Page 27 of High Season

The funeral was held in England, which felt like a huge insult to Josie.

After all those years of working herself to the bone, trying to build a life for them on the Azure Coast, Patricia Jackson had ended up cremated in a squat brick building next to a Kent A-road on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.

Gray skies; triangle sandwiches and sausage rolls; a wake held at a working men’s club.

Josie hadn’t spoken to many people there. She sat in the corner with a paper plate in her lap, finding it easy to not meet anyone’s eye. It turned out that nobody really wanted to talk to her either.

It was only afterward, when just she and Calvin were left, that he collapsed into her arms, holding her tightly. It was the first time all day that Josie was glad she came.

They spoke more, after that: Josie started to call her brother, just to chat. Sometimes about nothing in particular. Sometimes about their mother, or people that they both used to know. Sometimes, about that summer.

Talking to Calvin, Josie’s recollections of the childhood she spent by the sea began to pull at her in a way they hadn’t in years.

Good memories began overwriting some of the bad ones.

Hours spent on the beach. The rare afternoons when Patricia was off work, and they would take a picnic down to the sand.

The slow, sleepy way those days seemed to unfold, the sun tracking their progress across the sky.

Josie grew sick of the city, and the fact that she never seemed to see the sun.

She missed her mother in a way that she had never imagined she could.

Josie wanted to go home, and for the first time in years, she felt like she knew where that was.

Josie almost cancels on Nic that night.

Their preplanned date feels pointless now. She feels foolish for even letting herself imagine that she might have been able to go on a second date with someone. That she might be able to mimic the rhythms of an ordinary life, when her life is so far from ordinary.

She knows now that she will have to leave soon, and she will forget about Nic, and she cannot stand the thought of pretending otherwise. Pretending that this is the start of something, rather than the end.

But then, she thinks of how, years ago, she, Hannah, and Nic would borrow Hannah’s parents’ boat off-season.

How they would take sandwiches and cans of sugary drinks and spend the entire day diving, coming up with salt in their hair and sun on the back of their necks.

She remembers the peace of the water, the feeling that she would sometimes get when she was breathing beneath the sea. Impossibility and wonder all at once.

By the time Josie arrives, the beach is quiet, the crowds cleared out. Only a few stragglers remain, cracking open bottles of beer, pulling T-shirts over their swimming costumes as the heat bleeds out of the day.

“You look good,” Nic says, even though Josie has opted for a baseball cap and one of Calvin’s oversized T-shirts pulled over a borrowed wetsuit, the closest thing she could muster to a disguise.

He leans down to kiss her on the cheek, and Josie feels a heat in her face.

The fact that they didn’t sleep together last night—didn’t even kiss—hangs in the air between them.

She briefly imagines how things might have gone, if they hadn’t bumped into Nina Drayton.

The dance between the kitchen and the bedroom, the anticipation, the flirtation, the moment when their bodies finally touched.

She imagines how this morning might have been. The awkwardness of waking up next to a stranger. She knows it so well: the sense that somebody badly wants you to leave. The next-day understanding that you have nothing more to say to each other, the hazy magic of the night before turned to dust.

Or, she dares to imagine, there might have been the rare, tentative delight of waking up next to someone and feeling the start of something, rather than the end.

They would, perhaps, have sat outside drinking coffee together, a little embarrassed, a little excited.

Touching each other whenever they could.

Letting their fingers linger when Josie handed Nic a mug.

A brush of his hand against her waist. Her foot making idle contact with his leg.

Instead, Nic’s lips bump against her skin, the kiss misjudged, and Josie feels a flush of awkwardness. As if she imagined the crackle of something between them last night, the way the air felt tight and steeped with promise and ease.

“You don’t look very ready for diving,” she says, pulling back, self-conscious.

He’s wearing a loose-fitting shirt, a pair of board shorts. He grins, looking slightly bashful.

“Actually,” he says. “That’s part of the surprise.”

“I hate surprises.”

“Well, I think you might like this one.”

He reaches out and takes her hand, the unexpected contact making her flinch.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you at the boat.”

As they cross the beach to the small dock, Josie thinks how strange they must look together: she dressed for a dive, he as if going out for drinks. She is agonizingly aware of the glances that they must be attracting.

“There’s a lot of people around,” she says warily.

“Don’t worry,” Nic says. “We’re going somewhere completely private.”

He squeezes her hand.

