‘I needed that,’ she gasped, holding out her empty glass. Clearly she didn’t mind it at all.
There was soft laughter while he refilled her glass, just an inch or so, like Paisley had taught him.Red wine is for savouring, and you only need a little.He’d neck the entire bottle right now if he could; something in his brain was still going haywire.
‘So, you’re here,’ he said, stupidly.
‘Sure am,’ Annie said, looking around the shop before snapping her eyes back to his. ‘And so are you.’
It wasn’t awkward, as such, just momentous. Nine years is a very long time not to stand together in the same room.
They took deep breaths as they scanned their new surroundings, as though evaluating exactly how this was going to work. Panic spiked in Harri that she might be regretting coming all this way.
‘Is it okay?’ he asked.
She didn’t reply. She was staring in wonder at the shop. Something in Annie was blooming, bright and pulsing. He could feel it.
He’d forgotten this about her. Her body was like a transmitter. He’d always been able to, quite literally, feel her enthusiasm; it was shining out of her now like she’d absorbed the desert sunshine and had it on tap, an endless solar supply.
Lowering her glass to her side, Annie’s foot knocked a wonky floorboard as she made for the shelves. She stopped herself stumbling and laughed brightly, her glow only growing.
‘We got our own bookshop,’ she said in that honeyed voice laced with wicked wryness. ‘Our ownactualbookshop,’ she said again, flashing amber eyes towards him.
He folded his arms across his ribs, still gripping the stem of his glass. ‘That we do,’ he managed, shocked by how very Welsh his own voice sounded when it mingled in the room with Annie’s drawl.
‘It’s just how I imagined it,’ she said, stepping right inside the maze of shelves and disappearing. Harri’s feet were stuck to the floor until she cried, ‘Come on!’ and he followed her like a shaky-limbed February lamb.
‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she told him from the deepest point in the book labyrinth, running her hands across the spines in theAdventure Travelsection.
He knew that was a big lie. He was nearly thirty and kind of faded around the edges; at least that’s what he thought when he looked in the mirror in the mornings. Maybe it wasn’t showing itself physically, but it was there in his aura. He’d been fading away for years like an old Polaroid.
‘You look great,’ he blurted. ‘Really great. Beautiful, like always.’
Annie laughed again, a touch of shyness in it. He made a mental note not to say anything like this again. She hadn’t seemed to welcome it.
She did look beautiful though, better than beautiful. She was otherworldly somehow, in her long skirts and a jumper that managed to be both cosy-looking and somehow delicate like gossamer. He could see her skin through its woolly gaps all down her arms. She had a slight freckly tan even though it was only February.
‘Do you want to go to bed?’ she said, suddenly, and it drew Harri to a stop.
‘What?’
‘You look kinda…’ She mimed someone looking lost and vague.
‘Oh,’ he tried to laugh it away. ‘It’s been a long day. A long year so far, actually. I’m not really…’ He shrugged, not knowing how to finish his sentence. He hadn’t told her about the break-up, thinking Annie might blame herself for not turning over her place on this trip to Paisley.Notsomething Harri had wanted. ‘I’ll be firing on all cylinders tomorrow.’
She nodded, letting her eyes move across his face. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He only hoped she couldn’t see how faded he was.
‘I’m glad we’re finally doing this,’ he said, making a good show of suddenly admiring the books.
The distraction seemed to work, and Annie turned her attention to the shelves too. ‘I know, right?’ She plucked a title from theRural Livingsection and showed it to him, reading aloud. ‘Grow Your Own Beets for Fun and Profitby Ifor Griffiths. Relative of yours?’
‘Give over,’ he said, laughing, before feigning seriousness and taking the book to examine it. ‘Might be, actually.’ He reshelved it. ‘I preferred the sequel, though.Cabbage Farming: How I Made My First Million.’
He smiled goofily in response to her playful eye roll, and they passed along the shelves, inspecting them in increasingly loud silence.
‘Have you eaten?’ Harri asked eventually, remembering how he’d wanted to make Annie feel welcome and worrying he wasn’t doing a great job so far.
‘Not since the Amsterdam layover,’ she replied.
‘There’s a kitchen,’ he said, even thoughof coursethere’s a kitchen. Why was he being like this?
