This Secret We're Keeping (23 page)

‘So I hate to bring this up,’ Will mumbled to her as she lay with her head on his chest, tracing an index finger lazily across his warm skin, ‘but what would Zak do if he knew you were here?’

Jess swallowed. What Zak would actually do didn’t bear thinking about. ‘He’d be devastated.’ It was an understatement really, given everything that had happened with Octavia.

Will nodded in acknowledgement, the movement rough against the stiff, over-starched pillows.

‘His ex-wife, Octavia …’ Jess exhaled steadily, all too aware of her own hypocrisy. ‘She cheated on him with his brother.’

A pause settled between them. Jess could feel the guilt pressing down on her like a thumb grinding into her sternum.

‘You think he knows something’s going on with us?’ Will looked down, brushing the hair from Jess’s face so he could see her properly.

Lifting her chin to look at him, she shook her head. ‘If he did,’ she said, ‘we’d definitely know about it.’

He seemed to accept this. ‘Is he in London at the moment?’

She nodded, drawing comfort from the strong, steady
thump of Will’s heart against her cheekbone. ‘I’m supposed to go and see him tomorrow.’ She shut her eyes. ‘I’m going to cancel. I can’t do this and then … do that.’ Her face crumpled up with self-reproach. ‘He doesn’t deserve this.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nobody does.’

‘What … what about Natalie?’

‘What about her?’ he replied, but only because Jess’s question could have had a million meanings.

‘Do you think she suspects?’

He shook his head. ‘Honestly? I think she’s been too busy to think about it. Her mind’s been on the renovation and not a lot else. If she didn’t have that to distract her …’ He paused. ‘Yeah, there’s a risk she’d figure us out. She’s sharp, Jess. She doesn’t miss much.’

Jess felt her insides turn clumsily at the thought of it. ‘God, Will – I know what it feels like to grow up without a dad. What if she …?’

‘She doesn’t know anything, Jess,’ he said, and she realized that, for now, this was all the reassurance he could offer her. She suspected that he couldn’t bring himself to think about life beyond this afternoon any more than she could. The thought of the devastation they could cause was too horrible to contemplate.

As the sunshine turned to dusk, she rolled on to her front to examine his tattoos. The one across the firm curve of his left pectoral resembled a crow, but it was inked on with hundreds of tiny coils, like doodles with a fine-liner, to form the overall picture. It was beautiful. A large tribal design stretched down the right side of his body, from the front of his shoulder to the bottom of his ribcage.

‘They’re amazing. I love them.’ She smiled. ‘And pleased, obviously, that you’ve kept your six-pack.’

Will slung one hand back behind his head and glanced
down at his chest before throwing her an uncharacteristically bashful smile. ‘Thank you. Natalie hates my tattoos. She won’t let Charlotte see them.’

‘Charlotte’s never seen them?’ Jess was incredulous.

‘Well, she’s had the occasional glimpse. But Natalie’s always bitching at me to put a T-shirt on.’

‘Why? They’re stunning.’
And why the hell would you want this man to ever put a T-shirt on?

‘Oh, she thinks body art is psychologically damaging to young female minds.’

Though Jess tried to push it back, she couldn’t stop the thought from coming.
She doesn’t love you like I would have loved you.

Through the open window came the impatient peppered stamping of car horns, someone swearing.

‘Okay,’ Jess said, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘I have a big philosophical question for you.’

He shifted slightly. ‘I’m abstaining.’

‘Abstention denied. And you don’t know what I’m going to ask you yet.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘You’re going to ask me what I’d do if my fifteen-year-old daughter started shagging her maths teacher.’

She smiled. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Let’s call it a hunch.’

She bit down on her bottom lip. ‘Okay. So?’

‘Well, first of all, my daughter’s only seven, so we’re still a little way off that stage.’

‘Fine. Fast-forward eight years.’

He examined her face, almost like he was seeing her for the first time. ‘Why do you want to know this?’

‘I’m interested,’ she murmured. Her mouth felt dry, salty with dehydration.

He looked thoughtful. ‘On what basis? Sociologically?’

‘Idle curiosity. Humour me.’

