Is She Really Going Out with Him?

Chapter 24

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I wake up smiling, stretching slowly, like a cat after a long nap. I feel reborn. My whole body alive, revived, yet also gloriously tender. I don’t want to move, I want to melt into this bed and feel it all again, and again and again. Rolling over, I reach out a hand for Will but find an empty bed. Turning over, I see he isn’t in the cabin. Where did he go?

Stepping out of bed and opening the cabin door, I see him, hunched over the firepit, building a new fire to heat the kettle.

“Morning,” I call, waving to him from the door. I’m dressed in his T-shirt and my underwear, and though it’s oversized and comes down to my thighs, this morning I feel sexy wearing it.

“Hey,” he says, glancing back at me before adding some more kindling to the fire.

“You want to come and help me over here?” I ask, and he looks back over his shoulder to smile at me but doesn’t make a move.

“Just at a crucial part of the fire-building process,” he says. “I’m making you tea.”

He persists with his fire arranging, so I pull on my jeans and shoes and go out to join him. Twigs crack beneath my feet, and the low morning sun dapples the glade like nature’s disco ball. “Isn’t this wonderful? Waking up in the wild, being right in the forest, the fresh smell of dew and the morning mist still hanging over the field.”

“Someone’s full of the joys of spring,” Will says. He hangs the kettle over the flame, then stands up and strides across the glade toward me, reaching to brush my hair away from my face.

“I am,” I say, tilting my head upward to look at him.

“Shall we go swimming while the water heats up?” he suggests. Then he reaches for my hand, and I laugh as he pulls me along the woodland track, following the sound of the river. Small wooden arrows point along the bank toward the plunge pool. When we get close, Will lets go of my hand, pulls off his shirt and jeans in one seamless motion, then, naked, leaps off the bank straight into the swirling dark water.

“That was dangerous,” I call, blushing at the sight of him. “You don’t know how deep it is.”

“It’s deep enough,” he says, dunking his head under the water, then bursting through the surface, breathless from the cold. He shakes his head, sending water from his hair in a circle of spray.

Pulling off my T-shirt and jeans, I keep my knickers on, attempting to retain some modicum of modesty, then take a small jump into the shallows, squealing at the viselike grip of the water. Will finds my hand and pulls me toward him, the heat of his body confusing my senses in the biting cold.

“Refreshing,” I say, struggling to catch my breath, and he laughs. We’re face-to-face now, in daylight. His eyes are full of questions, but I don’t know what he’s asking, so I lean up to kiss him. Last night felt like a fantasy, like it might not have been real, but now that I feel his firm lips, soft and probing, everything comes back in a rush of delicious molten memory.

His mouth moves down to kiss my shoulders.

“How are we going to write about this?” I ask, my voice tight in my throat.

“Heavily redacted,” he says, suddenly picking me up and throwing me across the pool so I go all the way under. When I come up, gasping, Will is already on the bank, pulling on his clothes. I put my hands across my chest as I follow him, self-conscious in unforgiving daylight. He turns toward me, and I shoo his gaze away. “Don’t look!”

“I have seen you more naked than that, Appleby, in case you don’t remember.”

“Not like this, you haven’t,” I say, scrambling to find my T-shirt on the bank and pulling it over my damp head.

Back at our camp, the kettle is billowing steam, and while Will uses a hook to remove it from the fire, I run back to his cabin to find another T-shirt. As I walk back across the glade, Will calls to me, “I remembered your code, if you want to get dry clothes.”

“What?” I ask, tilting my head in confusion.

“Your door code, I remembered it in the middle of the night. Five seven zero four.”

“It just suddenly came to you?” I ask, eyeing him suspiciously.

“What? It did,” he says, shaking his head. Then his brow furrows, and he laughs. “You think I pretended not to remember it, so you’d be forced to sleep in my cabin?”

“Will Havers, you absolute scoundrel,” I say, glaring at him.

