Beneath the Moon and the Stars (12 page)

He laughed and was surprised by the sound of it. It had been a long time since he had laughed. ‘I’m not sure about the swimming after you’ve eaten one, but not eating yellow snow sounds like good advice.’

‘It probably just needs to be relit, or I could give it a kick or something.’

‘And lose your foot or your face in the process, I don’t think so.’

‘Spoilsport, that was The Finale.’

‘So you said, but not this time my love.’ He froze. Did he just call her “my love”? Luckily she hadn’t noticed. ‘What did you mean, no one came?’

‘Just that. It was just me and Darcy all night. Until you arrived.’

His heart bled for her. ‘No one. What about your friends?’

‘I don’t have any.’ She laughed. ‘No, that’s not true. I have brilliant friends. When I went to university I spent four years in the pockets of Libby, Annie, Suzie and Eve. We all studied Fine Art and Sculpture. We were inseparable. We went everywhere, did everything together. But when we graduated Libby went back to the furthest northern shores of Scotland, Suzie went back to Jersey, Annie went back to Iceland and the last I heard Eve now lives on a ranch in Texas, married to a huge cowboy called Red, with five equally huge children. God I miss them. We all stay in touch with Skype or email but obviously we don’t see each other that often.’

‘So everyone went back home and you didn’t have a home to return to? What did you do?’

She smiled darkly. ‘When university finished I was in the middle of a passionate whirlwind affair with Jake Aldbury, a guest speaker that had talked to us about carving wood. He was such a marvellous man – he had travelled the world, he’d seen so much and he could do things with wood I couldn’t even begin to do. Jake taught me so much about wood carving and the sex was amazing. When he travelled to Italy, I went with him. Then he travelled to Australia and I went too. We parted ways soon after that, but I had the travelling bug and as you said, I had no home to return to, so I didn’t see any point in coming back. I spent the next four years travelling the world. I worked in bars, I danced on tables…’

She laughed when she saw his angry face.

‘No not like topless dancing. I worked in one of those fifties style restaurants in San Francisco, where the waiters are costumed. Mainly I was Rizzo from Grease, but sometimes I was Marilyn Monroe in a blonde wig, apparently I had the tits for it.’

He refused to let his eyes wander to them to check them out.

‘So I was dancing on tables, cleaning hotels, I washed cars, delivered pizzas and in between I’m carving, whittling, sculpting wood and selling my pieces to tourists. The Aboriginals and the Native Americans taught me a lot about carving wood too. Then I met a chainsaw artist, and that was inspiring. I went to every single little pocket of the world, – Alaska, Easter Island, Christmas Island, Greenland, Thailand, New Zealand – and I met the most amazing people who I still keep in touch with, but unfortunately they’re all a bit far away to be coming to my little barbeque. I came back to England three years ago and for a while I was involved with Ed, he had loads of friends and suddenly I did too, but after what happened…’ she trailed off, frowning.

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter.’ Leading Finn to believe it did.

‘Did he cheat on you?’

‘No.’

‘Did you cheat on him?’

Anger exploded in her eyes. ‘No, I would never do that, never.’

‘Then what?’

‘It doesn’t matter, we broke up and suddenly all my friends, his friends that had been so nice to me in the year that me and Ed had been together, well as soon as Ed dropped me, they went back to being just
his
friends again. In the last two years, I haven’t been anywhere longer than three months. You don’t tend to make lasting friendships when you’ve only known someone for a month or two. So although I have friends, none of them live close. Oh listen to me warble on. My mouth does seem to disengage itself from my brain when I’m drunk. You should just tell me to shut up. Oh I love this song.’ She started dancing, swirling round in circles, her arms above her head as she started to sing to Cyndi Lauper’s Time after Time.

He watched her, his heart physically aching for her. Every single one of the villagers had snubbed her. She’d been thrown in a pond, been in a fight, had dog shit posted through her letterbox and she was still dancing. Nothing seemed to keep her down. It seemed she had gotten very good at being on her own, creating her own fun, but it shouldn’t be like that. She needed a friend. He could be her friend.

