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Kier

Devon, July 2018

After spending time with other people, Zeph always finds a way to reclaim me as his own.

Mentally. Physically. Hand on my heart. Hand on my soul.

It’s all about us. Just us. Everyone else falls away.

It’s been like this from the moment we met; a late summer’s evening in Liguria when a friend’s parents were hosting a post-beach party, Zeph the designated chef.

The attraction was instant, electric. Zeph was the only thing I saw on the dusty terrace, despite the crowds of people. Shirt off, he was leaning over the grill, sweat trickling down his face, pooling in the divot above his collarbone.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

He didn’t look up as I walked closer, didn’t even try to catch my eye. He was preparing food with the care and delicacy of a surgeon – shrimp lightly plucked from its marinade, laid carefully on the grill. Chopped salad. Vegetables .

‘Are you watching me?’

His words hit me like a cold splash of water to the face. I flushed, almost dropping the beer in my hand.

I didn’t reply. Couldn’t reply. My eyes were locked on the angles of his jaw, the lines of his body.

Zeph said, smiling, ‘If it’s the shrimp you’re not keen on, I can always do something else.’

It was then our eyes met. He was looking at me, really looking, with the same, studied absorption he looked at the food. Like I meant something. Like he already cared.

He made me up a plate, and as I ate, it felt like I could already taste him. Shrimp and salt and sea.

We talked while he grilled, late into the night. Later, over beers and rum-soaked fruit, Zeph confided in me what happened with his job, the restaurant. How his life and career had fallen apart.

Voice quiet, he told me how he arrived one morning to find they’d changed the locks on the restaurant doors, how the paparazzi had captured the moment, how the column inches tore his life to pieces.

I saw in him then the same extremes that lived inside me. The lows, the highs, the in-betweens where the only thing you can do to stay afloat is keep moving.

Laying himself bare made me want to do the same. When you know that someone else has touched the bottom, it’s easier to tell them what it felt like when you did too.

I told him things that I never told anyone. Mum and Dad. The maps.

I came that night with a group of people, but over the course of a few hours they all fell away. All I saw was him – his eyes, tattoos, the dark fuzz of his buzz cut.

Someone pulled me aside at one point, told me who he was, what he was famous for.

I barely heard them. Already, it was just him and me. Me and him. The two of us, our worlds colliding .

‘This was meant to be,’ he told me later that night, and I agreed with him. Not because I believed it yet, but because he did. I’d never had that kind of certainty. Someone who looked at me without seeing her.

‘I love you, you know that, right?’

Zeph’s voice jerks me back into the here and now.

I nod, and he gently pushes me back onto the bed. A familiar dip, low in my gut, as he slides up my top, nudging it over my belly. He splays his hands over my waist, his thumbs making a point at my belly button, lightly pressing until the shape of my ribs is exposed.

He softly kisses each one, his lips dry and cool against my skin. I can smell his skin. Spice and salt. The sea.

The first two kisses I can feel, the rest blur, my stomach hollowing out as he moves his head lower. I close my eyes as he reaches up, grazes my cheek with his finger. Moving up, he kisses me on the lips.

Hard. Hungrily.

Something softens inside me.

All those words that have calcified over the years, become something rigid and ugly.

You’re like your mum. A monster. Killer.

I remember the first time he kissed me like this, eyes wide open, watching. No one had ever done that before. Looked at me like I was the answer to their question. It was our second real date, at a climbing wall in Liguria, the first I’d ever tried.

Zeph got me to simply touch the wall at first. Not to look up or down. Just concentrate on the wall ahead, what’s right in front of me.

He told me: It’s what I do when I’m cooking. If I thought about a full night of service, everything that could go wrong … bad reviews, shitty customers, anaphylactic shock, I’d be paralysed. I just go step by step. One foot in front of another.

I can still feel that rock beneath my hands, warmed from the last rays of the sun, the powdery residue of the chalk on my fingers. I didn’t go far, maybe fifteen, twenty feet, but I wasn’t scared. He believed in me, so I did too .

After that first climb, Zeph leaned me back against the rocky wall, kissed me like he couldn’t stop. He did, frequently, checking in I was okay, and then started again, his mouth on mine, searching for something.

Someone wanted me. Someone wanted me. Despite everything, someone wanted me.

And so I wanted him, I wanted him all.

Afterwards, he falls asleep, but I lay there for a while, my mouth dry, lips bruised.

Disentangling myself from Zeph’s arms a few minutes later, I slip out of bed. I’ve only taken a few steps when I stumble, knocking the shelf above the bed with my arm.

Something falls to the floor with a thud.

Reaching up, I grope for the light, flick the switch. The floor illuminates. One of Zeph’s knife sheaths has fallen.

I crouch to pick it up and as I lift it, something slithers out onto the floor.

A necklace. Long, weighty, a gold triple chain, emeralds studded through at intervals. Beautiful, but extra.

Picking it up, I turn it between my fingers. It’s broken – not at the clasp, but somewhere in the middle, ends uselessly dangling. Something flickers at the edges of my mind before I remember.

I’ve seen this necklace before.

My heart thuds. It’s hers.

Romy’s.

As it spools between my fingers, my eyes lock on something on the emerald closest to the clasp.

Marks on the green stone. Tiny, rust-coloured droplets.