Page 30 of High Season

One of the best things about where they lived, Hannah’s mum always said, was how easy it was to get fresh ingredients.

Crab caught straight out of the sea, salty mussels that she would douse in butter and garlic and box up for a picnic on top of the cliffs, their fingers greasy as they cracked open the shells.

They didn’t need expensive restaurants, her parents always told her.

They had the best view for free, the best food that they could make at home.

They had the best company, as long as they were with each other.

Maison de la Mer was the kind of restaurant Hannah’s parents would roll their eyes at. They’d driven past it before, with its sleek white facade, a windowless cube right on the coast.

“Flora and I found this place last time we were here,” Rocco said as they clambered out of the car. “Great food. You’ll enjoy it.”

“And where is her eminence tonight?”

Blake’s voice was light, but there was a bite behind it. Something Hannah didn’t quite recognize. Rocco simply laughed, patting his son on the shoulder.

“Now, then,” he said. “That’s a big word for a son of mine. Flora’s stayed home. It’s a long trip for Atticus and Aurora.”

“Me and Tamara used to do it when we were their age,” Blake said, but Rocco was already noisily greeting the ma?tre d’, shaking his hand like they were old friends.

The interior was dark, candlelit, even though it was still light outside, each table a dimly illuminated orb.

As she led them to their table, the waitress explained that the chef had deliberately decided to block off the sea view—the idea was to taste the ocean, rather than see it.

Taste, she said, was a more powerful sensation than sight.

Rocco nodded along, making small noises of appreciation.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Just genius.”

He ordered a bottle of red wine with three glasses, and nobody asked Hannah or Blake’s age.

Rocco Mae spoke like a man who expected to get exactly what he asked for.

Hannah wasn’t used to wine, and when she took a sip, she found the taste strange and metallic, an undertone of iron that made her think of a time that Josie had sliced her index finger on a rock and, without thinking, Hannah had put her mouth to the wound to stop the bleeding.

Rocco asked for oysters and then steak. Blake echoed his order, and Hannah wondered what the point of sitting in a windowless box was if you weren’t going to order seafood for your main course anyway.

She told them that she wasn’t hungry enough for a starter, choosing a tuna salad for main, the cheapest thing on the menu.

The wine left a thick, dry sediment in her mouth, and she found herself drinking quickly in an attempt to wash it away.

Blake ordered a beer and switched between the two drinks, a mouthful of wine, a swig from his bottle.

He and Rocco talked about school while they waited for their starters, how Blake flunked his mock exams, his university applications.

Blake sounded almost proud when he talked about how his teacher had promised to surreptitiously bump him up a few marks on his coursework.

“She reckons that’ll get me into Leeds at least. Bristol, if I’m lucky,” he said.

“You’re a smart kid,” Rocco said, a pride in his voice. “Academic. Not like me and your mum.”

“And school said that I can go back late, in September,” Blake announced, as platters of oysters were placed on the table between them, gray and glistening. “They said it’s cool for me to miss a few weeks.”

Rocco picked up a dappled shell.

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Why’s that?”

Blake stilled, an oyster paused halfway to his mouth. Around them, the restaurant hummed, the clatter of cutlery, the sound of plates being set down on the polished wooden tables.

“The Vespas?” Blake said. “You know. We’re meant to be going down the Amalfi Coast together. You and me.”

Rocco slurped down an oyster, smacking his lips appreciatively.

“Did we say September?” he said. “I thought that we said maybe next year.”

“Yeah. We talked about it last time we spoke on the phone, remember?”

“Well. September might not be the best time for me, to be honest with you, kid.”

Blake set down the oyster without bringing it to his mouth.

“You said we would,” he said. “You said, if I spent summer with Mum, we’d do our road trip in September.”

Hannah felt his body tense beside her. Tight, like a coiled spring.

“I’m not sure that I said that, did I?”

“Yeah,” said Blake. “You promised. I’ve been doing research. You said that I could plan the route.”

And then, in a smaller voice:

“I already bought a helmet.”

“Well.” Rocco lifted a fork to scoop another oyster out of its shell. “September’s a crazy time for me. Atticus and Aurora are starting a new school, and Flora’s got this amazing job opportunity in Milan, so I’ll be doing the hands-on dad thing for a couple of weeks—”

“You promised ,” Blake said again.

There was a tremor in his voice now. Something that threatened to break.

“Well, stuff came up.” Rocco sounded close to irritable. He eased another oyster into his mouth. Swallowed. “You know how it is, kid. Don’t make me feel bad.”

Blake pushed his plate away from him.

“We’ve been planning this for months.”

“Planning? Aw, come on, kid. We were spitballing. You know I’d love to take a trip with you. But I have to put the family first, you know?”

Blake opened his mouth as if to respond, and then closed it. He folded his arms across his chest. Hannah could see, in his eyes, the glint of tears. If Rocco noticed, he ignored it.

“So, Hannah,” he said mildly. “Where do you go to school?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but the sound of Blake’s chair scraping back against the floor drowned out her words.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

Rocco’s expression didn’t flicker. He shoveled another oyster into his mouth.

“So cancel your main,” he said.

“This restaurant is shit,” said Blake. “Who the fuck builds a restaurant without windows right next to the sea?”

He reached out his hand toward Hannah’s.

“Come on,” he said.

