Tom

Christ, is it the middle of the night or the middle of the day? The heavy curtains in my aunt and uncle’s guest room make it impossible to tell.

The jet lag after flying from London, combined with Uncle Jim’s homemade rhubarb wine, has left my brain in a painful fog.

Have I been asleep for ten minutes or ten hours?

Unable to muster the energy to raise my eyelids more than a crack, I roll over and reach for my phone on the nightstand.

But my hand smacks into the cool glass of water next to it instead.

Shit, no.

Too late.

I’m not sure which sound is worse—the splashing or the shattering.

I push myself up onto my elbow and shove my hair off my face. Even with bleary eyes and no light, it’s obvious the glass is now in more than one piece and the table’s soaked. As is everything on it, including the books Aunt Maggie leaves there for visitors.

My phone had a lucky escape because that rattling noise was it falling down the back of the nightstand.

Fuck, the water’s dripping down the sides and onto the lovingly restored wood floor. From the carnage, you’d think I’d knocked over a pitcher, not just one glass.

I can’t exactly mop it up with the sheets, nor with my clothes that are in a crumpled heap on the floor. Must get a cloth.

This is my first time staying at the house my brother, three cousins, and I bought for Uncle Jim and Aunt Maggie two and a half years ago. I’m not totally familiar with the layout or where to locate a rag, but a towel from my en suite bathroom will do for now.

I sit upright and swivel onto the edge of the bed. One foot touches my crumbled boxers, the other squelches into the thick rug. Bollocks. I can’t make a mess of this beautiful joint less than twenty-four hours after I got here. After being hard up before we boys made our fortunes, Mags and Jim appreciate and take good care of everything they have now, and I don’t want to wreck stuff the first time I stay.

Apparently being vertical makes my head throb more. I let my eyes drift shut again and rub my temples. Does Jim make that wine with paint stripper?

The wetness under my toes is chilly—a contrast to the toasty warm room. It might be an icy New Hampshire January day outside, but there are no drafts blowing through this Victorian house—the renovation job was spectacular.

Anyway. Towel. Mopping of the water.

I stumble across the room in a line that would test the patience of the most forgiving traffic cop, pausing briefly to kick off the boxers stuck around my ankle.

As I open the bathroom door, a blinding light sears the backs of my eyes like the fire of a thousand suns. It’s coming through the window at the end of the landing. Guess that wasn’t the bathroom door then. And I guess it’s daytime.

“Whoa,” says a female voice that isn’t Aunt Mags.

Fuck. I’m naked.

The hands shielding my eyes from the stark winter brightness fly to my crotch.

Who the hell is this wandering around the house?

As my eyes adjust and I’m able to open them more than a micro crack, a petite blond woman comes into view.

“Shit, sorry.” I back away into the bedroom but crash into the door that’s inconveniently closed behind me.

Would one hand be enough to cover the essentials if I reach back to open it?

“Tom?” says the woman, looking just as shocked as I am, but with far more clothes on. “Is that you?”

Who the hell is this? How does she know me? And why is she in my aunt and uncle’s house at…whatever the fuck time this is?

“Um, yes.”

My attempt to squish the crown jewels into one hand isn’t going well.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

You’d think someone encountering a naked man in the hallway of a house that isn’t theirs would be less persistent.

“Visiting.” I keep a firm hold of the goods with both hands and jab at the door handle with my elbow. But it’s a knob, not a handle, so that’s achieving nothing but future bruises.

The woman plants her hands on her hips and tilts what I now realize is an incredibly cute face. An incredibly cute face that awakens a tingling of familiarity at the back of my aching brain.

Holy shit.

It can’t be. It really can’t be.

Those big blue eyes…

They might have fine lines at the corners and darker circles under them, but the spark behind them is the same.

The slightly upturned elfin nose.

The dimple as she purses her lips at me.

But it can’t be. Why would she be here? In Maggie and Jim’s house that’s in a small village about fifty miles and years away from our old lives in Boston?

Maybe I’m hallucinating. Maybe there was paint stripper in that wine. Or maybe someone sneaked in during the night and hit me over the head multiple times with a brick.

My eyes slide down to the hand resting on her right hip.

Fucking hell.

There it is. The tattooed star in the crook between her thumb and forefinger. An exact match for one on the right hand currently cupping my gonads.

Am I hot? Or am I cold? Is my heart racing? Or has it stopped? Am I still asleep and dreaming? Or nightmaring?

“Hannah?” It feels like forever since that name crossed my lips.

“Congratulations.” She gives me a slow clap. “Obviously I know you’d forgotten about me. But I never imagined it would take you that long to recognize me.”

“Forgotten?” Why the hell would she think that? “I’ve not forgo–”

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I here? This is my aunt and uncle’s house. Why are you here?”

“I work here.”

“What?” This might be less confusing if I had clothes on. Though probably not by much.

