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The first thing that ignites a flame of guilt in Richard Poole's stomach is the hitch of her throat.
He's a detective and appropriately has little difficulty discerning it from the regular steady lilt of her tone. Surely, Camille knows that. It's not a piece of evidence that's particularly difficult to unearth, but it's bloody stubborn in its refusal to leave. In the hours after his departure from Saint Marie, it's all Richard can dwell on. He exercises the sadistic art of entertaining hope: something that he's prohibited himself from doing for years in retaliation to the indignation that he might need to punish himself and now he wants nothing but.
"You'll want to stay there."
It's the latter statement that clings the most infuriatingly, because, well, it's true. Richard doesn't belong in the Caribbean. He doesn't like the sand in his toes nor the sun on his back—not when it's that unremitting. Hasn't been in the sea since that first mad dash, either, because he's a man of logic and heaven knows that decrees he learns from his mistakes. This isn't the island for him: it's Great Britain, dull and wet as it is, where the only danger in the sea is getting your foot tangled up in a plastic bag, or an eyeful from the loonies that seem to lurk beneath the piers.
But Richard opens his mouth to deny it. He doesn't know why; it's just there's something tugging low in his gut, proclaiming him to be a complete and utter plonker if he doesn't. If the notion weren't so absurd, he might have dubbed it intuition, but then, that's Camille's wheelhouse. He blames her. He always does.
Richard opens his mouth to speak—to comfort her, he realises—when Dwayne and Fidel materialise most infuriatingly upon the sand.
The second thing: the forgotten passport. Perhaps the display had been arranged in such a manner so that he would forget it. Perhaps it's a message, delivered from deep down in his gut or perhaps his heart. There's ties there like something out of a period novel, secured with a six-turn San Diego jam knot. Their strength startles Richard.
It startles him because they shouldn't exist. Somewhere between the quest to retain his lost luggage two years ago and the third time the hope of returning to London had swelled in his stomach, Saint Marie had claimed Richard not with casual encouragement but a fervour terrifying in its potency. Richard always needs to know. He dislikes surprises; hates the sun and the sea and the sand even more, or so he'll continue to insist even as something unpleasant worms its way against his stomach at the thought of leaving it.
Perhaps its fate or perhaps he's just going mad.
The third is the worst. It fills him with such a gut-wrenching affair that Richard thinks he might drop to his knees and beg forgiveness, had he been prone to such flights of absurdities. But he isn't. Sometimes, Richard thinks it might be easier if he were, because he knows it's going to take a bloody big one to destroy this high horror of perpetual uncertainty that impedes his actions.
She pecks his cheek and flings them both into a hug and Richard does nothing but stand and stare, mired in all of the actions never taken; words never spoken. If they were to cluster at his feet, they would reach his knees and anchor him in place. He'd never leave the island and that would be fine, just perfectly alright: London would just have to wait a few days, that's all.
(London would wait, but the taxi would not. On it drives and Richard wills himself to not look back.)
~~~
The plane journey, as most were wont to be, was dull. Dull, dull, dull: unbearably so. Richard completes six Sudoku puzzles before he dropping the pen and finding himself irritated with his past self for not packing a spare. The complimentary dinner had predictably done its best impersonation of a piece of soggy cardboard. A child had been screaming, the ride bumpy and none of it could wrench Richard's focus from Saint Marie and the people he had left there. The person.
Landing had been long-awaited. It's London and it's dull, too, but beautifully so. For the briefest of moments, Richard pauses at the threshold of runway and arrivals, relishing the fresh goosebumps that parade across his skin in triumph of their release two years after apparent incarceration beneath the sun's perpetually hot rays. There's a thin drizzle—the sort that gets you more soaked than a bloody monsoon—and it's magnificent. He thinks he could stand forever on the asphalt drinking the London air back into his lungs. He certainly considers it: his plans are promptly put to rest by an enthusiastic rolling hand luggage rammed against his calves.
Richard's faith in his country is rekindled in the taxi. The driver is a West Ham fan, illustrated by the air freshener dangling from the rear view mirror, and they spend the majority of the thirty-minute journey gassing about the team and the rain, and then the likelihood of their next game being rained off. It segues so seamlessly into the life he had missed with such fervour on the island that when the car pulls up beside his semi-detached in Croydon, sidling beside the overgrown hedge and a front lawn in desperate need of a mow, Richard is perturbed by the revelation that things have changed. Contrary to his belief in the taxi, everything has.
He looks at the flurry of leaves carving their best impression of a pathway towards his front door (beyond which he knows resides a small mountain of junk mail). He looks at the rubbish littering his front garden and the weeds running rampant across his drive and he decides that he doesn't give a hoot about it—not when there's a tree growing through his living room back home. It takes him until dinner, arsing about with pots and pans and only a vague recollection of where he used to keep the sunflower oil for Richard to realise that home is now an entirely different construct. It certainly isn't Croydon.
Richard ponders at the complexities of such an implication for hours—misses Antiques Roadshow, even: a heinous development that Richard isn't willing to explore.
He still hasn't arrived at any feasible conclusion twenty-four hours later when his doorbell rings and the answer materialises on his doorstep.
