Page 14 of High Season
“Anyway,” said Hannah, breaking it. “I should probably go and find Josie.”
“I’ll come with you.” Blake stood up. “Two pairs of eyes are better than one, right?”
“Bro,” said Barnaby, the upper-class cut of his accent dragging against the word. “I thought we were gonna go get that vodka?”
“I’ll get it on the way back,” Blake said. “Chill.”
He turned to Hannah.
“Come on then, H,” he said. “Let’s go and find your friend and my elusive sister.”
Blake offered to carry the sandwiches. It left Hannah unsure what to do with her hands. They felt ungainly swinging next to her sides, hanging gorilla-like, drawing attention to her long limbs, the fact that she was half an inch taller than Blake. She folded them across her chest, but then remembered that she had read a magazine segment by a body language expert saying that doing so would make her look hostile and unapproachable. In the end, she settled for burying them in the pockets of her denim shorts as they circled the ground floor of the house.
“They were supposed to be by the pool,” she said.
“Probably Nina, leading Josie astray,” said Blake, and Hannah had to glance up to check that he was joking.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry about them. Tamara and Barnaby. They think they’re being funny, but—”
“It’s fine,” said Hannah, too quickly. “I can take a joke.”
“But they shouldn’t take the piss out of you like that,” he said.
The words, said so easily, confirmed Hannah’s fears. That they were, in fact, mocking her. She tried not to let her face show the hurt scrabbling to the surface.
“Barnaby’s always been kind of a dick,” Blake continued, not noticing. “But I dunno what’s going on with Tamara lately. Usually I know exactly what she’s thinking, but she’s different this summer.”
They rounded out of the patio doors and onto the terrace. Even though Hannah had spent years going in and out of this house, the beauty of it never lessened. The deep blue glow of the swimming pool. The sea, pink with twilight, glinting with the last traces of sun. Guests had begun to dip their feet in the pool, their trouser legs rolled up, silk skirts spooling around thighs. The rattle of ice in a cocktail shaker. The distant pop of a champagne cork.
“Down here,” said Blake.
His hand reached out and brushed the inward curve of Hannah’s spine so lightly that it could have been a breeze, the shifting of clothes against her skin. She shivered, in spite of the warmth of the night. Shewas remembering last summer, a day when Blake had invited her and Josie down to the beach with him and his friends for the first time. How they had cracked open bottles of beer with their perfect, dentist-straightened teeth. Grilled hamburgers on disposable barbecues and eaten them on plain white buns with squirts of ketchup, sand peppering each mouthful.
How they had climbed up the cliffs and dive-bombed into the water. How she and Blake had jumped at the same time, their fingertips stretched out toward each other, as if trying to touch.
How, in that dark, tumbling moment after submersion—that second of panic when your body wants to fight for the surface but isn’t sure which way is up—his hand caught hers. All of a sudden, the water had cleared, and she had seen him, his face close, the breath that escaped him tangling up with hers, pockets of water rising up toward the light together.
For a moment, it was just them. They were the only people in the world.
And then, he had let go of her hand. Kicked up toward the world above, his body rising toward the shattered light of the sun.
When Hannah had surfaced, Blake was laughing. Splashing. He flipped onto his back and swam quickly and easily over to where his friends were waiting for him. The moment was over so fast, but Hannah could still feel it. His hand. His thigh brushing up against hers.
She thought about that moment often. All through last summer, when she would see Blake occasionally, with his friends or at the pink house, and both of them would act as if nothing had happened. In September, when the Draytons went back to London, and she clung on to the memory of that moment while her parents worried about whether they could afford to keep the shop open for another year, what they would do if they had to sell. In spring, when the prospect of summer loomed back into view, and Hannah dared to let herself imagine what it might be like when Blake returned. To imagine other things—his hands against her skin. His body. Him, touching her in the way that she had only ever touched herself.
Somehow, Hannah never mentioned the moment she and Blakehad shared to Josie, even though they told each other everything. It felt private, somehow. Sacred. It was the warm hum in the pit of Hannah’s stomach when Josie teased her about having a crush on Blake. A secret that only she and he shared.
“Knew it,” he said, leaning over the balustrades at the edge of the terrace.
Peering up at them, crouched on a slope of grass below, Josie and Nina. Dolls strewn on the ground around them, resplendent in tulle party frocks.
“This is Nina’s favorite place right now,” Blake said.
“She didn’t want to be around all the people,” Josie shot back.
“I know that feeling,” said Blake.
He stepped back so that Josie and Nina disappeared from view, and held out the plate of sandwiches toward Hannah.
