Page 51 of High Season
“Hey.” Gabby pulls Josie close so that she can speak in her ear. Her eyes are shiny. “Calvin and I were talking before we came out. The girl who does the afternoon shift at the café is leaving next month. I was going to advertise, but—well. You need a job, right?”
Josie leans back. They are still swaying to the music, Gabby grinning and glowing, Josie temporarily dazed.
This could be her life, Josie thinks, with a flash of clarity. Spending the day at the café, in a job that she likes, where the work is hard and simple and thoughtless and honest. Coming down to the beach with a group of friends, people who know her. Care about her. Maybe even a boyfriend, someone who loves her in a straightforward, undemanding way. Evenings spent drinking and laughing. The past becoming a distant thing.
The thought has not quite fully formed before Josie trips, Gabby’s borrowed dress tangled up around her legs. The two women collapse onto the sand, squealing and clutching at each other, a giggling heap of limbs.
“Alright, you guys.” Calvin is there before they can stagger back to their feet, one arm looped beneath Gabby’s to pull her up. “Think that you might have had enough to drink.”
“But we’re having so muchfun,” protests Gabby.
Then Nic is there, too, his hand gripping Josie’s, pulling her up. His touch sends a flicker across the surface of her skin, and when she meets his eye, they both hold the gaze for just longer than is necessary.
“Actually,” says Josie. “I am kind of tired. Maybe we should head home.”
“How about it, Nic?” Calvin says, slapping him on the back. “Nightcap back at ours?”
There’s a beat before Nic answers. A promise of what could come passing between him and Josie. The start of something. The startling optimism of their desire. Josie has learned not to expect anything from anyone. She has learned not to dream, but just now, she does. Just now, she lets herself lean into the hope.
“Yeah,” Nic says. “I think that maybe I will.”
They walk slowly, as if they have nowhere in the world to be.
Gabby and Calvin go on ahead, and Nic and Josie lag behind talking, the ambling, easy chatter of two people who’ve been drinking for the past two hours. Whose mouths are freed up, the intimacy of alcohol between them.
Josie tells Nic about how once, when she was in Paris, she shoplifted a handbag from a designer shop where the assistants were snooty and rude to her, and all of a sudden, the story feels funny rather than shameful, Nic laughing and letting out an impressed whistle and saying that she’s basically an anti-capitalism activist. He tells her about a time when he slipped a bag of sweets into his pocket in a supermarket as a kid, and his dad marched him back to apologize later that day, and Josie feels genuinely sorry for the little boy that she imagines, embarrassed and repentant, and has an overwhelming urge to pull Nic in for a hug.
“I’m glad you came back,” Nic says, when they’re close to the house. “You feel like you belong here, you know?”
To Josie, who has not felt as if she belongs anywhere for a very long time, this feels like the kindest thing he could have possibly said.
Their fingers brush against each other as they turn onto the road leading up to the house, and Josie could swear that she feels an actual crackle of static pass between them. The promise of what comes next is palpable, electric. She is thinking of Nic touching her. Kissing her. She is, with this tiny, almost imperceptible moment of contact, mapping out an entire future for them.
She turns her face up toward his, wondering if this is it. If Nic might kiss her, right here in the street.
But Nic is not looking at her.
Instead his forehead is creased, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance. His steps slow.
“Wait a second,” he says. “Is that…?”
His expression reconfigures, the shock sketched across his face.
“Oh shit,” he says. “I think that’s Nina Drayton.”
SIXTEEN
2024
Nina knew that Ryan would be concerned when she suggested staying.
They were in Nina’s childhood bedroom with its fresh white sheets and its cool stone walls, Nina’s running gear discarded on the floor. She saw Ryan’s eyes twitch toward the crumpled pile of leggings, wary, when she called him in. He would know, of course, that something must be wrong. Nina would never leave anything untidy. Disorder was not in Nina’s nature.
“I just don’t think there’s any point flying back today,” she said. “You already said that work doesn’t need you in this week. And we’re here now. Why not stay the weekend?”
“But the flights are already booked.”
“We can change them. And look—” She took a deep breath in, ready to play her trump card. “Mum’s birthday party is Saturday night. You know how much it means to her. We can stay for that, and go back early on Sunday.”