“I’m the housekeeper.”

What the fuck? My high school girlfriend, my first love, is my aunt and uncle’s housekeeper?

“I’m sorry, what?” This couldn’t be harder to figure out if a truck were driving back and forth over my brain, making that annoying backing-up beeping noise. “Since when?”

“Couple months ago. Just temporary. Till I move to LA.”

“LA? Why would you move to LA? Why would anyone move to LA? LA is hell on earth. I wouldn’t move to LA if it was the only land mass left on the planet. I’d rather take my chances bobbing around in the ocean. Surrounded by sharks.”

Why is my hatred of LA suddenly so important I have to say this many words about it?

“Thanks for sharing your completely unsolicited opinion.” She folds her arms. “Obviously I’ll change my mind instantly.” She puts a finger to her puckered lips as if thinking hard. “Oh. You know what? No, I won’t.”

Why are we even talking about this?

“How are you Maggie and Jim’s housekeeper?”

“Bumped into Maggie in the village. I needed work. And she offered me a job,” Hannah says as if of course that’s what happened.

“You just happened to be in Blythewell? The die-hard Boston city girl just happened to be hanging out in this sleepy little New Hampshire village?” My balls are starting to stick to my hand.

“You think I came up here deliberately to find them and hoodwink them into giving me a job? I didn’t even know they’d moved here till I saw Maggie in Jude’s plant shop.”

“Jude? Plant shop?” What are these words?

“My cousin, Jude, has a gardening and plant store in the village. I was staying with her and helping her out when Maggie came in. That’s when she offered me this job.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Jesus screaming hell, why didn’t Aunt Mags tell me?

“How would I know?” Hannah shrugs like it’s perfectly normal to stand chatting with your first love while he’s stark bollock naked on the landing of his aunt and uncle’s house more than a decade and a half after you last saw him. “I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known you were coming.”

“Why?” I can’t kid myself that doesn’t hurt a little. Why would she want to avoid me? Also, clearly I’m not the only one Maggie and Jim didn’t tell.

“Why?” She scans the ceiling in mock concentration. “I don’t know. Maybe because you said you were going to London for the summer…and now it’s fifteen years later.”

“Seventeen.” And like entering a time machine, I can see the face that’s looking at me now just as it was right before I left, with rivers of tears and black eyeliner streaming down its face, not the fury that’s behind its eyes now, blond hair shaved short on one side, chin-length on the other, not long and tied up in a ponytail as now.

She’s no less beautiful than she was then, just more tired, like she’s lived a whole life since I last saw her. The set of her jaw is no less determined, and the ability to speak her mind is obviously no less diminished.

“Yeah, seventeen,” she says. “More than half my life ago you just stopped replying to my emails.”

Oh, Christ. I can’t get into all this while jet-lagged, hungover, and naked.

I turn toward the door but stop halfway, realizing I’m about to moon her. “I’m going to get dressed. Then we can catch up after that.”

“Catch up?” she scoffs. “If you’d cared about catching up you wouldn’t have ghosted me in the first place.”

For all this to spew out in the first minute of setting eyes on me, it must have been floating pretty damn close to the surface this whole time.

The bit of hair that has a habit of annoyingly falling across my face is tickling my nose so much it needs a scratch, but I daren’t take a hand away from the master and his servants. Not least because the master has clearly noticed Hannah’s attractiveness and, unaware of the delicate nature of the situation, is doing his best to stand up.

“Ghost you? I didn’t—”

“Sure you did. I was just a kid, totally in love with you, waiting for you to come back. And all I got was a message saying you weren’t. And a promise I could come visit. Then…” She widens her eyes and thrusts her face forward, making me recoil and bash the back of my head against the door. “Nothing.”

“I was a kid too, Hannah. A kid in London. Surrounded by new and…” I’m suddenly chilly. “Look, can we please talk about this when I’m dressed?”

She looks me up and down, from whatever state my hair is in to the tips of my bare toes, as if only just realizing I’m clothesless. “Why are you out here naked anyway?”

Oh, yeah. The shock of seeing the love of my life has made me forget what the hell I was doing.

Love of my life? Was she? We were teenagers. And my brain currently feels like a bag of overboiled cabbage. So maybe that’s not a correct assessment.

“I thought it was my bathroom.” I jerk my head to the frustratingly inaccessible room behind me, swinging my hair across the end of my nose, tickling it more. “Knocked over a glass of water. Need a cloth, or a towel, or something.”

Her eyes narrow and roll at the same time. “I’ll leave you to it.” She steps away toward the stairs. “Then you can let go of all that”—she nods toward my crotch—“and open the door.“

Thank Christ.

“You must be in a bit of a state,” she says as she marches off along the hallway, “to not know the difference between the doors to the landing and the bathroom.”

She tosses me a look over her shoulder.

That look.

The one from half a lifetime ago.