A/N: This was written for Let's Write Sherlock Challenge 13: Vacation Getaway. Molly's vacation destination isn't based on a real place. I've never been to a French beach, and I haven't even been to an American beach in years. Would it have been a good idea to pick a setting with which I was more familiar? Probably. Did that stop me from writing this particular story? Unfortunately, no. This was very quickly edited and not Brit-picked.
x
There is something unpleasant, cloying, about an old crush that just won't die. It leaves an unpleasant taste in the back of her mouth. The boy is tall, blond, with clear blue eyes and a charming, bright smile, a confident air; he gathers large crowds around him when he speaks; his voice carries. He's a bit too smart for his own good and he knows it. And he's a bit too course for her, and she knows it, but his moments of sincerity, his seemingly genuine interest in her, the way he sits close to her with his arm behind her, not quite touching her, these moments disarm her utterly. She tells herself she's just flattered, but it isn't entirely that. She's not sure what it is.
She's been watching him all year. It's become a tiresome habit now, but she can't break it. Studying does not break it, nor does going out with friends, and when the year ends and summer comes, she decides there's nothing else left for her to do. She must forget. She must leave.
x
One bag will be sufficient: one bag of summer dresses, ratty paperbacks, her bathing suit. She packs sunscreen: her one concession to the practical. And her wallet. For a while, she plans to invite a friend, she isn't sure who, and she indulges in simple, airy fantasies of gossiping together while they sunbathe on the beach, eating late dinners in the summer twilight and clinking glasses of wine, window shopping and silly debates over which boy they pass is the cutest.
She zips her bag closed. Her window is open to the early summer air, which brings in a refreshing evening chill, and when she leans outside and takes a deep breath of it, she knows that it cannot be. No. It was a fair idea, a pleasant fantasy with which to pass the time, but in the end, it's hardly reasonable. Most fantasies are hardly reasonable. She won't get what she wants from this adventure if she brings someone else along.
Is it silly to call it an adventure?
Maybe.
There's nowhere to go at this hour, so she climbs out onto the fire escape to sit and think and wait for morning. By the time the sun rises, she has forgotten almost everything.
x
She crosses the Channel and then travels slowly south, stopping anywhere that looks interesting, exploring side streets and back streets of towns picked at random from her old, misshapen map. She spends as little money as she can. She speaks rusty and awkward French and does not care when her accent bleeds through. But she makes no friends or even passing acquaintances, and when she reaches what might be the end, a place at least worthy of a longer stop, she feels as if she's shed several layers of skin. Several layers of self. What is a summer road trip if it does not end at the beach? This is her holiday: spending whole days alternating between the sun and sand and the water, swimming out as far as she can, going under, then air-drying under the sun while she flips through the pages of a novel that she half-knows by heart.
She's skimming through the boring bits, she's burying her toes down into the warm sand, hiding them, when a shadow passes over her and she looks up. Most shadows mean nothing. Perhaps this one lingers longer than the others, and she senses hesitation, or interest, or perhaps it's just coincidence, or her thoughts wandering. She will romanticize the story later. But at first, the sun behind him turning him into a dark silhouette, an outline of a person, he is no one and means nothing.
He could be anyone and mean everything.
"Ah—sorry," a light, friendly voice, a smiling voice, interrupts her wordless half-thoughts. She shades her eyes just as he steps off to the side. "I'm blocking your sun. I'm just looking for a free bit of sand, really…"
"No, it's okay," she answers, tilting her head, taking him in. He's stepped into visibility now. The angle is just right. He smiles when she tells him she's not bothered and gives a short little nod, acknowledgement, no hard feelings, no feelings, and that should be it right here. Nothing. But just as his voice might be the first voice she's really heard in days, the first clear words in an indistinct chatter and hum that is other people's conversations and other people's lives, harmlessly intersecting hers in only the most cursory ways, so his figure and his face are the first she's truly seen in just as long. A person in sharp focus against a background blur.
He's blond, but a dirtier, more brownish blond than the boy she left behind, and his hair is growing shaggily over his eyes. She'd have to be much closer to discern their colour. She's fairly sure that if she stood, she'd find him only a few inches taller, but there's something just slightly imposing about him regardless, something that is perhaps confidence, perhaps experience, she can't yet know in what. He's about her age, but nothing about him says 'student.' It's just a feeling she has. He's on the edge of something else.
He's stretching absently, like someone in the habit, reaching first his right arm across his body, then his left. She has no idea how long she's been staring up at him.
"You could just sit here," she suggests at last. If he's surprised, it's almost certainly an act, but she smiles and lets it go.
x
They talk first, exchange names later. The conversation comes in fits and starts, in spare comments and admissions breaking long silences, while she pretends to read and he to look out at the people and the ocean and the sky. She knows that she comes off as shy. And he… There's something his manner that she thinks would seem easy and charming and cool, if his small talk wasn't so rusty (that's how it sounds: awkward, jagged). She pins him as a compulsive flirt.
She tells him about her book, when asked; he explains that he's with friends but they seem to have ditched him. This is a bit funny, seeing as the trip was their idea. "They have this idea that I should rest," he says, lying down on his back on the hot sand and crossing his arms behind his head. She's watching him, and pretending that she isn't. She has her own knees up against her chest, her arms wrapped around them, her place in her book marked with an index finger between the pages. Yes, it's true that this man doesn't rest. "But I don't know what to do with myself," he adds, confirming her hypothesis, her instinct, and then he smiles at her as if she must know exactly what he means. In a way, she does.
"And it's awfully boring," he says.
She's holding his gaze, wondering when he realized she was staring, wondering if he minds.
