Chapter 2: The Shelter

Peter shoulders the door open and the rain comes in with them, a cold sheet of it slapping the stone floor before he gets the door shut again. Then it's just the noise. The roof is corrugated iron, and the rain on it is like standing inside a drum.

"Oh," Jessica says, dripping. "Oh, it's so loud."

"You get used to it."

The shelter is one room, the size of a small kitchen. Stone walls, a wooden sleeping platform along the back, raised off the floor. A fireplace with nothing in it. Someone's left a candle stub on the windowsill and a laminated sign asking people to carry out their rubbish. It smells of damp wool and old smoke, and right now it's the best room Peter has ever been in.

He drops his pack on the platform and starts unloading. Stove, pan, the last of the gas. Water bottle. His sleeping bag in its dry sack, the one thing he's kept bone dry for four days on principle.

When he turns round, she's standing in the middle of the floor with her arms wrapped around herself, shaking. Not shivering. Shaking, her jaw tight, water running off the hem of the red jacket in a steady drip.

"Right," he says. "You need to get out of the wet stuff."

She looks at him.

"I'll turn round. I'm putting the kettle on, I'm very busy." He crouches over the stove with his back to her and fiddles with the gas, and listens to zips, and wet fabric peeling, and a small sound she makes when the air hits her skin. He doesn't turn. He's proud of himself for that. It takes some doing.

"Do you have," she says, and stops. "My spare clothes are wet too. The bag is not as waterproof as the man in the shop said."

"Never is." He reaches back without looking and holds out his dry sack. "Get in that. It's warm. Promise I've washed it this decade."

He hears her laugh through chattering teeth, then the rustle of the sleeping bag, and a long breath out.

"Okay," she says. "You can look."

She's sitting on the platform zipped to the chin, only her face showing, her wet hair dark against the green nylon. Her clothes are draped over the end of it, jacket, trousers, a thin top, and something small and pale that he very deliberately does not look at for too long.

The water boils. He makes tea in the one mug and hands it to her, and she takes it with both hands out of the top of the bag and holds it against her chin and closes her eyes.

"I think you saved my life," she says.

"Saved you a cold night in a field."

"Same thing. You've been here. You know."

He changes his own top in the corner, quick, cold air on his back, and pulls on the one dry jumper he has left. His trousers are wet through at the knees and he decides to live with it. Then he sits beside her on the platform, a careful foot of space between them, and they pass the mug back and forth.

Outside the light goes. It doesn't get dark so much as grey, then greyer, then nothing. He lights the candle stub. It throws their shadows huge across the stone.

"You're cold," she says.

"I'm fine."

"Your hands are shaking."

They are. He hadn't noticed.

She watches him for a while in the candlelight. Then she unzips the sleeping bag halfway down, and holds the side open.

"It's big enough," she says.

It isn't, really. It's a bag built for one man who doesn't move in his sleep. He gets in anyway, still in his wet trousers until she says "No, those too," and he struggles out of them half inside the bag while she laughs, and then there's no space at all. Her skin is warm now. Warmer than his. She's in her underwear and nothing else, and she presses her back against his chest, and he puts his arm around her because there is nowhere else to put it.

They lie like that a long time. The rain drums. Her hair is damp and faintly sweet, a shampoo he's never smelled before. He can feel her breathing against his forearm. He can feel, more than anything, his own body deciding things without him, and he shifts his hips back an inch, embarrassed.

She shifts back with him. The inch is gone.

"Jessica," he says, into her hair.

She turns over in the bag. It takes a while and a lot of elbows. Then her face is right there, close enough that he can see the candle twice in her dark eyes, and the tiny gold flower in her nose.

She kisses him first. He'll remember that later, that it was her.

It goes slow, and then not slow at all. The bag is too tight and they unzip it all the way and it doesn't matter anymore that the air in the hut is cold. Her hands on his back, his ribs, pulling him close. He gets her bra open on the second try and she laughs into his mouth. She's smooth and warm everywhere, tanned all over except two pale strips where some swimsuit has been, and he touches every inch of her he can reach. She makes a sound when he does that's lost under the rain.

