Somewhere New (Isle of Doughnut #1)

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

ASTER

‘ W e have to go down the mountains on that thing? Don’t you have a car?’

Callum straightened after attaching a trailer to the back of a freaking quad bike. ‘Wouldn’t you have noticed if I had a car?’

Was it wrong that I loved his voice even when he was persuading me to use a mode of transportation reserved for people with a persistent and enduring death wish? His Scottish accent was subtle, overlaid by gentle gruffness. Could gruffness be gentle? Before meeting Callum, I would have said no. But that was how I’d describe everything about him. A rough outer shell with the squishiest heart inside.

But back to the pressing matter at hand. ‘I didn’t notice you had this death trap. You could be hiding a car as well.’

Callum’s eyebrows lowered. ‘It’s not a death trap. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything dangerous.’

And there it was: the squishy centre that meant Callum could convince me to walk a tightrope over a river of lava if he held out his hand and smiled .

I stomped up to the quad bike and swung my leg over the wide saddle. ‘If I should die on this journey, on your head be it.’

Callum slotted into the space in front of me. I tried incredibly hard not to hyperfixate on his thick thighs flexing as his boots settled on the footrests or his broad back becoming impossibly broader as he reached for the handles or the rush of his familiar smell. Clean cotton and fresh sweat and something uniquely him.

‘You’re not going to die, Aster.’ It should have been a big, red, flashing sign that I was far too gone on this guy that even the way he said my name made me want to swoon so that he would catch me. ‘But you might want to hold on.’

‘Huh?’ I managed to grunt before the engine roared to life and we shot off down the mountains.

What I did from that moment on could have been loosely described as holding on. It would have been more accurate to say I plastered myself to Callum’s back and could only have gotten closer if I’d climbed inside him.

Despite the violent growling of the engine, I could feel Callum’s rumbling laugh. I wished I could see and hear it too. It was such a rare occurrence. Due to my persistence, we’d watched an entire season of Bake Off in the week since Callum stopped avoiding me and had moved on to Friends . The odd chuffs of laughter Callum emitted seemingly against his will every few episodes reassured me that I didn’t need to feel bad about forcing a popular culture education upon him.

We passed the place where Bonnie ditched me. The rocks blocking the road had been dragged off to one side. It was impossible to chat because of the mad vehicle we were charging down the mountain on, but maybe that was a good thing. Since Bonnie invited us for lunch, Callum had made it abundantly clear he wouldn’t be coming along. I’d wanted to ask why, but things between us still felt tentative and delicate. Despite what my dad might say, I did actually know when to keep my mouth shut.

We chugged over a bump in the road and the village came into view. From this vantage point, I could see the backs of the terraced cottages, each as colourful as the front. Vegetable patches, barren now but waiting to teem with life, sat in neat rows alongside swing sets and scrubby patches of lawn.

Beyond the houses, the curved bay sparkled in the midday sun. Fishing boats bobbed and gulls wheeled overhead.

My time in the mountains had been incredible, but something within me loosened as I took in the sights of actual civilisation. I didn’t know how Callum coped living all alone. I squeezed him extra hard as we abruptly slowed next to the last cottage on the long row. The lime-green one I’d wanted for myself.

‘This is Bonnie’s place.’ Callum cut off the quad bike’s engine. The quiet here was different than in the mountains. Waves hissed against the sea wall and the shouts of children carried on the salty breeze.

As delicately as an elephant lumbering out of a bog, I extracted myself from the saddle. ‘Ow.’

A flash of humour brightened Callum’s eyes, but quickly dulled. ‘I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours.’

‘Callum?’ I pressed my hand to his cheek before he could restart the beast’s engine and fly away. It was a thrill to touch him like this, that someone as closed off as Callum would let me this close. I had to remind myself a hundred times a day that it didn’t mean anything, that my plan to get over romantic entanglements was still on track. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in?’

His bearded jaw hardened under my hand, but I didn’t pull away. I dipped my head, waiting for him to meet my eyes.

