I’ve never met anyone from that city, the northernmost in England that I know of. It explains why I never could place his accent, at least.
“But we left town every chance we had to visit places like this. We came to this one in particular a few times, in fact. So in a way, you could say I am accustomed to the charm, yes.”
I tuck my feet underneath me—I kicked my shoes off, and my toes are starting to get a little chilly up here. But I don’t want him to stop talking, so I try not to move much, in case that distracts him. Luckily, his eyes seem pretty focused—or rather, totally unfocused, as he gazes off into the distance. “What was it like?” I murmur. “Growing up there.”
“Good, I suppose. Mostly. It’s not like I have much to compare it to.” He cracks a small smirk. “My parents are lovely people. College sweethearts, dated all through uni, then had me, settled down in the town where they grew up, had my sister next. We live a five-minute drive from my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles all live within a ten-mile radius. Even my sister, when she left, only moved into downtown Newcastle with her boyfriend, which is about twenty minutes’ ride tops on the bus.”
“But you left,” I point out.
“Not until after uni. I . . . ” He trails off, shaking his head. For a moment I think he’s done talking. But he heaves a sigh and keeps going. “I was a little lost, for a while there. Jumped from job to job. Couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live, none of it. My parents were pressuring me to buy a house, settle down, figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t want to stay there, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go, either, and since my whole family, all my friends were there, it just seemed a lot easier to hang around treading water instead of running away into the great unknown.”
I pick at a blade of grass beside it, toy with it while I watch him from the corner of my eye, like a shy animal I’m afraid to spook. “What happened then?” I finally venture.
“Took a poetry course at Newcastle. Realized I was good at it. Really good. My professor encouraged me to go for my masters. Mum disagreed in her unassuming sort of way, but Dad and I fought like hell about it—he told me I was already skint, so why make my life worse with student loans for a bullshit degree that’d never be worth anything. But I finally knew what I wanted. So I said screw him, moved as far as I could get in-country, down to London to go to Kings College, and I’ve not been back home since, save for holidays. Sometimes,” he amends with a grin.
Despite the smile, it’s clear that this is a sore spot from the twitch in his forehead, the tic in his angular jaw. I reach across the blanket and curl my hand around his, squeeze his fingers gently. “You’re brave for leaving.”
He squeezes back. “You’re sweet for saying so. But it was nothing. Not like I moved to a whole new country all on my lonesome.” He winks.
“You stood up to your parents, though. You knew what life you wanted to lead, regardless of the path they told you to follow.” I think about my mother, begging me to stay close for school. I think about the acceptance letter I received for Stanford, all the way out on the West Coast, a whole new half of the country to explore. I think about how I chickened out and tore that one up, told her I was rejected anyway, and accepted the place that Penn offered me.
Not that I dislike Penn, by any means. I love my school, and I’ve made a ton of friends there. Philly’s nice enough, too, with plenty of neighborhoods to explore. But sometimes I lie in my dorm at night, staring out the window, and I wonder what life on the other side of the country would’ve been like.
For a few minutes, we’re both quiet, eating our sandwiches and sipping the rest of our single glasses of wine in silence. Eventually, one of the cows in the field breaks the quiet with a long lowing sound, and we both break into laughter.
“Come on,” he says. “We’ve still got some riverbeds to explore.”
We pass the rest of the afternoon picking blackberries alongside one of the streams that trickles along the outskirts of town, and taking turns mashing them into one another’s cheeks on the pretenses of feeding them to each other. After a blackberry brawl that ends up with my whole face dyed purple, I take a break to strip down to my tank top and splash the juice off in the stream.
Of course, Jack takes this opportunity to shove me from behind, so hard I stumble into the (luckily only two-foot-deep) stream, screeching the whole way. Not one to let him get away with that so easily, I race back to the bank and grab his arm, dragging him in alongside me, both of us tripping over each other and kicking waves at one another’s faces until we’re both drenched from head to toe.