9

Lexi had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Olkfield. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Tyler's house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.

But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.

“I’ll drive you in then,” Tyler said, with a grin.

And that was how, scarcely forty-five minutes later, she found herself sitting in an outrageously flash sports car, prowling through the morning traffic toward the Olkfield Central Business District.

“I have to make a confession,” she said as they waited at a light. She glanced over at him, dressed in his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt— which should have looked ratty and casual and student-y, but didn’t. Not the way he wore them. “I had no idea you worked this hard. You underplayed it.”

Tyler laughed. “Maybe I wanted you to think it was effortless.”

“You work all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know when you sleep. No matter what time I wake up, jetlagged and victimized by the time change, you’re always awake. You take phone calls night and day. And yet you still have time to go on runs and toss weights around in your gym. I thought I was busy, but you’re a superhero.”

“I do run a company, Lexi,” he said, in a tone of mock reproach. But she was caught up in the way he propped his arm up on the steering wheel, and it was difficult to tell which was more powerful, the car or the man. “It can’t run on its own.”

“It’s just so…”

“Surprising?” Tyler supplied.

And he laughed when he said it, but she didn’t think he was kidding.“Impressive,” she corrected him. “I was going to say it was impressive.”

The look he threw her way was unreadable, but then traffic surged forward, and he put his attention back onto the road. And then, before she could ask him something, or say those things she kept biting back, his phone rang the way it always did. And he answered it the way he always did, because he was far busier than she’d ever imagined, and he launched himself back into another business conversation.

Lexi told herself she’d imagined her reaction to him when he pulled up to a curb on a city street some time later, told her to walk straight ahead and indicated that she should get out. But when she reached over to open the door, his hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.

It made her feel jagged inside. Scraped up. His hand was big and hard over her forearm and his eyes were so green. And something about Tyler looking at her so intently made her think she might shake. She wanted to, anyway.

“I’ll meet you later,” he told her, gruffly. “At the Opera Bar at the Opera House. Eight o’clock.”

“It’s a date,” she said, brightly. And immediately regretted her choice of words. But she didn’t have time to stammer about it, or take it back. Or even qualify what she’d said.

Because Tyler smiled, and it was an edgy thing, wired directly into that jaggedness within her. “I’ll see you then.”

And Lexi found herself out on the street, then walking, oblivious to her surroundings. Because all she could see was that look on his face. Which is why it took her a moment, after she’d walked down the block and under a rail overpass the way he’d told her to, to realize where she was.

He’d dropped her a block away from a walkway that led around to the iconic opera house itself. And the Olkfield Harbour Bridge. And the gleaming, beautiful water of the harbor itself, cut through by the green-and-yellow ferries. And sailboats catching the wind. It was like standing in a postcard.

And later, Lexi couldn’t have said which one of those things made the tears begin to stream down her face. Only that she cried, and she couldn’t believe that a place she’d seen on television a thousand times was far more beautiful than she ever could have imagined. And that somehow, even though she was standing there on a bright winter morning, crying her eyes out in the middle of the streams of Olkfield siders and tourists, so very far away from Nemford and the world she knew, she had never felt quite so at home in her life.

_________

Tyler had resigned himself years ago to the fact that he clearly loved a hair shirt. He liked to suffer, obviously. What other explanation was there for a hopeless, unrequited love that stretched on past hope, past reason, and insinuated itself into every interaction he had with other women?

Aren’t you just a fecking martyr, his older brother Andrew had once sneered at him. Andrew had talked a metric ton of shite that day, but that particular dig stayed with him. And if he’d ever had any doubt, that was gone now. Because there was carrying a torch, which Tyler had done for years now whether he liked to admit it or not. And then there was Lexi in his house. Living under the same roof.

Lexi looking soft and sleepy, shuffling around his kitchen. Lexi lost in thought, gazing out over the rail on his deck. When they’d been at university together, he’d known things about her. Intimate things that could only come from daily interaction. That she worried a lock of her hair around and around one finger while she studied.

Or when she was nervous, she worked a knuckle between her teeth. The way she hummed beneath her breath, always off tune, when she was happy. The awkward, yet endearing, way she danced to the endlessly cheesy music she liked.

Since graduation, those things had faded. When he saw her now, there was always so much less time. A dinner here. Drinks there. He texted her more than anyone else he knew, combined, but it wasn’t the same as those stolen intimacies. It couldn’t be. And he would have said he’d accepted all that, long since.