Page 47 of Pull Me Under

I slide down the wall, notebook clutched to my chest, and stare at nothing.

Being naked with him was easy.

Letting him read my lists?

That felt like bleeding in public.

Chapter Twelve

JUDE

Iwake up before dawn with a grin I haven’t earned and can’t shift. And muscles that are lying little shits about how much sleep I actually got.

The room’s still dark. The house is quiet except for the sound of the boiler kicking on downstairs – Dad’s up, then, making tea, starting his morning routine like clockwork. Like everything’s normal.

Like I didn’t spend a part of the night with Brynn Trelawney wrapped around me in a corrugated metal shed that smells of diesel and cat food.

I shouldn’t be grinning. I should be panicking. Should be cataloguing all the ways this was a spectacularly bad idea – and Christ, the list is long. She’s a Trelawney. Dad would lose his mind. The whole village would have opinions, and none of them good.

But mostly I can still taste her.

I roll out of bed and immediately regret it. My legs feel like I’ve been climbing cliffs – which, technically, I have. Once up to her cottage like a panicking idiot because I forgot she doesn’t sleep there, once back down to the harbour covered in mud and self-loathing. My bad knee has seized up from the cold and the rain and there’s a pleasant, well-used ache in my lower back that makes me think of her nails digging in, her teeth on my shoulder, the way she⁠—

Nope.

Not going there. Not yet. Not before coffee.

I pull on running gear because that’s what I do when my brain won’t shut up and I’ve got nowhere to be apart from chasing accounts and balancing books. I run. I sweat it out. I pretend that physical exhaustion can somehow organise the chaos in my head.

The morning air hits like a slap when I step outside – sharp and clean and still damp from last night’s biblical downpour. The cobblestones glisten under the street lights, and somewhere in the distance I can hear the gulls starting their daily campaign of chaos.

My feet find their rhythm easily – left, right, left, right. Down towards the harbour, along the quay, past The Ship where the windows are still dark. The swell’s still up from last night’s storm. Fistral would be firing. I should be on a board, not in trainers. But surfing requires a freedom I don’t believe I’ve earned yet – the freedom to do one thing that’s just for me.

I try to focus on my breathing. On the burn in my lungs. On the way my knee loosens after the first half mile, the joint warming into a rhythm that almost works. On anything except the replay reel my brain keeps serving up: the heat of her thighs, her voice in my ear – half command, half plea – the scratch of her nails down my back.

The way she looked at me after.

No. Not thinking about that either.

It was just sex. Stress relief. Two adults who can’t stand each other letting off steam in the least mature way possible.

Except it wasn’t.

But I’m going to pretend it was, because if I think too hard about the way she looked at me after – vulnerable and furious and halfway to honest – I’ll stop running altogether.

I round the corner past the chandlery and that’s when I see her.

Brynn’s in the shed doorway, hauling gear around like it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing at half five in the morning. The big doors are open, the trawler visible inside on its blocks, and she’s moving between the workbench and the boat with a focused energy that tells me she hasn’t slept either but she’s damned if she’s going to waste precious hours lying down.

She’s got her work boots on, hair pulled back in a high ponytail, and she looks about as friendly as a kicked badger.

Which makes two of us on the insomnia front, except she’s been productive with hers and I’ve just been lying in bed replaying the greatest hits.

I slow to a jog as I approach, and the smirk I’ve been trying to suppress all morning breaks free.

This is a terrible idea.

I’m going to do it anyway.