Page 50 of Reckless

The mattress dipped, and the sheets were cool against my legs as I stretched out. And then Robbie’s hand found mine under the covers, and it felt natural.

I turned onto my side to face him. We were close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin, could smell the faint salt on him. Sweat and ocean spray. His pupils were wide in the faint moonlight from the window.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hello.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth. It wasn’t much—just a twitch at the corner—but I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for longer than I wanted to even attempt to calculate.

Robbie pulled his hand gently from mine and moved it to my chest. He rested it there, palm flat, over my heart. I could feel the calluses on his fingers, the roughness of a man who laboured for a living. He didn’t say anything. He just lay there, his palm pressed against my chest, and breathed.

I watched his chest rise and fall. Matched my rhythm to his. He shifted closer, and I raised a hand so that I could card my fingers through his curls. I traced the shell of his ear, then the curve of his jaw. Mapped out the landscape of the stubble along his cheekbone.

The night was quiet and soft, and heavy with promise. And then Robbie tilted his chin and kissed me. It wasn’t a heated kiss. It was barely more than a soft brush of his mouth against mine, but it was our first kiss, and it felt, somehow, a lot like coming home.

I woke just before dawn, because Robbie had climbed out of bed and was pulling his clothes on in the faint greyish light. I shifted, and Robbie turned to look at me, his shirt half buttoned.

“Gotta go do the milking,” he said softly.

“Mmm.” I sat up, the cool morning air prickling my skin.

Robbie fumbled over a few more buttons, then said, “Want to come with me?”

“Come with you?”

He looked away. “See the farm, maybe. Doesn’t matter.”

“No,” I said. “I’d like that. I just... I’m still waking up, Robbie.”

He looked at me. That measured look of his, the one that felt like he was weighing something. Then he nodded and ducked his head as he finished buttoning his shirt.

I got out of bed, and we dressed in silence. Most things with Robbie, I found, came wrapped in silence. It was comfortable though. I pulled on an old jumper, the one with the hole in the elbow I kept meaning to mend, and a pair of boots that had seen better days. Robbie finished dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and we went downstairs.

Outside, the air washed over me like cool water.

Dauntless Island at dawn was a thing I hoped I would never take for granted. Faint tendrils of mist lay in the hollows like breath, curling around the base of the drystone walls and spilling across the road. The sun would burn it off when it rose. To the east, the sky was the colour of Robbie’s healing bruises—purple and pink and the pale yellow of early light. Gulls wheeled in the sky, calling. A dog barked somewhere in the village and was answered by another further up the hill.

The air smelled of salt and wet grass and cold stone. I breathed it in and felt something settle in my chest—the same something that had been unknotted last night and hadn’t quite tightened again.

We walked down the lane from my house, following the harbour wall for a moment before we turned into the village. The place was asleep; we were awake even earlier than the fishermen who would soon be making their way to the jetty. Our footsteps crunched in the sandy dirt of the road, our breath misting in front of us.

I wanted to reach for him, to take his hand, but I didn’t. Instead, I walked close enough that our shoulders brushed every few steps, and he didn’t move away.

We followed the road out of the village, heading up the hill that would take us away from the ocean, up to the fields in the middle of the island, that sloped down to the sea. Behind us, the water was flat and grey, the colour of pewter. On the other side of the road, a pair of goats grazed, barely looking up as we approached them.

“Are those yours?” I asked, nodding at the goats.

“Ferals,” Robbie said, but the word didn’t quite seem to suit the animals, who were calm and placid and didn’t even move away as we passed them.

We walked for a while longer, and I enjoyed the exercise. It felt like too long since I’d stretched my legs with a walk or properly filled my lungs with air.

The farm appeared around a bend in the road, a whitewashed stone house with a slate roof and moss growing in the gutters. The yard between the house and the shed was scattered with mud and hay and the rusted skeleton of a tractor. The shed was bigger than the house, its doors open wide, and I could already hear the low grumble of cattle shifting inside. As I watched, a few latecomers ambled into the shed, rear ends swaying and tails flicking.

“Do they stay out at night?” I asked.

“No predators on the island,” Robbie said. “So if the weather’s good, yeah.”

Robbie’s pace quickened as we approached. Not by much—just a subtle lengthening of stride accompanied by an alertness in his expression—but I noticed. He was at home here. He belonged.