Free The Other Half of My Heart by Stephanie Butland Page B

little surprised by the sound of his voice. She thinks that, maybe, she bores him. When Roddy is with other people he seems to have a lot more to say. She looks up into his face and finds herself studying his mouth. It’s a bit too full to be properly handsome; twisted, slightly, by a small scar from an old fall, when he had bitten through his lip. It’s the most interesting mouth that Tina has ever seen. She goes back to her leather. Roddy was right: her hands, still steady, are not betraying her, although she is shaking inside at the attention, and at the idea that he is thinking about her.
    â€˜Did you hear what I said?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she risks a glance, ‘but I wasn’t sure what to say.’
    Roddy laughs, mellow and low. ‘My mother is always saying, “Roddy, if you’ve nothing to say, say nothing,” but I’ve never been able to. She’d love you.’
    Tina is glad when they go back to silence. But then:
    â€˜My father says that he can trust you more than he can trust anyone else who works here. He says because you’ve earned your place, he knows you mean it.’
    Tina feels her blushes spreading up from her neck. She wiggles her toes; Katrina read in a magazine that that’s a good way to stop yourself blushing, because it sends the blood to the other end of your body. Tina thinks it might be working. She cannot believe that she’s a topic of conversation around the Flood table, or that she has been so noticed, so praised. But then Roddy makes her blush again.
    â€˜I think you should be more confident than you are.’
    Tina finds her voice. ‘Why do you think I’m not confident? Being quiet isn’t the same as being unconfident, is it?’ This is something that Sam said about her, once, when her school report had said that she needed to have the confidence to speak up in the classroom. Her father had nodded and said, well, empty vessels make most noise, you know. And Alice had made a little pursed mouth and said, guilty as charged, and they had all laughed.
    â€˜True,’ Roddy says, then, ‘I suppose because everyone else pushes themselves forward you look as though you’re holding yourself back.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ Tina says. Roddy is partly correct. Tina also knows that she doesn’t have that spark, part courage, part instinct, that marks the great riders like him out from the ones like her. What she really wants to do is manage this yard, but she hasn’t met a yard manager yet who isn’t male, forty or fifty, and hasn’t had an accident that put paid to a serious riding career. She’s too in awe of Charlie to ask him what her chances are, and anyway, he always says that they’ll carry him off the farm in a box. She almost asks Roddy, then, because she thinks of him as a friend. But: we never talk, she reminds herself, this relationship is all in your head, he likes you because you don’t talk.
    And then Roddy changes direction.
    â€˜Have you always been travel sick?’ he asks.
    She has got the hang of travelling to events in the front of horseboxes and Land Rovers. She takes her tablets well beforehand, gets in, sits tight and stares at her hands, placed in her lap as though she’s holding the reins of the steadiest Shire there’s ever been. So long as she doesn’t look up, or try to talk, she should get there without being sick, although sometimes she retches with relief as soon as she feels the ground under her feet again.
    â€˜Always.’ One of Tina’s earliest memories is being stripped out of her travel clothes, washed, and stretching up her little arms to have a bridesmaid’s dress slid over her head by her mother, who had hugged her, kissed her head and said, it will get better, sweetheart, I promise. It hasn’t, really. She manages not to vomit, if she concentrates and medicates, but there’s the same feeling of roiling, the panic, the