You, the Ocean, and Me

[Marie lies on the sofa, the throw blanket over her legs. Marcus stands at the window, looking outside. He crosses the room and stands beside the sofa, looking down at her, his hands linked behind his back.]

End scene.

It becomes a thing, a bit of a routine, tea with Harry, much quicker than Ivy expected it to. Just two days later he shows up on her porch, a sheepish grin on his face that he tries to wipe away with a hand over his mouth when she opens the door.

“Harry?” She tries not to smile too widely when she sees him. She spent the past two days replacing words and altering details in Act I, the kind of miniscule editing that you’re meant to do after you’ve finished a piece, not while you’re stuck in the middle, trying to waste time while feeling productive. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m just,” he begins, shoving a hand in the pocket of his coat, “I’m headed into town to do a bit of shopping, and I was wondering if you might like to come.”

“Oh.” Ivy’s about to make an excuse, say something about how she has work to do and she was really hitting her stride and shouldn’t stop now, but the allure of spending an afternoon surrounded by other human beings, including the one currently standing in front of her, is too great. And ever since Harry mentioned that she was a topic of gossip, she’s been curious to see said gossipers. “I’d love to.”

“You would?”

“Sure,” she says, nodding. “Let me grab a few things?”

“Of course,” Harry says, stepping just inside the door. She can feel his eyes on her as she dashes about the living room, crouching down to zip up her boots and digging through the pile of blankets on the couch in search of her mobile.

Finally, she slips her arms into the sleeves of her coat and picks up her bag. “I’m ready,” she announces, not bothering to lock the front door when they leave.

Harry’s truck is old, the blue paint rusted from the sea air, though it’s not so old that Ivy fears dying in it when she climbs into the front seat. She holds her cold hands (she forgot her gloves, dammit) in front of the heating vents as he reverses out of her driveway and heads down the road. Out the window, Ivy can see the cliffs dropping to the beaches in the distance.

“It really is beautiful out here,” she says to him after a few minutes of admiring the landscape and imagining all of the fairies and elves that might inhabit it.

“I suppose it is,” he says, glancing at her before returning his eyes to the road. “When you’ve lived here as long as I have, though, you stop noticing it. It’s just the everyday. Normal.”

“I hope I never begin to see such a beautiful thing as normal,” Ivy says, wishing she had a notebook so she could write his words down. “How long have you lived here?”

“Forever,” he says. Up ahead, the town comes into view. Ivy’s visited it before, of course, over the few weeks of the various summers she spent at the cottage with her mum. And although she passed through on her way to the cottage last week, she didn’t stop. “Besides uni, I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

Ivy lets that piece of information settle into her brain, adding another layer to the understanding she is building of this boy. Then she asks, “How’d you end up back here?”

Harry looks for a second like he might not tell her, but then the lines on his face relax and he answers. “My mum got sick, so I left London to be home with her, and then I just never left.”

“Oh, Harry, I’m so sorry,” Ivy says, sorry that she asked, sorry that he went through that. Sorry that control of his own life was taken out of his hands. She feels a bit like Joshua did that to her when he cheated on her, took away her agency and forced her into a corner. She still hates him a bit for that.

But, surprisingly, Harry smiles. “Don’t be,” he says. “She got better. All good now. Owns a flower shop.” He points out the window as they drive down the highstreet. “That one there, actually.”

Ivy glances at it, a shop front painted a bright green, flowers painted on the windows. “It’s cute,” she says. “But I am sorry, I think. That you came home because you had to, not because you wanted to.”

“Really, don’t be,” he says. He turns on his turn signal and a second later turns left into a parking space a few storefronts down from the market. “I like living here. I’ve got a job I love, my family’s here. There’s nothing to regret about it.”

I didn’t use that word, Ivy thinks, but doesn’t say so. “What’s that job you love?”

Harry smiles at her and then climbs out of the car without answering. Once Ivy gets out too, he locks the car and meets her on the pavement. “I teach music at the primary school.”

“That’s sweet,” Ivy says as she takes bigger steps to keep up with his long legs. He holds the door to the market open for her and then follows her inside. “I’ll meet you at the checkout?”

“Sure,” Harry says, smiling, which Ivy soon realizes is because the market is much smaller than she remembered, and there’s no chance of her losing him easily inside. Harry heads to the right, though, so she grabs a basket and goes left.

They meet in the middle, around the cereals, and Harry smiles widely and even wider when he looks at how full her basket is. “Stocking up?”

Ivy nods. “Like a chipmunk for winter.”

Harry laughs quietly and stands beside her as she picks up a brand of porridge she’s never heard of before and reads the back of the box.