‘It’s not that I think you should,’ I explained. Callum’s defence mechanism against things he struggled with was definitely avoidance and I wasn’t about to force him out of that. ‘I just want to make sure you know changing your mind is always an option, even at the last moment.’

Callum’s eyes widened, but the peace between us shattered at the sound of a door crashing open. I jumped back as he powered up the quad bike and sped away.

‘I take it my little brother isn’t interested in lunch with his nearest and dearest?’ Bonnie shouted from the lime-green cottage’s front step. I wouldn’t classify the look on her intimidatingly beautiful face as hurt, but something fractured shone behind her eyes.

‘Just me today, I’m afraid.’ I opened a waist-high gate and walked along the mismatched stone path towards her.

Bonnie threw back her head and cackled, her shining black hair cascading across her shoulders. Unlike when Callum laughed, I wasn’t sure I liked it. ‘You should be afraid. Shoes off, then come meet everyone.’

Wiggling my toes in my llama-patterned socks, I followed Bonnie through a cosy-looking sitting room—complete with a TV, so not everyone on this island was a cut-off recluse—and into a kitchen-diner.

She introduced me to the group scattered around the room who—while all being so good-looking it kind of made my head hurt—didn’t seem too scary. Her husband, Joshua, was carving meat off a chicken. His warm brown cheeks bunched with a smile as he waved a hand vaguely in my direction. Captain Errol sat at a round table, his head snuggled under a knitted hat and his expression one of pure delight at seeing his bestie again. His muscled arm was slung around a red-headed woman who I wanted to interrogate about every aspect of her make-up, hair, and outfit. If the others were casually gorgeous, she flaunted her good looks. I vaguely noted her name was Louisa while fawning over her bright pink lips that matched her nails and complemented the tight jumpsuit doing nothing to hide her generous curves.

Without a pointed introduction to unglue my eyes from the walking marvel that was Captain Errol’s wife, I might have overlooked the other guy sitting at the table. I got the sense Kit preferred it that way. His light brown hair fell in waves over his forehead and his grey eyes darted away from mine as he said hello.

Bonnie pushed me into a cushioned seat and slammed a glass with a finger of amber liquid onto the table in front of me. ‘Since I’m sure my socially inept sibling hasn’t given you a halfway decent welcome, here you go.’

Her assessment was correct, so I couldn’t defend Callum without lying. I settled for lifting the glass and taking a sniff instead. My nostrils burned with the pungent fumes.

Blinking through the pain, I set the glass down. ‘What is that?’

‘Only the best whisky known to man.’ Bonnie’s husband placed the chicken he’d carved on the table. His almost-black eyes crinkled with a smile not quite lost in a beard that would give Callum a run for his money. Didn’t look as soft as Callum’s though.

Bonnie clapped Joshua’s back so hard I would have been thrown across the room, but he chuckled and turned to a second bird steaming on the kitchen counter.

‘Joshua’s the master brewer on the island.’ Bonnie thumped a bowl of carrots onto the table and nodded at my glass. ‘Drink up.’

I wrinkled my nose. ‘I’d rather not.’

Bonnie lowered her eyebrows. I got the sense not many people refused her requests. ‘You can’t truly say you’ve arrived on the island until you’ve choked down one of these.’

‘Choked down,’ Joshua muttered, but it did nothing to deter Bonnie’s unwavering attention.

‘I’m not a big drinker,’ I hedged.

‘It’s one drink.’ Bonnie leant her hip against the table. ‘A rite of passage.’

I flicked a glance at the others sitting around the table. Their expressions were hard to read. These were Bonnie’s friends, and there was clearly some power dynamic at play here I didn’t fully understand. Maybe they had trouble saying no to her as well.

I picked up the glass and set it even further from my plate. ‘I’m grateful you want to welcome me to the island. Thank you. But I’m not going to drink this. I’m sure it’s great if you like whisky, but I don’t.’

‘You haven’t even tried it.’ Bonnie’s eyes narrowed.

I pressed my lips together. I’d hoped she wouldn’t keep pushing, but if I needed to drop truth bombs to get her to leave me alone, then on her head be it.