‘Okay. Do you really want to know?’

She nodded, tracing tiny shapes with her finger across his torso.

There was a brief pause. ‘Well,’ he said carefully, ‘I’d render his legs unusable for one.’ He registered her expression with some amusement and then shrugged gently. ‘What? You asked.’

‘You know that’s completely illogical, don’t you? If everything that happened between us was right, what you just said makes no sense.’

‘I never said it was right. And I also never said I didn’t deserve a pounding for what I did.’

She frowned, continuing to doodle absent-mindedly across his skin. ‘Well, my dad might have had something to say about it, I suppose. But I still don’t think you deserved to go to prison.’

He cleared his throat and stared towards the ceiling. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually, his voice sounding slightly roughed-up around the edges.

‘Will. What was it like?’ she whispered into the gloom of the room. From the pavement outside she could hear the click-clack of heels, giggling, the jostling of male voices. Doors slamming somewhere along the corridor. The soundtrack of the city getting ready to let its hair down.

‘Desperate. Mundane. Noisy,’ he said, his voice low. A pause. ‘Not safe.’

‘You said before that they were waiting for you. Tell me what happened.’

There was a long silence. ‘You don’t want to know, Jess,’ he said. ‘Trust me on that one.’

Letting it go, she settled down against his chest and they
lay there like that in the dusk for a few minutes, not speaking, just feeling one another breathe.

‘I thought about you a lot while I was in there though,’ he said after a while. ‘I had insomnia pretty badly, so I’d spend every night running over and over this stupid little fantasy where you’d be waiting for me on my release date. I just imagined us heading straight back round to my cottage and starting everything up again, exactly where we left off.’ He let out a short laugh. ‘I thought about it every night. I was really pathetic about it.’

‘And then what?’ she asked him, her voice small.

He shifted his weight against the mattress. ‘Well, when I first came back to find you after I got out, that was what I was thinking, I guess. That we’d … you know. Start over. But you were in France, so it was obvious you were rebuilding your life, and you didn’t need me coming back to fuck it all up for you. And after that … I don’t know. Things began to change for me. Any chance of a career was pretty much dead in the water, and I was living in that bloody cupboard scraping by on any odd job that didn’t need a reference, panicking about how I was going to live, long term. I knew you’d be okay, that you’d go on to do amazing stuff, so … I guess I had to let the fantasy die. Accept the fact that my life was never going to be the same again. And then I met Natalie.’ He looked down at her. ‘But I never stopped thinking about you, Jess. You were always there, in my mind. That’s why I kept coming back. Not … to start things up again,’ he clarified – though she would never have questioned his intentions anyway. ‘Just to say sorry, for everything that happened. Although I did start to wonder as time went on if you’d even want to see me again. I managed to convince myself that your feelings towards me would have changed, that you probably hated me. Which would have been completely justified, by the way.’

She shook her head, so relieved she’d had the opportunity to disprove his fears. ‘So how long are you here for this time?’ she asked him, terrified he would tell her they were all due back in London a week on Tuesday.

‘We’re supposed to be heading back in September,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, I’m secretly crossing my fingers for a delay,’ she told him with a smile. ‘I keep thinking your builder might go AWOL. Or maybe that you’ll discover the house is sited on some sort of prehistoric settlement and you’ll all have to down tools immediately.’

‘Ah yes, a high-profile archaeological discovery,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Nothing I love better than a media storm.’

She appreciated the joke by way of a nudge against his ribcage. ‘But you’ll be back after September?’ she guessed. ‘For holidays?’

‘Well, that was the plan,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I mean, when Natalie first suggested buying it, I thought maybe a holiday home would be a safe way of enabling me to come back from time to time. You know, like I could always take off again if I needed to. But being here … it’s not been as easy as I thought, Jess. I’m constantly looking over my shoulder. And, of course,’ he added, pushing his fingers through her hair again with a sigh, ‘there’s you. It’s not like I’m expecting to just keep popping in and out of your life. I don’t want to do that.’

