by Esme Devlin
Christmas Staycation
ESME DEVLIN
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 1
ISLA
EIGHT YEARS AGO
So the thing about living in a small town where everybody knows everybody is that everybody knows everything about everybody.
Dates of birth, that’s a fine example right there. That can come in useful (no one forgets to wish you a happy birthday, for example) but when you’re seventeen and trying to get into a pub for a casual tipple on Christmas Eve, it somewhat complicates the issue of using a fake ID.
But we geniuses will not be easily beaten, so we travelled fifteen miles to the next town over. Here, people still know everybody, but there’s less chance of “everybody” knowing my age.
“What’s your star sign?” The bouncer with the bald head looks from the driving licence to me and back again.
“Aries,” I tell him. Sixteenth of April would make me an Aries — I googled it to make extra sure in the taxi coming over.
He gives us the nod and the boulder that’s been sat in my stomach since lunchtime turns into a large pebble. It won’t go away completely — because I know from experience that getting in doesn’t mean staying in — but getting in is the first challenge.
Now we just need to get served.
We make our way across the sticky green carpet and find a booth out of sight of the bar. The place is — to put it bluntly — a dive. All dark wood and no charm. I reckon it’s not been decorated since 1968, and judging from the red, gold and green foil arrangements taped to every ceiling-tile I’d say that was the last time they bought decorations too. The wallpaper is more peeling than pasted, and any surface that should be white is yellow from years of nicotine… but beggars can’t be choosers and a pub is a pub.
“I vote Isla goes to the bar,” Jess announces.
The rest of the group nods their heads in agreement. That’s how it works in our group, you snooze you lose, and I’m cursing myself because I was singing Comma-Chameleon in my head while admiring the red, gold and green decorations instead of voting for Jess to go to the bar.
“I’m sure I went last time?” I protest.
Jess fumbles around in her purse before pulling out a twenty pound note. “Exactly. You have a proven track record. Plus, you have the biggest boobs.”
I laugh at her logic. “And that proves I’m over eighteen, how?”
Jess shrugs. “It doesn’t, but it gives you a better chance of not getting kicked out if the landlord suspects anything.”
I look around the group for some back up — Gemma, Megan and Louise — but I know I’ve lost this one.
“Fine,” I say. I take their orders and try to remember how to walk correctly in my too-high heels.
The whole journey to the bar I’m thinking about how someone who wasn’t in here illegally would act. They’d be poised, I’m sure… casual. Everything would be easy and they wouldn’t be acting guilty.
Do I look guilty?
“Three vodka and cokes, and a bottle of rose wine please,” I ask the man behind the bar.
“Sure thing, sweetheart,” he says as he turns away.
Sweetheart.
Sweetheart is good.
I’m convinced he wouldn’t be calling me that if he suspected anything.
Acting casual, I take a look around the pub. It’s busy, and it’s still quite early which means it’s bound to get busier. There are the usual older gentlemen sitting on stools beside the bar, watching the muted horse racing that’s playing on the small television. Groups of people sit at the booths and the various tables, laughing and joking.
It’s Christmas Eve, so people are in high spirits.
Towards the back of the pub, a large group of young men are drinking pints and playing pool and darts. You can hear them from all the way over here. I check them over to make sure we don’t know them (they could blow our cover) but they seem to be a good few years older than us.
I’m checking out the tallest one, brown hair and looking handsome as sin in a pair of dark denim jeans and a navy buttoned up polo-shirt when the bastard catches me.
Shit.
I turn away quickly before realizing that probably makes me look like I was staring at him — which I was — but now he knows it.
After squaring the barman up, I grab the tray of drinks and return to our booth. “There are some hotties over at the pool table,” I tell them.
Every one of them turns and looks towards it at the same time.
Subtle.
“Shit,” Gemma says. “That’s my cousin and his friends.”
Cousins aren’t good because cousins know your birthday. “Cousin? Which one?”
Maybe we can just keep our heads down and remain unnoticed.
“My cousin Lewis. The tall one, blue polo.”
Mr Handsome is Gemma’s cousin?
“Well lets just avoid them,” Jess says. “Stay here and away from the bar and you’ll be fine.”
The group agrees, and that’s basically an admission that I’ll be the one on bar duty for the rest of the night.
But to my surprise, we manage to pull it off. The drinks are flowing and with each passing hour the table gets louder and the nerves get less and less. There’s a minor panic when Gemma needs the toilet and we have to sneak her by the pool table, but other than that we’re on the home straight.
“Another round Isla-doll,” Louise slurs. Personally I think Louise needs a slice of toast more than she needs another round, but I’m not her mum so I do as she asks.
I’m bolder now. Me and the barman, Jimmy, have struck up a friendship and I’m giggling away to something he’s saying while he fetches our drinks.
That’s when someone gets all up in my space.
