Page 36 of Enemies to Lovers

It’s largely agreed that nobody wants to eat before swimming in case it makes them sink, as per the old wives’ tale, and so we put on our snorkels and masks and flippers, hooting with laughter at the ridiculousness of it.

‘Oh my god, Michael! Take a picture,’ Mum insists before we all go in.

‘God,’ complains Kate, ‘I don’t know if I can walk on sand to where you are.’ She’s down by the water’s edge, and has to waddle towards us in exaggerated steps because of her flippers, bow-legged and rocking left and right.

‘You look a right muppet!’ Laurie teases, and Jamie hits his arm.

‘Too right,’ nods Kate, acknowledging Jamie’s objection to Laurie’s words. ‘See? Jamie knows you’re sailing close to the wind, calling me a muppet.’

‘Yeah,’ defends Laurie. ‘But you’remymuppet.’ He holds out a hand and steps towards her, pulling her in for a bear hug. ‘My sexy, sexy muppet,’ he nuzzles into her neck, and Alex pushes between them, separating them, as he complains, ‘Okay, that’s enough foreplay here, thank you.’

Jamie slips in next to Alex, leaving me to stand beside him on the end.

‘Closer!’ Mum says, art-directing the shot from Dad’s side. ‘Like you’ve actually met before, darlings …’

I take a small step so I’m closer to Jamie, and then another when Mum insists. And then I feel his palm onmy lower back as he snakes his arm around me, and I’m so shocked by the intimacy of it that I squeal.

‘You all right over there?’ asks Kate, leaning forward and talking across everyone’s chests.

‘Yes, yes,’ I sing-song. ‘Sorry. I thought I felt a spider.’

For the next photo, Jamie’s palm loiters away from my bare back, and when we’re done and Mum is satisfied, he mutters, ‘Sorry.’ I murmur something back about it being fine, and we wade out into the water one by one, kicking off into the deep blue sea.

It’s beautiful. The water is so clear that you can see loads, and as we pad out and the water gets deeper, the fish become more colourful: flat ones with stripes, big fat ones in oranges and reds, and shoals of tiny little minnow-type things that travel together like an undulating, shimmering cloud. The water is super-calm, and for a while I open my arms and legs so that I float, letting myself be carried by it as I pretend I’m just another fish, minding her own business.

‘Ouch!’

I’m under the water, so as the shriek leaves my mouth, it makes me swallow a lungful of salt water, which makes me spit and splutter, which makes me take my head out of the water so that I can actually breathe. What the hell?

A dark shadow passes my eye-line and scares the living shit out of me, so I lurch towards the nearest rocks peeking out of the sea, throwing myself on them beforeI get eaten alive and bashing my elbow so hard that the skin splits and I start bleeding all down myself.

‘Dammit,’ I say, trying to ignore the raging sting in the very same arm that I have to use to pull myself up, out of the water. I’ve ended up right on the very edge of the peninsula that I promised I wouldn’t swim out to.

And so has Jamie.

‘Jesus, Flo!’ he says, bobbing out of the water. ‘Why the hell have you come out this far?’

I dart my eyes across the water and realise the dark shadow was him – it was Jamie.

‘You scared me half to death,’ I yell by way of reply. ‘I thought you were a shark!’

Jamie reaches up to the rock and pulls himself out of the water with a lot more ease and grace than I did. He pulls off his mask and snorkel and drops them onto the flattest bit of earth, and sits there, panting.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask, confused.

‘No, I’m not okay! Flo, do you have any idea how dangerous it is out here? We literally all talked about it twenty minutes ago.’

I squint and look out into the direction we came from.

‘You’ve come out way too far,’ Jamie continues. ‘I kept waiting for you to swim back towards us, but you didn’t; you kept being carried by the current and you didn’t even notice.’

I’ve never seen Jamie like this. He islivid.Absolutely livid.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just …’ I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Do I really want to admit to having been pretending I was a fish? I change tack. ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘you didn’t need to follow me.’

‘Well,’ Jamie counters, ‘I did, didn’t I? What if something happened?’

I bat back, ‘Because I can’t look after myself?’

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