Mia was already asleep. He lay listening to the faint murmur of her breath and the crickets singing in the undergrowth beyond the tent. What Finn loved about camping was that life moved at a slower pace. A simple meal took longer to prepare; a bed for the night had to be erected and then dismantled; a shower and change of clothes became a luxury rather than a daily routine. He took more time to absorb the sounds, smells and rhythm of a place, and to pay attention to what he was thinking.
Mia shifted, her hand slipping from her stomach and coming to rest on his forearm. He felt the heat from her skin against his. He could have moved his arm from beneath hers, yet he remained still. Unchecked in the darkness, he found his thoughts straying to a summer’s evening when he and Mia were 16 years old.
They were at a gig watching an American punk band called Thaw, who they’d been lobbying to see for months. Mia had worn a pair of pale jeans ripped across her thighs that she’d bought from a second-hand shop called Hobos. She’d painted silver eyeliner in sharp flicks at the edges of her eyes and brushed something on her cheekbones that made them shimmer. She looked older than the bare-faced girl he’d helped to reel in a mackerel earlier in the day, and the transformation both unsettled and appealed to him.
The band met all their expectations: the arena was pulsing with energy, the mosh pit was frenetic and with each song the crowd grew wilder. Mia was effervescent, dancing wildly with her hands thrown skyward. She turned and shouted something to a burly man with a thick neck who had been standing behind them. The man cupped his hands together and, before Finn realized what was happening, he watched Mia place her foot in the sweaty palms and be tossed into the air. Her body arched backwards, her arms outstretched at her sides like open wings, and she was caught by a sea of hands, crowd surfing over the tops of people’s heads.
The black Beastie Boys T-shirt she wore – one she and Finn shared as they could only afford one between them – rode up her waist exposing her smooth, slender stomach. The lighting crew picked out this ethereal girl with her wave of dark hair and spotlighted her journey to the front. A group of men, sweating heavily and thumping their fists in the air, whistled and catcalled at her. Every inch of Finn’s body tensed at their remarks, and he imagined beating a path through the audience and shutting them up.
The crowd continued to buck and writhe, illuminated by brilliant blue and white laser lights, and he strained to keep Mia in sight. Ducking to the side of a lanky man, he was able to spot the bouncers pulling her over the safety barrier. He didn’t know how she’d find her way back to him and four more songs were belted out before he saw her.
Squeezing through an impossibly tight gap, she stood before him, her cheeks flushed, her forehead glistening with sweat.
‘Mia!’
As the band launched into their final track, the audience surged forward, pinning her against him. Instinctively, he gripped her waist fearing she could slip beneath their feet. Thrust together he felt the heat of her midriff through her damp T-shirt. Unfazed by the crowd, which roared beneath a thick haze of smoke, Mia placed her hands around Finn’s face and kissed him briefly on the lips.
The crowd heaved backwards; Mia slipped free from his hands. She turned towards the band and carried on swaying and rocking. Finn remained rooted to the spot, while a thousand other people danced on.
There are key incidents in everyone’s history – pivotal points on which the axis of life can swivel, and a seemingly innocuous action can flip the entire direction of one’s fate. For Finn, that kiss changed everything. Mia, the girl he’d always knocked around with, became an enigma to him overnight. At school the next day, every ordinary interaction – holding a test tube while Mia added magnesium ribbon, eating ham sandwiches together on the bench beneath a sycamore tree, sharing a pair of earphones on the bus ride home – became fused with his new desire. It was as if he’d stepped out of his body and into someone else’s. He was so unnerved by this shift that he bunked off the final two days of term to give himself space to think.
When school broke up for the summer, Mia cycled to his house with her tent, sleeping bag and a bottle of vodka she’d bribed Katie into buying, and told him they were going camping in the forest that backed onto the cliffs. He could think of no excuse good enough to refuse, so he grabbed his sleeping bag and followed.
That evening, an unforecast downpour drove them into the tent before dusk. They played cards and drank vodka, and Finn stole furtive glances at Mia and wondered how he’d never before noticed that her eyes were the lush green of emeralds. Once the rain stopped, they unzipped the tent onto the dark forest steeped in a rich, earthy smell. They stood in the damp heather, the hems of their jeans turning sodden, and felt drunk and exuberant. The moon that night, a perfect silver disc, looked so spectacular that for no reason at all, Finn howled like a wolf. Mia giggled and then howled, too.
In the seventy-two hours since Mia had kissed Finn, he’d thought constantly of how it would feel to kiss her back. Properly. ‘Mia,’ he said, moving in front of her unsteadily. She looked at him, still grinning. She wore no make-up, and in the moonlight her skin looked luminous. ‘God, you’re so beautiful!’ he said suddenly. Then he reached a hand to her cheek and leant forward to kiss her.
Moments before his lips reached hers, Mia pulled back.
‘Finn!’ She laughed, thumping his chest. ‘I thought you were being serious for a second! Don’t weird me out!’
Finn had bent forward, pretending to laugh too, when actually it felt as though he’d taken a punch in the gut.
He didn’t see her for three weeks after that as he joined his family on holiday in northern France. On that trip, Finn lost his virginity to a seventeen-year-old girl named Ambré, who was working as a cleaner in the park where they stayed. She wore a pink bra and no pants beneath her uniform, and invited Finn to her caravan each afternoon on her three-o’clock break. While he was genuinely thrilled by the arrangement, it gradually exposed the depth of his feelings for Mia. He not only yearned to touch or kiss her in the way he was doing with Ambré, he also missed other things, like the sound of her laughter, or the way she’d bite the tip of her thumbnail when she was concentrating, or the determination in her voice when she’d tell him, ‘I can do this.’ He missed Mia’s friendship – and wasn’t prepared to risk that again.
When he returned home, he and Mia slipped back into their old routine, the night in the forest never mentioned again. A chorus of other girls, and later women, quietened his infatuation and he was grateful that their friendship returned to its usual tune. Yet today, when Mia had stripped to her underwear at the beach, revealing her exquisite slender body, a low note of desire had been struck and had resonated in his thoughts in the hours since.
He knew the great risk of allowing that forbidden note to sound louder, so Finn carefully eased his arm from beneath her hand and, reluctantly, rolled away.
California, March
Katie pulled down the beige plastic blind of the aeroplane window, closing out the view. She didn’t need to see that they were flying above the clouds, that the ocean was thirty thousand feet below them, or that the white wings of a Boeing 747 were the only thing keeping them from spiralling down to earth.
The first time Katie flew, she had clutched the armrests so hard that her knuckles turned white. Beside her, Mia’s eyes had been wide, her pupils dilated, with what Katie had first imagined to be fear but then, as she’d watched the smile break over her face, recognized to be awe. She couldn’t understand