She didn’t tuck herself under my arm when we watched telly. She didn’t reach for my hand in the kitchen.
And in bed…
Where last week she’d curled into me like I was the world’s largest, warmest hot water bottle, she now lay on her side facing away, breathing steady, a whole inch of mattress between us that may as well have been the Atlantic.
An inch was a chasm when until a few days ago we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
“Everything all right, darling?” I asked one morning, brushing my knuckles over her shoulder as she sat at the table surrounded by charts and notes, laptop open, her gran’s book propped beside it.
“I’m fine,” she’d said too brightly, shrugging off my hand. “Just lots to think about. Don’t worry.”
Unfortunately for both of us, that was impossible not to do. Not with her.
“Lass,” I’d tried again. “Talk to me. Something’s bothering you.”
“I just need to figure things out on my own,” she’d said, jaw tightening. “Please, Torin. I promise I’ll talk when I’m ready.”
And that was that.
I couldn’t push. Not when she looked at me like she was balancing on a tightrope and I’d be the one to knock her off.
So I did what I always did when my world didn’t make sense.
I went to the woods.
To distract myself, I cleared half a kilometer of trail, took down a dead ash threatening to fall across the path, and gave three separate lectures to customers about paying better attention to the trees where their branches hung over their roofs.
Bracken often followed me, chittering away, and I talked to him too, even though I couldn’t understand anything he said back to me.
The truth was, I was worried. I could feel Liora pulling back and it was triggering every protective instinct I had. I wanted tofix it. To shore up whatever crack had appeared. But this wasn’t like a broken fence post I could replace. This was Liora, and she’d asked for space without quite saying the word.
So I was respecting that.
Mostly.
Which was why, when Friday morning rolled around and I reached for my keys and she told me that I didn’t need to pick her up from the pub after her shift, that Graham would drop her home or she’d walk, I said, looking her square in the eye, “That isn’t going to happen.”
She groaned. “Torin.”
“Liora.” I folded my arms. “There are Kelpies in the loch and you’ve barely talked to me all week. I know you’re not going to be paying attention to whatever’s out there. You think I’m letting you walk home alone on a Friday in the dark? Not a chance. I’ll come in for trivia and bring you home. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
Her mouth quirked despite her exasperation. “You’re very bossy for a man who spends most of his time with trees.”
“Trees respect routine,” I said. “You might try it sometime.”
She threw a cushion at my head.
So that was how I ended up at The Tipsy Thistle on Friday night, walking into the hum of voices and clink of glasses, the smell of chips and beer wrapping around me like something familiar.
The pub was packed. Trivia nights always were. You could be promised a good show when Agnes and Graham argued over obscure questions, which ended up making half the village shout at each other over whether a wombat’s poo was square or round.
For the record, it was square. Agnes had proved this once with a very graphic demonstration involving sugar cubes and a diagram on the back of a coaster. I still wasn’t over it.
I spotted Liora straightaway, my gaze drawn to her like a heat-seeking missile.
She was at the far end of the bar, a notebook tucked under one arm, balancing a tray of pints with more grace than she claimed to have. Her hair was in some kind of messy knot with bits falling out around her face, her cheeks flushed, eyes sparkly as she laughed at something a regular said.
She looked … happy, damn it.