We spend the next three days like this (when we aren’t working in our shop or café) and in all that time Elliot never once drags his mattress down onto the bookshop floor at night.
We’ve barely set foot outside the shop and Elliot’s forgone his morning run to stay here with me each morning instead. Watching him doing core crunches on the bedroom floor, one hundred reps every morning, is probably one of the nicest sights I’ve ever beheld.
Oh, and that tattoo? It’s a fox bursting through red flames and trailing black stars and swirls in its wake all across his shoulders, up his spine to his hairline and over the backs of his upper arms. Perfect.
The one thing we haven’t really done much of is talking, so I was thrilled this morning, a bright and sea-breezy Saturday dawn, when we managed this exchange before going our separate ways for the day – him to the bookshop, me to my early morning spot by the ovens:
‘I’m getting up now,’ I said.
‘Should I look away?’ Elliot replied, sleepy and half-smiling under the sheets.
‘Bit late for that.’ I slipped out from under the covers, totally naked, and unhurriedly made for the door. Elliot sat up a little in bed to watch me.
‘Aww, hell,’ he said in a low voice, clutching his hand to his bare chest.
I panicked immediately and flew back to his side on the bed. ‘Oh my God, what is it? Are you all right?’
‘It’s just, it’s just…’
‘What? You’re worrying me!’
‘It’s just we might have a problem here with, like, how much I’m attracted to you.’
‘Shut up,’ I cried, smacking his arm, and the muscle didn’t yield at all.
‘I’m not kidding. You’re so beautiful and I’m just so…’
‘Stop being daft,’ I warned, hoping he’d never stop.
His eyes trailed over me and it made my skin prickle like it did the first time we undressed after our café picnic and Marvin Gaye.
‘It’s not my fault,’ he said, mournfully. ‘It’s these eyes of mine. They can’t help it. But every time I look at you it actually physically hurts, right in here.’ He jabbed a finger between his pecs, making me laugh. I made a show of pretending to push him away when he reached his arms around me. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Jude. It’s a problem.’ He tilted his head to kiss me before breaking off. ‘Listen, I’ve got an idea. Maybe my eyes will get tired of you if they just stare at you for, say… the next fifty years or so? And one day they’ll be like, OK, meh, I’m over it.’
Pushing Elliot onto his back, I clambered on top of him, only the cotton sheet between us. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘The fifty years bit?’
‘The meh, I’m over it bit.’
‘Hey, take pity on me and my poor heart! I can’t feel like this forever,’ he smiled slyly.
‘Well, all right, better start your fifty years of looking right now then, get it over with as quickly as we can.’
‘Good plan.’ He trailed a fingertip up my arm and the sparks it sent through my nervous system made me limp and I folded, bringing my face close to his. ‘I’m gonna get tired of those eyes first, probably,’ he continued, low and deep. He kissed both my eyelids in turn and each warm press of his lips felt like a promise. ‘And your lips…’ He trailed his mouth to mine, languidly claiming it. ‘I look forward to the day I can finally say I’m done wanting to look at them… can’t come soon enough.’
With our mouths together I heard his breathing accelerate. I kissed him hard until he moaned into my mouth. He turned us both over and at the same time somehow shifted us down the bed and I don’t even know how it all happened next, but I couldn’t kiss him deep enough, or get enough of his touch and the sweep of his tongue, or the sound of his cries, and another Clove Lore summer dawn slipped away from us.
‘Thank God, only forty-nine years, three hundred and sixty-four days left of this torture,’ he said as, later, we lay in each other’s arms, knowing I was late to turn on the ovens and mix the scones.
‘Not long now,’ I told him, and we smiled because everything was perfect.
For three days, as soon as the ‘Closed’ sign was turned in the afternoons, we made our way upstairs and we kissed away the whole night. We’ve fed ourselves pretty much exclusively on the remnants from the hamper and on the morning’s leftover baking and – as in, ahem, other areas of my life – my confidence in the café kitchen is growing.
I’ve tried rock cakes, sweet bread rolls to be eaten split with jam or chocolate spread, and cherry scones for a twist on a classic, all taken from Grandad’s recipe book and all snapped up by café customers.
Jowan brings down the extra ingredients I need from the visitors’ centre shop if I text him a shopping list, and since Aldous is still refusing to eat anything other than chicken broth he’s got to stay at Anjali’s surgery for a little longer.
Mrs Crocombe hasn’t popped in again since she put the fear of God into Elliot on Tuesday with all her prying and matchmaking, and Izaak’s only been in once enquiring if we had a copy of ‘that one with all the chocolate, you know, Frenchy chocolate?’, and Elliot and I had both said at the same time, ‘You mean Chocolat?’ And we’d been so pleased to crack his riddle so easily and then so disappointed to realise I’d sold the only copy we had to a holidaymaker from New Zealand a few days before.
I tried not to think of the time slipping by and how a week had already passed and it won’t be too long until I have to return to Marygreen, alone. Mum and Dad fly off to begin their cruise this morning, Saturday, leaving my bedroom waiting for me in their new house with my boxes still to be unpacked. The very thought makes me ache for my lovely bookshop and Elliot’s arms, makes me wish this was permanent. So I choose not to think about it, for now.
My insistence on needing a self-sufficient summer of solitude was, it turned out, nonsense. This was exactly what I needed, and I don’t ever want it to end.