Page 26 of Vine (Island Love #3)

CHAPTER 25

MAX

Caspian’s kiss was a fierce thing. Tasting of fresh earth and bitter salt, like a violent collision between the vines and the sea. And, even better, our tongues were wrapped around each other’s tonsils not five metres from his gawping pig of an ex-husband.

“I like your date outfit,” he whispered against my mouth as he gave my waders a little pinch. “It’s hot.”

I pinched him back. “My red sequinned pair are hanging over the steering wheel.” I was getting good at jokes.

Caspian’s hand slipped around to my arse and gave it a squeeze. “Then what are we waiting for, big man?”

He folded his hand into mine. Not looking back, we headed to the tractor. “It’s only got one seat,” he commented as I swung myself into the cab.

I patted my broad thigh. “No it hasn’t.”

For years and years, I’d spent Friday and Saturday nights behind the wheel of my tractor instead of going on dates. Who knew you could do both? Caspian’s cute bum jiggled up and down as I drove, warming the length of my thigh. With every bump in the road, his grin stretched wider.

“Where are we going?” he shouted in my ear.

“On a date,” I shouted back.

The coast road grew narrower and sandier. As the ocean glimpses between the trees lessened, the cyclists and cars petered out too, the rutted, sandy track an impediment to both. After a few more minutes, I slowed in front of a thick padlocked chain linked between two trees and bearing the words keep out . Hopping down, I removed it, drove through, then reattached it. “My cousin’s land,” I explained. “Lots of islanders own patches like this.”

But this one was the prettiest. Especially at this time of day, when the sun hung low in the sky and the wading birds chattered non-stop to each other. Dusk was no more than an hour or so from touching down. If we were lucky, we might spot a few dolphins enjoying an early evening frolic.

As Caspian was about to find out, I’d already visited here once today. Hidden from nosy parkers on three sides by a dense strip of woodland, the fourth side of my cousin’s flat square of tufty grass sloped down to a stretch of unworked salt marsh and a shallow bay beyond. All the patches along this stretch were designated floodplains, useless for building on. The council members turned a blind eye when locals rough-camped on them, seeing as half of them owned one too.

I couldn’t make someone love me. éti was right about that. Perfect Peach stressed it too. But neither said anything about using a host of underhand tricks to showcase your wares. And this beauty spot was one of the best.

Clambering down from my tractor, Caspian paced in a slow circle. He absorbed the strings of fairy lights twinkling between the trees, the plump cushions and soft blankets spread out on the ground, the incredible colours painting all those things in a dreamy haze, courtesy of the low orange sun beyond.

His mouth spread impossibly wider. “Is this… have you done all this for me?”

“Yeah. And for me too,” I added quickly, to make clear I wasn’t just dropping him off.

“This is like something out of a tourism brochure photoshoot, Max.”

“Better, I think.”

His hand found mine without me noticing, and he raised himself on tiptoe to give me a peck on the cheek. I adored when he did that. It made me feel big and strong and protective all at once. “Is this our bed for the night?”

His lips trailed down to behind my jaw, to where his kisses tickled, except it was the kind of tickling I didn’t want to stop.

“If you want it to be. It’s warm enough for you. Lowest temperatures tonight are expected to be at least 18.4 degrees Celsius with negligible wind chill. And Noir is safe with my dad, and I have wipes and bottled water, a change of socks and underwear each, toilet paper and mosquito spray. Though the mozzies aren’t that bad here—the sea breeze keeps them away. And I brought my radio, too, so we can listen to the shipping forecast in the morning. And also a podcast on slow worms that I want to hear. We could listen to that tonight, if you like.”

I silently congratulated myself. I’d absolutely thought of everything.

“Is the podcast during sex or afterwards?”

“Afterwards,” I answered immediately. “I can’t concentrate on slow worms if my penis is erect.”

People think of laughing as a noise that comes from the mouth. When Caspian laughed, when he properly laughed, it was nothing like that. It was as if his heart was laughing, as if the dusty corners of his lungs were laughing, and all the broken fractals within him were mending. Every time it happened, a little bit more knitted together; his cuts scabbed, old scars sealed over for good, never to be reopened.

