And It All Comes Down To You (3 page)

“Please.” I held my hand up, adopting an air of offence. “Do I look like the kind of girl who buys her knickers in Primark? I’ll have you know I’m a little more upmarket than that!”

I truly was kidding; Primark usually has a kickass selection of knickers, but my inner mischievousness had started running the show again, primarily to save me from the embarrassment of discussing my pants with Logan.

“Alright, Miss Fussy!” Logan laughed. “There’s probably something around here more suited to your refined tastes.”

“I’m sure there is, but how are we going to get there? We don’t know where we’re going, we can’t go anywhere in the car because we can’t see out of the windows, and we’re dressed for sunshine, not storms.”

“Jesus, woman! Talk about creating problems! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I left it at home with my umbrella.”

He shrugged. “Fine. We’ll go home when it stops raining so hard.”

I didn’t miss the smirk on his lips, and I bit my own lip to hold in a laugh. I couldn’t let this trip end yet. Screw it, even if we drowned on the way to the shops, it would be worth it just to be with him a bit longer. And it seemed like he genuinely wanted us to stay. Why, I had no clue, but I wasn’t about to question it.

“Let’s stay. I can suck it up and wear budget pants for one day.”

Present

“Well, well.” Lydia smirks. “Talking to Logan about your underwear. This is hotting up!”

I fling my beer mat across the table at her, laughing. “Stop. Don’t rush me.”

I figure I’m doing pretty well with the sharing, in spite of me trying to preserve the memories. Each memory I share brings with it another little snippet of something that happened; a small brush of our hands as we ran through the rain, me catching him smiling at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, small jokes that made us laugh at the time but wouldn’t make sense to anyone now. I suppose those are the things it’s okay to keep to myself. My things.
Our
things. I wonder if Logan looks back on them with the same fondness, or if he even remembers the little things. Maybe guys remember things differently and don’t hang on to small details. For me, those small details are everything.

“Right, right.” Lydia said. “I know. You like to build the dramatic tension.”

“Well, I can just get to the end if you want…”

“No!” Lydia pushes my beer mat back towards me. “I need to hear how this progressed, but, as I said, the underwear talk is giving me a good idea of how things went down!”

“Stop sleazing up my weekend! It wasn’t like that.”

It
wasn’t
. But the memories of touching him send shivers through me then lead to an ache I’ve carried in the pit of my stomach since the day we got home. We have plans to see each other soon, but until then, the whole thing still feels a little like a dream. I’m frozen in time, waiting. From the second I stepped into my house after our trip, I missed him. Lying on my bed the night we got home, I genuinely reached out for him to tell him something, my hand stretching over before I remembered he wasn’t there. I felt that after one full day with him. I still feel it.

“I miss him.” I didn’t mean for the words to slip out because I don’t want Lydia to think I’m still not happy after such a brilliant trip. I’ll just be happier when I see him.

Lydia’s head tilts to the side. “You haven’t seen him since?”

I shake my head. “He’s away with work this week and it’s killing me.” I laugh, feeling my cheeks warm. “I know I’m ridiculous. We’ll see each other at the weekend but this week is dragging.”

“It’s understandable. You’ve waited a long time for this. I mean… I’m still assuming there’s a happy ending here.”

“What kind of person gives away the ending this soon?” I chuckle, though we both know I wouldn’t be this detailed if the trip had been a disaster. Also, I would have called her, crying, and spent the last few days eating ice cream straight out of the tub.

“Good point. But I do need to know if you ended up buying your undies in Primark. So… keep talking.”

The Serious Stage aka Thinking Out Loud

It would be an understatement to say that storms are not my thing. However, in an extremely dorky realisation, it occurred to me that with Logan, I could probably fight a dragon or wrestle a tiger, and all manner of other things I didn’t think I could do alone.
What
is
that?
I’d had that feeling around him before more than once. Perhaps it was partially that I didn’t want him to think I was pathetic, so I tried harder with him around. But that wasn’t all of it. Something about him was encouraging, motivating. Had I been with Lydia, I probably would have huffed over the weather, and then chosen to go home. That way, at least we’d be warm and dry. With Logan I could take a little discomfort so as not to let an opportunity slip away. If it even was an opportunity. What I was effectively doing, was taking the opportunity for another potential opportunity to occur.