‘Dance with me Finn.’ She held out a hand for him and he instinctively took it, with the other hand at her waist, pulling her close against him. She tried to loop her arm round his neck, but she couldn’t reach so she settled for her hand on his shoulder instead, leaning her head against his chest. With her warmth, her smell, her body against his; a wave of desire crashed through him like he had never felt before. He’d had girlfriends in the past, women he had found attractive, but right then he wanted Joy like a drug addict wanted heroin. He nearly pushed her away – the need for her, to have her, was so strong.

Just then the redundant firework blew up with a deafening boom, Joy jolted a bit and he automatically pulled her closer. Ribbons of gold, silver and red shot across the sky and they both looked up, admiring the view.

As the light faded from her eyes and she stared into his, he knew they could never be friends, not when he was now seemingly falling in love with her.

Chapter Seven

Joy woke the next day, her head was pounding, her mouth was dry. She was in bed, in her pyjamas with no recollection of how she got there. Her head was sticking out the bottom of the bed, but then she always did wriggle around a lot in her dreams when she was drunk. She sat up carefully, holding her head in her hands when it pounded with the excessive movement.

Images of the night before flooded through her mind. The barbeque, the fireworks, Finn, dancing with Finn. She had felt so safe there in his arms, so protected. She suddenly groaned as her cheeks burned red. She remembered trying to kiss him. She remembered him stepping back from her, pushing her gently but firmly away, before he disappeared back through the gate without another word. The shame of rejection washed through her.

Darcy rolled over, resting her great head in Joy’s lap, her beautiful doleful eyes staring up at her.

Joy stroked her ears. ‘Oh Darcy, maybe I really should just stick my nose up Finn’s butt, it seems to work for you.’

Suddenly, Joy heard a spluttering, a coughing from next door – it was so loud, so clear it was almost as if Finn was in the room with her. It sounded like he had just drank some water and spat it out again. Had he choked on it in shock over what she’d just said? If she could hear him coughing so clearly, he would definitely be able to hear her speaking. She was sure her cheeks were glowing crimson right now.

She scrabbled out of bed and went to stand near the adjoining wall.

‘You heard that didn’t you?’ she asked the wall.

There was silence for a moment then she heard a shifting of weight as someone moved closer to the wall.

‘Yes,’ came Finn’s voice.

She closed her eyes. Silence stretched between them. There were no words she could find to lessen her embarrassment. She wondered, if she prayed and wished really hard, if the gods, fairy godmothers, guardian angels or whoever else might be listening might be persuaded to turn the clock back five minutes. In fact, whilst the gods of time were messing about with the timeline, they might as well turn the clocks back forty-eight hours. That way she wouldn’t, rather embarrassingly, bare her soul to Finn about her parents and her home, she wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble for the barbeque if she’d known no one was going to turn up, then she wouldn’t have got drunk, told Finn she hadn’t got any friends and then tried to kiss him.

She kept her eyes scrunched for a moment, hoping that when she opened them she would be lying on the chair swing, wrapped in the blanket that Zach had covered her with and everything would be right with the world.

She opened her eyes and to her disappointment she found she was still standing next to the wall.

Joy sighed. She knew she would have to speak to Finn at some point and at least talking to him through the wall was easier than doing so face to face.

‘I’m … sorry about last night.’

She heard a shifting of weight again as he moved closer. She couldn’t say why, but she felt sure he was pressing his hand against the wall, almost like he wanted to touch her. It was a silly thought, if he wanted to touch her, he would have done so the night before.

‘It’s fine.’ His voice was cool, clipped. She sighed. They had been making headway in their friendship. The day before, when he’d been so nice about the farm, had been lovely. Now it seemed that they were going to revert back to how they were when she first moved in.

‘Darcy, let’s go for a walk,’ she said, indicating to Finn that their conversation was over. She stormed out, but then hesitated near the door as Darcy ran past her and thundered down the stairs. She frowned in confusion at the lack of movement from Finn’s side, almost as if he was still standing there, next to her wall. Turning away, she went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

*

As Joy walked back from the fields with Darcy, she thought back again to the night before. The way Finn had held her when they had danced, the way he had looked at her right before she tried to kiss him, had indicated to her that perhaps he had feelings for her too. The rejection confused her.

