The Cruise Entertainer

Okay so let me set the scene, because honestly this whole thing started with a fridge.

I'm Sylvia, I'm twenty-eight, and at the time this happened I was house-sitting for my friend Myra, who lives in this little cottage in the Lake District with a garden that wants to kill you. She's off in Portugal for a month and I'm a graphic designer who works from a laptop, so it made sense. Get out of the city, look after the cat, pretend my divorce is a fun adventure instead of a sad thing that happened when I was twenty-six. Two years ago, the split. Amicable, everyone says that, but still.

Anyway. Tuesday afternoon, a van pulls up to the cottage and a driver drops off this enormous box on the front step. Wine fridge. A big one. I hadn't ordered a wine fridge. I checked the label and the name on it was something like "G. Marsh" with a completely different address, but the house number was one digit off from Myra's, and the driver had already gone.

So I did the responsible thing, which was drag it next door. It weighed a ton, by the way! Whoever invented wine fridges clearly never had to shove one up a gravel path. It took me about ten minutes of grunting and rocking it back and forth, and by the time I got it through the gate of the lumberyard next door I was sweaty and furious and ready to yell at somebody.

The lumberyard is one of those open-air places with racks of timber everywhere and sawdust in the air. There was a man in the yard, mid thirties, big shoulders, flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was sanding something at a workbench when I shouted at him.

"Excuse me! Hello! Is this yours?" I smacked the box. "Your delivery driver left it at my house! The wrong house. Completely wrong house."

He looked up and he laughed. Not a rude laugh, a proper delighted laugh, like I'd shown up as entertainment. He wiped sawdust off his hands on a rag and came over.

"Well, that's embarrassing," he said. "That's the break room fridge. Been waiting on it for weeks. You hauled that all the way here yourself?"

"Through a gravel path and a gate that tries to take your ankles off, yes," I was still out of breath. "Somebody should tell your driver that numbers have more than one digit."

"That they do. I'm Gus, by the way." He stuck out his hand and then looked at it, still holding the rag, and put it away again. "Sorry, I'm covered in sawdust. Gus Marsh. This is my family's yard."

"Sylvia. I'm house-sitting next door for the month." And I shook his hand anyway, because his hand was clean enough where it counted and I wasn't going to make it weird.

"Right, Sylvia. You've earned a drink off this thing, honestly. Can I plug it in and make it up to you?"

And that is how I ended up following a stranger into his office trailer, which I want to point out is not something I usually do! But he was funny and the whole thing had a sort of absurd charm, a wine fridge as an apology. The trailer had a little break room at the back, kettle, chairs, and a wine fridge sitting there humming away like it had always lived there.

"Right," he said, opening it up. "Okay, slight problem. It needs a few hours to chill anything properly."

"You dragged me in here for warm wine?"

"I did not drag you in here. I invited you." He grinned and went to a cooler in the corner. "But I've got a bottle in here from the weekend that never got opened. We split it, we call it even, and you get to sit down after your heroic delivery."

"Fine. But I'm keeping the glass."

"Deal."

So we sat in the break room of a lumberyard on a Tuesday afternoon drinking wine out of actual glasses, which felt faintly illegal, and he told me about himself. Thirty-four, manages the yard, lives two villages over. And then he said this thing that made me put my glass down.

"I also do this side gig," he said, sort of embarrassed about it. "Cruise ship entertainer. Been doing it since I was twenty-three, on and off. Magic tricks, a bit of comedy, the whole thing."

"You're joking."

"I am completely serious. I do four shows a season. Sequins and everything."

"Sequins. I need to see this immediately. Show me a trick right now."

He laughed and got up, and I want to describe this properly because it was genuinely good. He asked to borrow my ring, and I took it off and gave it to him, and he did the whole patter about watching closely, and his hands moved fast, and then he put his fist out and told me to knock on it. I knocked. He opened his hand and my ring was gone.

"Where is it?" I grabbed his wrist. "Gus, where is my ring."

He turned my own hand over gently, and there it was, sitting in my palm. I had no idea when he'd done it. I never find out when people do that trick, it drives me mad, and this time was no different.

"That's cheating," I said. "You can't just put it in my hand."

"Magician's secret. I could tell you but then I'd have to do a second show." And he was still holding my hand, sort of lightly, from when he'd closed my fingers around the ring, and neither of us moved for a second. His thumb did this tiny thing across my knuckles, almost nothing, and I felt this little spark go off somewhere under my ribs. Playful, but pointed, if that makes sense.

"You're holding my hand," I said.

"Am I?" He looked down like he was only just noticing. "Well. Occupational hazard. I hold a lot of hands in my line of work."

"Do you now."

"Volunteers get nervous. I've learned to be gentle about it." He didn't let go, and I didn't pull away, and we both knew exactly what that meant and neither of us said it. "Sorry, that was probably smooth in my head."

"It was a bit smooth," I admitted. "It nearly worked, which is annoying."

He finally let go, and I put the ring back on, and we drank the rest of the bottle talking about nothing important. He asked about the house-sitting, I told him about the divorce in the light way you tell strangers, he told me he took the yard over when his dad got ill and the cruise thing is his one bit of nonsense he refuses to give up.

"My ex thought it was silly," he said, shrugging. "The sequins thing. But it's the only part of my week where I'm not counting boards or invoices."

"I liked my husband fine," I said. "That was the problem, actually. Fine is a terrible reason to stay."

"That's very fair." He refilled my glass without asking. "So what brings you back to life, then? Besides terrorizing delivery drivers."

"I don't know yet. That's sort of why I'm here. To find out." I looked at him over the glass. "Ask me again at the end of the month, maybe."

"Maybe I will." He smiled at me in a way that made my stomach do something unhelpful. "Come back Thursday. I'll have the fridge properly cold and a second bottle ready. And if you're lucky I'll do the trick with the cards."

"The cards. Oh, I'll be back for the cards."

I walked home feeling lighter than I had in months, which is a stupid thing to feel over a wine fridge and a man who does magic tricks, but there it is. Thursday. I already knew what I was going to wear.

Thursday came around faster than I expected, honestly. I spent Wednesday doing actual work in Myra's garden with my laptop balanced on a garden chair, sending off drafts to clients half-concentrated, because my brain kept wandering next door to a lumberyard. Which is ridiculous! I'm twenty-eight years old, I've been married and divorced, I know how attraction works, and there I was picking out a top like it mattered.

I wore the green one. It mattered.

I got there about four in the afternoon, and the fridge was humming away in the break room with a proper white wine in it, cold as promised. Gus had changed into a cleaner shirt, I noticed, which made me grin. "You dressed up," I said.

"This is my normal shirt."

"It has no sawdust on it. That's dressing up."

"Fair." He poured the wine and we clinked glasses, and he did the card trick first thing, which was annoyingly good again. Three cards, my free pick, and somehow the one I chose ended up folded in his shirt pocket before I'd even finished looking at it. I demanded to know how and he refused, obviously, and I threw a biscuit at him.

"You know what I've realised," I said, settling onto the wobbly break room chair with my feet up on a milk crate. "You must have a whole repertoire of this stuff. For charming passengers. Tricks, jokes, the little hand-holding thing. The full package."

"The little hand-holding thing is not part of the repertoire."

"It seemed part of the repertoire."

"It was improvised. One-off performance." He was grinning though, so he wasn't exactly suing for defamation. "But yes, alright, there's a