Innocence (15 page)

I put my tea on the table next to Finn’s bed and sit down on the chair. I don’t feel like talking. Jay comes to stand behind me. If anyone knows anything of how Finn feels, or is going to feel, he does. I lay my hand on the sheets and gently touch the bandages wrapped around Finn’s wrist. Jay strokes my hair. I think he realizes everything that happened between Finn and I is over now. I also think he knows I have no idea what to say or do if Finn wakes up. I’m kinda hoping Finn doesn’t wake up right now, and yet I want him to know I’m here and I want to talk to him, I just don’t want to end up saying something stupid, like
it’ll be okay
, when clearly it won’t be. When everything is a long, long way from being okay for him.

We end up staying for an hour, though Finn doesn’t move the entire time. I feel quite calm when I walk out of there. Malachi, however, looks like an animal in a cage, completely wired and tense, pacing back and forth down the corridor.

Grimacing, he tries to hide his agitation, but he doesn’t even ask how Finn is until we are outside the hospital. I can tell he just wants to get out of there.

“Do you want me to start work today?” I ask uncertainly, but hopefully, as we get in the car.

After this morning I don’t really want to go home.

Malachi’s expression is unreadable, and I wish I
could
read him like I can read Jay and the way he’s folded in on himself in the backseat. But I can’t. And Jay is just going to have to get over this.

“Alright,” Malachi sighs, in not the most enthusiastic manner. “I’ll drop Jay off first.”

When we stop at the Tavern, I make an excuse that I need to change so that I can walk back with Jay. As soon as we’re back on the boat, I drag him into our bedroom.

“Listen to me. There is nothing between him and me. He’s straight. You saw how he was with that receptionist.”

I’m finding it hard to conceive why I need to justify myself, and yet here I am. After what happened with Finn, I don’t want Jay to worry about me, and I’m not going to keep any more secrets from him.

But Jay stares at me like I just don’t get it, then lifts himself up onto the bed and pulls the duvet over his head.

T
HE
FIRST
time Malachi makes me drive round the field is the worst.

“I want to see what you remember,” he says, folding his arms across his not undeveloped chest after handing me the car keys to the oldest car I’ve ever seen and waiting to see what I will do.

But he is too close to me, and the scent of him, the promise of his skin, is driving me a little bit crazy. I will myself to stop thinking about the hard shape of the muscles beneath his thin shirt, but even his nipples are too obvious. All morning I’ve been like this, my imagination in overdrive—he’d probably kill me if he knew—and now that I really need to concentrate, I can’t.

I open the car door. The day is overcast and muggy, and my T-shirt is already sticking to my skin because of how nervous I feel. I hate that I want more than anything to impress him. And after proving to him with my hundred-and-one questions all day that I know nothing about cars, I have little confidence as I get in the driver’s seat, fiddling around under the seat for ages until I can adjust it so that my legs aren’t cramped up under the steering wheel. Far too carefully I then adjust all the mirrors, just a tiny fraction. Malachi looks on, amused, but I don’t care. At least he’s in a less distracted and agitated mood than he has been since this morning at the hospital.

Inside, the car smells of damp leather and mold, and I hardly expect it to start when I turn the key in the ignition.

So it’s not a complete surprise when it doesn’t.

“Pull the choke out and press the accelerator down with your foot.”

“What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Arms still folded, he nods at the space where the radio would be in any normal car.

“The choke is the round knob next to the air vent. Pull it out a little.”

I pull it out, turn the key, and press my foot to the accelerator. With a loose jolt, the car starts.

“Okay, when the engine stops juddering and starts to run a little smoother, you need to push the choke back in, slowly.”

“Why? We didn’t do this last time.”

Malachi smiles. He’s so weird sometimes. But I’m beginning to understand there’s some stuff he likes talking about and a lot of stuff he doesn’t. Though so far the “like” list only has cars and guitars on it.

“This is a much older car. When the engine is cold, it needs a richer air-fuel mix to start, pulling the choke out closes off a plate over the opening of the carburetor, restricting the air entering it, which makes the air-fuel mixture richer. Modern cars don’t have carburetors, they have fuel injection.”

