Chapter Nine

After…

The days faded into weeks, and before I knew it, almost two months had passed by.

Nate, as it happened, kept track of time dutifully—it was late August.

Still, I found myself too swept up in our idyllic bubble to care about much else, although Rebecca frequently crossed my mind. It was selfish of me not to have gone home already, and I knew she would be worried. The truth was, for the first time in my life, I was truly happy. It made me reluctant to want to be anywhere else.

Being with Nate was so very easy. We spent our days lazing on the beach or taking walks along the bay in the rain. We did chores when we needed to but rarely spent any time apart. We made love as often as we liked, wherever we wanted. The need for each other was just as intense as it was in the beginning.

After a week of bad weather, the roof on one of the outbuildings began to leak. Having just returned from a supply run to the builder’s merchants on the industrial estate, we set about replacing the felt. Nate did most of the hard work while I passed him tools and distracted him every so often with a kiss.

The weather had grown hot again after the storms of heavy rain, leaving me with a cracking headache, and so I climbed down from the roof and went to fetch us drinks. I returned minutes later, holding two tall tumblers of water in each hand. Nate shot me a smile and then shuffled over to the ladder. As if in slow motion, he miss-stepped and fell backward off the roof, hitting the floor hard with a sickening thud.

A scream ripped from my lungs, and the glasses slipped from my hands, shattering on the ground beneath me. “Nate!”

I ran to him, skidding down onto my knees by his limp body and taking his head in my hands.

“Nate!”

A few seconds passed by in what seemed like an eternity before he opened his eyes and choked in some air. A flood of relief washed over me. I kissed his cheeks while he coughed and wheezed.

“For Christ’s sake,” I snapped, “You could’ve been killed!”

He coughed and grinned. “It’s your fault! You keep distracting me.”

My hand went out to give him a playful slap, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me down on top of him. He kissed me urgently, although he was still a little breathless. I thought about resisting, on principle, but it was useless.

Swiftly, he rolled me over on to my back and pinned me to the ground, wincing in pain ever so slightly.

“I may have bruised a rib,” he grimaced, ignoring my indignant glare by pressing his lips against my neck.

I sighed longingly. “This is exactly why nothing gets done.”

****

It took me a good five minutes to hunt down my underwear from wherever Nate threw them after undressing me. He gave me a wry smile while pulling his jeans back on and then ruffled the dirt out of his hair. I narrowed an eye and pursed my lips to hide my smirk. As I pulled my dress back on over my head, he came up behind me and locked his arms around my waist.

“I love you.”

His statement caught me off guard. He hadn’t said it before, and my heart skipped several beats.

“Do you?” I asked coolly and leaned back against his chest.

He spun me around to face him. “Yes. I thought it was obvious.”

“Then don’t die,” I replied.

Probably not the response he was looking for because he looked a little downcast.

He tightened his grasp on me. “Tell me you love me.”

“Maybe later.”

Nate didn’t really need me to say it. He knew I loved him. He knew I was as hopelessly and blissfully entangled in this as he was.

He laughed. “I’ll just have to withhold certain benefits till then.”

“You wouldn’t.”

A low, mournful groan rolled from his throat in mock-annoyance. “No, I wouldn’t.”

I shot him a seductive smile and leaned close to his ear. “I love you.”

He continued to hold me captive for a little longer, stroking my hair as I rested my head on his chest, but eventually, we reluctantly detached from one another so he could finish his work on the roof.

The pounding in my head hadn’t eased despite drinking several pints of water and loading up on painkillers, so I ran a cloth under some water and applied to it to my forehead, and then flopped down on the pink velvet chaise-lounge in the bedroom. Positioned beneath the window, I could easily keep an eye on Nate from here without causing him further distraction.

A storm front rolled in about an hour later, bringing a strong wind and lowering the temperature considerably. Luckily, Nate finished repairing the roof just in time.

“Still not feeling any better?” he asked me as he wandered, stark naked, into the bedroom after showering.

I tried to keep my eyes on his face. “No.”

He pulled on a pair of black joggers and came and sat next to me on the chaise-lounge.

“It’s cooler out there now,” he said. “A walk will help.”

Typical doctor. They all believed exercise was a cure-all.

