Harri drew himself to a pause, thinking, before exhaling hard, his posture crumpling. ‘Me neither,’ he admitted. Annie couldn’t know it, but Harri thought of his cases back at the shop, containing almost everything he owned. He could go on anywhere from this little spot by the sea, it occurred to him, if only there was somewhere waiting for him where he was welcome, where he might thrive rather than just survive, like he’d been doing for years now.
For a moment, a troubling little pathway in Annie’s brain was telling her that Harri might end up back in the flat with Paisley but she didn’t want to say it out loud. She’d returned the last of his stuff to his parents’ place, hadn’t she? That must represent real ‘getting closure’ stuff for Paisley, mustn’t it?
‘That night at the castle… It’s not as though we’re like…’ she stumbled over the words, ‘…boyfriend and girlfriend, or anything.’ She tried to force laughter into it but it came out sounding glib and weak.
Harri mirrored her. ‘Pfft!It’s not like we’re walking down the aisle or anything.’
Annie tried to be vehement in her agreement. ‘It was just… chemicals firing in our brains, what with the… novelty of it all,’ she said.
‘And loneliness,’ Harri added. ‘Plus, there was a fair amount of booze involved.’
‘Exactly!’ Annie pounced on this. ‘And those are a dangerous mix. They can make a person crazy.’
Harri seemed to be running with it too. ‘Right. Right,’ he was nodding. ‘It’s not very respectful is it?’
‘What? Getting hot for each other just because we’re in a strange place?’
‘Yeah, just because we’re thrown together like this,’ he said.
Annie drew her head back, a little humbled. ‘Oh! Like I could be anybody and you’d feel the same?’
‘Would I?’
‘Yes! Definitely,’ she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Probably. It’s lazy, and not respectful, and it’s… predictable! A man and a woman, best friends, they take a vacation…’
‘In, basically, book heaven,’ Harri added.
‘Right, and it’s so beautiful here and it’s winter and it’s cosy.’
‘We’re bound to get stupid ideas?’ he said, very much like it was a question.
‘My point exactly. I’m glad we stopped when we did, before it got… silly.’
‘And now we should stop thinking about each other in that way?’ Harri said blankly.
Annie felt an uncomfortable nudge at her heart. She didn’t know how she’d stop thinking about Harri. At night, alone in her room, he was all she could think about. ‘Right,’ she said.
This brought silence, followed by yet more silence. Annie noticed she was wringing her hands and shoved them down by her thighs in tight fists to stop herself.
‘Or…’ Harri said.
‘Yes?’ She practically jumped at this. ‘I’m so glad there’s an or.’
‘Or maybe…’ Harri was flushing pink now, the spots below his eyes were positively red. ‘Maybe the problemisn’tthat we should stop thinking about each other… in that way. Maybe the problem is we should really,reallythink about each other like that.’
‘Huh?’ Annie felt herself untethering, at risk of letting go the last vestiges of common sense she’d been clinging to.
‘Maybe,’ Harri went on, ‘we need to get any… residual attraction out of our systems?’
Annie blinked abruptly. ‘When you sayresidual attractionlike that, it kind of makes me want to throw up.’ She registered the tiniest flash of disappointment in Harri’s eyes. ‘Hold up. When you sayget it out of our systems, you mean…?’
Harri didn’t say a word, only looking back at her frankly, making a ‘why not’ kind of gesture.
‘Is that what you want?’ she asked, her pulse quickening.
‘Is it whatyouwant?’
‘What if it ruined literally everything?’ she said, her voice little more than a gasp.
