‘No, this is fine,’ I assured him as I slid onto a wrought-iron chair and repositioned my sunglasses from the top of my head to my nose.
The arresting green of Rhys’s eyes was hidden behind dark-tinted shades, but the black t-shirt he’d paired with faded jeans did little to conceal the marks the lightning had left on his body. They appeared, if anything, even more pronounced than the week before. He caught me looking and pulled a rueful expression.
‘They’re still here,’ he said.
I nodded and then stepped over so many boundaries I should have been arrested for trespass. ‘They’re not unattractive,’ I said. ‘And they’re the mark of a survivor.’
Rhys lowered his sunglasses and looked at me over their rim.
‘That’s a very glass-half-full way of looking at things.’
‘I suppose it is. And if you’d have said that about me a week ago, I’d have told you that wasn’t me at all.’
‘But now?’
I gave a confused sigh. ‘Now everything feels a little different.’
‘Different isn’t always bad.’
The day was hot but the heat from his eyes was even more intense. I swear I could feel myself about to combust, my sleeveless shift dress too warm and my hair too heavy for the back of my neck. I swept it up in one hand, praying for a breeze. I couldn’t tell if his gaze lingered on the curve of my neck longer than it should have before I released the flame-coloured strands or whether the lightning had fried some important circuitry in my brain and I could no longer differentiate fact from fantasy.
I licked my lips, which were suddenly incredibly dry.
‘What would you like to drink?’
‘A really cold beer,’ I said, with so much feeling he laughed.
I tried hard not to let my eyes follow him as he strode back inside to get our drinks, but he pulled my gaze as though it was magnetised to him.
Sitting alone in the sunshine, my thoughts went back to the bag of medication in his car. How rude would it be, on a scale of ‘perfectly okay’ to ‘totally unacceptable’, to ask him what the meds were for. Unbidden, my mother popped into my head, like a parental Jiminy Cricket. She was right. Good manners prevented me from asking. But once in my thoughts, Mum proved hard to evict. I’d tried to reach her several times over the last few days but still hadn’t been able to make contact.
I glanced towards the pub doors, but there was no tall, dark-haired man standing in their frame. So I reached for my phone and quickly rang my mother’s number again.
It wasn’t unusual for weeks to pass between our phone calls – sometimes even longer if we’d fallen out over some stupid disagreement. But something was starting to feel wrong about not being able to reach her for the best part of a week.
This time, when I got her voicemail, I did leave a message.
‘Hey, Mum, it’s me. I was just wondering where you are. Is it your WI day, or the day you go swimming? I can never remember your schedule. Either way, give me a call when you get this, okay?’
I bit my lip as I severed the connection and slid the phone back into my pocket, unable to silence a strange feeling of disquiet at the back of my mind. It felt like something important was hovering there, but each time I tried to grab hold of it, it evaporated away like smoke.
We drank icy-cold beer straight from the bottle, clinking them together in a toast to new friends, which tasted almost as good on my tongue as the Bud Light.
For a man who was so good at keeping a conversation alive, Rhys was equally skilled in the art of maintaining a comfortable silence. So he surprised me when he broke it.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what happened to us last week.’
I sat up straighter in my chair.
‘Do you think it was something more than just pure luck that we both survived it?’ he asked.
I blew out a long breath. ‘That sounds like something my friend Mel would say. She’s always been way more woo-woo than me.’
The corners of Rhys’s eyes crinkled appealingly whenever he smiled. The ever-present grooves there suggested it was something he did a lot.
‘She’d probably say it’s a sign we’re meant to do something big – something important – with our lives from here on.’
‘Maybe the universe was giving us a wake-up call?’ Rhys suggested.