“I swear, the way Verity said it, in that singsong voice, it just pinged back into my brain when I woke up. You never get that?” Will seems earnest, while finding my suspicion amusing. “You really think I would go through all that—trekking up that hill in the dark, offering to sleep on the floor—just to trick you into bed?”

“A convenient lapse of memory, was it?” I ask, unable to decide whether I believe him or not.

“If I recall, it was you who initiated things, not me.” He walks slowly around the fire toward me, and I feel myself unfurl beneath his gaze. “I was happy to keep this unrequited,” he says. “Well, not happy exactly, resigned.”

He reaches for me, tucking a finger inside the top of my T-shirt, twisting it, pulling me toward him. I push myself up on tiptoes, tilting my chin upward. “I’m going to get a cricked neck if I’m not careful,” he says softly.

“I’m worth it,” I say, kissing him.

“I love seeing you in nothing but my T-shirt,” he says. His eyes meet mine, his pupils wide and full of heat, but then, rather than kiss me again, he unwinds his finger and lets me go. My feet sink back to the floor, disappointed. “Come on, let’s see if I remembered that code right.” He strides across the glade toward my cabin, then punches in a code. The door clicks. As he opens it, he turns back to me. I’m still standing by the fire where he left me.

“Did you want to go on that guided walk at noon?” he asks.

“Maybe, why?” I ask. He beckons me with one finger, and I follow, a yo-yo on some invisible string.

When I reach the cabin step, he says, “Because I want to know how long I have,” which sends an arc of anticipation through me.

“I do not need to go on the guided walk,” I say with an uncharacteristically girlish giggle.

“Good,” he says, picking me up in one deft movement, carrying me up the steps, then kicking the cabin door closed behind us.

The rest of the day passes like a dream. I am not myself. I am not Anna the mother, nor Anna the journalist, not even Anna the sister. I am not divorced or thirty-eight or anything you could write on paper. I am simply a woman in the woods, in my own private Eden, returned to a raw, animal state. I’m annoyed and delighted in equal measure to discover why this beautiful, arrogant, swaggering man walks through life with such a cocksure gait. In his hands, my body feels like a Ferrari, long parked in a dusty garage, now being driven by a Formula 1 driver who knows exactly how to handle one.

Without our phones, I have no concept of time or the outside world. The day unfurls like one long conversation, with no end or beginning, just moving locations. When we’re not in bed, we lie outside in the forest glade, Will reading me a chapter from my book, my head resting on his chest. I learn that his physique is not from the gym but from a daily habit of outdoor calisthenics. He can shift his body into incredible positions and tries teaching me how to do a headstand, but it only ends in a lot of laughing and a head rush for me.

When the sun is high in the sky we take a long walk around the perimeter of the field, then find bread, cheese, and salad in the cool box for lunch. That evening we lie out on a blanket in the field looking up at the stars, and I wonder if we have been here for a year or a day. I feel energized, blissfully content, fun, and attractive. If I was in my hibernation era, I am now well and truly awake.

“I love that I can just look at you now,” Will says, rolling onto his side on the blanket, propping a hand beneath his head, eyes moving lazily from my lips to my chest, then back to my eyes. “I always felt guilty when I looked at you in the office.”

“Why were you looking at me in the office?” I ask, but he just kisses my hand.

“Because it’s impossible not to.”

“What would people at work say if they saw us now?” I say, covering my face with my other hand.

“I don’t think anyone at work needs to know,” he says, trailing his fingertips up my arm.

“What happens in the woods stays in the woods,” I say, nodding.

Will reaches to cup my cheek, shoots me a look of such tenderness, then groans and falls back on the blanket. “This is the worst timing, Appleby,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve fancied you forever. Since I started at the magazine, but you wouldn’t give me the time of day. Now this happens and…” He exhales loudly. “Jesus.”

I beam at this, his words sending delight thrumming through me. “That’s not true, don’t lie,” I say, my cheeks starting to ache from smiling.