I wrinkled my nose in distaste but rose groggily off the seat with an unenthusiastic “Okay.”

As it happened, the wind was quite soothing, but I still didn’t feel like a walk, preferring instead to sit down on the sand a few meters from the incoming tide. Nate kneeled behind me and gently massaged the muscles in my neck and shoulders.

“I don’t remember the storms being this bad before,” he said.

He was right. Out at sea, an angry tempest brewed. Each summer, the thunder and lightning seemed to grow more and more intense.

“Maybe mother Earth is trying to fix the climate now the humans are gone,” I answered.

I heard Nate sigh. “Good on her.”

“Do you think if we got the chance again, we’d do it differently?” I asked him.

It was a few seconds before he replied. “Yes. I do.”

These days, we lived more harmoniously with nature, but it wasn’t out of choice. Life was easier with cars and nuclear power and all that other jazz. Would we willingly renounce modern life in favor of a more simplistic existence, one that respected mother earth instead of destroying her? I knew Nate would. And I would too. But I couldn’t see Rebecca passing up the opportunity to go back to the way things were—she’d told me repeatedly that she wasn’t meant for provincial living.

Rebecca. It was never going to be an easy subject to bring up but now seemed as good a time as any.

“Nate, I have to go home.”

“You are home,” he replied.

“To my aunt’s, I mean.”

Nate’s entire body stiffened against mine. “No,” he said flatly.

I shimmied around to face him. “No?”

His tone came off slightly angry, but more confused and panicked. “You said you’d stay. I don’t understand. I thought you loved me.”

“I do love you. And I will stay with you. But I can’t leave Rebecca on her own any longer. It isn’t fair.”

Nate frowned. “Then we’ll go together. You can’t expect me to let you go off by yourself. It’d drive me mad, not knowing when I’d see you again or if—”

I rolled my eyes and cupped his face in my hands, kissing him quickly. “I meant for you to come with me, Nate. I don’t want to be apart from you either.”

He tutted but grinned. “You could’ve said that first.”

“Sorry.”

He relaxed. “We could bring her back here?”

“Maybe.” Truthfully, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“We could set up one of the caravans for her,” Nate added. “That was always my plan if more people ever turned up.”

His expression became a little distressed, so I leaned in and kissed him again.

“How did you do it?” I said after finally pulling away from him. “How did you cope with being on your own for so long?”

He flashed me a broad grin, “Cold showers.”

“Not what I meant.”

He sighed and looked past me to the shoreline. “I don’t know, Halley. I don’t think I coped very well at all. At first, it wasn’t so bad. I was sure survivors would come here. Or that I’d find someone.”

He cleared his throat, still firmly directing his gaze away from mine. “As time went by, I started having bad days. I’d sleep all the time or get drunk, but I’d always pick myself up again and carry on.”

With a strained breath, he interlocked his hands with mine, his grip so tight my fingers throbbed. “I’d stored all my parents’ belongings under the cabin. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t bring myself to chuck it out. One night, I got totally wasted and lit a fire on the beach. I burned it all. Everything. That’s when I found a bottle of my dad’s heart medication—he had an arrhythmia. I knew if I took too much, I’d fall asleep and not wake up.”

“I set a date. If no one came, I would take the pills, and that would be it,” he continued. “Three times I made that deadline, but I couldn’t go through with it. But the day before you came I—”

He shuddered. “I was in a bad state. I’d been drinking for a week straight. I just didn’t want to be here anymore. So, the next morning, I took the pills and fell asleep.”

“Oh, Nate.” My heart broke for him all over again. I wished I hadn’t asked the question at all, although maybe it’d do him some good to talk about it, in the same way that I’d needed to talk about my stepfather. For me, it’d been a purge of sorts—a way to get the bad stuff out so it couldn’t hurt me as much anymore.

Wriggling my numb fingers free of his clasp, I locked them around his neck instead. “I’m so sorry.”

Why hadn’t I left home sooner? Why couldn’t I have been braver?

I tried hard to keep my tears at bay, but a few broke free and rolled down my face.

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” Nate whispered and gently wiped away the droplets on my cheek with his thumb.

He tried to smile. “Thing is, even as I swallowed down the pills, I kept hoping someone would come and stop me.”

