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By the time the train stops in Edinburgh, Martin’s about ready to call the whole thing off. Or at least to suggest to Jon that maybe they use their travel budget for a night in Edinburgh. Martin’s arse hurts, and she doesn’t like the idea of spending more time than necessary in the arse-end of Scotland, which is of course where they’re both heading. Plus, the rain drizzling down the windows as they speed past kilometre after soggy kilometre of England and Scotland has gone from romantic in a Keats-y way to depressing in a Larkin-y way, and Martin’s desire to write has completely abandoned her. She fidgets nervously in her seat, as though she’s trying to stop herself from asking if they’re there yet. Stop acting like such a child, Martin, her brain helpfully supplies in her mother’s voice, and then Jon’s looking up from her book as the train lurches into Waverly, and Martin hurries to tidy up her notebook from the table. She hasn’t written so much as a stanza, but it’s the sort of prosaic rote motion that everyone seems to need to take on public transit or long train journeys.
“Everything alright?” Jon asks, sticking an old receipt in her book as a bookmark as she looks over the top of her glasses in Martin’s direction.
“Yeah,” Martin says.
Martin fidgets in these last moments of train motion. Her hair’s getting long and she pushes it out of her eyes out of a need for something to do with her hands. She’ll have to trim the fringe once she’s back in London, or once she gets her hands on a pair of scissors.
“Have you ever been to Edinburgh?” she asks, and immediately kicks herself for asking something that obvious. Great job, Blackwood. Acquaintance-level small talk with your boss, on whom you’ve got an enormous crush. That’ll make her love you for sure.
“Yes,” Jon says crisply, tucking the book back into her rucksack. “It was for Fringe, a long time ago.”
Martin’s seen the uni cast photos in Jon’s office, even though Jon tries to hide them away, so Martin knows she did theatre, but somehow she hadn’t put that together with any of the more mundane aspects of theatrical reality. But now it all makes sense. Oxford, Fringe, the air of authority Jon carries around with her and seems to put on in the morning the way some other women might put on lipstick, all of that combined and sailed (along with Jon’s deportment and the way she looked at the beginning-- the crisp bob, the rollneck shirts, the sensible heels) straight to Martin’s heart. And now Martin’s hopeless for her, even though Jon’s not wearing business casual, and looks like hasn’t slept in a month
“Oh, I’ve never been. Dad wasn’t big on holidays, growing up,” Martin says awkwardly.
This is a stupid conversation, Martin thinks. It’s always been stupid. And she’s just going to be pining from afar for forever now, because she’s clearly failing any attempt at communication with Jon like a normal person outside of the confines of the office.
“You’ll have to come back,” Jon says as they step off the train. “Plenty of interesting poetry sights to see.”
She’s wearing an odd little smile on her face, one that Martin immediately decides to memorize and commemorate in a poem. Maybe once she gets back to London, though, because there’s something distinctly horrifying about the idea of writing a poem about Jon while Jon’s sitting next to her on the train, or sleeping in the other bed in the hotel room in the village to which they’re heading.
Jon’s already off checking the big arrivals and departures board in the station, shoulders hunched in order to better carry her bag. Martin comes to stand beside her, very aware of the distance between them.
“Our train’s in twenty minutes,” she says, as though Martin can’t read the sign herself.
“I can, er, see that,” Martin replies.
Jon doesn’t dignify her pathetic attempt at conversation with a response, but instead lugs her bag over to a nearby bench. Martin follows, and there they sit, watching the sky darken with more rainclouds and the clock tick down the minutes to their departure.
***
Martin takes a nap on the next leg of their journey. When she wakes, it’s to a grey sea zooming past the window, seagulls and villages and church spires all grey as the water and the rain. It fills Martin with an aching, unaccountable loneliness, and not for the first time today, she wishes Elise could have sent Tim on this trip as well. At least she’d have some funny stories, or at least Martin hopes Tim would. The new Tim, though, who is cold and distant and fighting constantly with Jon, Elise, and everyone else she can sink verbal claws into, might still be sullenly silent. But maybe a quest to gather information, a quest that might potentially allow her to strike a blow at her pain and her fury and to save the world, she might get back some of her old spirit. Jon, meanwhile, keeps reading her paperback. She’s got earbuds in, and for all intents and purposes appears to be ignoring Martin, so Martin contents herself with looking out the window.
