Page 65 of Pull Me Under

BRYNN

The first thing I notice is the cold.

Not the sharp, corrugated cold of the shed – that was metal and wind and the particular bite of air coming off the harbour. This is different. Stone-cold. The deep, patient cold of a house that’s been empty for twenty years, slowly surrendering its warmth to the ground.

The second thing I notice is the silence.

No creak of the trawler’s hull shifting on its blocks. No harbour sounds filtering through the shed walls – engine idling, chain clinking, gulls starting their shift. Just the tick of the space heater cooling in the corner and the steady plink plink plink of water dripping into the saucepan I positioned last night.

One leak. Hallway. A cracked tile the roofer missed when he did the flashing – I can see the water trail on the ceiling, a single dark line threading towards the light fitting. The bedroom ceiling is dry. The kitchen ceiling is dry. This is one tile, one saucepan, one more line on the list.

Why doesn’t it ever stop raining in Cornwall? When I think of the first seven years of my life, all I remember are golden stretches of summer, hazy heat and warm pavements.

Not this. Rain, drizzle, and cloud cover that sits on top of your head like a sulky hat.

I’ll get up on the roof this afternoon. I’m not paying another £180 for a single tile.

The bed is cold. This isn’t new, but for the first time, the cold feels like an absence rather than the default.

I know exactly whose warmth I’m thinking about, and I refuse to give it a name.

I pull the pillow over my face. It smells of paint and plaster and the lavender fabric softener Dot sent up with the bed and mattress.

Fresh sheets from the charity shop in Pencross. The space heater moved up from the shed. Almost warm, if I don’t think about it too hard.

This is the first place I’ve slept that I actually own. The first bed in a room that nobody can take from me. No landlord. No lease. No midnight calculations about whether the rent increase means I’m moving again.

That alone makes the cold bearable.

Outside, the wind is picking up – rattling the windows, finding gaps in the pointing, whistling through the cracks around the door. March in Cornwall. The tourists haven’t come yet. The village is contracted into itself like a fist against the cold.

I should get up. Check on Ghost. Start the day.

Instead, I lie there for one more minute, thinking about Monday.

This can’t happen.

I know.

Jude’s face, so close to mine I could count his eyelashes. The way his voice dropped when he said my name – not Trelawney, not an insult, just Brynn, like it was a word he’d been turning over in his mouth all day. The heat between us on that harbour wall. Undeniable. Terrifying.

And the way he stepped back.

Colleagues.

Right.

The saucepan of rainwater overflows. Water spills onto the floorboards.

‘Shit.’

I’m up and moving, grabbing a towel, mopping the flood, emptying the saucepan and repositioning it under the drip. One tile. I’ll fix it today.

I make coffee – instant, because decent coffee costs money I don’t have, and this jar is the particular kind of instant that strips the back of your throat and murders your taste buds – and stand at the kitchen window. The cooker works now, the gas blue and steady, the kettle boiling properly for the first time since I fixed the thermocouple. Small victories. Grey sky, grey water, grey stone. The faint scream of a gull from the harbour.

Monday I’ll be there. Training. Working alongside Jude Harding while we both pretend that shed never happened. While I pretend I don’t know what his hands feel like. While I pretend his voice doesn’t do things to the base of my spine when he’s being serious.

Colleagues.