He needed boundaries, but they also had unfinished business he hoped to take care of—if he could convince her.
‘Can you put down the truncheon?’ he asked. ‘It’s making me nervous.’
Rosalind bent at the knees, set the metal object onto a backpack and stood up, her dark-grey eyes on him the whole time. ‘You’ve told me how you got here, not why. And hurry up. I have to get back to work.’
He picked a reason that she couldn’t say no to. ‘I was watching the sky through my bedroom window when I remembered you telling me that I hadn’t seen stars until I saw them from this spot. I thought, what the hell? I’m awake anyway, let’s see what the fuss is all about.’
She glared up at him over the top of her glasses. ‘So what do you want to see?’
He was looking at it. But he said, ‘Show me something spectacular.’
‘You’ve picked a rubbish night.’ She dragged her eyes away and looked up into the clear heavens. ‘Huh, well, what do you know? Five minutes ago you were all hiding. But in he waltzes and there you all are, all bright and shining and cheerful. Capricious brutes, the lot of you!’
She glowered back down at him. ‘Well, go on, then. There it all is for your viewing pleasure.’
Cameron looked up into the clear sky, and there it all was, the Milky Way, spread across the sky like someone had scattered a bag of jewels on a swathe of black velvet.
He looked down at her; her nose was tilted skywards, her chin determined, her long, pale neck and wavy hair glowing in the moonlight. He breathed out through his nose. Spectacular.
As though she sensed him watching her, she turned her head just enough to make eye contact. She blinked at him, then leaned down towards the eyepiece and found a bearing using the naked eye. She twirled knobs, gently shifted the lever, changed filters, then with both eyes open pressed one eye to the eyepiece and carefully adjusted the focus.
A minute later she stood back and made an excessive amount of room for him to have a look. He took her place, looked through the lens, and the view therein took his breath away.
She’d given him the bright side of the moon. Craters and plateaus in stark white-and-grey relief faded into the creeping shadow of the dark side. So far away, yet it felt so close.
He pulled away, blinked up at the white crescent high in the sky and said, ‘I also came here because I don’t like leaving a conversation unfinished.’
He felt Rosalind cross her arms beside him. ‘Oh, I think we both had ample opportunity to say what we wanted to say.’
‘Can I ask…if I hadn’t kissed you…?’
She shivered, and this time he knew it wasn’t the cold. He wanted to wrap her up in his jacket, but he knew she wasn’t near ready for that. Not yet.
‘What do you want from me, Cameron?’
‘Truth?’
‘Always.’
‘I didn’t like watching you walk away tonight.’
She said nothing. The conversation it seemed would be all up to him.
‘I’ve been having a great time being with you. I get a kick out of your frankness. You must have noticed that I have huge trouble keeping my hands off you. And none of that has changed. All I’ve ever hoped is that we might continue to enjoy one another’s company for as long as it’s enjoyable. And not a minute longer.’
He felt her breathe in. Breathe out. ‘And who gets to decide when that minute’s up?’
‘You can, if it needs to be that way.’
‘And if I think that minute has already passed?’
‘Do you?’
He looked down to find she was no longer staring at the moon; she was watching him, her eyes wary, calculating, her mind changing back and forth with every passing second.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said.
Her chin lifted. ‘I don’t plan on getting hurt.’
She was talking in the present tense. And, though she wasn’t smiling at him, neither was she scowling. He’d done enough. Relief poured through him, its intensity rather more than he would have expected.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked.
And he realised he was shivering. She might have been rugged up like she was about to spend a week on Everest but he was still in his jeans, T-shirt and track top.
‘I’m absolutely freezing,’ he said. Now he’d noticed it, he really noticed it. He rubbed his hands down his arms and stamped his sneaker-clad feet before they turned to ice.
‘You have to make the most of your body heat.’
He stopped jumping about like a frog and asked, ‘My body heat?’
‘One’s body heat,’ she reworded.
‘I was going to say, that was a line I hadn’t heard before.’