There’s rocks out the window, and the fog’s coming in fast, and it chills Martin to the bone. She remembers running into Petra Lukas back in the Institute, and this feels like that. There’s a loneliness sinking into her bones that she hasn’t felt since she was fifteen, a baby butch in a dead-end town, rapidly catching up with the dead end her life was careening towards, the awful aching certainty she’d have to throw her life away forever to care for a father who hated her (and she knew he hated her, even if she couldn’t always hear exactly what words he was hissing at her). Martin looks away from the sea, unable to bear it, and instead looks at Jon.
She looks so intent like this, twirling the end of her ponytail around a skinny finger, her other hand turning the pages of her book. There’s a little frown on her face, a wrinkle in her forehead, and in the grim light of the train carriage, the grey in her dark hair is highlighted, streaking its way back into her ponytail. Though she’s burrowed into a ratty sweatshirt, jeans, and trainers, she still looks somehow elegant, carrying within her a feline grace that Martin both envies and desires. And as Martin stares at her, Jon looks up and jerks one earbud from her ear with a decidedly ungraceful movement.
“Do you feel it too?” Jon asks.
“Feel what?” Martin asks.
“The Lonely. We’re getting closer to it. The lighthouse from Justin Somerton’s statement, which seems to be some combination of Lonely and Stranger.”
Martin nods.
“This is what we have to investigate?”
“Yes. Elise wanted me to make sure we hadn’t missed anything in our research. It’s only a weekend, Martin,” Jon says.
There’s a hint of her old sharpness lingering in her voice as she puts down her book and rummages in her bag for the other half of her lunchtime sandwich.
“I hope this doesn’t get us eaten by worms,” Martin says, trying and failing to make a joke.
To her immense delight, Jon smirks, her mouth quirking up into something like a laugh. But there’s a faraway look in her eyes as she turns to Martin. Something green and unknowable lurks in the brown depths of them.
“No,” she says. “It’s emptiness we need to fear.”
She doesn’t speak for the rest of the train ride.
***
The town whose name Martin didn’t catch is quiet when they stop at the little train station. The station looks forlorn in the late afternoon darkness, sheltered by an expanse of grey clouds, and though they’ve gone a bit inland, there’s still the dark funk of salt and mudflats in the air, sharp and piercing in Martin’s nostrils. Even through the layers of wool she wears, the mist and moisture of the air clings clammy to her skin. The streetlamps are already on, probably because it’s fall and the dark comes early this time of year. Martin shuffles from foot to foot, seeing nothing to do on the platform, and Jon fiddles with her phone, cursing softly when she realizes there’s no reception.
So they stand, untalking, waiting, each cocooned in her own private thoughts. There’s a coach to catch, and just when Martin thinks she’s about ready to venture into the village and seek out a pub in which to wait, the coach arrives with a great squeaking of brakes and a hissing exhalation of exhaust. Inside, it’s not much better than the decrepit station. The upholstery’s peeling, and the thing’s largely empty and reeking of damp. Even so, Jon squeezes into the seat next to Martin, and Martin sits uncomfortably with her rucksack on her knees, leaning against the window. Still, they don’t talk.
By the time they arrive in the village the dusk is falling, earlier than Martin expected, with a chill off the water that raises the hairs on her arms and makes her startle when Jon’s warmer skin lands on her hand as they step out into the autumn half-dark and the cold reek of the sea.
“Look,” Jon says.
She points to the water, and there Martin sees the lighthouse, sticking up like a claw from the little spit of rock where it stands.
“It’s low tide,” Jon continues. “It’s an island off an island by high tide. That’s why the Lonely likes it so, I think. No matter how isolated it already is on its little barrier island, it can always be isolated more.”
There’s something in Jon’s voice as she speaks that reminds Martin of when she reads statements. It echoes, dramatic and even and dark, and Martin could lose herself in that voice. She shakes herself, quietly, hoping it can be mistaken for a shiver. Not now, Martin. Now is not the time to get all starry-eyed over Jon’s voice. Not on a work trip. She silences the small traitorous thought that maybe work trips are the best time to confess one’s feelings, and trudges after Jon as the road turns from asphalt to cobbles as they near the center of town.