“Anna, did you not notice I was constantly inventing reasons to talk to you? I asked you out to dinner twice; both times you shot me down. I was convinced you hated me.”

“I kind of did, until Hay. I don’t remember you asking me out twice.”

“Well, I did.”

“And correcting my grammar and trying to steal my column were your way of flirting, were they?” I ask, turning onto my side so we’re now lying face-to-face.

“It worked, didn’t it?” He shoots me a devious grin, and I pretend to punch him. He laughs, folding his hand around my fist. “No, the column wasn’t about you. Jonathan mentioned he was reviewing content on the back page, and I saw an opportunity. As for giving you edit notes, I genuinely just want the magazine to be as good as it can be. Also…”

“Also?”

“I love your indignant face. You get this cute little cleft chin, and your eyes go all wild and fiery. It does something to me, I’m sorry.” He falls back on the rug with a guilty laugh, and I climb on top of him.

“So you get off on making me angry?”

“Not as much as I get off on making you smile,” he says with a grin.

“You are such a cheeseball,” I say, leaning down to kiss him. “Why did you pull back after Hay, if you weren’t seeing Deedee?”

“ You cooled on me . You shot me down when I mentioned another full moon party at your place. You said what happened in Hay stayed in Hay. I thought you regretted it.”

“I didn’t, I don’t,” I tell him, holding his gaze, daring to be honest. “When you left me in Hay, I felt something had changed.”

“I’m sorry. I was distracted. I guess I didn’t want to come on too strong. I was worried I’d pushed it too far at the window. I wanted to see you in person to gauge how you felt about it.” He rolls me off him and sits up, elbows on his knees, palms pressed against his eye sockets. “Why couldn’t you have decided not to hate me six months ago? I’m going to Paris next weekend. I have a meeting with the network head there. It’s the final round.”

“Wow. So it might really happen then,” I say, trying to sound happy for him. “That would be incredible.”

“It would be. It’s just the kind of job I wanted. I’m down to the final three out of two hundred applicants…” He trails off, closing his eyes. “I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. There’s still a sixty-six percent chance I won’t get it.”

“You’ll get it,” I say confidently.

“You’re making me want to not get it,” he says softly, looking up at me now, his eyes laced with sadness. “You can’t move to Paris, I presume?” he asks with a wry smile.

“Pretty tied to Bath for the next decade, I’m afraid,” I say, sitting up beside him, clasping his hand in mine.

“I don’t want to minimize this,” he says, turning to look me in the eye. “This is incredible— you are incredible.” He pauses. “But I also don’t want to feel bad about leaving. My brothers are moving back; it’s my time to go, whether it’s this job in Paris or another somewhere else.”

“I know. Will, this is just…it’s just a weekend in the woods. I don’t expect you to rethink your whole life plan for me.”

He pulls back to look at my face, trying to read my expression. “What you do mean, ‘just a weekend in the woods’?”

“What happens in the woods stays in the woods,” I say in a singsong voice.

“Really? You want it to be just this weekend?” he asks, turning away, and I can’t tell if he is disappointed or relieved. I’m about to clarify, to say I only said that because I was parroting our phrase. But what else could this be? I’m not looking for a boyfriend, certainly not one I’m going to have to say good-bye to in a few months. Then before I can answer, Will says, “Maybe that would be best. It could get messy otherwise.” My chest contracts. What does he mean by “messy”? The mood feels spoiled and serious, so I quickly lean in to kiss him, desperate to reclaim the lightness.

“I blame you for starting this,” I say into his mouth. “You pretended to forget my code.”

“Really, that’s the story you’re going with?” he says, rolling me over, clasping both my hands, and pulling them above my head as I laugh beneath him, trying to buck myself free, but he’s too strong. “Who forgot the code?” he asks again.