We didn’t have sex straight away. And although I thought about having it pretty much every five minutes, I was glad we didn’t. We wandered down to the water’s edge instead. I showed Caspian which shells to keep for creating things and which to throw away. We collected some driftwood too, for kindling. After we hauled it back to our nest, I showed him how to set a responsible campfire, by digging out the dirt and creating a low rocky wall around it, how to arrange the kindling, how to make a safe spill. And then we sat next to it as it crackled and spat, with Caspian between my legs and wrapped in my arms, his beautiful pale face shimmering in the orangey glow.

As we ate my Comte cheese sandwiches with a beer each and watched the sun sink even lower, he told me about some of the wonderful meals he’d learned how to cook from his time at the fancy restaurant in Paris, and how he’d cook them all for me one day. Which felt very much like he was thinking about hanging around after the filming stopped, but I didn’t mention it.

When we’d done all that, when we’d finished eating, drunk all the beer and run out of talking, I told him what I’d needed to tell him for days. “I maybe-love you.” I used my quietest, most gentle voice. “But I don’t know why.

“I mean, you’re pretty to look at,” I explained, because he was. “But so are strawberries. And I don’t love strawberries. They make me come out in hives. You could be the ripest, juiciest strawberry ever grown, and I wouldn’t ever like you. And though we have great sex, I could find someone else to have great sex with now I’ve practised it with you. So it’s not that either. And I even think I maybe-love your pale cheeks and your perfect earlobes even more than I love my blue mugs. Which is a lot.”

Putain, that might be the longest speech I’d ever made. For some reason, Caspian found my declaration of maybe-love amusing.

“ Being maybe-loved by you is a drug, Max—it’s addicting.”

More addicting than the cutting, I hoped, but didn’t say so. He snuggled closer, tipping his head onto my shoulder.

“You know, you weren’t supposed to be this.” He gestured towards the sea and also around our private patch of land. Fortunately, he clarified. “This thing between us. This… this maybe-love .”

He kissed my neck. “You were supposed to be a distraction, just a big hunky guy to fondle. A means of getting my rocks off. And now…” he sighed, and his gaze drifted back to the sea, “now you seem to be an indispensable piece of my life. I feel I have started to depend on you. That my day-to-day wellbeing depends on you. And I… I’m not sure if that will prove to be a good thing.”

In my opinion, it was an excellent thing, so his mouth turning down at the corners was puzzling. “Why?”

“Why?” he repeated, then laughed, only a little, but it was not a laugh I liked very much. For the first time, his skin touching mine prickled. I pushed myself back from him a couple of centimetres.

“Yes, tell me.”

“Why? Because I’m a full-grown man, Max! My ability to get through the day without resorting to self-harm shouldn’t ever depend on someone like you.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“Someone like me? What the fuck do you mean by that?” In the blink of an eye, I maybe-loved him a bit less. “Do you mean a man diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified , but which now falls under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorders? ”

I didn’t use my full diagnosis ever, mostly because it was a lot of words, but I spat the hateful phrase out now. I used to roll it around my tongue for hours, days even, chanting it over and over in my head, like a magic spell. Obsessing, thus proving the diagnosticians correct.

Caspian scrambled to his feet, probably because I was yelling very close to his ear. “No! Of course not. That’s one of the things I like about you! That makes you so attractive!” He shook his head. “But also yes, sort of. I meant relying on someone with their own struggles.”

Mon dieu, we were having an argument. I was useless at arguments. I couldn’t reason quickly enough and snap back a modulated response, not like smart Nico and witty Florian. I tended to resort to shouting and throwing things.

By now, my fingers were counting themselves, my heart thumped wildly, and all attempts at volume control were abandoned. “Do I look like I’m struggling?” I roared. “Do I? With my house and my dog and my responsible job? Does someone struggling bring blankets on romantic dates? And sext his boyfriend and learn about salmon?”

I made a harrumphing sound, like my father did when he was angry—he wasn’t very good at arguments either. “Better that you need to depend on me than on a razor!”