“And so I’m driving the old car because…?”

He rolls his eyes and then fixes them on me, making my heartbeat quicken. “Because she’s less forgiving and she’ll teach you more.”

She?
I sigh. Here I was thinking it was only boats that had to be female.

“Foot on the clutch and put her in first.”

My only saving grace is that the field is waterlogged and muddy, so it’s not solely the fault of my bad driving that we skid, slide, and kangaroo in messy circles across it.

It’s exhausting. I feel like I’m hauling the car along with my bare arms. Malachi is never going to let me drive out on the road after this.

Coming to a halt, I turn the engine off and rest my head against the steering wheel.

For the briefest heart-stopping moment, I’m sure his hand hovers above the back of my neck, making the short hairs there stand on end as if they’re reaching out towards him.
God, I want him to touch me so badly.
So badly it hurts.

But of course he doesn’t.

“It’ll only get better,” he says gently.

“That’s just another way of saying it was awful,” I mumble against the moldy leather steering wheel cover.

Sighing, I slowly sit up and look around the light brown leather interior of the very brown car. “This car looks like it’s come straight from one of those crappy seventies police dramas you get in the middle of the day on TV.”

Malachi snorts, raising his eyebrow. “That’s exactly what I thought when I bought it. I’d always dreamed about owning a crappy seventies car.”

I can’t tell with him when he’s being sarcastic. And anyway, I’d thought all the cars were Liam’s.

He drives me home in it, and tells me it’s a classic Jag, which apparently isn’t such a crappy car.

“I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow,” Malachi says pulling up outside the Tavern.

I walk back to the boat, wanting to tell Jay that I am officially the world’s worst driver, wanting to make him smile and laugh, but… he’s not home. I wander through the boat, the emptiness deafening.

It’s 5:00 p.m.

There is a note for Dad on the sink. I turn it over. It’s from Jay, telling him he’s gone out with Lorne and he’ll be back at 7:00 p.m.

There is no note for me.

He must be really pissed.

I start making something for us to eat for tea, but in the silence I just can’t concentrate. Instead, I shove it all back in the fridge and go out for a walk.

This is the first time Jay has ever just gone out like that. I should probably be happy, he needs other friends, but instead what I am is heartsick, scared he’ll do something stupid because he’s upset with me. It’s pathetic, and I’d never admit to anyone how much it hurts.

I get back by 7:00 p.m., but Jay is still not home. The light is just beginning to leak out of the sky, the river turning to shadow and blackness. I tell myself I’m not concerned, and I wait outside in the cooling evening air as Dad clangs around in the galley, making dinner. I’ve not let him cook for me since he told me he wants me to leave, and he’s not said anything about the wasted food. He’s not even asked me where I’ve been all day and why I haven’t been with Jay. It’s as though we’re at an impasse and neither of us is willing to give an inch.

At twenty past seven, Jay’s slight figure appears from behind the Tavern. He is alone. I’m sitting on the towpath, my legs dangling above the filthy scum at the edge of the river. Jay makes a show of stepping round me, and climbs down onto the boat.

“Where’s Lorne?” I ask quietly.

He stops, pulling down his bandanna. “Gone home,” he says without looking at me.

“Where were you?”
I was worried.

“Just out.”

He never just goes
out
.

“Jay—” I call, frustrated, but he disappears into the galley.

It’s as though he’s finally figured out how he can hurt me like no one else. I don’t understand why he’s so angry about me working for Malachi.

A
FTER
WE
spend the morning changing the exhaust on the gray saloon, Malachi makes me lunch in his van. There is never anyone else at the camp in the daytime, I don’t even know if anyone has noticed I now work here, if anyone has noticed I’m no longer on the building site.

Although he has Maisie following him around, I wonder if Malachi used to get lonely out here on his own all day, or if being alone is what he wants.

“What do you want for lunch today—soup, cheese on toast, a sandwich?” he says, opening his cupboards and pulling out a loaf of bread.

