The Endless Beach by Jenny Colgan

Author:Jenny Colgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Four

N o sleep. Endless work. Nothing from Flora. Nothing from Colton except more work, of the worst kind.

The hotel was bearing down on him oppressively, and Joel no longer felt he could call Mark ever since both he and Marsha had made such a massive point about how much they adored Flora, of course, and how much they felt this girl was the one for him and how he should settle down and so on and so forth. So he cut himself off from that.

He exercised relentlessly, which normally worked to quell his restlessness, but pounding the city sidewalks for hours didn’t help; didn’t tire him out enough to sleep; didn’t switch off the endless, clouded panic circling in his brain. He tried more work, but the more he did, the more Colton fed him. He tried drink and realized that in the past he would have gone to a bar and found an incredibly attractive woman and tried to screw it out of himself . . . but he didn’t . . . He didn’t want to do that anymore. There was only one thing he wanted, only one person, and he couldn’t seem to get through to her at all—couldn’t seem to get it right. He was worried that she would want more and more and more, and all sorts of things that weren’t in him to give.

And now that place—the place he thought he’d found, where the endless, self-doubting torment, the desperate running and fleeing wasn’t necessary—now was that still there for him? Colton was about to change it irrevocably. Was he even still welcome there? He had no idea, truly, what was going on in Flora’s head; he felt merely that he had been locked out of paradise, that Flora’s careful, noncommittal chats echoed precisely the language he had been used to all his life, when a well-meaning but nonetheless determined social worker had explained, yet again, why he wasn’t welcome at this place, that they would try and find somewhere else for him.

He went to the balcony. The heat and noise of the city rose up to meet him. Christ, he hated it here. He hated it. He wanted to be cool, and quiet, and walking a long beach, and smelling the freshest of sea wind, just letting the air blow out every cobweb in his head. No. They weren’t cobwebs. They were more like twisted snakes, coiled around the inside of his brain, squeezing tighter and tighter, and if Flora knew . . . If she only knew, if she got close enough, if she suspected what was beneath the carapace of him; what it contained . . . It was a writhing, choking mass of slithering monsters that tightened every synapse, the great coiling insides of him that he could conceal with a smart suit; with a charming manner; with a fit body; with spending money; with everything like that. For as long as that worked.

He couldn’t risk letting her get closer. But if he didn’t, he would lose everything.

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