Even in the dusk, the village is unremarkable. It’s quaint in a hardscrabble fishing village sort of way, the place that might have some sort of gift shop, a listed church, and a beach at which you can theoretically bathe during the one week of the year when you won’t freeze your tits off in the crashing surf. But in the half-light, the village and its strange, broken-down lighthouse on the headland feel unutterably lonely, the quaintness pushed back to the edges of perception. Martin feels the misery radiating off the bay as she and Jon make their way to their residence and as a light mist begins to fall.
Their destination is an old house redone so as to hover on the border between bed and breakfast and proper hotel. It crouches next to the harbor, with lace curtains in the windows out of some sort of fussy tourist affectation and disheveled carnations wilting in its window boxes. Jon shoulders her rucksack, and grabs Martin’s hand, practically dragging her over the stoop and into the quaint little lobby.
The woman behind the desk is dumpy and small, but her arms are muscular and her face betrays no hint of alarm at the look of two travel-weary Englishwomen hauled up like dead fish onto her doorstep.
“You the researchers with that London institute?” she asks, her Scottish accent blunt.
“Yes,” Jon says. “Did Elise Bouchard call ahead?”
“Yes,” the woman replies. “She’s settled the bill already. You’ll be here for a few days, won’t you?”
“Certainly,” Jon says.
Martin tunes Jon and the receptionist out as they figure their way through the hotel’s amenities and through room locations. With the idle instincts of someone who’s worked many years in libraries, she flips through the meagre assortment of tourist brochures on a side table. Most of them are useless, but one’s a map of hiking trails around the area. Careful to make sure no one notices, she
“You said you wanted one room,” the woman goes on. “The one available’s got only one bed. Will that be a problem?”
“No,” Jon says crisply, fidgeting with the end of her ponytail, the grey wisp shot through it now being twined around her fingers. “That’ll do perfectly.”
“We get your sort up here often,” the woman says with a smile. “I find they like to hike up on the cliffs. And no one should bother you, or anything. People are very open-minded.”
“We’ll keep that in mind. After all, I guess you could consider this our honeymoon.”
Before Martin has time to process this astonishing statement, Jon’s squeezing her against her, pressing Martin into her tall, commanding boniness. It’s unmistakably a demonstration of romantic intent, and, well, Jon’s clearly a good actress, because she seems to be selling it, steering Martin up the stairs, selling the act until they reach their room.
***
The room, as promised, has only one bed. It is covered with an ugly floral duvet that matches the equally hideous wallpaper, and it smells decrepit and sweet, like fading potpourri. Jon wrinkles her nose as she drops her bag. Apparently, a long trip across countries and continents has sapped her of all desire to immediately tidy the room. Instead, she inspects the guestbook.
“Not only does she think we’re on our honeymoon, she’s clearly put us in a honeymoon-designed room,” Jon says, brandishing the guestbook in Martin’s direction. “Unless all these rooms have guestbooks for some reason, which seems bizarre. You’d really only expect there to be one in the lobby.”
Martin sits on the bed, still processing as Jon unpacks her clothing into the rattling chest of drawers.
“What the hell was that?” she asks Jon, her voice going high.
Jon shrugs.
“What’s better camouflage than a romantic trip to go do research and some hiking by the sea? More to the point, it provides cover in case we wind up poking around in things we shouldn’t.”
“I don’t know, a lot of things? Who the hell is going to believe that we’re--” Martin can’t make herself say dating.
“Clearly, the receptionist. And hopefully, whatever that ghost ship Justin Somerton saw was will keep away from people with connections. Not too far away, but you know, far enough away to not eat anyone. And Petra Lukas has apparently been sniffing around here, god knows what she’s doing, and I don’t want to lure her into any conversations about institute funding.”
There’s a rueful smile on Jon’s face, and then she turns back to her clothes. Martin doesn’t unpack. Instead she makes tea. There’s no lemon to do it the way Jon likes, but she makes do as best she can. Jon comes and sits beside her on the bed when the tea’s ready, and Martin does her best to pretend that maybe they are on a honeymoon now.
Martin wishes it was simply a trip to go do research, not to track down a monster and possibly a smiling monster on a fancy yacht (she’s not sure why she’s so certain Petra Lukas has a fancy yacht, but somehow she knows it to be true). But instead, she can only sit next to Jon, and later, sleep next to her. Once they’re in bed, Jon puts up her pillow and bundles herself into the blankets without another word. It’s really unutterably cute, but Martin would never dare admit that.
