A cheeky smile played across his lips. David was what Louisa would have called ‘second glance handsome’ – none of his features stood out but the more you looked at him, the more you realised he was good-looking. Especially without his glasses on, which he’d chosen to forgo this evening.
For a moment I imagined him holding my hand, embracing me, kissing me…then immediately stopped. Trying to picture being like that with him caused a jolt of nausea to pass through me. I could never be more than his friend. Could never let him touch me the way his eyes currently told me he wanted to.
“I don’t reckon the teachers will be all that capable of good chat for much longer,” I joked, side-eyeing Professor Reynolds as she let out a hiccough. “Or maybe their best chat comes when they’re steaming? Perhaps I should go over and –”
“Let’s go to the karaoke room,” David cut in, laughing softly, picking up our drinks so I could hold my bag in my arms and follow him through the door.
The room we entered was dark save for a multi-coloured projector bouncing lights off every surface. Max and a girl called Julie were rapping Love the Way You Lie as loudly and as angrily as possible down a single microphone. I was somewhat impressed by the fact neither of them seemed to breathe during their entire performance.
Circular booths and tables lined the walls so that the main floor was kept clear for dancing and karaoke, though the room was so full a lot of folk were simply standing around talking to one another. Since all the booths were taken David and I headed to the stools at the bar, which was smaller than the bar in the main pub.
David pointed to a corner of the room where a pile of jackets lay abandoned just as I put my bag on the floor. “I think everyone shoved their stuff over there,” he explained. “Why don’t you do the same? You must be roasting.”
In truth I was. However, now that I was surrounded by people who knew me I grew self-conscious about the fact I’d put so much effort into my appearance. It wasn’t as if nobody else had dressed up – plenty of the girls had and some of the boys, too – but I always felt this way when I was with people who didn’t often see me in full make-up and nice clothes.
And dyed hair.
But then I saw Lir through the hazy air and changing lights, waving Max over to the booth he was sitting in with their lab bench once Max’s song finished. When he caught my eye I looked away, knowing I was blushing.
“You’re right,” I told David, necking back my gin and tonic just as quickly as I had done the vodka, “it’s a bloody sauna in here.” I shirked out of my two jackets and took them and my bag over to the corner, rearranging my hair around my shoulders on my way back to the bar.
David stared at me, open-mouthed. “That’s…wow,” he said, waving towards me somewhat uselessly. “Grace, you look stunning tonight.”
I gave him a nervous smile. “Um, thanks. Felt like I should put in some effort given that I was unconscious for most of the afternoon.”
“When did you dye your – oh!”
Someone bumped into David, knocking his drink all over his white shirt in the process. When the offending person raised their head of tousled hair to look at me I was torn between laughing and staring at them in horrified silence.
“Christ, David, I’m sorry,” Lir said, sounding so authentically apologetic I almost believed him. He grabbed a napkin from the bar and handed it to David, who took it with numb fingers. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. You should probably wash that out before it stains.”
David grimaced at the large yellow spill down his clothes. If only he’d had a vodka lemonade, I thought, still trying hard not to laugh. He fired an almost accusatory look at Lir before heading for the toilets.
“What’re you drinking?” Lir asked, who was suddenly very, very close to me. When I flinched he chuckled, then moved a respectable two feet away. He raised an eyebrow, holding up his own glass of what looked like whisky. “Well?”
“Gin,” I said, remembering how to speak, “and tonic.”
Lir ordered me a double. I didn’t correct him.
Now that we were standing beside each other I could see him far more clearly. He was dressed well and simply, in a navy, long-sleeved t-shirt and tight-fitting, charcoal grey jeans. Lir’s hair was just as messy as usual; I was beginning to suspect he cared very little about it. Regardless, I liked the way it looked.
“– have you been?”
