Page 5 of Pull Me Under

I don’t answer because I’m too busy staring. My gaze focused on the set of her shoulders, the way she’s planting her feet like she’s expecting a fight. My brain’s doing that thing where it tries to match a present threat with a past pattern. It’s coming up empty but insisting I should know – I should recognise the familiarity in the way she moves, and believe me, it’s all contained violence and deliberate space-taking. She’s surveying the harbour with a hint of possession that makes my hackles rise before I even know why.

She’s parked in the old spot by the harbour wall. The one we’ve been using for equipment storage so long I’d forgotten it was ever anyone else’s.

‘Shit,’ I say, and start walking over before I’ve even decided to.

‘Jude?’ Tom calls after me, but I’m already halfway there, some primitive part of my brain recognising trouble before my conscious mind catches up.

‘You can’t park there,’ I say, and I sound like a useless tool, but it’s too late to back down now. ‘Public parking is up in the car park.’ I gesture back up to the road sloping away from the harbour.

She turns, lifting aviator glasses that she perches on espresso tangled waves, and the world does that thing where it tilts just enough to make you seasick on dry land. Her eyes are dark, so dark, as they blink at me, one shutter of long lashes, and then another. I’m sure she has a rest of a face, I just can’t look at it yet. I’m stuck on the eyes. A loose thread in the back of my mind gives a little tug.

‘Says who?’ Her accent’s not quite Cornish – someplace else, Welsh maybe, or further, not city, not like some of Isla’s friends who have visited recently.

And I don’t know why I do it. It’s probably the way she’s standing there looking at me like she’s just tacked me on the sole of her shoe into her house, but I decide instantly to be an arse.

‘Says common fucking decency. We’ve been using that spot for⁠—’

Her hand comes up to cut me off. Rude. But then I did just swear at her for no reason other than I’m a moron. ‘For storing your shit in a space that doesn’t belong to you?’ She reaches into the Land Rover and produces paperwork like a magic trick. A wad of official-looking documents is paperclipped together. She makes a show of pretending to read it, like she’s reading to a five-year-old. ‘Oh, there. Trelawney Marine Services. Still own it. Never sold, just … abandoned.’ Her smile is cherubic hell bitch.

Trelawney.

The name hits like cold spray in the face, and the gears in my brain start grinding together. Suddenly I’m nine years old, chasing a girl with seaweed dripping from my hands while she shrieks and runs, stopping every few paces and glancing over her shoulder to make sure I’m still following.

Suddenly it’s summer again, not March, and the edges are softened, brilliant with impossible colours as we sit on the harbour wall and protect our ice-creams from seagulls circling over easy prey.

Jesus Christ.

‘Brynn?’ The name comes out strangled. Forgotten. Sideways in my throat.

Her eyes narrow. Pouted lips pull into an upturned smile. Then her expression clears, a beat of a breath, before hardening into icy depths of darkness. I swear a cloud passes across the sun in the same moment. ‘Well, well. Jude Harding.’

She says my name like it tastes bad.

‘You came back.’ It’s possibly the stupidest thing I could say, but my brain’s still catching up to the fact that Brynn Trelawney – the girl whose grandfather left in disgrace, whose family name became just whispers and legends, the girl I asked to marry me with a Haribo ring when we were both seven. The girl who I tried to learn to surf with, falling under waves, laughing as we choked on salt water, is standing in front of me glaring like she wants to burn the whole harbour down with me as the guy stuck on the top.

‘Disappointed?’ She leans against the Land Rover, all studied casualness, but her shoulders are high, the toes on the foot she’s crossed over the other are drumming into the sand-topped pavement of the dock. I’m speechless. Which is a lifetime first. ‘Thought all the Trelawneys were gone for good?’

‘I thought—’What? That she’d dissolved into memory? That I’d always wondered what happened to make her family leave in the middle of the night and never return. That I’d spent years listening to my dad badmouth them.

That ultimately, I’d forgotten her.

‘We were kids.’ She tilts her head, and there – there’s the girl who built sandcastles with architectural precision just to prove they were better than mine. ‘You’ve grown up. Got tall. Got…’ She gestures vaguely at all of me, and I can’t read whether it’s insult or observation. ‘That limp new or did I do that when I hit you?’

‘You broke my nose, not my leg.’

‘Shame. Would’ve been a better story.’

We’re standing too close for strangers, not close enough for whatever we used to be. The space between us feels charged, like the air before a storm rolls in.

‘You can’t park here,’ I say again, because falling back on the original argument feels safer than whatever this is.

‘Watch me.’ She turns back to the truck, leaning inside the cab, and I catch myself noticing the way her hair falls, a thick curtain of brown waves turning fire red under the shine of the sun.

‘Brynn—’

‘That’s all you’ve got?’ She turns back, arms full of boxes. ‘Twenty years and the best you can manage is “You can’t park here”? At least tell me to fuck off properly. Make it interesting.’

‘Fine. Fuck off.’