‘My mum died when I was twelve.’ I threaded my fingers together on my lap so no one would see my hands shake. My grief over losing Mum wasn’t the howling wound it had been for years, but talking about her always made me wobbly. ‘It was sudden, and my dad didn’t cope very well. He drank to numb the pain. A lot. Which put me off alcohol for life. So thank you for your kind offer, but I’m going to have to ask you to back off.’

Bonnie stared at me for long seconds. I looked at everyone else, anticipating the normal reactions to playing the dead mum card when people put too much pressure on me to drink. Pity. Uncomfortable glances. Sympathy.

I didn’t expect the barely contained glee on Louisa’s face. Errol was grinning. Kit bit his lip. His eyes briefly met mine before flicking away.

Joshua broke the tension by sliding another perfectly roasted chicken onto the table. ‘You got told, Bonbon.’

Bonnie huffed and grabbed my glass, downing the contents in one gulp. ‘Yes, I’m an arsehole. We all know it. You don’t have to look so delighted about someone calling me on it.’

‘That was amazing,’ Kit whispered, as Bonnie helped Joshua bring the final heaped bowls of vegetables to the table.

‘Stop drooling,’ Bonnie snapped as she sat down. ‘He’s clearly taken.’

I frowned between the blush on Kit’s cheeks and Bonnie’s feral grin. ‘I didn’t realise I’d mentioned a boyfriend in our emails, but he broke up with me before I came here.’

Boyfriend was a stretch. And could someone who refused to define what was happening between us really break up with me? Sure felt like Jamie could.

‘Yeah, that’s absolutely what I meant.’ Bonnie’s grin didn’t falter.

‘You should help yourself, Aster,’ Joshua urged. ‘Otherwise these animals won’t let you get a look-in.’

The roast spread across the middle of the table had already been heavily depleted. I took a hearty helping, which looked modest compared to the amount of food piled on everyone else’s plates. Callum was just as ravenous. It must be living in such fresh air.

The others talked over one another as they ate seconds and thirds, their conversations swinging between the strange things people had left on Errol’s boat this week—a single shoe and a condom wrapper—and Joshua’s gentle needling of Bonnie—joined by Louisa’s not-so-gentle mockery—when she moaned about her mayoral duties.

‘Are you enjoying being on the island?’ Kit asked me during a rare lull in conversation.

‘It’s incredible.’ I noted Captain Errol’s smirk, and pointed my fork across the table. ‘Some people might have lost all appreciation of nature, but I swear every day I’m here this place gets more beautiful.’

‘Ignore Errol,’ Louisa advised, stealing a golden potato off her husband’s plate. ‘He’s bitter because he grew up on a neighbouring island that’s butt ugly.’

‘It is beautiful here,’ I said. Then I caught myself. ‘One place isn’t as wonderful as everywhere else.’

‘Did you find the sewer system?’ Bonnie nabbed the last chicken leg from a decimated carcass.

‘Um, no.’ I swirled my fork in a puddle of gravy. ‘I found an abandoned house.’

I’d steered clear when placing my examination squares, since my project was about places that hadn’t been wrecked by humans, but the house had gnawed at the edges of my mind. I felt it every time I connected with my powers.

I could have asked Callum about the house but every time the words formed on my tongue, my lips had zipped shut. Callum hung out with me, but he was closed off. If our conversations crept towards anything vaguely personal, he shied away. I didn’t know that the house had anything to do with him but if it did, I didn’t want to send him into hiding again.

I looked up from my plate. Everyone had stilled.

Joshua took a sip of his water. ‘We don’t talk about that.’

‘Oh. Right.’ I cringed. ‘Sorry. I just found the house and it doesn’t look super old. I assumed you guys would know about?—’

Bonnie’s chair fell backwards as she stood. ‘We don’t talk about it, Aster.’

Joshua shot me an apologetic look as he followed his wife out of the room.

I cringed. ‘I didn’t mean to?—’

‘It’s fine,’ Louisa interrupted, her tone firm. ‘Don’t bring it up again, yeah?’