“We’re almost there. In fact, if you just look that way…”

She recognizes the boat at once. The same one that Hannah’s parents used to take tourists out on, all those years ago, her father’s pride and joy, looking a little more run-down now, but unmistakably the same.

Hannah hadn’t been allowed to drive it, and the three of them had taken the smaller, scrappier speedboat out when they were kids.

But now, Nic proudly extends one hand to guide her aboard.

“Ladies first,” he says.

“Do we really need the big boat, for just the two of us?” Josie asks, embarrassed by the extravagance.

He laughs.

“It’s my boat now,” he says. “Came with the territory, when I took the business over. Besides. I wanted tonight to be special.”

“Oh?”

He grins at her.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

He leads her to the front of the boat where the bow stretches out toward the sea. An unbroken view of the amber-colored sky, the water reflecting back the yellow-red glow.

“Surprise,” he says, his voice soft, close to her ear.

There, spread out in front of them, is a picnic blanket. A hamper. A bottle of champagne, two glasses waiting next to an ice bucket. A bowl of strawberries. A beautiful, perfect setup for a date. The most romantic thing that anyone has ever done for Josie.

The sight of it makes her heart sink.

“Do you like it?” he says.

He sounds so pleased with himself, so excited.

“It’s—”

“I know it’s a bit clichéd, strawberries and champagne and all that stuff. But I thought after the disaster that our first date turned into, I wanted to push the boat out. No pun intended.”

“Nic, it’s—”

“And we can always go diving another time. But I just thought, for tonight—”

“Nic.”

She says it too loudly, too sharply. He stops talking, his mouth still open, a hopeful smile still hovering on his lips.

“It’s too much,” she says.

He pauses, looking down at the picnic and then back up at her.

“Is it the champagne?” he says with a small wince. “Honestly, it’s only one of the cheap ones. I didn’t spend a fortune on it.”

“It’s not the champagne, it’s…”

Her skin feels too hot, and she wonders if she caught the sun earlier. She gestures toward the picture-perfect setup.

“It’s all of it,” she says. “The whole thing. It’s…”

She’s struggling to find the words. Struggling to put it in a way that won’t hurt him.

“Well. This is something that you do for someone that you really like.”

“But I do—”

“No.” She holds her palms flat out toward him. “Don’t say it.”

“I…” He looks again between the picnic blanket and Josie, as if searching for a response.

As if there’s something fundamental that he’s missed, some answer that might be hiding behind the bowl of strawberries.

“I don’t understand,” he says at last. “I thought we had a good time last night. I thought we had a lot of fun. I thought that if Nina hadn’t turned up…

well. It felt like it was maybe going somewhere. ”

“You’re right,” Josie says. There’s something heavy and solid in her throat. “You don’t understand.”

The sea is calm, but still she feels her legs brace as if prepared for a great wave.

“I can’t do this.”

“The picnic? Or this?” He gestures one hand between them both.

“Any of it,” she says. “I don’t know what you want from me, but it’s too much.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” he says. “I just thought that we clicked. I thought this seemed like something that could go somewhere. That maybe we could just see where it goes—”

“But that’s exactly the problem. I don’t have the luxury of being able to just see where things go. ”

Josie closes her eyes, briefly, and takes a deep breath in. When she opens them, he’s still there, still looking at her, forehead furrowed.

“You don’t understand what my life is like, Nic. It’s not like yours, or Gabby’s, or Calvin’s, or anyone else’s. I can never just see where things go, because they always, always go wrong, in the end.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you want more from me than I can give, Nic. I can’t do relationships.

I can’t do falling in love, or thinking about the future, because in the end, I always have to leave.

You’ll end up hating me, and I’ll end up having my heart broken.

It’s just how it is. It’s how it always has been, for me. ”

He doesn’t say anything. His mouth, poised open as if ready to leap in with a defense, shuts.

“I think I should be getting back,” Josie says quietly.

She sees him swallow, the bob of his throat.

“If that’s what you want to do,” he says. “I’m not going to stop you.”

“Fine.”

“Great.”

“It’s not you, Nic, really. It’s me.”

It’s always me, she thinks. Always ruining things. Always hurting anyone who comes close.

He’s already turned away from her. He starts to gather up the picnic blanket, packing the champagne back into the hamper.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She isn’t sure that he hears her.

She turns and walks away.

She is almost certain that she will never see Nic again.