I shrug. We’ve been through this routine a few times now, and he usually just goes ahead and makes something to eat.

But not today.

Running his hand along the work surface, he closes the cupboard with his hip. “No preference at all?” He watches me from beneath the shock of hair fallen across his face, his eyes the deepest, darkest amber.

When he looks at me like that my stomach becomes full of a million bubbles, all of them lighter than air, and my mouth wants to grin stupidly. But I won’t let it. Instead I shake my head, leaning against the breakfast bar lest I fall over when my knees give way.

“I told you, I’ll eat anything.”

“Anything?” He raises an eyebrow, leaning closer, teasing me.

This is the easiest he’s been with me all week. “Okay, I don’t
like
crayfish. I’ll eat them, though.”

“Crayfish? From the river?”

I nod.

Unfortunately, crayfish is one of Dad’s favorite things to cook, probably because it’s free. But now I never have to eat crayfish ever again, because Dad’s not feeding me anymore.

This is also the reason I’m more than willing to eat absolutely anything classed as food at lunchtime.

As Malachi picks a couple of cans of soup and a pan from off the shelf and proceeds to heat up the soup, I wander aimlessly around the living area, looking at the photographs on the windowsill. Photographs of Malachi with his guitar at what looks like a festival, surrounded by people… people I will never know. I wish I knew more about him.

“Can you get the plates, please? How’s your dad with you working for me?”

I get the sense Malachi doesn’t like me looking at photographs of him. Every day I try to get a closer look, and every day he tries to distract me. I’ve no idea why.

“My dad’s fine,” I say smoothly, covering up the fact I haven’t actually told him. Not that he’s even asked. Jay’s reaction is the one that’s slowly tearing me apart.

We sit down at the narrow breakfast bar to eat. I no longer try to hide how hungry I am, and Malachi always makes extra.

“You’re not drinking anymore,” I say quietly when I’ve finished most of the soup.

I’ve been thinking about this for days.

When he looks up from his bowl, his gaze is full of shadows, and I know he’s going to ignore what I’ve said. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“But you don’t want to talk about it,” I mutter, carrying on when he doesn’t respond.

I need to learn to keep my mouth shut, but I just can’t help it with him. I need his reactions. I need him to be real with me, exposed. It’s as though conflict is the only way to peel back the layers of ourselves.

“That thing you do… don’t,” he murmurs warningly.

But there must be something wrong with me.

“That thing I do where I want to know about you? Because not wanting to have limits on what I can talk about is so abnormal, right?”

“Christopher….”

Picking up my bread, I get up and go and sit outside in the rain, coaxing Maisie out of her basket underneath the caravan to come sit with me.

I’m falling for him. I can’t help it. And I wish I could.

“I
COULD
ask Malachi to teach you to drive too, if you like?”

We’re lying in the dark of the bedroom. Jay is on his bunk, rolled over and facing the wall, and I’m swinging restlessly in my hammock, my foot thumping against the veneered wood paneling every few seconds.

“Or maybe I could show you how to do it, take you across the fields?”

“I just want to go to sleep,” he mumbles.

I’m up to saying anything to get him to have a proper conversation with me. It’s been almost a week now.

“Come over to the camp with me tomorrow morning.”

“Got other stuff to do,” he whispers, but his voice cracks as though he’s upset.

I get up and go over to him, unable to stand the heavy weight of my heart any longer.

“Jay….” I say gently, tentatively putting my arm round his shoulders. I need him. I need to hold him, to bridge the ever-widening gap between us. I’m so scared I’m losing him.

But with one swift jerk, he shoves me off. “Leave me alone!” he snaps, and I fall backwards, collapsing inside.

The rest of the night, I lie awake on deck, staring into the nothingness, wishing there was a storm to wash me away. Wishing I felt nothing, because it all hurts too much.

T
HE
DAY
before my birthday, it rains heavier than the night of the lightning storm. Malachi comes to pick me up in the morning and tells me he’ll bring me home again at lunchtime if the rains carry on, as we can’t work when it’s like this.