His hand stays on my bare arm for a couple of moments, and even though I try, I can’t think of anything to say.
‘Want to eat by the sea?’ he asks. ‘We’re only five minutes from Mackenzie Beach.’
We follow the line of palm trees and manage to snag the last pair of sunbeds under the shade of a seagrass parasol. We’re closer to the pavement than the water, but the sound of the waves lapping the shore is pleasantly zen-inducing, even above the squeals of happy children.
Mark straddles his sun lounger and attacks his pitta, while I prop myself upright, my legs stretched out in front of me, and take small mouthfuls of salad with a wooden fork.
I let him eat. At the rate he’s going, he’ll have finished the whole thing in five bites.
Eventually, I ask the question that’s been weighing on me. ‘What’s going on, Mark?’
‘We’re sitting on a beach in Cyprus named after a Scot who opened a restaurant here in the nineteen forties.’
‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it, but annoyingly, I have to ask, is that true?’
‘Yep,’ he says. ‘Check Wikipedia.’ He takes another monster bite of his food.
He probably thinks I’m going to whip out my phone and look it up, but I’m not going to let his little history lesson distract me. ‘Your behaviour last night felt very …’ I search for the right word. ‘Self-destructive.’
He swallows and wipes his mouth with a napkin, the shiny paper rasping against two days’ worth of beard-growth.
‘I was drunk and tired and clumsy. That’s all there was to it.’
‘Where were you yesterday?’
‘Why all the questions?’
‘Of all people, I think I’m entitled to ask.’
He bounces a knee up and down. His restlessness makes me sure he wants to talk about it, but not quite yet.
I don’t want to push him, so I resort to that clichéd conversational lubricant: the weather.
‘God, it’s hot.’ I fan myself uselessly with a hand. ‘It’s driving me crazy to be at the beach and not get into the water.’
His eyes flick to the thin straps of my dress. ‘You wearing anything underneath that you could swim in?’
That he might be imagining what’s under my dress makes my mouth dry.
I manage a small shake of the head. ‘Not if I don’t want to get arrested.’
‘What if I promise to bail you out?’
The tone of his voice is doing little to cool me down.
Something is different about him today, something physical, and it’s giving me goosebumps. And then I realise it’s because he hasn’t shaved.
The addition of stubble is like fairy-dust over his glorious face. It makes his lips darker and fuller; it adds sparkle to those single-malt eyes, the flash of an ice cube in the crystal glass.
He should look ragged, sleep-deprived and dishevelled, but instead, he looks like a rock star who just rolled out of bed after a night of orgiastic sex and is ready to play Wembley.
I feelhorriblefor the direction of my thoughts. He almost died, and I’m acting like a frisky teenager.
‘Let’s walk,’ I suggest brightly. ‘I want to feel the sand and sea under my feet. I’ll miss it when we’re back in London.’
I pull the bows on the laces of my wedges, then slip my feet free. Mark’s feet are already bare – he discarded his hideous flip-flops as soon as he sat down.
I’ve maybe taken three steps before the soles of my feet start burning. I hop back to the shade of the sunbed.
