Page 100 of Take Me Away

He doesn’t give me time to recover. One breath and he’s moving over me, braced above me, the head of him slick and insistent as he pushes into me in one long, devastating thrust. The sound he makes – a guttural groan, low and broken – rips through me.

‘Look at me,’ he demands, forehead pressed to mine. His eyes hold me wide open as his body takes me, slow at first, then harder, deeper, until the bed thuds against the wall and my nails score red lines down his back.

It’s not careful. It’s not clean. It’s years of loss and longing, of everything we never said, colliding in the dark.

And when I finally come undone beneath him, it’s wild, gasping, raw. His name rips out of me, messy and desperate, and he follows with a groan that sounds like surrender, pulsing inside of me, filling me up in the most basic and territorial way.

For a moment, it’s not just sex.

It’s ruin. It’s reclamation. It’s home.

After, we collapse in a sweaty, tangled heap, limbs knotted, chests heaving. I’m grinning like I’ve had too much wine and not enough sleep. Kit’s face is buried in my neck, laughter vibrating against my skin.

‘I can’t feel my legs,’ I mumble.

He lifts his head, eyes gleaming. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘You’d be correct.’ I sigh, stretching, aching in all the right places. ‘Jesus. You should be illegal.’

He chuckles and rolls to his side, pulling me with him, still wrapped around each other like we forgot how to let go.

‘Do you need to get home for Maisie?’ I ask, giving his arms a squeeze so he knows it’s not a negative, only positive.

His head shakes against the pillow, rocking mine too. His arms are steel-tight. ‘No. I’ll message Jude and ask him to stay.’

‘Kit…’

‘I’m staying, Isla.’ He plants kisses on the back of my neck with his words. ‘But I’m on the boat tomorrow morning, so don’t panic when I’m not here when you wake.’

‘Panic? Me?’

Another kiss.

‘And Isla?’

‘Mm.’

‘Think we need to decorate this room. It smells of damp and your dead grandmother.’

I snort a laugh, and turn to kiss his mouth.

For the first time in months, I close my eyes and just be. There’s a silence in my head I’d forgotten could exist.

Eventually, I must have dozed off, because Kit wakes me when he lets me go to reach for his phone, the glow of the screen illuminating the walls. As soon as the phone is down, he pulls me back in, and I kiss his chest, breathing him in.

Calm.

At last.

It’s been three days since our date. Three days of having my phone off, ignoring my old life, while dipping tentative toes into what could be a new one. Do I feel guilty that I haven’t spoken to Piper in days? Yes. Do I need this? The silence of just being in here in a place where I’ve found Isla again, found me? Not Isla Quinn, actress? Yes, I do.

Isla laughs. She loves tea with a biscuit dunked in its warmth until it’s about to break. She loves the wind in her hair, the bare feel of her skin under the elements. She loves mismatched woollen layers and gardens wild with roses. She loves counting pebbles and searching for rocks on the beach and running from a crab with pincers the size of a ruler. She loves a fisherman with a beard whose grin is devilish, whose sea-blue eyes hold pain and loss but unimaginable hope, and who pushes deep inside of her with unrelenting need, making her gasp and cry and want to shout.

Yes, I like being Isla…

Tonight, though, is the first big test. Bigger than quiz night at The Ship Inn.

I’m cooking.