She was desperate to ask him what it was that he wanted to do instead, but she knew it was an almost impossible question. So she simply shut her eyes, allowing herself to be transported seventeen years into her past – to pretend that it was Matthew Landley’s chest she was resting on, that he belonged to her. That she had double maths first thing tomorrow. That nobody knew a thing.

‘I would love to say I have this all bottomed out,’ Will mumbled gruffly then, like he was ashamed to be telling her otherwise, ‘but not a single plan I’ve made in my entire adult life to date has come off. Even having Charlotte was a bolt out of the blue.’

During the long pause that followed, Jess felt for Will’s hand, pulling his fingers into a little knot with hers. The weight of her secret was clumping up inside her once more like something cancerous, and she began to wonder again if she might finally have the courage to confess.

She tried to imagine how the words would sound, once she’d breathed them out, contaminating the perfect air between them; but just as her heart began to pump a little faster at the thought, Will suddenly jolted. ‘Oh,
fuck
.’ He reached over to grab his watch from where he’d discarded it on the MDF bedside unit. ‘Fuck! Charlotte … Helen was only supposed to have her until seven.’

She sat up. ‘What’s the time?’

‘It’s nearly nine.
Shit
.’ He leaned over and grappled in the pocket of his jeans, lying crumpled on the floor, for his phone. ‘Fuck. I’m out of battery. Can I use yours?’

Remaining where she was, she nodded numbly. ‘Of course. It’s in my bag.’

He got up and retrieved it before sitting back down heavily on the edge of the mattress and tapping a number on to the screen. She watched his tattoos flex as he put the phone to his ear.

‘Helen? It’s Will. I’m so sorry. Have you been … ? Yep. Yep. Sorry. Yeah, my phone ran out of battery. Is she okay? Has she eaten? Oh, okay. Yep, that’s fine. I’ll be back shortly. I got delayed. Really sorry about that.’

Jess shut her eyes.

‘Yeah, I know, I’m really sorry, Helen. Yep. Can you hang
on for another half an hour or so? Yep. Thanks very much. Thanks. Okay. Okay. Bye.’

He turned round and looked at her, and in that moment she felt cheapened once again, sitting there naked on a damp mattress in a budget hotel room.

Cheap is what happens when you do things like this.

‘I’ve really got to go,’ he said, like it physically pained him. ‘I can’t believe I forgot her. What a prick.’

Jess wrapped the bed sheets around herself in a self-conscious attempt to preserve her dignity as he pulled on his T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, fished around for his sunglasses and car keys, and stuffed the dead phone back into his pocket.

‘Jess,’ he prompted gently.

‘Oh! Sorry.’ She reached down next to the bed and groped about for her underwear, painfully aware that she needed a shower, to wash her hair, to change her clothes.

But as she bent down, something caught her eye on the floor.

It was Will’s leather bracelet, snapped cleanly off. She’d only just noticed it, dark as it was against the grey-purple carpet – an odd choice of colour scheme that reminded her a bit of feral pigeons. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized it was missing from his wrist until now.

‘Will,’ she said, picking it up and holding it out to him.

He paused for just a moment, then took it from her. ‘Bollocks.’

‘Anna would say this is a bad omen.’

Smiling faintly, he closed his fingers round the bracelet, then slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. ‘It’s just old, Jess. I’ll fix it. Don’t worry.’ He shot her a reassuring smile. ‘Good spot, though. They might have posted it back to me in a branded envelope.’

Jess’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

He laughed. ‘Maybe someone’s watching over us.’

‘Or warning us.’

There was a brief pause. ‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it.’ He held her gaze for just a moment. ‘Sorry, Jess, but …’

‘Right. God, sorry.’ She pulled her things on quickly, grabbed her bag, looked back to check the room and then took his outstretched hand.

‘Sorry to rush you,’ he murmured as they left the room and made their way back down the corridor. ‘I feel like I’ve spent my entire life telling you where to be and when.’

‘It’s the teacher in you,’ she said with a smile, squeezing his hand to let him know it was okay.

He looked down at her then and for a moment she thought he was welling up, but he turned away before she could be sure.

They paused at Reception to return their key, Will gruffly muttering something about a change of plans while Jess feigned a sudden and unlikely fascination with the tourist information display.