They lie in the darkness with a gulf between them for a while. Martin tries to not count Jon’s breaths, even as she hopes that someday, Jon will notice her. She watches her sleep, and she yearns. You’ll be lonely forever, sing the waves outside the window, and Martin tries not to believe them as she falls to sleep. Or, rather, as she tries to fall asleep, because suddenly there’s a loud banging next door, as though someone is enthusiastically slamming the bed against the wall. Then, someone moans, and shouts something suspiciously like “oh, Alfred!” Martin feels her entire face go red and tries her damnedest not to look at Jon. She can only imagine how she must be blushing in this darkness.
***
The morning is crisp but cloudy when Jon and Martin make their way out of the hotel, bags packed for the hike to the lighthouse. Martin’s done the planning for this leg of the trip, thanks to the tourist brochures. She’s found a rowboat rental to get to the island, and a tide chart showing all the myriad ways they could potentially find themselves stranded on a rocky little headland covered in bird shit and seals. For this reason, they’re seeking some picnicking foods before they make their way to the headland and the dumpy recreation that’s supposed to be clinging to the rocks there. At this rate, with Jon dithering in the shop over several kinds of energy bars, Martin’s about ready to march them both down to the harbor and haggle her way onto the first fishing craft she can find to take them out to the lighthouse. And that’s when someone taps her on the shoulder, and the cold of the fog burrows into her skin.
“Fancy seeing you here,” says Petra Lukas, and Martin nearly jumps out of her skin.
The shop’s gone blurry at the edges, as though it’s been ringed in mist, and Martin shivers despite her comfortable clothing. Jon seems oblivious, still standing in front of a shelf of snack food, comparing prices, but here Martin is, next to Petra Lukas. When last she saw her, she was in a sharp suit, but now she’s dressed like a very posh fisherman, complete with a blue and white striped jumper that probably cost at least half Martin’s rent. She’s even got the ridiculous flat cap at a jaunty angle on her head, and she looms over Martin with an altogether too pleased grin.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Martin snaps.
“Just passing through. Like you and your Archivist over there.”
Martin glances in Jon’s direction. Mercifully, she appears to have moved on from the energy bars to ring up her purchases. She still doesn’t appear to have noticed Petra Lukas.
“Why are you bothering me, then?”
“Not so prepared this time, are you?” Petra asks. “No knife?”
Martin does, in fact, have a very nice knife in her pocket, anticipating needing to use it for something or other on the leg of this trip. But she’s not about to brandish it at Petra in the middle of a village shop in Fuck-Knows-Where, Scotland. So she smiles through gritted teeth, trying to dredge up artificially happy Customer Service Martin and use her to get Petra to fuck off.
“No knife,” Martin says. “Now, let me out of whatever you’re keeping me in, and send me on my way.”
Surprisingly, Petra does, and warmth returns to Martin’s fingers little by little as the shop slides back into focus. Sound and light grow brighter as Petra saunters away from Martin. But as she leaves, she doffs her cap to her.
“See you at the ghost ship,” she says.
The door jingles merrily behind her as Jon comes up to Martin.
“What the hell was that?” she asks, clinging to her bag with white-knuckled hands.
“Petra Lukas,” Martin says grimly as they start up the high street towards the headland.
***
The boat rental is exactly as dreary as Martin imagined. She’d worked in a rather posher one the summer before she left school, and even then there’d been a depressing scent of mold around the place. This salt-bleached shack is deeply unpleasant, and Martin wouldn’t trust most of the boats in it on an ornamental pond. But it’s going to be easy enough to get out to the lighthouse island once they have the boat, and it only takes a few moments of frowning from Martin, a comment from Jon about honeymoons (apparently proving the rationale behind her insane charade), and an assurance to the surly old man at the rental that she knows what she’s doing in a rowboat to get them a solid dingy with an outboard motor that Martin has no intention of using, and to push off into the chill water.
There’s a brisk breeze, but really, the sea is smooth, and Jon chats as Martin rows, filling her in on the ghost ship, and on its recurring hauntings of this abandoned lighthouse. The tide’s with them, and it seems like it’s no time at all before they’re pulling towards the sandy shore.
Martin likes rowing, she really does. And there’s something soothing about this, just her and Jon and the shrieking, laughing gulls, the slap of the sea against the boat, and the sheer delight of motion. Really, Martin honestly thinks this might be the happiest she’s ever been at work. Also, Jon’s excellent at telling ghost stories, even if all they deal with are rumors of scuttled merchant ships, of lighthouse keepers going mad on storm-tossed nights, and of all the fear this peaceful strip of water has to offer.