He looked into my eyes. “Halley, I wished for you. I wished for you, and you came to me.”

I raised my eyebrows and sat back. No wonder he’d believed me to be a figment of his imagination. It was a miracle I’d found him without seeing his signs, let alone finding him in time to stop the pills from killing him. As someone who didn’t believe divine intervention, I still couldn’t help but wonder what’d led me here. Was it luck? Or something more inexplicable?

“I think I wished for you too,” I said, before aggressively pushing him back onto the sand and smothering him in unrelenting kisses while untying the drawstring on his sweatpants.

Sex wasn’t going to make all the bad memories and the unanswered questions go away, but it served as one hell of an effective distraction.

****

Before…

My aunt’s cottage was fairly secluded, surrounded by woods and farmland. Our closest neighbor lived about five minutes’ walk away, down the lane. Since moving in with Rebecca, I’d only seen him once in passing.

One morning, he came knocking at our side door while we ate breakfast in the kitchen. We’d just managed to microwave some stodgy porridge before the power cut out again.

“Don’t let him in!” Rebecca said in a hushed voice. I went to the door where he stood with his face pressed up against the grubby glazing, peering in.

He was about the same age as my aunt, tall and well-built with thick muscular arms. If he’d wanted to get in, he wouldn’t have found it much of a challenge.

“Rebecca,” he called. “Let me in!”

She hovered behind me, an uneasy expression on her face. “What do you want, Will?” she answered him, arms crossed, biting her nails.

“I need to talk to you, please. I’m not sick,” Will replied.

I turned to her. “What should we do?”

“Don’t open the door,” she said.

“C’mon Becca,” Will pleaded. No one had ever called her ‘Becca’ that I was aware of. Not even my mother.

“My wife phoned. She told me that Oliver…”

Rebecca moved in front of me, concern flooding her face. “Oliver is what?”

Will covered his mouth with his hand as his eyes began to glisten. “He didn’t make it, Becca. My boy is gone.”

She stood there for a moment, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. Then she unlocked the door and stepped outside, leading Will away from the cottage and down the side path to the front gate. I went into the lounge so I could watch them through the net curtains without being seen.

Will was crying. Rebecca had a hand on his shoulder, her own eyes now a little red and watery. I watched her mouth move, unable to make out what she was saying. Somehow, it turned into an argument. Even though their voices were both raised, I still couldn’t hear their conversation other than a few words: ‘our fault,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘blame me.’ While their interaction was heated, there were also fleeting moments of tenderness between them—a reassuring touch, a sorrowful glance, a brief clasp of hands.

Clearly, she knew him far better than she made out.

Eventually, Will left, charging off angrily down the lane. I thought Rebecca might go after him, but she didn’t.

We never saw Will again—not alive, at least.

A month later, when our supplies dwindled, we went over to his house. We knocked and knocked on the door of his cottage, but there was no response.

Just as I was about to suggest breaking a window, Rebecca produced a key and unlocked the front door. She insisted I stay in the hall while she looked around first—downstairs and then upstairs.

After a minute or two, she hurried back down the stairs with a crestfallen expression on her face. “He’s dead.”

We emptied his cupboards of food and took anything else we could use; tools from the garage, several bottles of whiskey and vodka, and the small trailer parked on his drive.

As we left, Rebecca took hold of the vodka and stuffed a washing-up cloth into the neck of the bottle. She lit it on fire and then smashed the bottle against the hallway wall.

With old timber beams and a thatch roof, the cottage caught fire easily.

Later that night, sat at our kitchen table, Rebecca and I downed a few shots of the twenty-five-year-old whiskey she’d taken from Will’s house.

“His favorite,” she told me, after pouring herself another glass.

Tonight, she was distinctly melancholic, her eyes glistening as though on the verge of weeping.

“We slept together a few times, while he was still married. His wife found out and took their son,” she said. “I’m not proud of what we did.”

I didn’t respond with anything comforting, although I probably should’ve. Sometimes, I wanted her to feel bad. I wanted her to hurt, for not fighting harder to get me away from Andrew. For leaving me there.

I knew it was stupid to feel the way I did. The past couldn’t be altered. It was pointless being mad at her now.

Not when there were far more awful, terrible things to be angry about.