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?t brave enough to ask. She’d put herself out there last night already. She couldn’t do it again, not when Archie was seeming so horribly polite. So she took her cues from him instead. “Thank you for everything yesterday.” She sounded so stilted. “The presents, the chocolates… we haven’t tried the whisky yet, but we will.”
Archie just nodded.
“We’re staying for another few days,” Laurel blurted. “Until the twenty-ninth.” She heard how hopeful she sounded, and it made her cringe, especially when Archie smiled sadly.
“Three days or thirty, Laurel,” he said quietly. “Does it really make a difference?”
Her stomach felt as if it were freefalling. “What… what are you saying?”
Archie sighed heavily. “I’m saying that maybe last night we both got carried away.”
Oh. Laurel tried to iron out the expression on her face, which she feared had become horribly crumpled. “Oh,” she managed, her voice like a thread. “Right.”
“It’s just, we have different lives, don’t we?” Archie lifted his shoulders in a what-can-you-do sort of shrug. “I can’t leave Orkney, and you’re in York.”
“Yes. Of course.” The words came automatically, and they reminded her of how she’d responded to her sister’s brushoffs of old. I’m busy, Laurel. I have to study. I can’t come home. And she’d always nodded and said, yes, yes, of course. I understand. Even when she hadn’t, not really, not at all. But if she pretended she did, then maybe she wouldn’t feel so hurt.
Except of course she had.
“Even if we were interested in having a—a relationship,” Archie continued, “I don’t see how it could work, with five hundred miles between us.”
Even if? Did that mean he wasn’t? What on earth could she say now? Then Laurel realised, with a sickening rush of disappointment, that there was nothing she could say to make this better.
Even if she wanted a relationship with Archie, how could she possibly pursue one now? She had Abby and Zac to think of. She was going to London with them, and she couldn’t hare off to York or Orkney the minute her sister’s back was turned, not when she was so vulnerable, her life so uncertain.
Besides, those five hundred miles meant a lot. She could hardly suggest moving to Orkney for Archie’s sake, not when they barely knew each other, and did she really want to leave her whole life in York for a man she’d met last week?
And yet it all felt so unfair. Wrong, even. This wasn’t the way it worked out in the movies, or those blasted BBC adaptations. Fantasies they might have been, but she could do with a small dose of it now.
“It’s difficult,” she managed at last. “I have Abby to think of now.”
“Of course you do. The last thing you want to do is hitch yourself to an old codger like me, not that you’re even thinking that way.” He let out an odd little laugh. “At the end of the day, it was just a kiss.”
Just a kiss. Except it had been so much more… hadn’t it? Cosy suppers, evenings playing games, heart-to-hearts like Laurel hadn’t had with anyone else, ever. Could she really turn her back on all that?
Did she have a choice?
On the Aga, the kettle begun to hum and then whistle. Soon it was a screech, and yet neither of them moved or spoke. What was Archie waiting for? What was she?
“Yes,” Laurel said at last. “Yes, it was just a kiss.”
*
Back at Bayview Cottage, her heart leaden inside her, Laurel tried to smile as she asked Abby if she wanted to go for a walk on the beach. She’d left Archie right after they’d both agreed that all they’d shared was a kiss, and she felt as if she were dragging a two-ton weight around, each footstep an unbearable burden. Still, she had to try, with Abby, if not with Archie.
Archie. She couldn’t think about him. Maybe one day she’d smile about her brief holiday romance, remember it with bittersweet whimsy, but right now it hurt far, far too much. It felt as if she were breaking into pieces inside, so her heart was nothing but flotsam, jagged pieces floating around in her body.
Still, Abby had agreed to a walk, and they headed through the garden to the beach, a stretch of silvery, damp sand under a heavy grey sky, the sea a flat surface stretching endlessly to the horizon.
“I forgot how bleak it is here,” Abby remarked as they started walking along. “You really feel as if you’re at the end of the world.”
“I don’t think it’s bleak,” Laurel protested, although she supposed there was some truth to Abby’s words—the vista of sea, sand, and sky, interspersed with tufty grass and jagged cliffs, was both bleak and beautiful. “Didn’t you like it here, back when we were little?” she asked, steeling herself for the answer. Those memories were precious, but what if they weren’t for Abby?
Abby sighed as she hunched deeper into her parka. “Of course I did. It felt magical.”
“Yes—”
“But it ended.”