Oh God, I shouldn’t have said that, but it was already out. Nico wouldn’t have said that, nor would Florian. Neither would have buried themselves in this hole in the first place. This was supposed to be a romantic date! They’d be having sex by now.

We stewed in quietness, a few metres apart. If Caspian knew which direction to take and wasn’t staying at my place, he would have stormed off and walked home. I nearly stormed off myself, except that Perfect Peach said couples in heathy relationships didn’t go to bed on an argument. In fact, that sentence was underlined. Twice.

So I stared at the ground, imagining myself storming off and how satisfying it would be but not doing it, until the urge to rock from side to side passed and my fingers settled down.

“Sorry,” said Caspian after nine minutes and thirty-five seconds. Though he had his back to me, looking out over the dark ocean, he was talking to me. “You’re right. You’re not struggling. You are absolutely not. You thrive, Max. You really do. So I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I did. I’m on edge—I’ve had a trying day, ending on a row with Leigh. It’s been a trying week. And I lash out when I’m tired. Though it’s no excuse. You’ve gone to so much effort, and it was an excellent romantic date until I ruined it. Sorry.”

“I need to rock,” I admitted, staring at the ground. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “It’s something I do when I’m cross. I can’t help it, and I know it makes me look silly. So keep on looking the other way, please.”

He gave a shaky laugh. “Hey, Max. I cut myself. You don’t need to explain odd coping strategies to me. I wrote the fucking book. Fill your boots.”

Another metaphor I recognised, so I didn’t point out my boots were already full of my feet. I didn’t think he’d written a book on odd coping strategies either. While I rocked at my lowest level, Caspian gazed out at the dark sea.

The next period of quietness lasted four minutes, eighteen seconds. It was a silence of two parts. The first part had me trying very hard to accept his apology. One of the few things, along with arguing and choosing from long menus in fancy restaurants, I wasn’t very good at. I believed he meant it, but we’d never claw back our excellent mood now. Our romantic date was fading fast, faster than the evening light. Gone forever, although my memories would stay.

Tagged onto that silence was an unfinished part: finding a way to move forward from our argument and his apology. If I could end the silence with something clever, if I could get my words through that frosted layer of glass, if I could somehow make him believe that needing me was not a weakness, then, maybe, we’d get the first half back again.

“I think what I’m trying to explain, except really badly,” said Caspian in a voice much quieter than I ever managed, “is that, eventually, everyone tires of being with someone who is mentally unwell.” He picked up a dry twig that had strayed from the fire and snapped it in half. “Sympathy turns to… I don’t know, apathy and frustration. I don’t want my dependence to become a chronic inconvenience for you, Max. Like I was to Leigh. And probably my mother too. I keep telling you, but you don’t seem to hear. I’ll have ups and downs—hopefully, a lot more ups than downs now I’m escaping television and Leigh. But I won’t get better.”

I pondered a minute, trying to block out everything but his words, trying to see into that future. Him needing to cut and me talking him down.

Picturing it didn’t scare me. “But what if… what if that person you are dependent on is someone who needs to be needed?” I answered eventually.

“No one needs to be needed that much. Trust me.”

“Well, I do,” I disagreed, in as ordinary a voice as I could. “I wasn’t needed enough until you came along. I think… I think that was missing.”

He shook his head. “I’ve met your family, Max. Lots of people need you. Your dog needs you. And that bloody snake.”

“No. They don’t. Well, Noir does, Kaa doesn’t. And my family doesn’t, not really. Listen, after my mum died, my dad fell apart. He would have destroyed the oyster business if he hadn’t let Nico take over the reins. And Nico, well, he was grieving too, and if he hadn’t had éti to rely on, then he’d have also been a useless bag of shite. I coped by sticking to my routines. I have obsessions, Caspian, although I control them well. One used to be working at the farm, seeing how many oyster pouches I could toss, managing one more than the day before. I looked like I was coping. Inside, I was collapsing, and no one noticed. Until one day, éti told me she needed me. And she really did. She was coming out as trans and said that I was the only sane person in her mad world, and it was even madder then.”

And we were all here and still thriving, so we must have done something right.

“Even so, my dad and éti and Nico all have someone for themselves. Someone needs them. And I want that, too.”