Rocco leaned back in his chair.

“You’re not seriously upset about the road trip?” he said. “Come on. You’re supposed to be a man now, Blake. You need to start acting like it. Atticus and Aurora—”

“Fuck Atticus and Aurora.”

“Hey. I won’t have you talk about your siblings like that.”

“They’re not my siblings, though, are they? They’re yours and Flora’s kids. I could probably count on two hands the number of times I’ve met them. Just because we happen to have the same dad doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well, if you’d come to the vow renewal…”

“Flora didn’t want us at the vow renewal.”

“Well, now I think you’re projecting.”

Blake’s jaw was set so tight that Hannah could see a muscle twitch.

“Come on,” he said to her again.

She stood, slowly.

“Thanks for the wine, Mr. Mae,” she said.

Rocco didn’t look away from his plate.

“I’ll send you the bill for your steak, shall I?”

“Fuck you.”

Blake’s hand closed around Hannah’s.

“Let’s get out of here.”

They hadn’t called a car, so they left the restaurant on foot.

The road was narrow and scrappy, teetering into dirt, forcing them to walk tight to the cliff edge.

Blake’s strides were longer than Hannah’s in spite of her height, her sandals catching on rocks and scrubby patches of grass as she tried to catch up.

She forced herself to slow when she turned her ankle on an uneven shelf of tarmac, then stopped when headlights soared into view.

Her arms were folded against the night chill, her body briefly silhouetted by the roar of light, but Blake kept walking as the car passed by, his hands dug into his pockets.

Hannah had to quicken her pace into a half jog.

Her stomach was starting to ache with hunger and her ankle throbbed.

“Blake!”

She called his name, but her words were whipped away toward the sea.

“ Blake .”

He stopped then, his back still to her. A second car screeched past so quickly that it had to swerve to avoid them, the acrid smell of hot tires against asphalt.

Hannah cried out, stepping reflexively back from the road’s edge, a horn blaring into the night.

She could imagine the driver, hands gripped on the wheel.

Stupid kids, walking along an unlit road .

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Blake was striding back toward her, catching hold of her wrist. He pulled her away from the sheer drop of the cliff.

Toward a squat, brick building on the other side of the road, some kind of abandoned outpost or long-closed substation, the kind of thing that Hannah would pass by often without thinking about.

“I wasn’t—”

“You practically stepped out in front of that car.”

“I—”

He brought his face so close to her that she could feel the dampness of his breath, flecks of saliva on her face when he spoke.

“Don’t you think I have enough of my own shit going on, without having to worry about you?”

“Blake.” Her voice was a thread through the back of her throat, thin and taut. “You’re hurting me.”

He dropped her wrist then. On her arm she could just make out the shadow of his hand, the ache where he had gripped her too hard.

“ Fuck. ”

The word tore out of him, almost a scream. He raised his arm and Hannah flinched, held her hand up reflexively as his fist barreled into the wall. The sound of bones against brick was ugly and deadened, and he let out a bellow of pain, bent double over himself, clutching his fist into his chest.

“Fuck.”

She had never seen him like this before.

Animal, almost unrecognizable, anger rising out of him like heat.

She should walk away. She should leave him here, with his fury.

And yet, she felt that thread in the back of her throat again, and this time it seemed to pull her toward him, unspooling into the syllables of his name.

“Blake.” It sounded like a plea. Like a prayer.

His head was in his hands, the one that he had used to punch the wall limp, arched beneath the other as if for protection. His shoulders were shuddering. She realized, with a jolt of surprise, that he was crying.

“Here,” she said. “Let me look at your hand.”

She tried to peel one fist away from the other, but he resisted.

“It might be broken,” she said. “Let me see.”

And then he was grabbing her wrist again, straightening, pulling her in toward him.

His mouth was on hers, and he was kissing her with a fierce urgency as if it was the only way that he could stop her from seeing his tears.

Pressing her up against the brick wall. His uninjured hand tugging at her jeans, pushing into her underwear.

“Blake,” she said. “Stop it.”

She turned her head away, but his mouth was on her jaw, her throat. The wetness of his tears against her skin. She tried to move his hand away. Tried to turn the mewl of fear in her mouth into a laugh, because it would be so much easier if she could laugh this off. So much better.

“Someone will see,” she said.

“What?” he said. “Are you frigid now or something?”

The word hit her like a second punch. He pressed his hips into hers, and she could feel that he was hard through his jeans.

She imagined the girls that Blake had slept with before, how they radiated sex, how they would probably find this entire situation fun and daring.

Hot. She wanted to be like them so badly it hurt.

She didn’t want Blake to look at her the way that they did, with pity and condescension.

So, she let Blake turn her around, press her against the crumbling wall, pull her jeans down, push himself up between her legs.

She closed her eyes and moaned like she was supposed to, pretended to enjoy it, like her teeth weren’t gritted so hard that her entire skull ached.

She arched her back the way the magazines her mum sometimes read told her to.

She said the same word over and over, yes, yes, because it was better than saying no.

When it was over, she realized that Blake’s hand had been bleeding, and that everywhere he had touched her was now streaked with red. Somehow, Hannah couldn’t stop thinking of the wine that she had drunk earlier, that ironlike taste, how impossibly different the evening could have been.

Hannah Bailey never drank red wine again.