"Jeremy? Is that you?" Richard calls, blundering for his key and not really having a clue what's happening, because it's eight in the morning and he doesn't want to be awake right now. "I'm just coming, I—"
He stops. He stares. He stands in the doorway where the wind catches him in his shirt sleeves and the familiar force of a familiar hand prods him back into the wholly unfamiliar hallway.
"You weren't kidding when you said England was cold. I see why you always complain about Saint-Marie."
Camille looks almost comically out of place in his house. It's painted in shades of beige and more beige--a shade more drab than he can recall, but perhaps, he muses (this, still in the wake of Hurricane Boardley blustering in from his doorstep, with her bright clothes and bright smile), that's what the Caribbean does to a chap. One no longer sees things in black and white. They come instead in bursts of colours: brilliant blues and reds and greens. When juxtaposed
"I complain about Saint Marie," states Richard. "Because it's obscenely hot."
She corrects him. "Because you wear a suit all the time."
"Because it's professional."
"Because you're so full of it—"
"Because—"
"You idiot—" She says, or perhaps he imagines it, because there's the press of lips against his and Richard isn't entirely certain which way is up anymore.
They kiss and birds don't sing. The sun doesn't burst with inexplicable cheerfulness through the perennial smog of London (the ravens could leave the Tower, but the kingdom would never see its fated destruction coming past the dim grey skies). Brooks fail to babble and the Earth continues to turn, because Richard thinks that his stomach might stage a rebellion if it didn't refrain. Judging by the persistent percussion of butterflies that thunders in the interior of his belly, the barricades were already forming.
They kiss and it isn't perfect, because Richard still possesses the chronic inability to stop taking: a trait that he'd somehow discovered part way across the Atlantic and failed to return on his pilgrimage back home. He has the compulsion to jabber himself into whatever deep hole from which had clambered, whether in England or Guadeloupe, with words of insecurities and self-doubt not strictly demarcated. In a textbook, albeit decidedly inconvenient example of Catch 22, the cycle resumed itself once more.
He considers informing her; almost tries, too, before the absurdity of the notion (acquiescence to the concept: Richard does his best to not follow the crowd) prohibits him.
They kiss, then, and Richard knows she can feel his teeth through his lips. He wants to apologise for his inadequacy, but he struggles to find the words in the glow of never wanting it to end. It isn't perfect nor is it idealistic, but Richard wagers nothing in this world can rival it.
"Camille," he starts, in spite of it all. "This is—"
She raises a brow in challenge. "What?"
"Wrong. No, not—" Richard backtracks with haste at the familiar steel to her look - the one that exists solely to make him squirm. "It's fine, I mean— it's great, but— I mean, we work together. It's not the done thing, is it? I'm your superior."
"Do you want a shovel to dig yourself deeper?"
He doesn't. His hands are pre-occupied, anyway: one twirling the existing corkscrew curls into yet more of a helix; the other clasped at her shoulder, fingers splayed and nervous. "People will talk. They always do."
"You shouldn't bother what people think about you, Richard."
"It's silly, isn't it? They don't it very often."
"What?"
"Think."
"Then I don't see what your problem is."
"I never said that I had one; I was merely pointing out that—"
Camille continues, unperturbed, "In London, maybe it's a problem. On Saint Marie? Not so much."
"I don't know if it happened to escape your notice halfway during the flight, but we're in London."
"I know. This is me making sure you come back."
"You flew halfway around the world to ensure what would have been perfectly fine in a scathing email?"
"I couldn't do this in an email," she says and kisses him again. This time, Richard doesn't say a word.
~~~
Somewhere, somehow, they manage to navigate a precarious route through her suitcase and his shoes—the ones in the hall that ought to have been tidied away, but that still remain in disarray from his sudden relocation two years ago—and Richard finds himself on the sofa beneath the comforting warmth of both Camille and the sensation of being a teenager once more. Well, of the notion of what he expected teenagers got up to, if they weren't preoccupied with cricket and exploring the delights of forensic analysis (which he definitely didn't do, nope).
They're snogging on the sofa and he feels about seventeen and that's just fine, Richard tells himself, delegating the role of persistent worrying to the rear end of his thoughts, because he could really do without it right now. He knows that he can't think too much; it's a death sentence. As in, Camille will probably throttle him if he says another word. Besides, she's being really very distracting: all lithe fingers at his shirt buttons and thighs between his. Richard doesn't think he'll ever manage to summon the conviction to move from this spot.
Somewhere, somehow, he does.
"Camille, wait, I haven't—"
Camille does, of course, jump to conclusions.
"You've never done this before?"
"Of course I have," blurted with Richard with all of his usual indignation. He hoists himself up onto his elbows—looks Camille in the eye as best as he's able. "Don't be stupid. Why is that the first thing to spring to mind?"
"Are you worried your technique isn't up to par?"
"Now you're putting words in my mouth."
"I know, terrible, isn't it?" says Camille, tipping her head back with a sigh. Richard is treated to an elegant sweep of her neck and the opportunity to wriggle upright when she sits back onto her haunches. "I spend so long trying to get you to be quiet."
"Oh, I don't know. You were doing a pretty good job of it just now."
She smacks him on the shoulder, but kisses him again all the same. Richard doesn't protest again.