I nodded. Before we could descend into an awkward silence, Kit jumped up from his chair. I stared after him as he ran from the room.

‘Callum must be back,’ Errol explained.

I twisted to look out of the window, but all I could see were the vegetable patches spread across Joshua and Bonnie’s garden. Then I heard the roar of the quad bike.

‘Kit must have seriously good hearing.’ I stood up.

‘Something like that.’ Bonnie swanned into the room like she hadn’t stormed out moments before. ‘Leave that,’ she commanded when I began stacking the plates.

‘Thank you for—woah.’

Bonnie walked right up into my space and placed her hands on either side of my face. Slowly, she traced them down my neck.

Panicked, I peered over her shoulder at her husband. His expression was more quietly exasperated than outraged his wife was groping another guy in his presence.

Bonnie squeezed my shoulders, then dropped her hands. ‘Look after my baby brother.’

‘Sure. Absolutely. Will do.’

Despite Joshua not seeming murderous, I gave him a wide berth as I scarpered into the living room. My boots took an age to tug on, my skin tingling where Bonnie had caressed me during the weirdest goodbye in history.

Callum’s head snapped up as I stepped out of the front door. I stumbled, which was definitely due to not tying my laces in my haste to escape the house of strange conversations and even stranger face touching. Nothing at all to do with the fact that Callum had Kit pressed to his chest.

The smaller guy stepped back when Callum dropped his arms. The smile on Kit’s face dimmed once he turned to me. Clearly I was broadcasting how shocking I found their hug. Which was stupid. Why would I assume I was the only person Callum went around hugging? It wasn’t like we’d signed a hug-exclusivity contract.

‘Give me a second.’ I bent to tie my laces, and made sure I had a normal expression on my face when I straightened up.

Kit patted my arm as we passed at the front gate. ‘It was nice to meet you, Aster.’

‘You too,’ I mumbled. It had been nice to meet Kit. The not-nice thing was how a teeny part of me wanted to punch him in the face right now. Not a normal reaction to seeing one friend hug another friend.

‘You got everything you need?’ I asked, not quite looking at Callum before I swung up behind him on the quad bike .

‘Are you okay?’ He disregarded my attempt at small talk.

‘Fine.’ I wound my arms around his middle. ‘Fine, fine, fine.’

Callum waited a second, but then started the engine. As we climbed up into the mountains, we had no more opportunity for talking. I hoped that once we reached a certain altitude, the memory of my weird reaction to him hugging someone else would drop out of our heads.

The drive back to the cabin was more sedate than our mad careen down to the village. Callum had filled the trailer with sacks and it was probably harder to drive like a maniac uphill. I had time to admire the scenery, rather than closing my eyes and hoping my inevitable death would be quick and painless.

I hadn’t lied when I said Doughnut became more beautiful each day. Callum had told me winter was lingering—which I understood was a bad thing since his eyebrows drew down as he said it—but I was glad to be here for the awakening of plants that had burrowed into themselves during the colder months. All around us, tiny flowers created pinpricks of colour amongst the grass and the buds of blossom on the trees looked about ready to burst.

I hadn’t had to concentrate on connecting to my powers for days. As we travelled up into the mountains, the surrounding vegetation sang to me.

There was always an off note though. No matter how far I roamed from the hollowed-out house, it cried out. Not in a way that suggested it needed help. More like it wanted to be heard. It was a part of this island. It couldn’t be forgotten.

Bonnie and her friends’ dismissal fanned the flames of my curiosity. I was glad I hadn’t asked Callum. Judging from his sister’s reaction, he would have wandered into the mountains and never been seen again. Since I couldn’t talk to anyone about the house, I had to hope my old friend Google held the answers.

Callum stopped the quad bike outside his cabin and I unpeeled my arms from around his waist. The drive up here hadn’t been as perilous, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t clung to him like a scared baby orangutang.

‘Do you need help with this?’ I waved a noodle-weak arm at the sacks tucked into the trailer. Clinging on for dear life was exhausting.

