Page 42 of High Season
He turned to look at her, and his face was lit up by the sun.
“I like being here with you.”
Hannah pulled up the anchor and taxied the boat out farther. The water softened, waves passing beneath them in slow swells. They lay on their backs so that their heads were close together, their faces turned up toward the fading pinks and oranges of the sky.
“I can see why you enjoy this,” Blake said.
“The boat?”
“Diving.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call that diving,” Hannah said, testing how it felt to tease him.
He laughed, and the sound felt like liquid gold in her stomach.
“Do you come out every day?”
“Not every day,” she said. “Sometimes it feels too much like work. It’s something I have to do, to help my parents out.”
She didn’t tell him how, as much as she loved diving, it often felt like a reminder of all the things she didn’t have, the precarious line they were always walking. The days when her parents canceled trips because not enough people signed up, when the bell over the shop door never rang.
“I get that,” Blake said. “Sometimes I feel like so much of my life is about who my parents are. Like who I was going to be was already decided, before I was born. Like I never had a choice.”
Hannah trailed her fingers against the surface of the water, considering this. She wouldn’t mind not having a choice, if it meant she were a Drayton. If she could live in the pink house, and have staff, and never have to worry about money.
“What would you want to do?” she said. “If you had the choice?”
“Honestly?” Blake said. “If I had the choice, I wouldn’t have been born a Drayton in the first place.”
He shifted so that he was propped up on one elbow.
“People think it’s great,” he said. “This life. They think they would want the money and the attention. But they have no idea what it’s like having the legendary Evelyn Drayton as a mother.”
There was a twist behind his words, something sharp and bitter.
“Right,” said Hannah carefully. “She’s a bit… well. She’s not your typical mum.”
Blake snorted at this.
“That’s an understatement,” he said. “And it’s not fun, you know? Having all the guys at school know who your mum’s slept with. Knowing that their parents gossip about us. Laugh at us. Think we’re trash, because we’re stillnewmoney, even though my granddad made his fortune backin the fifties. But we don’t have houses and a family name that goes back generations. So—as far as they’re concerned—my mum is some dumb heiress whose only notable achievement is pissing away our grandfather’s cash.”
Hannah had never heard him talk like this. It was as though that moment beneath the water—that flash of vulnerability she saw in his eyes—had carved something out of him. Created an open hollow that he now spoke to fill.
Blake flashed a sideways look at Hannah, and seemed to catch her surprise.
“You didn’t know that she’s running out of money?” he said. “She’s always been running out of money, as long as I can remember, and yet she can’t stop spending it. Somehow, every time we’re in crisis, she conjures up a miracle.”
He leaned back again now, so that he was no longer looking at Hannah. So that his face was tilted toward the sky.
“So I guess, in answer to your question, I would choose to be someone different entirely,” he said. “Someone from a good family. Whose surname isn’t a joke to people. Someone who has stability. Actualmoney, not just pots of dwindling assets. People think they want to be part of our world. That’s what you want, right? But you have to understand that we’re not in that world either. Not really. I’m on the outside as much as you are. We don’t belong any more than you do.”
Hannah almost flinched at that. She had been so careful to play it cool. Never to let Blake know how badly, how desperately, she wanted to be like him.
And yet…
Blake thought that they were alike. He was wrong, of course; she knew that. Whatever subtle class differences existed between Blake and the people he went to boarding school and on skiing trips with were infinitesimally small compared with the vast gap between his life and hers. The fact that Blake could even notice the intricate hierarchies within his social sphere only proved how deeply embedded in it he was.
But what Hannah really heard was that he thought they hadsomething profound and important in common. Something that really, truly seemed to matter to him.