I blinked, taking a sip of the drink the barman handed me without once taking in what Lir had asked. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked you where you’ve been,” Lir repeated. He leaned easily against the bar, inviting me to take a step closer to him so I could hear him better over the cacophony of the newest karaoke singer. “David seemed beside himself with worry.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you dislike him?”
“Nope,” Lir replied immediately. “He’s a nice enough guy, I suppose. But he’s head over heels for you. Surely even you have noticed that by now?”
Such a blatant comment on my usual obliviousness would ordinarily have rankled me to no end. From Lir, however…hearing that he understood my personality made me inordinately happy.
“I guess I had a notion,” I admitted, finally taking the step towards Lir he was waiting for me to take. It really was too loud to talk two feet away from each other without shouting. “But David hasn’t actually said anything to me about it.”
“He was going to ask you out tonight. Good thing I got in his way.”
I didn’t reply. It felt cruel to say I was happy Lir had deliberately spilled a drink on David and interfered with him asking me out, but I was. I was over the moon Lir would do something like that of his own accord.
When we finished our drinks I bought another round, and the two of us talked about the last week at the Research Station. It was a general, boring conversation – not the kind of conversation I’d wanted to have with Lir at all – but as the evening progressed I found that I didn’t care. Any kind of conversation with him was good.
When David reappeared from the toilets and saw that Lir was still talking to me I caught him skulking back to his friends out of the corner of my eye. I felt bad though, in truth, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Then I heard a few people tipsily shout things like ‘poor David’ and ‘I didn’t even know Dylan and Grace were friends’ at him.
Lir and I both tilted our heads to listen in just as Max replied, “Are you joking? It’s about bloody time they got together!”
I turned my back on the students, hunching my shoulders to my ears in a desperate attempt to disappear to another plane of existence where I wasn’t being spoken about. But Lir moved a few inches closer to me, just barely grazing my arm with his.
“Does it bother you when people talk about you?” he asked.
I let out a short bark of humourless laughter. “I think most people are bothered by that, not just me.”
“Maybe so,” he mused, “but you really don’t like it. Why is that?”
I turned my head ever-so-slightly towards him. Lir’s face was impassive, though his grey eyes were alert and attentive. He was genuinely curious about my answer.
“I just…” I began, thinking hard through the beating of my heart for an answer. “Being around lots of people makes me anxious. So when they all start talking about me, well…it makes me feel worse. Even if what they’re saying is nice or whatever. I’d rather nobody spoke about me at all.”
“Would you ever want to be invisible?”
“I – what? Invisible?”
Lir nodded seriously. “Would you? Nobody would ever know you were there. You could do anything you wanted with no repercussions.”
“That would be incredibly lonely, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Lir admitted, taking a long draught of his whisky. “Maybe if someone else was invisible with you it wouldn’t be so bad.”
I regarded Lir’s face carefully. It didn’t look like he was discussing invisibility as a joke.
“What would you want to be invisible for, then?” I asked.
The smile that curled his lips was decidedly mischievous. “It’s a secret.”
“That’s not fair!”
“You’ll just have to get to know me better and then you can work it out.”
It sounded like a challenge – one which I’d gladly step up to meet.
After a few minutes the comments about me and Lir died down, and we returned to companionable silence for a while. I wanted to say something. Of course I did. But here, in the bar, felt like the wrong place. I didn’t want to be surrounded by other people with him.
I wanted us to be alone.
Eventually I realised Lir’s eyes were on my hair. “Did you dye it last night, in the hostel showers?” he asked, reaching out to touch a lock of turquoise before pausing an inch from it. But I leaned into the touch, and when his fingers met my hair he ran them through it all the way to my neck.
“I – yes,” I replied, heart thumping in my throat as Lir began stroking my skin very, very slowly. “I didn’t want to get any dye in my parents’ bathroom. My dad would have killed me if I did.” I knew I was rambling. What did Lir care about my parents’ bathroom?