He stops with his heart going like a hammer, propped on one elbow over her.

"I haven't got anything," he says. "With me. I wasn't exactly planning."

She looks up at him. For a second she seems puzzled, and then it's gone.

"It's fine," she says, and pulls him down.

He thinks: she's on something, then. Thank God. And then he stops thinking.

---

Jessica lies awake after, listening to the rain ease off to a patter, then to drips.

Peter's asleep. He fell asleep almost straight away, one arm heavy across her waist, his breath slowing against her neck. Men at home don't do that, her friends say. Men at home lie awake after, staring at the ceiling, counting days.

I haven't got anything.

She turns the words over. She thought he meant a sickness. That he was clean. It seemed a strange thing to say, at that moment, and very English. She said it's fine because it was fine, because she didn't care, because she was half the world from home in a stone hut in the rain with a man with straw hair who had touched her like she was something he'd been given.

Now, in the dark, she counts.

She counts back to her last period. Twelve days. She knows what twelve days means. Every girl on the island knows what twelve days means. The school nurse drew it on the board when they were thirteen, a circle like a clock, and colored the dangerous days red.

Twelve is red.

Her heart starts going, slow and heavy. A baby. By a foreigner, a man she has known for one day, who lives in a city she can't picture. She thinks of her mother's face. Of Mrs. Oteri down the street, who raised her son alone, and how the women at the market go quiet when she passes, and how nobody ever says the word but everyone thinks it.

Then Peter murmurs in his sleep and pulls her closer, and his hand opens flat against her stomach, warm.

It's only once, she tells herself. Women try for months. Some try for years.

She closes her eyes. She doesn't sleep for a long time.

---

They walk out together, two more days to the end of the trail and the little town with the railway station. Neither of them mentions the lodge again.

The weather breaks properly on the second morning, and for the first time all week Peter sees the hills with nothing on them, no cloud, no rain, just green and gold and grey going on forever under a huge washed sky. Jessica stops in the middle of the path and stares at it with her mouth open, and he stands next to her and watches her instead.

They don't talk much about after. She asks about his work, and he tells her, quality manager at a firm that makes parts for other firms' machines. Making sure the bits fit. She says she teaches English to children, and does a voice, stern and singsong, "Repeat after me: the cat is on the mat," and he laughs so hard he has to sit down on a rock.

At the second shelter, a better one with a proper door and a stack of dry wood someone's left, they make a fire, and they make love again in front of it, slower this time, her on top, the firelight going gold all down her body. He doesn't ask anything this time. She's got it handled. She said.

In the morning she's quiet. He puts it down to the end of the holiday.

The station is two platforms and a vending machine. Her train to the airport is at eleven, his is at twelve, going the other way. They stand on the platform with their packs at their feet and nothing to do with their hands.

"Give me your phone," he says, and puts his number in it, and calls himself from it so he has hers. Jessica, he saves it as. Then he adds a little island after it, the emoji with the palm tree, and shows her, and she smiles, but it doesn't go all the way up to her eyes.

"I'll text you," he says. "Is that all right? I want to."

She kisses him before she answers, quick and hard, and keeps hold of his hand. "Please, do."

The train comes in, two carriages, and she gets on, and waves through the scratched window, and is gone.

He sits on the bench for the hour until his own train, and replays all of it. The hut. The fire. The look on her face on the hill, with all that sky.

---

He texts her that night, from his flat, and she texts back. And the next day, and the next, long messages in the evenings that he reads twice. Photos of a beach so blue it looks fake. A classroom of small kids in white shirts, grinning. A bowl of green, oblong fruit with scales like a pine cone, with "the real thing. you see? we have food." It takes him a moment to work out it's the same stuff she fed him on the hill.

On the nineteenth day there's no message all evening.

He's half asleep on the sofa when the phone buzzes against his chest.

*Peter. can you call me. please.*

He sits up. Another buzz before he's even unlocked it.

*my period is late.*