Callum furrowed his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know where anything goes.’

Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. I wouldn’t have called him graceful, but he was normally confident and steady. As we stood next to the quad bike, I could only describe his half movements as dithering.

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah.’ Callum shook his head, then half reached for one of the sacks, and shook his head some more. ‘Can I just?’

He didn’t finish the question, but stepped up to me so we were almost chest to chest. He raised his hands to the exact places Bonnie had coasted her palms over my skin.

My heart shot right past hammering and settled on using an industrial-sized mallet to thump blood around my body as Callum closed his eyes and lowered his forehead to mine.

‘My sister is an arsehole,’ he murmured, his calloused hands loose at the sides of my neck.

I huffed out a laugh. ‘It’s a known fact.’

Callum stepped back, whatever had interfered with his usual self-assurance gone. He lugged a huge sack over one shoulder and carried it around the side of the cabin to the stores he’d vaguely mentioned.

Not a single item in the trailer looked Aster sized, so I let myself into the cabin. It certainly wasn’t my conscious plan to research the abandoned house immediately, but my laptop powered up on my knees as I rubbed life into my cold fingers before the smouldering fire.

Callum would be unloading the trailer for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity to find out what had happened. Strangely, typing Doughnut Abandoned House into Google didn’t bring up anything useful. I had to unearth my ferry ticket to find out how to spell the island’s actual name.

Then I lost myself to article after article. I felt cold as we bombed along on the quad bike, but a chill more like when I’d gotten caught in the non-snowstorm invaded my bones as I read.

The abandoned house had belonged to Callum and Bonnie’s family. Their mum and dad lived there, plus an aunt and uncle and some cousins. They had a younger sister as well.

They’d all died at sea during a terrible storm.

As I tracked the articles chronologically, I noted the main points while trying not to spend too much time gazing at a younger Callum as he walked through a crowd outside a courthouse. His face might have been turned from the camera, but I couldn’t miss the broken slump of his shoulders.

It was murder. A woman and her grandad had tricked Callum’s family onto a boat during a storm and had purposefully damaged it so it would sink once they were out of rescue distance. They offered no excuse for their behaviour, stated what they’d done in a way that one reporter called soullessly robotic . They’d been sent to prison for the rest of their lives.

The woman was called Naomi White. Her grandad’s name was George. Callum’s reaction made a whole lot more sense now.

The door of the cabin swung open, and I slammed my laptop closed.

‘Porn,’ I shouted as Callum walked in, his hair dusted with a light offering of snow. ‘I was looking at porn.’

His eyebrows reached new heights as he stood on the threshold, distracted enough by my desperate lie to let Albert scamper past him.

‘I’ll stop now.’ I patted the lid of my computer. ‘All done.’

I left Callum with an alarmed look on his face and raced through to the bedroom. I didn’t think he would snoop on my computer, but I opened it for long enough to close all the tabs before shoving it into my backpack.

I returned to the main room, hoping Callum would be content to continue our day like I hadn’t shouted something wildly inappropriate at him. I hadn’t thought anything could distract me from the lingering sadness of my search and the pulsing embarrassment afterwards, but I hadn’t accounted for the bag in Callum’s hand.

‘Hash browns?’ I rushed over and grabbed them. ‘You bought hash browns?’

Callum’s lips twitched. ‘Do you like them?’

‘I fucking love them. I worship them. My last meal will be a bucket of these guys.’ I tore open the packaging. ‘We have to cook them all. I’ve seen how much you eat, and I want a fair share.’

While I spread the delicious triangles of potato on a baking sheet, Callum turned on the oven and placed breaded chicken on a metal tray.

‘This all takes twenty-five minutes to cook.’ Callum slotted the wondrous food into the oven. ‘Think you can wait that long?’

I narrowed my eyes. Callum hadn’t been in contact with Lucas or my dad, so there was no way he could know I’d once tried to eat a frozen hash brown. In my defence, I’d just finished a hike and twenty-five minutes felt like a lifetime to a hungry teenage boy.