When they hit the shore, Martin helps Jon secure the boat, and then fishes out their things, including two enormous thermoses of tea. Jon arches an eyebrow at that.
“I thought we could eat lunch at the lighthouse,” Martin says.
Jon, to her credit, nods, but even so, she looks worried.
“I’m not sure we’ll want to,” she says to Martin, and they start to hike around the island towards the tidal strip between the lighthouse and the island proper. Above them, seagulls cry, and Martin doesn’t think she ever realized quite what a lonely sound it was. There’s no talking now, for the chill is too oppressive under the sheltering sides of the islands.
“The tide whirlpools in here when it’s in flood,” Jon says softly as they cross the spit. “I’m not sure how I know that, but I know.”
Martin shivers. She shivers again as they climb the steps to the old lighthouse, ancient and barnacled and carved into the rocky side of the cliffs. Once they’re at the top, surrounded on three sides by the roaring sea, Martin sees what Jon means. There’s nothing appetizing about this place, with the ridge of dark clouds that rises over the horizon, and the crumbling lighthouse sticking up over the bird-scarred rocks. And even the seabirds seem to have abandoned this place. But the door to the lighthouse swings open, creaking slightly in the ice-bound wind, and Jon gestures toward it.
“We need to go up. Or I do,” she says.
The air whips her hair up around her head, grey and dark tendrils mixing together in a wild tangle twisted loose from her ponytail, and Martin once more needs to tell herself that this is absolutely not the right time to ogle her boss. But she follows Jon (always following, always) up the steps of the tower.
It’s very dark inside, even with the little windows set in the lighthouse’s length and the steps creak uncomfortably under the weight of two grown women and their packs. But it’s really not as tall as Martin feared, and soon they’re climbing their way to the very top of the lighthouse, out into the brisk and biting air, into the loneliness of height and distance from the ground.
Up here, Martin can see everything-- town lights far down the mainland shore, the little cluster of houses that is the village, and their dinghy back on the leeward side of the island, right where they’d left it, nothing but a brown splotch against the beach. She pauses her contemplation to glance at Jon, who clings to the corroding metal railings as though she’s terrified she’ll fall. But the expression on her face is completely elated.
“Martin,” she says, “I see--”
But Martin’s been distracted already. Distracted by a beautiful yacht moored far off shore, a yacht that, as they speak, is putting down its own dinghy, manned by a little blue splotch of its own, and not afraid to use its motor. There’s no doubt in Martin’s mind that Petra is coming to claim someone for her god, and Martin will be damned if it’s Jon.
“Jon,” Martin says, “you need to get back to the dinghy. Now.”
Jon splutters, but it’s clear she’s seen Petra now too. “I’m not leaving you here. It’s you she wants.”
“If it’s me she wants, then we’d better not give her the Archivist too. And I know how to deal with her,” Martin says. “You don’t. Just run.”
“I can learn!”
“You can come back and get me if you need to come back and get me, Jon. It’s fine.”
Jon looks at Martin like she wants to say something, but Martin cuts her off.
“Go.”
Jon looks hard at her, and then, without a word, she turns. Martin hears her feet echoing down the stairs as she stands on the lighthouse, waiting for Petra Lukas.
***
It could be twenty minutes or twenty lifetimes as Martin picks her way back down through the darkness to the place where she will ultimately meet Petra Lukas on the headland. She stands there, her back to the sea, hoping that Jon has made it back across the strand. Already, she can hear the water starting to thunder towards the narrow channel, turning the rock into an island. And yet she stands here, waiting for Petra to appear.
Appear Petra does, smiling incongruously at Martin as though she has all the answers to everything.
“Well, well, my favorite archival assistant, without her Archivist,” Petra says.
Martin glares at her.
“She’s gone, and you can’t have her for the Lonely.”
“I don’t want her for the Lonely,” Petra says. “I want you. The sadness radiating off you is, well, delicious. And you’re bright. And even Forsaken needs its own bright young things, if only to gradually leech away their colour and vitality, and bring them into the fold. Don’t you ever dream of running away from everything? Of being perfectly alone? All it would take would be to go with me to that ghost ship, far, far away from here. You know you want to.”
