Page 45 of Trouble

He followed her as meekly as a lamb, and when they reached the empty kitchen, he pulled up a chair and collapsed into it gratefully, as if he would have returned to the floor if they had arrived at their destination but a moment later. The surfaces had all been diligently scrubbed, the dinner things cleaned and put away. Emily lit a candle, wondering why her hands were slightly jittery. In the light, she could see that his face was bruised around the eye socket, a mottled red that would likely mature to a rich, moody purple.

She rummaged until she found the bandages as yet unbloodied by Joe, and then handed them awkwardly to Captain Edwards. He looked down at them as if gathering the strength to act, and then started winding them around his hand. He kept losing the tension, so that they sagged, then having to start over again. Eventually Emily rolled her eyes and sat down next to him, pulling his hand towards her in as businesslike a fashion as she could manage.

‘You don’t seem very happy here,’ he said to Emily, as she frowned over her work.

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything,’ she replied without thinking. She reached the end of her winding and tied a knot so tight that Captain Edwards winced. ‘Sorry.’

‘Monstrous as I am, of course, in the tradition of men at the helms of .?.?. of large boats and slightly smaller houses .?.?. I do not wish for you to suffer under my roof.’

Emily gave him a doubtful, unimpressed sort of look. There seemed little chance he’d remember the details of this conversation in the morning.

‘Well, it’s suffer under your roof or suffer elsewhere. Sorry if I ruin the view.’

‘No, that is .?.?. not what I meant.’ Captain Edwards was looking at her very directly from under a wayward lock of hair, one of the ones not yet streaked with silver, and she kept having to look away. ‘Did you have trouble at your last house?’

‘Trouble?’ Emily said, confused by the turn this conversation had taken. ‘No, I don’t .?.?. Why would you think that?’

‘The other day when we were talking .?.?. some might say arguing, although I certainly wouldn’t be one of them .?.?. you mentioned men with ill intentions, and I wasn’t sure .?.?.’

‘Oh,’ said Emily, trying to remember exactly what she had said, feeling irritated with herself that she had brought it up at all. ‘No. I mean, it wasn’t at my last house.’

Captain Edwards nodded seriously. ‘I suppose there’s no way to say that would not be tolerated here without it sounding .?.?. Well .?.?. But I have said it anyway.’

Emily continued to be baffled. ‘You have.’

‘But you are resolved not to be happy here, anyway, so it is of no consequence.’

Emily looked sharply up at him and saw that he seemed to be joking.

‘You are happy, obviously. Happy people often find themselves coming home with split knuckles,’ she said, feeling brazen. ‘Unable to pick themselves up from the hallway floor. The calling card of a person at peace and content, the Tuesday evening drinking binge.’

For a second, Emily thought she had miscalculated, but then Captain Edwards laughed quietly. It transformed his whole face: his eyes crinkled, the furrows at his brow smoothed. He looked younger. Alive. There was something about that laugh that tugged at Emily’s stomach, a sort of horrified pleasure that she had been the one to cause it.

Or maybe she was just hungry. That was probably it.

‘You are very impertinent,’ Captain Edwards said, as if it was a neutral trait.

Emily shrugged, then remembered herself and picked up the scissors so that she could cut the end of the bandage and free him from her grip. She had to lean in close to do it, so that she didn’t accidentally slip and cut him, and for reasons unbeknownst to her, she found that he had leaned in a fraction closer to her, too.

‘I admire impertinence,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You wear it well. I almost believe you’d stab me with those, if I truly deserved it.’

She didn’t look up at him. That felt far too intimate and dangerous. She simply focused all her effort on the slide and cut of the scissors, to distract from the fact that she was so close she could actually smell him – sea salt and wet grass and sweet whisky – and that his breath was ruffling the loose strands of her hair.

He must have been very drunk to have forgotten himself like this and leaned in so very close. Or perhaps his head simply felt too heavy, his neck too weary to hold it up properly any more, like a baby’s.

‘There,’ said Emily, abruptly sitting back and dropping the scissors onto the table. ‘I’ve finished.’

‘Mmm,’ said Captain Edwards thoughtfully. He leaned back in the chair and pushed his hair out of his eyes, blinking hard as if trying to sober himself up. ‘Yes. You have. AndIhave embarrassed myself terribly, haven’t I.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Emily. ‘I wasn’t there.’

‘No, not out there,’ said Captain Edwards dismissively. ‘Here.’

‘Here?’ said Emily.

‘Yes.’ There was no premeditation behind his words; nothing about them was practised, or intentional. He genuinely seemed to be speaking almost as soon as a thought occurred to him, which was why Emily was so stunned by what he said next. ‘I think it must have been the way I was looking at you.’

Emily knocked the scissors from the table as she stood, and was gone almost before they hit the floor.