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“Yes, if you’re number one and you open box one, and number fourteen is in box one, so then you open box fourteen, and number twenty-seven is in box fourteen, eventually you’ll get to—”
Distracted as I was, I thought I understood. But, truthfully, it didn’t matter to either of us if I did or not. This was Adam’s poetry: these puzzles and their outcomes, the way numbers danced for him like the crystal spheres of Jareth, Goblin King. Another of my early crushes, my taste for dangerous men finally satisfied by the kindest person I’d ever met. With my eyes half-closed, I imagined his voice was his mouth upon my skin, each word a kiss, a bite, a mark to make me his. The light from the noonday sun fell in swoops and curlicues across the distant hills, calligraphic ornaments inked in ephemeral gold. And I—discreetly for the sake of other travellers—gave over the rest of the journey to Adam’s instructions and my own not so quiet passions.
Adam, of course, had already looked up where to park in Chirk. He manoeuvred the car briskly into a space behind the railway station, while I attempted to catch my breath and calm down. Before I gotvery far with that, however, he had surged round the passenger side and yanked open the door. For a moment, I just blinked up at him. He could look very tall from the right angle, especially when partially in silhouette. Then I was being unceremoniously dragged out the car, pushed up against it, and kissed the way probably nobody had ever been kissed in a car park in Chirk.
I loved it.
“That,” Adam growled, still pressed heedlessly tight against me, “was a human rights violation, Edwin. I’m surprised we aren’t in a ditch or you aren’t getting thoroughly mauled over the bonnet.”
“Maybe you could try that on the way back?” I suggested.
His teeth grazed my ear lobe. “Brat.”
And I just smiled giddily into the sky beyond his shoulders. “Yes.”
“Come on.” He stepped away, leaving me weak-kneed and moderately indecent. “Let’s go find your ex.”
“Or we could not.”
“We’re here now. And besides”—opening the boot, Adam heaved out a heavy-looking bag that clinked as he lifted it—“I brought him a present.”
I glanced from Adam to the bag and back again. “Is that my elderflower wine?”
“Aye. Thought he’d appreciate it.”
“Adam, nobody appreciates my elderflower wine.” With, to be fair, good reason.
“It’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad.”
Hefting the bag over his shoulder, Adam grinned, looking fartoo innocent for a man about to subject another man to what practically amounted to biological warfare. “I enjoy watching him not telling you that, though. It’s like not being a dick causes him physical pain or something.”
“He’s…” Not for the first time, I cast around for a word for Marius. Any word. “Complicated? Also, I don’t really know where he is.”
“You said Chirk.”
“NearChirk. Between Chirk and Llangollen.”
Adam was instantly checking Google maps. “That’s nearly seven miles of canal. Why don’t you text him?”
“Because he never replaced his phone.”
“The other bloke has one though?”
“I think he uses it mostly for work.”
“Then it looks like we’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us.”
I winced. We weren’t in Europe and there hadn’t been a volcanic eruption, but here I was, still following Marius around, feeling lost.
“We might as well try,” Adam pointed out, his eyes—as ever—seeing slightly too much. “If we find him, gradely. If we don’t, we’ve had a lovely walk along a towpath. And we’ll find a nice pub to have a late lunch in. Perfect end to a mini-break.”
He was right. This was still our holiday. It was silly to let Marius—not even Marius, but the ghost of long ago hurts—take that away from us. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Adam took my hand (something else Marius only ever did under sufferance, insisting it was twee and stifling) and we left Chirk behind us, crossing a railway bridge and cutting down to thecanal. There were towpaths in Oxford, and I walked along them often, but it wasn’t like this. There was a deep stillness here, even close to the road, and something that felt as enfolding as silence—for all it was studded by birdsong or ruffled by the breeze. The canal itself was a channel of dark water, smooth like polished stone, whose surface held an almost perfect reflection of the surrounding woodland and a ribbon of silver blue sky.
“Well,” I whispered, half-convinced even the trespass of my breath could break the serenity, “now I don’t think I care whether we find Marius.”
