He left Lara outside the yacht club, where she instantly entered into conversation with a couple who had crewed for him last year, and with whom she seemed to have struck up an instant friendship. When he returned, clutching two balloon glasses of gin and tonic, Lara was in hysterics, wiping her eyes, and looking instantly guilty when she spotted Jannes coming towards her.
‘Why do I get the feeling you were talking about me?’ he asked.
‘They were just telling me what a tyrant you are.’ Lara laughed. ‘How have I never seen this side of you?’
He raised an eyebrow at the two crew.
‘Tyrant seems a little harsh. I’m...competitive.’
They all fell into hysterical laughter again and he decided he’d rather not know the specifics of what had been said in his absence.
‘Have you seen much of Harbourside?’ one of them asked Lara, and she shook her head.
‘So far just the yacht club and Jannes’s place. I’m looking forward to exploring.’
‘Well, if you ever want to get together... No, what am I saying? Of course you don’t. Just call me in a year or two when you’re out of the honeymoon phase.’
Jannes hadn’t realised until he caught their pointed looks that his arm had sneaked back around Lara’s waist, as if it always rested there. He met Lara’s eyes and the expression there hit him somewhere in the gut, the top of his ears turning pink as he wondered whether his thoughts were as clear on his face as Lara’s were on hers.
‘You two are too cute,’ one of the crew said. ‘Don’t let him get away.’
Lara nodded solemnly. ‘He’s a dictator but he’s one of the benevolent ones.’
‘Well, thank you for that resounding review,’ Jannes said with a laugh, ‘but I’m going to have to steal Lara away before you spill all my secrets.’
‘Everyone is so nice,’ Lara exclaimed as they walked back to his house that evening, the light fading from the sky and the sounds of the party still going on in the yacht club behind them.
‘I’ve told you before,’ Jannes said as they skirted round the side of his house and came straight out on to the deck behind, with its view of the stars reflecting on the water. ‘You have that effect on people—they’re never half so nice to me.’
‘Because they’re in awe of you.’
He scoffed, but she tugged on his hand to pull him closer.
‘I’m serious,’ she said, meeting his eyes and fixing him there with a look. ‘They respect you, and it’s obvious why. I like seeing you here, you know. You make sense here in a way you don’t in London.’
He huffed out a half-laugh. ‘You do know it’s quite hard not to be offended by that, considering you have only ever seen me in London before today. Which basically means I have never made sense to you.’
Lara smiled. ‘What can I say—you’re an enigma. Very mysterious. Impossible to know what you’re thinking.’
Her voice had started out jokey, playful, but fell towards the end as her gaze dropped to his mouth and stayed there.
‘Do you really want to know what I’m thinking?’ he said. ‘You only have to ask.’ But he wasn’t sure that he wanted her to. He knew what he wanted the answer to be. He needed her to be sensible here, because he wasn’t sure that he could count on himself to be. He was watching her mouth now, as intently as she had been watching his.
‘Okay,’ she said, her voice rough. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘You.’
The word slipped out before he could stop it. The monosyllable the only sound he could manage amidst the cascade of malfunctions in his brain at the thought that she wasn’t being careful with him.
‘That’s a coincidence,’ Lara said, her voice dropping to something low and breathy and unfamiliar. ‘I’m thinking about you too. Specifically, I’m thinking about kissing you. Does that freak you out?’
This was such a bad idea. This was everything that they had both been fighting for three years. Fighting harder than ever since that day in the park when they’d both discovered that the two of them together would be every bit as intensely perfect as he had always imagined it would be.
‘Yes, it freaks me out,’ he replied, too on edge to smile. But he was so tired of fighting something that he knew would feel so right. All his life, he had watched people walk away from him. He’d nursed those wounds through his whole childhood. And here was something good. Someone who loved him and had never walked away and had never hurt him. And he didn’t know if he could trust yet that that would never change, but he couldn’t carry on pretending that she wasn’t everything to him.
‘I don’t think that you should let that stop you though,’ he added at last, his gaze fixed on her.
‘From thinking about it or doing it?’ she asked.