At First Sight Hannah Sunderland (free e books to read online txt) 📖

a little achy from when I’d clutched Charlie’s hand to a state of blueness against the armrest. Everything this morning had gone surprisingly smoothly. Charlie hadn’t suddenly decided not to come, like I thought he might and Carrick had been less hungover than I thought he would be, after finding him and Ned in the kitchen just after midnight, three bottles of wine down and playing a particularly competitive game of Jenga, where Carrick had somehow ended up shirtless, his chest stained with long-since-dried droplets of red wine, and could be heard periodically shouting, ‘How about that, Sassenach?’

I leaned forward and looked past a slumbering Charlie to see how Carrick was doing. He’d taken the aisle seat as the altitude ‘fecked with his bladder’ as he’d so poetically put it. He was sleeping it off now, his head leaning back against the headrest and his sunglasses pulled down over his light-sensitive eyes. I hadn’t wanted to sit by the window, but Charlie had said it would be good for me and if I was making him face his fears, then I’d have to face some of my own too.

‘Don’t worry about him. The man wears a hangover as often as he wears trousers,’ Charlie said, his voice making me jump.

‘For the sake of everyone in Westport, I hope that means that it’s often.’

He chuckled and opened his eyes. ‘How’re you doin’?’ he asked, squeezing my hand.

‘Okay. You just might have to keep your hands away from me when we land, unless you want your bones crushing again.’

‘Duly noted.’ He shifted in his seat and took hold of the tea on his little fold-out tray that, surprise surprise, he’d let go cold.

I thought back to the mug beside the bed in which Abi had died, and something clicked.

Tea. It was the last thing he ever did for her. He’d made her a cup of tea, a cup which she never drank. That’s why he never drank his own, because why should he be allowed to when Abi hadn’t? Did he buy himself cup after cup of wasted tea because it was his own small way of punishing himself, of making sure he never made the mistake of getting distracted again?

‘I wonder how Ned’s doin’ with the cat?’ Charlie asked, breaking my train of thought.

‘Oh, I don’t think you need to worry there. They’re soulmates if ever I saw them,’ I replied.

There couldn’t be that much longer to go now before we started descending and the closer we got, the more haywire my nerves seemed to be getting. What were people going to think when Charlie showed up with a strange new Englishwoman on his arm? Would people think that he’d brought a date to his wife’s funeral? Because I was only there for moral support; it wasn’t like we were going to be making out on the buffet table after the service, or making out at all for that matter.

‘Hey, Nell?’ Charlie asked, shuffling in his seat so that he was facing me as much as he could. ‘When I disappeared …’

‘Which time was this? The first time or the second when you ignored me for two weeks?’ I grinned to lessen the sharpness.

‘Ha-ha.’ He mock laughed. ‘The second. There was a reason for it, yer know. I was erm … well, I was afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Of you.’

‘Me?’ I asked, my brows knitting at the mere notion of it. ‘I know I’ve got a little bit of a temper sometimes but I wouldn’t say that I was particularly menacing.’

‘Not of you as a person, of what I felt … for yer.’

My chest felt as if it was filling with pressure, like a balloon pressed beneath the sole of a shoe.

‘I felt a lot more than I thought I would ever be able to feel again,’ he continued. ‘I felt guilty. I want yer to understand that Abi and I never broke up. We never fell out of love or ended up hating each other. She was just there one minute, gone the next and I had, still have, no idea what to do with everything I feel for her. So, when I began feelin’ that churnin’ in my stomach and wanting to lean in and kiss yer. When I touched that tattoo on yer shoulder and wanted to take yer upstairs, that all felt like cheatin’ to me, like I was gonna get home and Abi was gonna be there with a private investigator and a look of murder on her face.

‘It wasn’t because I didn’t like yer, it was because I liked yer too much. And I was always gonna come back and talk to you again, explain myself. Yer just beat me to it.’ His hand landed gently on mine, his fingers falling into the spaces between.

Since I’d met Charlie, I had felt something for him that I had never felt for another human being before. It was an unspoken intimacy that felt more real, more connected than any bond I’d ever shared with anyone else. It made everything about us, even these new, timid touches, feel natural, inevitable.

‘I understand,’ I said, my voice almost a whisper. ‘I can’t imagine how hard this has all been for you and I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to replace her or make you move on faster. This can be done at your own speed.’

He leaned his head forward until his forehead rested against mine and he exhaled a relieved breath.

‘I’m so glad I met yer, Nell,’ he said quietly, his face so close to mine that his eyes morphed into one in the centre of his forehead. But what a handsome cyclops he made.

I thought of what would have happened if we hadn’t met.

An extra space at the café table. One call less on the waiting list. The sound of sirens in the distance that I didn’t know the purpose of. A cordoned-off road that added a couple of minutes to my journey. A few more miserable mornings