We waited for thirty minutes in the warmth of Logan’s car for the rain to slow. It didn’t. If anything, it got heavier, and the thunder grew louder, interspersed with flashes of lightning that made me jump every time. We didn’t have many options available. Stay where we were, or make a dash for… somewhere. After consulting Google Maps, we realised we were two streets away from a B&B, and in the interests of making sure we had a place to stay, we braved the rain and made the fastest run ever, hoping there would be a vacancy.

“Oh my God!” I tried to catch my breath as Logan and I reached the undercover porch of the B&B. There was not an inch of my skin that wasn’t saturated, and the hair I’d meticulously straightened that morning now hung in dark, frizzy curls around my shoulders. As I looked at Logan, water dripped from his hair onto his cheeks, his clothes clinging to his body.

Sweet Jesus.

If we’d been in a movie, we’d probably have laughed at how ridiculous we looked then kissed as our rain soaked bodies clung to each other, his hands in my hair, and mine…

“Marnie?”

“Huh?”

I blinked a few times as my thoughts flicked back to reality, and silently thanked God that I hadn’t actually reached out to him during my mini daydream. I could only have been a second from pulling him into me… my fingers digging into his back…

Stop it!

His brown eyes flickered with amusement, almost as if he knew what I was thinking. My face was already wet so I had no idea if I’d drooled while I’d been lost in my fantasy. All I could do was take a deep breath and say, “Do you think they’ll let us in in this state?”

“I’m hoping they’ll take pity on us and make us a bed anywhere. In the attic if necessary.”

“Ha, because that’s not creepy at all! A dark attic in a storm. What else do you want to add? Is the attic haunted with the ghosts of former guests?”

Laughing, Logan rested his hand on my shoulders and turned me towards the door. “Come on. Let’s get in there.”

I opened the heavy front door, and Logan and I stepped inside. I’d been kidding when I’d mentioned ghosts, but the reception area was dimly lit and the décor looked like it hadn’t been updated since the seventies. The wallpaper was faded and the carpets lacked their former colour. Even the framed artwork on the walls was lacklustre and dated.

I shifted my eyes towards and Logan and found him giving me a similar look of apprehension.

“It’s just one night,” he said. “Or we could look for somewhere else?”

The raise of his eyebrow made me roll my eyes. As if I was going back outside without a clear idea of where we were going unless I absolutely had to. Also, I couldn’t imagine going anywhere until we’d dried off a little. Assuming the owners of this establishment didn’t turn us away for ruining their already downtrodden carpets.

A tiny elderly lady wearing a floral dress and a thick white cardigan stepped out through the door behind the reception desk. Her jaw dropped when she saw us dripping all over her floors.

“Goodness me, look at you two!” She scurried back into the room she’d just exited and returned with two large towels, handing one to me and one to Logan.

“Thank you,” I said, wrapping the towel around myself and breathing in the comforting scent of clean linen while Logan began drying his hair.

“I presume you two need a place to stay?”

“Yes please,” Logan told her. “Do you have any rooms?”

“I have one.” She scuttled behind the desk again and opened up a large leather bound book. “It’s a double room though. I presume you two are married?”

My eyes widened, my mouth opening and closing like a deranged goldfish
. Married?
I couldn’t bring myself to look at Logan. Geez, I’d just hoped I’d get close enough to maybe kiss him, now we were married?!

The old lady glanced up from the book, her lips twitching as she winked. “I’m just teasing you, dears.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Logan’s shoulders sag in relief as mine did the same thing.
Old lady’s got a sense of humour.

“Are you okay with a double room?” Logan asked.

Hmm. Having been so freaked out by the owner’s joke, I hadn’t considered the potential weirdness of us sharing a bed. But it wasn’t like we were strangers, and sure, we weren’t that close but… what the hell, I wanted to get closer to him and you can’t get much closer than sharing a bed.

I nodded. “Fine with me. As long as you’re cool with it.”

“Should be okay. As long as you don’t snore.”

With another roll of my eyes, I turned back to the old lady and said, “We’ll take it.”

