Chapter 2: The Back Room Closes In
The fryer timer screamed, a shrill, mechanical shriek that cut through the thick silence of the back room.They broke apart. Isla stumbled back a half-step, her hand flying to her lips as if to confirm what had happened. Her eyes were wide, the green darkened with a shock that mirrored the electric jolt in Josh’s own veins. The air, once charged with a dizzying heat, now felt cold and grease-heavy.
Josh’s hands, which had been cupping her waist, hung uselessly at his sides.His pulse hammered in his temples. “Isla—” he started, his voice rough.
“The timer,” she interrupted, her words breathless.She didn’t move.He turned. The wire basket sat submerged in oil, the batter on the cod inside long past golden, now a deep, unforgiving brown.Useless. A waste. He grabbed the handle, the metal scorching through his rag, and hauled the basket clear, dumping the ruined fish onto the drain tray with a series of dull, greasy thuds.The act was violent, final.
The smell of burnt food filled the space, acrid and condemning.
“I should…” Isla began, gesturing vaguely toward the sink, the potatoes, the world outside this room.Her cheeks were flushed a deep, vivid pink.
“Yeah.” Josh kept his back to her, staring at the blackened cod.He couldn’t look at her. If he looked at her, he’d kiss her again. He’d push her against the chipped countertop and taste the salt on her skin and forget every single thing that mattered. The thought was a physical craving, a hollow ache in his gut. “Probably.”
She didn’t leave. He heard her shift her weight, the soft scuff of her trainer on the greasy floor.“Josh.”
“Don’t.” He finally turned. The remorse was already coiling around the desire, strangling it.“Just… don’t say it was a mistake. Not yet.”
“What else would it be?” Her whisper was fierce, edged with a fear he recognized. It was his own.
“I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the familiar dusting of flour there. A marker of his ordinary life, now grotesquely out of place. “But it didn’t feel like one.”
A slow, shaky breath escaped her. She leaned back against the sink, arms crossing over her chest, a defensive pose that made her look younger.“Declan asked if I could pick up a six-pack on my way home. That was his message. ‘Get beer.’ After I told him about the conference acceptance.”
Josh’s jaw tightened. The mention of the boyfriend, of the outside world, was a bucket of cold water.“Right.”
“And Millie?”
“Book club.” The words tasted like ash.
Isla gave a soft, humourless laugh. “She’s not in a book club.”
“I know.”
The acknowledgement hung between them, ugly and truthful. It was the first time he’d said it aloud to anyone, maybe even to himself. His marriage was a facade, a comfortable, passionless habit. He looked at Isla—really looked—saw the intelligence sparkling behind the worry in her eyes, the way she carried her ambition like a secret weapon. She saw his shop not as a dead end, but as a place he’d built.She made phytoplankton sound fascinating.
“This is so fucked up,” he said, but there was no heat in it, only a weary acceptance.“Yeah,” she agreed. She uncrossed her arms, picking at a thread on her apron.“What do we do now? Do I… do I quit?”
“God, no.” The panic was immediate, startling in its intensity. “Don’t do that.Please.”
“Then what?We just… go back to washing potatoes? Pretend your hand wasn’t just…” She trailed off, the flush returning to her neck.
He took a step toward her, then stopped, forcing his feet to root to the spot. “I don’t want to pretend. But I can’t… We can’t…”
“I know.” She hugged herself again.“It’s just chips, right? It’s just a job.”
It wasn’t, and they both knew it.It was the only place where either of them felt truly seen. The shop, with its grime and its gossip and its endless, repetitive work, had become the most honest room in their lives.
“We’ll be normal tomorrow,” he said, the promise feeling weak and fraudulent. “We’ll be normal, and we’ll fix fryer four, and you’ll tell me more about coastal erosion, and I’ll listen.”
“And tonight?” she asked, her gaze direct, challenging.
“Tonight, we close up.” He gestured to the burnt fish. “And we both go home.”
The finality of it was a dull weight in his chest. He saw a flicker of something in her eyes—disappointment, relief, he couldn’t tell—before she nodded, turning to the sink with a stiffness that wasn’t there before.They worked in silence, side-by-side but careful not to touch. He wiped down the fryers; she mopped the floor, the sour smell of disinfectant gradually overtaking the scent of burnt batter and longing. Every clang of a pan, every splash of water, was a punctuation in a sentence they couldn’t finish.
When everything was clean, surfaces gleaming dully under the unforgiving light, they stood by the back door. The neon ‘Open’ sign was off, the street outside dark and quiet.“See you Thursday,” Isla said, not meeting his eye. She shouldered her canvas bag, the one with the university logo.“Thursday,” Josh echoed. He watched her walk out into the cool night, the door swinging shut with a soft, decisive click.
He locked it, then stood for a long time in the empty stillness. The hum of the refrigerators was the only sound. He walked back through the shop, past the counter where he joked with customers, past the table where she sometimes sat doing her homework.His kingdom of grease and salt.
In the back room, he leaned against the very sink where she had stood.He pulled his phone out. No new messages.He typed out a text to Millie: Heading home now. Need anything?He deleted it.He typed another: We need to talk.
He deleted that too. He stared at the blank screen, the memory of Isla’s mouth on his so vivid it was like a brand. Finally, he just turned the lights off, one by one, plunging the shop into darkness, and stepped out into a night that felt profoundly, unchangeably different.