He slipped down beside me. We kissed for a long time. I touched him, I made him touch me. Everywhere, and there. I don’t care, I don’t care about anything else.
I love him.
Those three words, over and over, written with such passion that they scored the underlying pages.
Lucas was probably drunk, May knew that. She was certainly drunk herself. None of it mattered. Behind his head, where the glimmer of his hair bisected the sky, she could see an arc of cold stars. May closed her eyes to shut them out. She leaned forward, dipping into space, swimming through nowhere until her mouth connected with his. Warm, solid and a surprised hiss of indrawn breath. She pressed closer, willing him with all of herself not to recoil.
There was a surge of delight when he began to kiss her back. She sucked the inside of her cheeks to stop her lips curving in triumph. It was not a matter of scraped mouths and clashing teeth, which was all she had known of kissing before. It became simple and imperative, like drinking when you were thirsty. Only it made you thirstier still. It wouldn’t be enough, even if you drank until the water ran out of your mouth.
Lucas stretched himself on the ground in the shelter of the hollow and drew May down in the circle of his arms. She measured herself against him, gleefully registering soft and hard. His hand found a breast. ‘How old did you say you were?’
‘Uh, fifteen, nearly sixteen.’ He had forgotten; she had told him the truth once before.
‘Jesus.’ He breathed the word into her mouth but he didn’t lift his hand. His fingers teased in a slow circle so that her back arched upwards to meet him as he leaned over her.
She opened her eyes and saw the stars again. Don’t move, she warned them. Stay frozen like this for ever.
Lucas’s long leg rested over her hip now. His hand was in her hair, she was fastened to him. There was a trace of sourness in his mouth. His fingers were busy at her shirt front.
I touched him everywhere, and there.
May knew what she should do. Lightly, with her breath locked in her chest, she trailed her fingers down to the belt of his jeans. Don’t let me fumble, she prayed.
Was this what Doone had done?
The leather tongue was awkward, clamped in the buckle’s ridges. One-handed, Lucas undid it for her. A minute’s exploration yielded folds of cloth, then what she had expected to find. Only more solid than in her imaginings and somehow more brutal.
She didn’t know what to do now. She had forgotten how to breathe and her stomach was churning. Her mouth dried and she drew her head back a fraction. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a movement between the trees. She struggled to sit upright as words broke out of her mouth. ‘There’s someone there.’
Lucas lifted himself on one elbow and scanned the silent woodland. ‘No, there isn’t. There’s nobody.’
‘Someone was watching us.’
The note in her voice made him shield her with his arms. He found that she was shivering. ‘It’s okay. C’mon, look. We shouldn’t be doing this, anyway. I’m really sorry.’
Whatever it was must have been in her imagination. May threw herself down again into the mould-scents of dead leaves, knowing the thread was broken, torn between despair and relief. Lucas lay back too and held her against him. He had done up his jeans and now he began to button her shirt for her.
‘Don’t be kind,’ she begged. ‘I don’t want you to be kind.’
A door had opened on to a new landscape and had slammed shut again before she had a chance to take in the view.
He smoothed her hair, tidying strands of it away from her open mouth, the embodiment of kindness. ‘Why not? You’re really nice, aren’t you? Much nicer than your sister.’
The clarity had all gone. Her face felt swollen and a tide of nausea and longing and revulsion swelled inside her. She lay still in order to contain it, and made herself listen to the sea and the minute crackling and sighing of the woodland. She was wrung out by this confusion of the explicable and the unknown. After a while Lucas’s hand faltered, then stopped in mid-stroke of her hair. From the rhythm of his breathing she could tell he was falling asleep. ‘Talk to me. Tell me about something.’
‘Sure.’ His voice was blurred. ‘Tell you about what?’
‘Last year.’
‘Uh. What about it?’ He was yawning under his breath. There was no shadow, no weight pressing on him – there couldn’t be.
‘Doone. Will you tell me what she was like?’
They were lying so close that his twitch of surprise passed straight into her. ‘Doone, why? She was kind of just a kid. I didn’t really know her. It was sad when she drowned but – you know, it was an accident. It was exactly a year ago, come to think of it.’
‘I know,’ May said.
I made him touch me. Everywhere, and there.
Only now she understood that somewhere along the way, somehow, she must have made a miscalculation. Lucas wasn’t hiding anything, he couldn’t be. He wasn’t clever enough to act so convincingly. His detachment was genuine. Whoever he had been for Doone, it couldn’t have been Lucas.
The certainty made her feel suddenly lighter. They were separate after all, the two of them – what she knew now wasn’t what Doone had also known. Perhaps none of it was significant, none of Elizabeth’s disturbing old stories, the island, the pale-faced woman. Lying down with Lucas it was easy to dispel the thoughts of them. What was real and yet fantastical was here and now. The ribbed collar of his faded sweatshirt that curled under her cheek. The rivets on the pockets of his jeans revealed to her fingertips, the faint grease scent of his hair. Finding herself in Ivy’s place. Love lodged itself uncomfortably beneath May’s breastbone like a lump of undigested dough. ‘What did you do a year ago tonight?’
‘Pittsharbor Day? Let’s think. Softball, like today, and the girl I was with didn’t get in a snit about it like your sister. We swam, I think, and drove over to the Star Bar for a burger. Yeah, that’s right, I remember Beth got carded. There were a bunch of people over there, it was a good night.’
‘Did you see Doone?’
‘No, of course not. In the afternoon I saw her on the church green, when I went up there for a half hour. I didn’t speak to her or anything and I only remember seeing her then because of what happened the next day. What is all of this?’
There was the choice of telling him, or keeping it zipped within herself. Either he would think she was nuts, with her diaries and codes and fears of slipping out of herself and into someone who was dead, or else she was normal, like everyone else. Or maybe even better than that, in the way Ivy always managed to be. ‘Nothing,’ she managed to say. ‘I just feel sad about her. You know I’m sleeping in her bedroom?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
She pressed on, knowing that she should be quiet. ‘I wondered if people, all of you who were at the beach last summer, can still see her in your memories? Like today, if remembering the way she was last year somehow gets overlaid on this day that’s empty of her, so it seems like she is still here?’
Lucas thought about it, but not for very long. He sounded bored. ‘I guess if you knew her at all, you might feel something like that.’ And beneath May’s cheek his shoulder twitched in dismissal. She felt a tiny flake break loose from the block of her admiration for him and drift away into a space of disappointment.
The recklessness that had come after the wine was diminishing too. There was a cramp in the arm that lay buckled underneath her and she didn’t want to move her legs in case it made him let go of her. She forced herself to lie completely still instead, thinking,