“Come on, let’s head back to my apartment and wait for him there.”
We walked back to the staff house in silence, our breaths mingling in the cold night air.
In Lew’s apartment, we stood facing the door. SweetPea opened the door without knocking, with his curls for once not tied back into the high bun but floating around his face. It made him look ten years younger and even more attractive. He beamed as he crossed the threshold with a bottle of whisky tucked under his arm.
“There you go,” SweetPea said, and he set the bottle down on Lew’s kitchen counter. “First foot’s in. Mind ye make good use of it.” With a wink and a little wave, he left.
“Right.” Lewis took two tumblers off a high shelf and poured two healthy measures of amber liquid out for us. No ice, no water, just pure Scottish burn. We always took our whisky neat.
“To you,” he said as we clinked the glasses’ heavy bottoms together.
“No. To us,” I corrected him, and we both downed our drinks in one. The alcohol seared in my throat and warmed my belly.
“To us,” Lew repeated. He put both our glasses next to the bottle, closed the distance between us, and hoisted me up into his arms. “Lets get you out of this kilt, Puppy.” Lew growled, nipping the side of my neck playfully. “I’ve been dreaming ofhaving you spread out for me like this all night,” he said as he placed me gently on top of his mattress.
Afterwards, when we lay in his bed, the world seemed soft and close, yet a million miles away. The words sat right on my tongue, but I still couldn’t say them.
The right moment would present itself. I knew that, but dammit. I really wished Lew wasn’t too noble to tell me that he wanted me to stay.
Chapter 34
Noah
The email I had been dreading for weeks came on an inconspicuous Wednesday in mid January.
Dear Mr Bright,
We are pleased to inform you that your visa has been issued …
My heart dropped right out of my stomach when I read on. No delays; it all had gone as planned. I didn’t want to get on the flight on Valentine’s Day, and go back to my life in Bali, back to a life without Lew.
And then what? There’s no me without him.
“Fuck!”
I slammed my laptop shut and jumped off the couch, suddenly unable to breathe properly. Every single time I allowed my brain to go anywhere near Bali, I got an anxiety attack, and that email broke me.
I tried to ground myself in tree pose, but ended up with my forehead pressed to the threadbare carpet.
I should really talk about this with Lewis, but I didn’t want to taint the time we had left. I wanted to squeeze every last bit of love out of the next couple of weeks.
How am I supposed to survive losing us and how good we are together?
It took me ten minutes of breathing in the musty air of the old carpet in child pose to calm down sufficiently to even look at my laptop again.
“I can’t do this, Mr Pickles.” My cat looked up when I addressed him, meowed once, and then curled up in a ball again.
The next quarter of an hour I spent digging through my inbox to find my flight confirmation.
I should clear out my inbox, but the prospect of having to deal with over twenty thousand emails, 80 percent of which were spam, nearly made me go straight back into child pose.
Ah, there you are!
A tiny link at the end of the email took me to the page where I could make changes to my reservation.
I had to confirm the cancellation twice. When I closed the tab, I felt lighter than I had been in weeks.
Mr Pickles purred when I walked over to scratch his chin. It was furry, just like Lew’s but in miniature.