She set about taking our details, payment, and telling us everything we needed to know – including her name: Mrs Kay. I tried hard to take it all in, but the wetness of my clothes was beginning to seep into my skin, making me shiver. There’s nothing more uncomfortable than having soaked clothes stuck to your body.

Spotting my discomfort, Mrs Kay said, “We need to get you out of those wet clothes and get you warmed up.”

“We were going to head into town to buy something to wear but…” I looked down at myself. “I don’t think I can move yet.”

“Wait there.”

Mrs Kay, once again, disappeared into the back room, and I turned to Logan. “Maybe this place isn’t so bad.”

He shrugged, but he was shivering too. Again, I tried to keep my focus on his face and not on the fact I could see his abs through his wet t-shirt. “Beats going back outside. And the old bird obviously doesn’t mind us spending a night in sin.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself smirking. Was sinning an option? If so, staying over was a better idea than I’d expected.

When Mrs Kay came back, she carried two crisp white bathrobes, and she handed one each to Logan and me, along with a key. “Go on up to the room, change into these, then bring your wet clothes down. I’ll give them a quick wash and dry for you.”

Hold. Up. She wanted me and Logan to get almost naked while she washed and dried our clothes? Clearly, she thought we were a couple, not just two stranded friends. If that were the case we would probably have taken advantage of the lack of clothes. But that
wasn’t
the case.

That’s not to say I wasn’t
thinking
about taking advantage of it. Which sort of made it worse.

“Thank you,” Logan said, totally unfazed by how weird this was. Did he often hang out with girls he didn’t know that well with only a robe to cover his nudey bits? Because for me, this was a first. However, if he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, I couldn’t either. I gave Mrs Kay a smile before following Logan up the stairs to room number five. The lights along the hallway flickered, continuing the slightly eerie vibe, and with the thunder still crashing outside, goose bumps erupted across my skin.

It’s all fine. You’re perfectly safe.

“Don’t worry,” Logan said, seriously, as he unlocked the door. “Our clothes won’t take too long to wash and dry, and then we can go out again.”

I think he was trying to reassure me that he wasn’t going to pounce on me while we were almost in the buff, which I appreciated, but with the unease at being somewhere unfamiliar and dark in a storm, a massive part of me wanted him to wrap himself around me until I calmed down. My heart hammered in my chest as we stepped into our room and flicked on the light.

Flowers. Flowers everywhere. Hideous pink flowered wallpaper covered the walls, and the curtains, duvet and cushions matched. The carpet was also pink, and the furnishings were as outdated as the décor downstairs. Still, it was warm and the bed looked comfortable. Too bad neither of us could sit down until we’d dried off. I was exhausted from our run through the rain, and I couldn’t wait to thaw out with a cup of tea.

Within thirty minutes, Logan and I had showered, changed into our robes, and delivered our soaked garments to Mrs Kay.

I didn’t feel as uncomfortable lying on the bed next to Logan as I’d expected. Obviously, I was careful to make sure my robe was fully secured so I didn’t accidentally expose anything, and I kept as still as possible. I didn’t much fancy smacking him with my boobs if I turned over too fast. But I didn’t feel like I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom until I was dressed again either. Beside me, Logan seemed relaxed as he checked Facebook on his phone, but he too kept his body still. The only thing moving was his thumb as he scrolled the screen.

While he was distracted, I allowed myself to take some long, slow breaths, enjoying the sound of the rain against the windows. Now I was safe and dry, the booming thunder didn’t make me flinch quite as much, and my mind wandered to what we
should
have been doing. I’d imagined us having a couple of drinks on a vacant patch of grass while we waited for the music to start, sun beating down on our skin, and discussing the acts we most wanted to see and the songs we wanted to hear. Then, we’d move closer to the stage, maybe pushing our way through the crowds to get nearer to the front. We’d become absorbed in the melodies and the atmosphere, and we’d dance to the fast tracks and sway our arms to the ballads, laughing and joking, maybe teasing each other the way we had on the journey.

The reality wasn’t so disappointing. I mean, who’d have thought I’d get this close to naked Logan? The lack of disappointment wasn’t really related to our lack of clothes. It was related to the fact that we were still together, not returning home. Okay, the weather sucked, but
Logan
had been the one to suggest we stayed and he seemed pretty cool with how we were.

You know, almost naked on a bed.