She sighed. She had bared her soul the day before. He now knew more about her than most of her friends. Why she felt so compelled to share her innermost secrets with him, she didn’t know. All she had to do now was tell him of the time she was attacked in London and that would be it, all her secrets would be laid out before him.

Almost all of her secrets. There was still one that she held very close to her chest.

She had given away too much information about her wood carving and chainsaw experience to Finn the night before. If he saw her with the chainsaw or Casey told him about it, Finn might put two and two together. They both could, especially if they compared notes. The unfortunate timing of the Menton Hall robbery was too close for comfort as well. She had spent the best part of two years keeping the identity of her alter ego hidden, she couldn’t afford to be found out now just because her tongue got a bit loose when she was drunk.

She let herself back in, filled Darcy’s water bowl and opened the back door so Darcy could lie outside.

Blanking out the number plates outside her home just before her last job had been a mistake. Normally she did it just round the corner from where she would go off road, but as Menton Hall had been so close, she’d done it at home and that had been careless. If anyone saw, if Finn saw that, then suspicions would certainly arise.

She had another job to do tonight, another local one. Maybe she would start to load a few bits now so it didn’t look quite as suspicious as it would if she did it all in one go later.

‘Hey!’ called Zach from his garden, disturbing her from her reverie. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make your barbeque thing last night. I wish I could have come, I bet it would have been much more fun than the stupid rehearsal dinner thing.’

‘A rehearsal dinner does sound a bit strange. What do you need to rehearse? She says I do, he says I do, job done.’

Zach laughed. ‘You’re right, it is silly. Casey’s just doing anything for a quiet life at the moment. That’s why he keeps hanging round here all the time, trying to keep out of Arielle’s way whilst she goes mad with all the wedding preparations.’

She stepped closer to the fence. ‘What do you make of Casey marrying Arielle?’ She had to be careful what she said here.

‘I think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve never known two people less suited to each other. I’m pretty sure she’s shagging Robert Franks, the local plumber so I doubt it will last. She makes Casey miserable and if Mum stopped getting so excited about this big wedding of the year for just a second, she would see how unhappy he is. I do worry about him.’

Joy was surprised by this. Although Zach seemed like a nice bloke, she had always thought that he was quite self-involved. To hear him so concerned about his brother was incredibly endearing.

‘Listen I have something to ask you,’ he went on, ‘and just hear me out before you say no. I know you’re coming to the wedding on Saturday but I was wondering if you would come as my date. No funny business,’ he added quickly. ‘It’s just that there will be a lot of single women at this wedding and a lot of them are interested in me…’

‘Poor you, that must be so hard.’ She smirked at him.

‘Well, normally I wouldn’t mind, but since I fell in love with the girl next door, I’ve been sworn off women for the next month. It would make it a lot easier if I had a date to the wedding – that way no possible suitors will come after me. I’m not asking you to pretend to be my girlfriend or anything, just to accompany me. Maybe dance with me once or twice.’

She barely heard what he said; her mind was still processing the fact that he’d just said he was in love with her. No one had ever said they loved her. There’d been boyfriends in the past, but no real long term relationships. Ed had been the longest and he’d never uttered those words. But then it was clear he never loved her – if he had, he wouldn’t’ve dumped her over what had happened that fateful night.

But Zach had just said it so casually, so simply, the words didn’t seem to matter at all. She had always envisaged hearing those words for the first time in much more romantic circumstances. Did he really love her? The ‘can’t breathe, can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t think,’ kind of love?

She found herself nodding, inwardly cursing herself for being so flattered that he loved her, or at least had said it. ‘Ok then, just as long as you know that it’s not a proper date, there’ll be no kissing or anything else that your dirty little mind can imagine.’

He pretended to look offended. ‘I’ll have you know that my mind is squeaky clean.’