I turn around, because I value boundaries, but my words catch in my throat when I see it’s Mr Handsome — Lewis I think his name is — and he’s staring down at me.
Jeezo, he is tall. And he smells divine — like mischief and danger and a brand new car. That’s a bad analogy but I’m drunk so who cares, right?
“My friend has his eye on your friend,” he tells me.
Huh. Well that’s nice, but under no circumstances can we let your friend and my friend get together. That’s what I want to say, but of course I don’t.
“We’re having a girls night,” I tell him instead.
The corner of his mouth pulls up in a smile and there’s amusement behind his eyes as he replies, “I can do girls night.”
I eye him up and down before glancing at his friends near the pool table. “Sure looks like it.”
He catches Jimmy’s attention with his hand and orders four pints of lager. “Why don’t you come and join us and we’ll see who does ladies night better?”
“Not tonight, sunshine.” I smile at him while I pay Jimmy.
“You make a shite wing-man,” he says. “My friend will be disappointed.” He’s close now, closer than he was before. His bare arm is touching my own, and he’s warm — hot. Everything about him is fucking HOT and if it wasn’t for the fact he was my very-seventeen-year-old friend’s big cousin, I’d be wing-manning the shit out of this situation.
But it’s too risky.
“She’s not interested,” I shrug.
&nbs
p; He laughs, and it makes me want to smile too. “What if I told you that you were the friend who my friend liked, and my friend was actually me?”
“I’d tell you that’s a funny way of chatting someone up.”
Smirking, he rubs the stubble on his chin while he looks down at me. God, he’s a man. An actual man with stubble and muscles — not like the boys our age. I’d say he’s mid-twenties, maybe. I’m going to be kicking myself in the morning for not even (at the very least) getting his number, but my friends will kill if I blow our cover over a boy.
Well, man.
“And I’d tell you that playing hard to get is only going to make me want you more. Dance with me?”
“You can’t dance to Feed the World,” I argue, giggling.
He laughs right back. “That song is one-hundred percent not called that.”
I shrug. “Well it should be.”
He looks down at me with a amused look on his face. “You’re funny.”
I swallow. My drinks are on the bar. I could leave — scratch that — I should leave, but he’s making this difficult. He’s not even doing anything, I just don’t want to leave his presence.
But staying and engaging more would only lead to one thing — our demise.
“What’s your name, darlin?”
Fuck my life.
I’m going to hell.
“Isla.”
Jimmy puts the last pint on the bar and he hands the money over, telling him to throw the change in the jar. I eye him up sideways now that his attention is focused elsewhere. He has skin that looks like it would be tanned if it wasn’t December in arguably the cloudiest country in the world. It suits his dark brown hair that’s kinda messy in a deliberate way. In my drunken stupor all I can think about is reaching out and touching it.
And I’m still thinking that when he turns his attention back to me, so I take a sip of my drink to distract from the fact he caught me staring again.
“The Queen of the Hebrides.”
I chuckle at him. “Never been called that in my life, but I’ll take it.”
“I’m Lewis,” he says, holding his hand out for me to shake. “And you know we’ll need to name any future babies we might have after islands. It’ll be our family tradition.”
It takes me a second before the penny drops and I catch his meaning. The Isle of Lewis, Isle of Islay. I almost spit my drink out. He is bold. “Barra for a boy and Mull for a girl?”
He grins, revealing a set of straight white teeth my dentist father would be proud of. “Whatever the queen wants, she gets.”
I shake my head. “The queen would like to return to her table now.”
“One game of pool. You win, I’ll let you go. I win, you go out with me on Boxing Day.”
I eye him up while I take another sip of my drink. I’m actually pretty good at pool. For three weeks every summer we’d visit my grandparents in the south of Spain, and I’d stay up til midnight playing with my Grandad. I haven’t played in a couple of years, but I reckon it’s like riding a horse.
“Where would you take me?”
He shrugs. “Wherever the fuck you want to go.”
His eyes are dancing and it’s infectious. I know it’s risky, but what’s the worst that could happen? Isn’t that why people go to pubs in the first place, to drink and have a good time with their friends and meet their future husbands? Okay, that’s definitely the drink talking — but there’s something about this guy I like. So, we get thrown out if he clipes on us, but it’s almost closing time now, anyway. “Let me just give the girls their drinks then.”
“I’ll chalk a wee cue for you, darlin.”
Chapter 2
ISLA
PRESENT DAY
It was supposed to be a red-eye flight.
London Gatwick to Edinburgh International scheduled at five in the morning. It should have been filled with business folks just like the hundreds of other red-eyes I’ve done over the last few years.
So why, why, why, was I stuck beside a bratty six-year-old who had their iPad on the loudest volume setting? I clearly underestimated the shift in demographics that occurs over the holiday season. I guess it serves me right for traveling on the eve of Christmas Eve.