“I did, I did,” I say, laughing into his lips as they find mine, and we return to the world where nothing outside the blanket matters and words are not required.

There is something different this time. We undress each other, slowly, deliberately. There is none of the wild urgency of last night, or the eager discovery of each other’s bodies we had this morning. This is slower, more conversational. He asks me what I like, what I want. It is tender, gentle. It’s as though we know we can’t take this home, so we want to savor every detail, seal it into our memories; at least that’s how I feel. He looks me in the eye, and I feel something forged between us that will not be undone.

Time dissolves into something unmeasurable again. I don’t know how much later it is when we become aware of someone watching us. We’re still lying on the blanket, using a second blanket for warmth. I hear the crack of twigs and then I see her, a woman in her sixties, with a gray bun, holding a camera.

“Don’t move,” she says, her voice quiet, as though we are deer she’s trying not to spook. “You look perfect, right there.” She snaps her camera, and I pull the rug up around myself.

“What the hell! Who are you?” I yell as Will scrabbles for our clothes and moves in front to shield me from the photographer.

“Stop taking photos, please,” he says, his voice deep and stern.

“Greta Van Prague,” says the woman unapologetically. “I’m the photographer, from the Times .” She pauses, looking back and forth between us. “I’m to take photos for your article. I hope I’m in the right place.”

“Oh, right,” says Will, turning his back to her as he pulls on his jeans, his face puce. “I’d forgotten you were coming.”

“You knew she was coming?” I cry, crawling to find a T-shirt, wrapping the blanket tighter around myself. When I dare glance back at Greta, she looks amused, one hand on her hip, mouth curled into a smirk.

“Sorry.” Will rubs his face with both hands, then paces back and forth, before finally extending a hand toward her.

“You can’t use those photos,” I tell her.

“They’re your photos, you decide what you use. You looked so perfect together, wrapped in those rugs in the dappled light. Moments like that are always better captured than posed.” She looks back and forth between us. “This is a romantic getaway feature, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s not—we’re not going to illustrate it with half-naked pictures of ourselves,” Will says, shaking his head. “Please delete those.”

“It wasn’t a close-up. There’s nothing to see.” She leans over to show Will the photos on her camera screen. “Even if you don’t use them for the article, I’d want to keep these if this was me and my partner.”

“Oh no, we’re not…” I start to say.

“No, no, we’re not,” says Will, mortified.

Greta looks back and forth between us, and I hide my face in my T-shirt.

“We’re colleagues.”

“Ah, I see,” Greta says slowly, then laughs. “Well, I’ll take a ton of pictures, you decide which ones you use to illustrate the article.” She pauses, looking across at Will, then winking at me. “Nice work if you can get it, hey?”

Greta gives us space to put our clothes back on. Will and I share a mortified smile. Once our faces have returned to their normal tones, Greta asks if she can pose a few photos of us sitting by the fire, then standing outside the cabin with mugs of tea.

“I’ll let you get back to it,” she says, which turns Will’s face pink again. “There must be something in it, then, this Reconnect retreat.”

“Please don’t tell anyone at the Times about this,” I plead.

“Honey, relax,” says Greta. “When you get to my age, you’ll only wish you had more weekends like this.” And then she’s gone, marching back the way she came.

“I’m so sorry,” Will says to me as soon as she’s out of earshot. “They said they would send a photographer, but they didn’t follow up with any details. I thought they’d come separately to photograph the location.” His face is racked with guilt. “That was so unprofessional.”

“I can’t believe she thought we might want half-naked photos of ourselves in a national newspaper,” I say. Then when I catch Will’s eye, we both burst out laughing.

“It was a good photo. I might print it out and put it on my desk at work,” Will says.

“That might be a little unprofessional,” I say, my cheeks aching from smiling.

Then Will picks me up, in one sweeping motion, and carries me across the glade back to his cabin. “What are you doing,” I say, grinning up at him.

“I’m going to show you exactly how unprofessional I can be.”