“But why me?”

“Because I’ve got a lot to give and you’re in need of it. And you have a perfectly shaped head. As well as nice cheeks and earlobes. And all those things are probably why I maybe-love you.”

Caspian was still looking out to sea. Pulling myself up and moving to stand behind him, I lifted away his left arm from wrapped around himself. He tensed as I hitched up his sleeve. There were no fresh scars, thanks to me. His recent angry purple ones were nothing but faded, sad leftovers. I brushed over one with my thumb, as lightly as I could without hurting him.

“You are fighting a war in secret, la mer Caspienne ,” I began. “And I know how hard that is because I’ve done it all my life. I used to try not to be peculiar. I used to try to fit in, to fight the thing in my head that made me weird. But I messed up all the time. I blurted things out from Colette’s list of hidden social curriculum violations . Or became so stressed I couldn’t say anything at all. Not speaking for months, years. Which was even worse.” I traced the edge of the welt, wishing it would vanish altogether under my fingers. “So… so I know secret wars are hard.”

With a long shaky sigh, Caspian looked down at his feet.

“Do you still fight it now?” he asked, “being different?”

“A bit,” I answered. “In places like the dentist or the hairdresser's or the bank—I hate the bank. If I go on my own, they treat me like I’m stupid. If I go with Nico or my dad, they ignore me. But mostly, I don’t care. I grow my hair long now and have good teeth.” I clacked them together to demonstrate. “And got myself some online banking.”

“You do have nice teeth,” he replied, “And long hair suits you.”

“When I have problems, I have éti and Colette to help, or my dad and Nico. And it’s fine. I don’t worry about asking them. Colette has explained that even very strong people like me can have weak moments when they need someone else. I think you’ll be good at helping me, Caspian.”

“You think so?” He sounded doubtful.

“I know so. We could, like, have a secret signal when someone springs a metaphor on me, so I don’t look like an idiot. And you’re great at meeting new people, at remembering their names and pretending to be interested in them. I find that very tiring, and Nico says it shows on my face.”

“Yeah.” He pulled his sleeve back down. Not in a snatchy way, but like he couldn’t bear to look anymore. “I could help you with those.”

When I wrapped him up in my arms, he fell back into them, and I rubbed my nose along his perfect left cheek. My skin didn’t prickle, so I knew our argument was over. For two wonderful minutes and nineteen seconds, neither of us moved.

“I fight the urge to cut myself every single day, Max. Every hour, on some days. I find myself inventing excuses to justify it. And then making excuses to be alone so I can. I can’t understand why you’d want to shoulder that.”

“And I can’t understand why you don’t think I would.” I gave him a nudge. “I have massive shoulders.”

With a soft huff, he swivelled to face me. “You do. And you make excellent jokes.”

We kissed. My first kiss-and-make-up kiss, slow and long, deep and soft. Like our tongues were carrying on with the sorrys. It was a kiss hinting I was even more than indispensable; I was essential. That he needed me like our ripening vines needed sunlight. That, with time, he could grow to maybe-love me too.

As Caspian’s hand slipped to the sturdy zip of my waders, the kiss changed. And, just like that, our romantic date was back on as he tugged my arms from the sleeves and threw his own shirt to the grass. My T-shirt was close behind it.

“Massive shoulders,” agreed Caspian, burying his pretty face against my right one. Entwining my fingers in his, I pulled him away and back to the blankets.

“They look even bigger when I lie down.”

After that, it wasn’t long until Caspian had his pretty face buried between my thighs. Which made it prettier still. And then he whipped out his secret second tongue, the pointy one he saved for my slit, which he kept hidden during non-blowjob related activities behind his normal, flatter one.

As his penis was also erect, he suggested we do the sixty-nine position. He wouldn’t suggest it again in a hurry. We discovered I couldn’t concentrate on his penis as well as my own pleasure, especially as I’m taller than him by 29.3 centimetres and the position was awkward. So, switching between his two tongues, he sucked my cock and laved along my shaft until I came in his mouth.

And then I returned the favour. Caspian has a Perfect Penis as well as a Perfect Peach.