The girls had to twist my arm to get me to agree to this. Since my parents took early retirement and sold up the house and the practice in Scotland, I’ve never been back here. I moved to London, and they redeveloped my grandparent’s villa in Spain, so I’ve always spent Christmas there with them. It’s not warm enough for the swimming pool, but it’s not below freezing like it is right now.
That’s what I’m thinking about as I cross the busy carpark to the car rental place and a gust of icy wind almost knocks the breath right out of me.
I could be in Spain. Or Paris. Or Marrakesh — where the company I work for has just opened up a fancy as hell spa retreat. But the girls and I made a drunken promise to each other when we all left our little town, our pin-prick on the map. We’d all come back when we were twenty-five and spend a Christmas together, just like when we were kids.
So here I am.
Louise got a good deal on one of those Air B&B’s — I think it’s a castle. She’s working in Aberdeen now, so is driving down today. Jess and Megan both live in Glasgow but Megan dropped out at the last minute (sick relatives) so Jess is getting the train to Inverkeithing and meeting Louise on her drive down. As for Gemma, she never left. Well, she did briefly for college but then returned and married her husband and had a baby, so she’s just coming for Christmas Day.
Our group of five turned out to be three, and as I stare down at the car in front of me I’m wishing it was two.
“I left a note asking for an SUV?”
The rental guy goes through the papers in his hands while glancing nervously at the car in front of us. It’s a city car, and probably the smallest one they have at that. I wouldn’t usually mind, but it’s supposed to be heavy snow this weekend, and there is no chance this little toy could handle the dirt roads, especially when they’re covered in feet of snow.
“Oh yes, I see that. Unfortunately we don’t have any. People have been upgrading left and right due to the weather, and this is best we can do.”
He hands the keys out to me and I stare at them. “I really need a four wheel drive.”
The man sighs and then shrugs his shoulders. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. This is all we have available.”
He gives the keys a jingle and I take them. What else can I do? After the flight from hell I don’t have the patience to argue the point with him, and once I get there I don’t intend on leaving until Boxing Day anyway — so it won’t matter.
I’ll just need to drive extra carefully.
“Well, thanks I guess.”
The guy nods his head before rushing back to his wee tin cabin. I can hardly blame him, it’s bitter-cold. Dragging my suitcase to the back of the car, I open up the boot to reveal it has the capacity of precisely zero gallons. The suitcase will need to go across the back seats. I shut the boot and go to the back-door, flinging in the big bag containing the six tins of shortbread I purchased from the duty-free and my suitcase.
After some pissing around with the lights and wipers and pumping the seat up so I can see out of the front window, I’m off.
The drive is busy. It may be Christmas-eve-eve, but it’s still rush hour and the traffic on the city-bypass road is foot on the break the whole way. It takes an hour to pass Edinburgh, and the further away I get the worse the roads become.
There’s a steep mountain that needs to be crossed and I pray the snow gates haven’t been closed. As I get closer, I see the snow piled high in big dirty white mounds at the sides of the road, but sometimes the plows and gritters just close the gates and give up on the mountain.
I push my foot to the floor and wait for the automatic gears to kick in and help me up the hill. The gap between me and the lucky fucker in the Audi in front widens because there’s barely enough power in this th
ing to break 50mph. At this rate even the lorries will be trying to overtake me.
But my little tiny car — who I’m calling Bridget from this moment on — makes it up to the top of the mountain and I’m delighted with us. The fog is thick and now the snow is coming down faster than the grit-salt can melt it. I reckon I’m about an hour away. After the mountain is where civilized things such as solid roads ceases to exist. It’s the countryside, the lowlands (which isn’t too dissimilar from the highlands, just a bit flatter), the farming towns.
And it’s home.
Chapter 3
LEWIS
“Get you’re arse in here, ya dafty.”
She looks at me like she’s about to disobey, and then she catches herself and follows me inside.
It’s freezing out there, which takes a lot for me to admit since I rarely feel the cold. But I can feel it in the air. They said it’s going to be the worst storm in one-hundred years. I’m not usually one to believe that hyped up shite they sprout just to sell newspapers, but my balls can concede there might be some truth in it this time.
I shut the door behind us and Kimber shakes the snow off her coat, sending flecks of it everywhere — including my eye.
“Could you not do that outside, eh?” I’m shaking my head as I trail through the back kitchen, not giving a fuck that my boots are leaving big slushy patches. There was supposed to be a booking this weekend, so normally I’d be mindful, but I cancelled due to the storm. They put out a red weather warning from midday today which basically means if you go outside then you die.
Or something.
I’m secretly glad about it though. My cousin-in-law (is that a thing?), Jamie suggested I try the whole Air B&B malarkey. I inherited the castle in my grandparent’s will five years ago and it’s been a thorn in my side ever since, but I didn’t have the heart to sell it or the desire to live in it. When Jamie suggested renting it, the estate was lying empty and the upkeep on an empty sixteenth-century castle is a bastard.