“What is it that you’re writing?” Harry asks. “Ivy?”

Ivy smiles at the sound of her name and looks over her shoulder at him. “A play,” she says, putting the porridge in the basket. No harm in trying something new. “Or, rather, I’m supposed to be writing a play. I’ve got this grant, see, for fresh voices from the Weatherby, that’s Manchester’s primary theater and it’s a dream to have a play staged there as a new writer, but I’m a bit stuck.”

“Writer’s block?” Harry says with a raised brow.

“What do you know about writer’s block?”

Harry grins. “Not much, actually. But I suspect you’ll get through it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re a writer. Writers write.”

Ivy laughs at the simplicity of that–writers write. Painters paint and florists arrange flowers and flautists play the flute, so of course writers write. “I wish it were that simple.”

Her basket now full, Ivy adds a carton of milk, a box of eggs, and a loaf of bread before heading to the checkout counter. Harry’s basket is nowhere near as full (he seems to have picked up only a few necessities), and Ivy wonders whether he actually needed to go shopping, or if it was just an excuse to see her. She wouldn’t mind the latter.

Harry helps her load her bags into some milk crates in the bed of his truck, and then he points at a cafe across the road. “Tea?”

“Sure,” Ivy says.

The cafe is warm and crowded, and it’s here, Ivy suspects, that the town gossips gather. The girl behind the register perks up at the sight of Harry and greets him eagerly.

“Hi Cherry,” Harry says as he and Ivy approach. “This is Ivy. She’s staying up at Redstone Cottage.”

Cherry’s eyes go wide. “Oh, the writer! It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too,” Ivy says, smiling, though she’s not sure she likes the curiosity in the girl’s eyes, nor the way she suddenly feels as though everyone in the room, down to the bloke in the corner with oversized headphones over his ears, is looking at her.

“What can I get you?” Cherry asks.

“I’ll have a small coffee,” Harry says. “And,” he glances at Ivy, “a chamomile tea?”

Ivy nods. “Yes, please.” She reaches for her purse, but Harry shakes his head.

“Let me,” he says. So she does.

It’s easy with him, letting him pay for her tea and letting him bring it to her at the pair of armchairs she’s chosen in the corner. He sits down, his knee bumping hers, and that’s easy too. He doesn’t feel like a stranger, someone she’s spent less than a collective hour of time with. He feels like somebody she went to primary school with, somebody whose life she’s kept up with through Facebook posts and “happy birthday!” messages.  

But it’s more intimate than that. Which might be why, when he asks her what the play’s about, she doesn’t hesitate to answer.

“It’s a love story,” she says. “Or it was supposed to be. It’s about a woman whose husband has died, and she’s packing up their belongings so she can move house. He’s a character too, a ghost or her memories or something, but she doesn’t know he’s there.”

“That’s intriguing,” Harry says, though Ivy’s pretty sure it’s the most boring premise for a play she’s ever heard in her life. “Why the writer’s block?”

Ivy shrugs. “Pressure, I suppose. This grant I’ve got, it’s very prestigious, and I don’t want to let them down.” That’s only one of the reasons (the other one starts with J and ends with A and in the middle there’s a lot of bitterness), but it’s the only one she wants to share with him now.

“Well,” Harry says, holding his mug in his lap. “What’s the worst that could happen? Are they going to take the money away if it’s not what they were expecting?”

Ivy’s flustered. “Well, no. I don’t think they could do that. But they could refuse to stage it.”

“You could get it staged somewhere else, couldn’t you?”

“I guess I could, but the Weatherby is–”

“Manchester’s primary theater for up-and-coming playwrights, I know.” Harry tilts his head and studies her so closely she feels her cheeks reddening. She glances down at her mug, pulling the string of her teabag so it bobs up and down. “But since the play’s completely hypothetical at this point, it’s not really worth worrying about getting it produced, is it?”

Ivy shakes her head. “It’s not really about the production aspect. It’s more about, I guess, meeting a certain standard. The Weatherby’s, I suppose, but my own as well.”

“Hmm.” Harry rests his mug on his thigh, and Ivy can tell that he’s thinking hard, trying to find the right words to communicate what he wants her to know. “I think you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, Ivy. It’s your opinion of yourself that matters most, of course, but you have to know that no one judges you as harshly as you judge yourself.”

“That’s very wise of you,” Ivy says lightly, not wanting to think too hard about his words for fear she might cry. It’s been awhile since she cried, but back in uni, she used to cry whenever anyone looked at her (or her writing or her alongside her writing) too closely.

“I spend a lot of time with seven year olds,” Harry says, making her smile.