But Lir smiled softly and bent a little closer towards me. He ran his hand around the back of my neck as if he was going to pull me in, closing the last few inches between us. “You’re like a siren,” he murmured, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. My eyes were on his lips, watching them form words even as I wished he’d do something else with them entirely.
God, I wanted him to kiss me so badly I could cry.
I shivered when his lips brushed my ear. “So does your underwear match your hair, too, or is just your eyes?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
It took me far too long to realise my phone was buzzing in my bra, where I had stored it for safekeeping when I moved my stuff over to the corner. Achingly aware of what Lir had only just said, I pulled my phone out – his eyebrows were lost beneath his hair as he watched me, they rose so high – and saw, in horror, that the last ferry to the mainland was due to leave in fifteen minutes.
“I have to go!” I exclaimed, jerking away from Lir and his devilish touch as if he had burned me. His eyes narrowed in confusion, and he straightened his back to face me properly. “I – ferry. The last ferry. I need to get it. I – bye.”
Without waiting for a response from Lir – or anyone else for that matter – I grabbed my stuff and fled the pub for the blessed outdoors. The bitter night-time air was a welcome relief against my skin. I was so hot.
Too hot.
Lir had made his intentions abundantly obvious, and I’d responded by running away without even getting his number or arranging to see him again.
I was so stupid.
Chapter Ten
It was closing in on ten in the evening and the bottle of prosecco I’d bought a few days ago was now half-empty. I hadn’t bothered changing into pyjamas yet, though curling up on the couch still dressed in a miniskirt and heeled boots wasn’t exactly comfortable. Perhaps it was self-inflicted punishment for running from Lir in a panic.
I was still hitting myself over it. All I’d had to do was say, ‘Hey, I actually have to go home now but do you want to meet up tomorrow before you go back to Glasgow? My parents won’t be back until Monday so we’d have their place to ourselves.’
There. That was it. Succinct, to the point and very obviously an invitation for him to see if my underwear did match my hair. Oh, well. There was nothing I could do about it now except continue to drown my sorrows in bubbly alcohol.
When I returned I’d stopped by Terry’s to ask him if Tom had returned. My mood fell even more when he said no. I was beginning to seriously worry – what if my cat had been run over somewhere and I had no idea?
With a grunt I shifted off the couch and wandered over to the large bay window, pulling the curtain back in order to peer into the darkness. There was no sign of Tom in the garden.
“Damn cat,” I grumbled, turning from the window to slide into my dad’s anorak (which by this point I was seriously considering ‘borrowing’ to take back to Glasgow) and grab a torch from the utility room. I had to bang it against the counter-top several times before it flickered to life.
It was actually warmer outside than it had been when I’d returned from Millport; clearly the wind had changed direction in the past few hours. The air was unnervingly still.
“Ten minutes,” I told myself. “I’ll look for ten minutes.” To be honest I didn’t expect to find much of anything in ten minutes but I had to at least try to find Tom. I let out a low whistle as I searched the back garden. “Tommy, come out,” I begged. “Come on, Tom. This isn’t funny. I’ll never shout at you again for keeping me up at night, I swear.” It was a lie, of course, but at this point I’d promise anything for my cat to return before my parents came back from holiday.
When it became clear that Tom was nowhere in the garden or the shed I moved onto the street. He wasn’t skulking along the promenade – the ornate, wrought-iron street lamps meant even at night visibility of the entire seafront was good. So I decided to check the side streets, instead, turning up the road our house shared with Terry Jones.
No sooner had I turned the corner than a scream rent the air. I froze to the spot, terrified, listening as the scream was followed by another and another. Then something inside me kicked into life and I ran towards the screaming, calling the police in the process.
The road was dark when I found the source of the screaming, for the street lamp had been broken. A shadowy figure loomed over another, brazenly hacking away at their victim right in front of me. The silver of their blade was all I could hone in on, flashing and glinting and then disappearing as it entered the victim’s body.