“I don’t, actually,” Martin says, even as Petra Lukas stretches out her hand.
With her hand comes fog, a more choking fog than Martin has ever seen blanket her, and it fills Martin with a sudden, unaccountable terror, as though she’s back in her father’s house, tiptoeing through the halls and hoping that she’ll avoid his wrath, knowing that nothing will get better, and that everything’s lonely, that life for a girl who looks like her, who loves women and loves the look of herself as a woman who can maybe one day consider herself dapper will be nothing but heartbreak and sadness.
“Except I’m not lonely,” Martin says aloud, and she runs.
As she runs, she thinks of Jon, keeping the fog away with memories of her hand touching Martin, the way she twiddles her ponytail when she’s thinking, the way she’s smiled at Martin on this trip. Even if there’s nothing romantic there, there’s still friendship, and isn’t that, in and of itself, a kind of love? She keeps Jon in her mind as she reaches the very tip of the headland, and stands there, breathing in the salt, feeling the fog on her back. Martin turns. She sees Petra Lukas smiling. And then, she jumps.
***
The water is a shock to Martin’s system when she hits it, ice cold, knocking all the breath she’d tried so desperately to hold from her. She opens her eyes (not that it does much good, though she did manage to force herself to wear contacts today). There’s nothing around her but eye-burning salt and the maw of the sea, but she’s not in the fog. She’s escaped Petra’s fog. She’s free, more or less, whether she dies or manages to swim back to the part of the island not altogether taken by the Lonely.
With the last of her strength, Martin manages to swim to the surface, to pull in a gasp of air. The waves around her are high and grey and unforgiving, and she has a sudden, crystal-clear realization that this is how she will die. So much for that, she supposes. So much for life. Maybe drowning isn’t a bad way to go, Martin thinks, and she sinks beneath the surface, just as she hears the rumble of a boat engine.
Before Martin can process it, there’s an oar reaching down towards her.
“Grab it,” a familiar voice cries, and Martin does.
She hauls herself over the splintery side of the boat, and into the rather bilgey bottom of the rented dinghy. Jon’s standing at the back of it, the wool skirt she’d insisted on wearing to hike for some stupid reason (Martin assumes to make a theatrical impression) flaps about her, and her hair is nearly fully unbound. She’s manning the outboard motor that Martin hadn’t dared to use, and she’s looking at Martin with something like shock just as the sky begins to release its rain.
They bob there in the sea for a moment, staring wide-eyed at each other before Martin breaks the silence.
“Where’d you learn to drive a boat?” she asks.
“I grew up in Bournemouth,” Jon says, as though that answers anything.
Martin nods.
“You’re good at it,” she says as the rain starts to fall in earnest.
“Thanks,” Jon replies, and then, before Martin knows it, she kisses her square on the lips.
The rain pours down around them as they sit there in their ridiculous dinghy, and Jon really should be minding the steering, but instead she kisses Martin with a warm, determined mouth, wrapping her arms around her, for at least a minute more. They break apart, and Martin thinks that it’s too soon, or that she really has died and this is heaven.
“I was so afraid for you,” Jon says as she goes back to steering the boat.
“And I was for you!” Martin retorts. “I thought you’d try to stand up to Petra Lukas and get us both killed!”
“I think that kind of recklessness is more your thing,” Jon says, and Martin feels something warm and undefinable bubble up within her.
They motor back to the harbor, not the boat rental, and Jon explains their circumstances (namely that they’re both soaked) to someone Martin thinks is probably the harbormaster. She’s shivering on the quay, and all too happy to head back to the hotel immediately. Jon seems to be too, but on the way back, in the quiet, mostly deserted street, she turns to Martin and, with a no-nonsense expression, backs her firmly into a brick wall, her height making such a prospect easier.
Her lips are on Martin’s again, and her hands, warm and firm, work their way under Martin’s jumper. She opens her mouth and sighs into Martin’s and Martin returns it in kind. She wants to touch every bit of Jon, to love her and to appreciate her, even if they are standing in a downpour, and even if Jon’s hair is straggling in dribbles down her face. Martin moans, embarrassingly loud, and Jon pulls away and looks around.
“We should probably go inside,” Jon says, looking down the street towards their hotel. “What do you want to do?”
“Give Alfred and his partner a run for their money,” says Martin, before she can stop herself.
Jon laughs, and grabs her hand.
“I can’t wait.”