yesterday, that's where I slam on the brakes one more time. Not because another lamb is in danger—the one I glimpse this morning is safe and sound, bouncing around a redheaded teen who sits on a quad bike. A farmer is with him, inspecting a fence, and there's no need for me to stick my beak in, but here I go, Mr. Impulsive, getting out of my car to jog over the road to poke my nose in because I have to know this.

"Is it okay?" I point at the lamb through the fence wire. "After yesterday?"

The farmer straightens. "That was you?" He gestures for his son to join us. "Noah? Come here." At least, I guess it's his son until the boy speaks.

"What? Why? I didn't do nothin'." His accent isn't local. If anything, it spits familiar, rapid-fire bullets like that older student who'd helped Charles. It's also another reminder of Mum, right where I don't expect to get one. She didn't only teach music lessons at posh schools like the one where I ended up. She taught plenty of kids from London sink schools. Hard lives, hard faces, and hard eyes, she'd said, and this kid's eyes narrow in the same way theirs had until music helped to thaw them.

The farmer lets out an equally soft sigh. "No, you didn't do anything, Noah. No one's making accusations, okay?" He adds a quieter, "This is who saved your lamb."

The boy's tone makes an abrupt shift, almost breaking. "That was you? You really went over the cliff for her?"

"Not only me." I can't take all this credit. Both that lamb and I would still be on that ledge without Liam. Or we'd both be fish food. "But yes, I saw her go over and I got to her before she could fall the rest of the way down." Here's what has kept niggling at me. "I had to hold her tightly. Really tightly." Now isn't a good time to feel Liam's arms around me. His snug hold had felt amazing. So incredibly safe. This lamb can't have felt half as happy about me crushing its ribs. "Did I hurt her?"

The farmer does the same as Glynn Harber's headmaster, telling me not to worry. "You didn't do her any harm. And thanks. She's the first lamb Noah delivered. All by yourself, right?" He says that with enough pride that the boy blushes, that bright pink clashing with his hair as he thanks me.

"It was no problem." That's such an understatement, but all's well that ends well, right? And last night more than made up for lamb shit on my suit and a scuffed pair of glasses.

I can feel Liam again then, as if he still won't let me go, even though it's the farmer who reaches over the fence to grasp my hand and shake it. "Seriously, thank you. It means a lot to him. I appreciate it. You need anything, call in." He points to a farmhouse set between a headland and rugged moorland. "Just follow the signs for Love-Land Weddings."

Pride is a weird emotion. I don't know what to do with it, but it's a good dampener for the anxious prickle that travels with me all the way to my next destination. Pink roses at the entrance to this open garden remind me of that boy's flush. I park my car, and more realisation dawns.

I had one more bit of unfinished business in Cornwall—someone who's been on my mind forever. Two people, if I'm honest, and Luke Lawson's brought me directly to them.