While our meal filled the cabin with saliva-inducing aromas, we made ourselves comfortable on the sofa in front of the fire. I looked over at Callum and underneath the distracting gorgeousness, it wasn’t difficult to see a man broken by what had happened to his family. It emanated from everything about him. The wary way he smiled. How he always waited for me to initiate a hug. The way he barely talked about himself and lived in the mountains all alone. Except for the goats. And me. For now.

I frowned. Bonnie’s insistence that discussing the house was off limits didn’t sit right. I could understand not wanting to go into a detailed explanation with a stranger, but there was something about how everyone reacted when I’d mentioned the house. Like they didn’t ever talk about it.

I shuffled to sit facing Callum. He looked up from the jeans he was repairing and gave me a soft smile.

‘You can talk about your dead family with me if you want to,’ I blurted out. Perfect. Exactly the way to broach this delicate subject. Gold star for Aster.

Callum’s smile fell. ‘What did Bonnie say?’

‘She didn’t say anything,’ I reassured him, sure that at any moment he would leap up from the sofa and flee. ‘And that might be the problem?’

Callum looked ridiculously lost, his eyes darting between mine like he was searching for something.

‘Will you let me explain?’ I held up my hands.

For a second, I thought he might say no. But then he set the needle down on top of the jeans and angled himself towards me. His face was a study of wariness, but he hadn’t shut me down. Which gave me hope I was on vaguely the right track.

‘I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, since it’s not something you drop into a casual conversation, but my mum died when I was twelve.’ I grasped my hands together on my lap. Unlike everyone at lunch, Callum tracked the movement before his eyes snapped back to mine. ‘It was sudden; she had a heart attack and died within minutes. And it totally sucked.’

Totally sucked was a light way of putting it. My mum, who I’d believed capable of anything, was alive and laughing one minute, then absolutely and irrevocably gone the next.

‘At first, me and my dad didn’t talk about it much, or about her. It was too hard. We were too sad.’ Sad also didn’t encapsulate the horrible wrongness of those first days and weeks. ‘But months later, I got heartburn and freaked out. I thought I was dying too.’

Dad came home to find me writing my will. Since I wanted all my worldly possessions—which included a complete Lego Death Star—to go to Lucas, it didn’t amount to much.

‘After that, we talked about Mum a lot. All the time. And not just the good times. We talked about how horrible it was to see her lying cold in the hospital and how we hated watching her coffin lower into the ground. We talked about everything and instead of it making things harder, we became lighter. We could lift our heads and see a tiny bit of good in the world.’

I shrugged, easing the ache that always awakened in my chest when I shared about Mum. ‘Talking about her didn’t make the pain go away, but it made life better again. There wasn’t this horrible thing that had happened that we couldn’t speak about hanging over us.’

I looked into Callum’s eyes, their colour a dull brown as he sat frozen. ‘I might be overstepping and I’m sorry if I am, but from the reaction at lunch when I mentioned the abandoned house, it seems like Bonnie and her friends don’t talk about what happened. I wanted to let you know that if you wanted to talk to someone, I would be honoured to listen.’

Callum didn’t answer. He swallowed, then jerked when the oven timer went off.

My eyes widened and my mouth filled with saliva. ‘It’s hash brown time,’ I whispered.

Callum’s lips twitched, and we stood to serve up a meal fit for kings. I wondered if he would ever reply or if my offer would remain unacknowledged, but he rested his hand on my forearm before I could take my heaped plate back over to the sofa.

‘Thank you, Aster.’

That wasn’t a yes. I didn’t know if I’d interpreted everything wrong and Callum was perfectly happy repressing every memory he had of his family, the good and the bad. But the dark space on the island wasn’t tugging at me so much any more. It had been acknowledged, even in a small way.

I sat and lifted the first steaming forkful of potato to my mouth. Flavours exploded on my tongue, which had been appreciative of Callum’s cooking but nothing could compare to this.

‘Oh my fucking god,’ I moaned.

The only thing that could add to my delight was the similar—if slightly less emphatic—moan that escaped Callum’s lips as he began to eat.