"It can be," she agrees—then gets the distinct impression that if she'd answered differently, somehow, a moment might have been created rather than ruined.
She buries her feet under the sand again and asks him where he's from, to break this new silence of her own creation. It's the first awkward pause between them. She's replaying the tone of her own voice in her head, wondering if there was something in it that would push an average person away. She's used to drawing people to her, though not always in the way that she would like. The boy with the blue eyes would put his arm around her sometimes, yet the gesture was tinged always with ambiguity.
"London," he's saying. He's from London. Funny, so is she. He's just finished his degree, he says, at Bart's, and it is to celebrate being a full-fledged doctor now that his mates insisted on this holiday. This makes her grin—he seems confused at first—and when she tells him that she's in medical school too, the bridge he couldn't form before forms with almost laughable simplicity, and instead of thinking through silences they are all but talking over each other with stories.
x
When his mates call him away, he seems sorry to leave, and she stands up at the same time without thinking, as if she were being called away too, as if she were to go with him. Obviously she is not. "I'm John, by the way," he says, into the pause, as she falters. He's holding out his hand.
"Molly," she answers, sliding her hand into his. Then: "Would you like to go to dinner?"
x
They choose an outside table at a cute, out-of-the-way little place, with a beautiful view. It is almost romantic. She wears the nicest dress among the ones she packed so haphazardly in London, one she has not worn once yet on this particular trip, and her hair, after much internal debate, down and flowing over her shoulders. When she arrives, she feels a bit silly for the effort she put into her appearance, and it's not because John looks particularly ill put together, but because she's reminded again that he's a mere stranger, nothing more. She isn't the type to have a fling. She has no reason to think this is the start of a fling.
He smiles, and tells her she looks beautiful.
After they order, conversation turns to life stories, histories. She notices his habit of licking his lips and of asking more questions than he answers. Is he so interested in how she grew up an only child, in her parents' house with its huge kitchen and the hanging crystals that splashed rainbows on the wall when the sunlight angles in just right, in the skeleton in the local library that made her want to memorise every bone in the body, every tiny bone and every joint and every detail of such a complex, fascinating thing? These little stories pile up but create nothing. But perhaps listening to them is easier than admitting anything about himself.
He does tell her that he plays rugby—tangents off into an explanation of the game she can hardly understand—and that he has a sister, but they do not get along. Never have. He shrugs this off, and pretends he isn't uncomfortable, and she pretends she does not notice that he id. She changes the subject.
"So what's your plan now?" she asks. She wants to call him doctor, but she doesn't know his last name. "Where do you want to go?"
It's a vague question, she knows. He could misunderstand, or pretend to misunderstand, or laugh at her unclear, expansive phrasing. But he seems to know she picked these words on purpose. She watches him nod, twice, and look down at his now-empty plate. "Where do I want to go now?" he hums. "Somewhere unusual. Somewhere thrilling. I'd really hate to do the same-old, just like everyone else."
She reaches across the table and takes his hand, a movement that does not feel daring at all until she feels the warmth of his skin against her fingertips. He makes a sound almost like laughter, but a sigh, and turns his hand over in hers, and asks, "You?"
"I'd really like to work with dead bodies," she answers, her voice quiet, but not nervous, not secretive, almost bright. When she'd explained as much to her mother, she'd found it quite odd, and Molly had not let herself think, well, but Dad would have understood just fine. And she will not let herself be disappointed if, now, John does not understand either.
He opens his mouth; she's certain he'll make a joke. But he doesn't. "I can see the appeal," he answers, nodding, laughing perhaps just a little, but at himself. She can tell. She can tell by the way he tilts his head down but his eyes glance up and meet hers; she can tell by the way he squeezes her hand.
x
Her hotel is only a few minutes' walk away, so they take the long route, John never once letting go of her hand. They talk only a little. Her mind wanders from one possible sentence to the next, but if his thoughts are similarly manic, he does not let it show; he seems quite content to keep step with her, to breathe in the late twilight air as their feet sink into the sand. She's not sure what will happen when they reach her door, nor what she hopes will happen, nor what she wants.
This need not be the end. Nor need it be a beginning.
But the time they reach her hotel, they've left the beach behind, and the gentle, warm, breeze has turned into the still, cool air of deepening evening. She hesitates for so long with the words on her tongue that he laughs quietly and says, "It would be crude of me to invite myself up, you know." But even then, she's still not sure how to respond.
All she can think is that she did not leave her tiny little flat, and her tiny little life, for nothing. So she leans in and she kisses him. The blue eyed boy at home towers a head above her; when she imagines kissing him, she pictures herself leaning up on her toes to reach him, or perhaps lifted up by him, pressed against a wall and pined, her legs around his waist. But John is only a few inches taller than she and simply to press forward, her lips against his, is so easy, so simple.
He's short but he's strong, stronger than she'd guessed or imagined (in those slight bits of fantasy she'd waded into, tentative and uncertain, while she brushed out her hair, picked out a dress), and confident, and she loves the way he pulls her close. She holds on to his arms. She thinks he could lift her, if he wanted to.
x
Later, they exchange numbers, and she indulges in another fantasy: that she will return to London and still remember exactly this feeling, that she will still want him in exactly this way. She'll open her window to the same breeze that beckoned her here. She'll think about him, shake her head and laugh at herself for her nostalgia, because he's not so far away, is he? Close her eyes, recall every moment with him. Find his number again, hidden in the contacts of her phone. Just his first name, four letters easily lost. Text him, or call him just to hear his voice.
This is how she wants it to be. But they both know it is only an illusion. They will never speak to each other again.