I tried to find my voice to warn them off but nothing would come out. My entire body was shaking.
My torch had burned out.
I knew I couldn’t stand there, silently watching as some poor soul was stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. So, using some kind of courage I never knew I possessed, I threw the dead torch with all my might at the attacker, hitting them across the back with a dull thump.
“The p-police are coming,” I stuttered, my voice painfully insubstantial but just loud enough to carry across the street.
Without a word or even a glance in my direction, the perpetrator fled.
I wasted no time in running towards their victim, though part of me worried the attacker had pretended to run off with the intention of stabbing me, too. But no such thing happened and, as I skidded to my knees beside the person currently bleeding out on the ground, I realised in horror than I recognised them.
“Terry!” I cried, desperately searching for the worst of his wounds to try and staunch the bleeding. He was wearing a thick jacket and cable-knit jumper that seemed to have taken the worst of the damage from the blade’s attacks on his chest and stomach, but there was a serrated opening on his neck that was bleeding out far too quickly.
I wrenched off my dad’s jacket and pulled off my camisole to hold against the wound, not caring about the way the night-time air cut through my skin. “Hold on, Terry,” I said, blindly trying to check his pulse but realising I was in too much of a panic to count it out.
Terry’s eyes were wide and glassy. He tried to grip my arm but there was no strength behind it. “W-watching your house,” he said, voice thick with blood. He coughed up thick globules of red.
“Shh,” I soothed, wiping my hand across his forehead, “don’t try to talk. Help is on its way. Just hold on, Terry. Hold on.”
“No,” he tried again, desperate. “Watching your –”
His voice was cut off by the sound of sirens, and all around me I became aware of the porch lights of nearby houses blazing bright as concerned neighbours came outside to see what was going on. Before I knew it I was pulled to my feet and Terry was bundled into an ambulance.
As the police questioned me I felt more and more usel
ess. “My torch broke,” I told them. “I didn’t see the attacker’s face. No, I couldn’t see any defining features. No, I don’t know if it was a man or a woman.” All I knew was that they’d used a serrated blade, like the one my dad had in his fishing kit.
I should have changed the batteries in the damn torch.
By the time I returned to my parents’ house I was numb and cold and shaking. My tights were ripped; I wrenched off my boots then tore the ruined material from my legs. When I unbuttoned my skirt and threw it in the washing machine my fingers came away wet and red.
My hands were covered in blood well past my wrists. I turned on the kitchen tap to clean them, thrusting my hands beneath the faucet without acknowledging what I was doing. It was only when the water became scalding hot that I pulled my hands away.
I didn’t know what to do. What to think. My neighbour had been attacked – viciously, mercilessly stabbed – right before me. This was Largs, not Glasgow. Things like this didn’t happen here.
Dully I thought of the muggings in Millport that hadn’t really been muggings at all. Were they related? I didn’t know enough about the cases to form a good hypothesis.
“I…need a drink,” I mumbled, collapsing onto the couch in my underwear and pulling a thick, woollen blanket over my skin. I’d been so excited about the prospect of Lir seeing my lacy blue lingerie. But it had been Terry, old and bleeding and possibly dying, who’d seen it instead.
I wanted to stop such a ridiculous train of thought but I couldn’t. My mind was a mess of impulses and emotions and sheer, overwhelming terror. If I hadn’t gone out looking for Tom – if I’d stayed in Millport for another night to spend more time with Lir – Terry would in all likelihood have died.
He might still, my brain chimed in unhelpfully.
“Shut up shut up shut up,” I cried, banging my temple with my fist in a useless attempt to sort myself out. I barely managed to pour a glass of prosecco with a violently shaking hand, bringing it to my lips and forcing it down with desperate gulps.
I wanted to call my parents. I wanted to call Louisa. But they were all in time zones several hours ahead of me and long since asleep; I would not get a hold of them no matter how much I longed to hear their voices.
The Boy from the Sea Page 7