Page 135 of Carry Me Home

He glances at his mum. She’s already waving him away.

‘Go, go. We were just catching up.’ She gives me a look that says she knows exactly what’s happening and has been waiting eleven years for it. ‘Take your time.’

We walk out the back door. The evening air is cool and salt-sharp, the sky purpling at the edges. The harbour stretches out before us, boats bobbing gently, the water flat and silver in the last of the light.

We stop at the wall. Lean against it, side by side, looking out at the sea.

Silence.

‘So,’ Tom says eventually.

‘So.’

More silence. The waves. The halyards. The muffled noise of the pub behind us.

‘Tom.’ I grip the harbour wall. The stone is cold and rough under my fingers and I need that – need to feel something solid while the rest of me shakes. ‘Jude told me. At the pub. The night they wet the baby’s head. He was drunk and he thought I already knew.’

Tom goes very still.

‘Told you what,’ he says. But it’s not a question. His voice is flat. Careful.

‘That you’re in love with me. That you’ve been in love with me for eleven years.’

The words hang in the salt air between us. Tom doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. His hands are gripping the wall the way mine are – knuckles white, holding on.

‘I’m going to kill him,’ he says eventually.

‘Don’t be angry at him.’

‘I’m not angry at him.’ He runs a hand through his hair. ‘I’m angry at myself. I should have told you. Years ago. Instead of just … hovering.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Because you were with Peter. And then you were grieving Peter. And there was never a right time.’ He laughs, short and joyless. ‘That’s what I told myself. That I was being patient. Noble. But really I was just terrified.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of you saying what you said when we were seventeen.’ He’s looking at the water, not at me. ‘That kissing me was like kissing your brother.’

The words land like a stone dropped into still water. I watch the ripples spread – through my chest, my stomach, my hands gripping the wall.

‘Tom.’

The shame is physical. A heat spreading up my neck, across my face. Seventeen-year-old Nina, performing bravado for her friends, reducing a first kiss to a joke. Because she was scared. Because the way he looked at her was too much, too real, too honest, and the kiss tasted too much like a forever kiss, which seemed so silly when so young and with our entire futures ahead of us.

And yet here we both stand. Still us. Still the two of us, our past and future entwined.

‘Tom—’

‘You don’t have to⁠—’

‘I was seventeen.’ My voice comes out rough and cracked. ‘I was seventeen and you looked at me like I was the only person at that party and I didn’t know what to do with that. So I said the cruellest thing I could think of because it was easier than admitting I felt it too.’

He turns to look at me. The stillness in him is absolute.

‘What?’

‘I felt it.’ My hands are shaking. I take them off the wall because I don’t want to hold on to anything solid right now. I want to be in freefall. I want to be honest. ‘I’ve been feeling it. For weeks, or months, or maybe for eleven years – I don’t know where it started, Tom, I can’t find the beginning of it. I just know that when you left, it was like – it was like the lights went out. And everyone kept telling me it was normal to miss my best friend but it wasn’t that. It was bigger than that. It was the wrong shape for friendship.’