Page 46 of High Season

THIRTY-FIVE

THREE DAYS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Blake mentioned the bonfire one afternoon when Evelyn and Harrison were out of the house.

He had thrown a window open, but the smell of their bodies still filled the air.

Body spray and sweat, the plastic of the condom.

A new fragrance that Hannah was already beginning to associate with sex. With him.

“It’s the party of the whole summer,” he said. “For real. It’s always crazy.”

His eyes were bright, still full of that post-orgasm high. One hand trailed across the contours of Hannah’s body as if he couldn’t get enough of her. She shivered as he brushed the inward curve of her waist.

“What about your mum’s birthday?” Hannah said. “I thought that was supposed to be the party of the summer?”

Blake’s hand lifted away and dropped onto the covers. He rolled over, reached for his boxer shorts, the light falling out of his eyes.

“My mum’s birthday party is bullshit,” he said. “Always is. People she barely knows, coming to tell her how great she is, how she doesn’t look a day over thirty. It’s boring.”

Hannah sat up, pulling the sheets over her bare chest. It still felt like a kind of sacrilege, being naked on a bed that belonged to Evelyn Drayton. Linens that probably cost more than Hannah earned all summer.

“Really?” she said. “I always thought it looked kind of fun.”

She didn’t tell Blake that for years she had dreamed of being invited to one of Evelyn Drayton’s parties.

She thought of the previous summer, when she had been asked to step in when one of the hired waitresses had fallen ill.

She had worn a white shirt and too-short skirt, and stood in the hallway holding a gilt tray of champagne and small, damp canapés that had been left out slightly too long, smiling apologetically when people complained about the heat.

She had felt so out of place, her palms clammy, the room heaving with bodies, people who seemed to wear satin without worrying about sweat stains, who talked over one another in increasingly loud and high-pitched tones until their voices drowned out the strains of the string quartet.

She had moved around the room with her eyes lowered, exactly as she had been told to do.

Giving the impression that she was hardly there at all.

At one point, Blake had taken a drink from her tray and she had tried to catch his eye, waited for him to recognize her.

He had, after all, known her almost their entire lives.

His gaze had skittered from the glass back to the person he was talking to.

He hadn’t even looked at her properly. She had been invisible.

Ever since their first kiss, she had imagined how different things might be this year.

She had dared to dream that the two of them might attend Evelyn’s party as a couple.

Hannah in a dress that she would have to convince her mum to drive her into the city to buy.

Something long and fitted; something that would turn her body—too tall, too rectangular—into something curved and beautiful.

Blake would have his arm around her, his hand against the base of her spine.

A waitress, maybe some girl that Hannah went to school with, would offer them a tray of champagne, and there’d be a flash of envy in her eyes when Hannah accepted a glass.

Hannah imagined herself on the inside at last. Part of a world she had skirted the edges of for years, serving its drinks, tutoring its children, clearing up their mess at the end of each high season, the littered beaches, the empty houses. She would belong there, finally, because Blake chose her.

“Don’t tell me that you want to go to my mum’s stupid party?” Blake said.

There was a taunt in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“God, no,” Hannah said quickly. “You’re right. It’s probably lame.”

He was distracted, searching for his T-shirt.

“The bonfire sounds cool though,” she said.

He shrugged. His brightness from a few minutes ago dulled, reconfigured into casualness. In some ways, he reminded Hannah of Nina. His moods were so changeable. It was so easy to make him happy; so easy to send him spinning away from her.

She thought again of the night she met Blake’s dad.

A week ago, but also another lifetime. A week ago, but also this second.

For the last few days, Hannah had found the memory hovering around the edges of her body.

The sensation of Blake pushing up inside her, the way she had felt inanimate. Not quite human.

She has tried repeatedly to transform the image in her mind into something more palatable.

Told herself that they were both caught up in the emotion of the night, all the nerves and the rage and the hurt turning into that moment on the clifftop.

That maybe she had enjoyed it, too. That maybe she had wanted him just as badly as he seemed to want her.

Still, just the thought of it sent a drum of adrenaline through her, a tightening in the center of her chest that felt almost like panic.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

“Maybe I could stop by?” Hannah ventured.

She didn’t dare ask if she could attend as his girlfriend. She was afraid to address what this thing—delicate and undefined between them—really was.

Blake pulled his T-shirt on over his head.

“You probably wouldn’t like it,” he said. “It’d just be loads of people you wouldn’t know.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“I would.”

He rolled over to her, lifted a strand of her hair between two of his fingers.

“I like it better when it’s just us,” he said. “I don’t want to share you with anyone. Not yet.”

He tugged at the hair, making her neck jerk toward him.

“Your hair is way too long,” he said. “It gets in the way.”

She had noticed him saying these things lately. Small, throwaway comments about her appearance. That she looked better in skirts, rather than the jeans or shorts that she usually wore. That she should think about getting her ears pierced, because she’d look more feminine that way.

She knew that changing herself for Blake was the kind of thing that would make Josie roll her eyes at her. That, even a few months back, Hannah would have insisted that she would never do.

Still, she couldn’t deny how good it felt when his eyes skimmed over a new skirt that she’d bought a few days back.

How she hummed with pleasure when he said that he’d seen a pair of earrings that would suit her, knowing it meant he had been thinking of her when she wasn’t there.

How, with each suggestion, he gave her the secrets to fitting into his world.

She lifted her hand, easing the hair out of his grip.

“I should probably get it cut,” she said. “I haven’t had it done for a while.”

Blake stretched his arms up above his head, his body lengthening, a schism of skin between his boxers and his T-shirt.

“Hey, Evelyn and Harrison will be back soon,” he said, with the air of a conversation that was over. “You should probably think about leaving.”

The day of the bonfire was also the first day of the heatwave.

The streets were quiet, even as the sun started to set, anyone with any sense staying inside where it was shady and cool. As soon as Hannah applied her makeup she could feel it slide against her skin, a gossamer-thin slick of sweat already melting it away.

No one realized, just then, that this exceptionally hot day was only the start. That they would spend the next week fanning themselves hopelessly, stripping down to their underwear, throwing open the windows, gray rings of perspiration soaked through all their clothes.

Hannah did not know that by the time the heatwave ended, Tamara Drayton would be dead.

Her mum knocked on her bedroom door just as Hannah was applying a second layer of foundation.

“Josie’s downstairs,” Marie said. She wrinkled her nose. “Is that my perfume?”

“No,” Hannah lied.

She snapped the powder compact shut. She had taken the bus to the market down the coast that sometimes sold knock-off beauty products, and asked the woman manning the stall to help her match the bottles of foundation to her skin tone.

Still, she didn’t look quite right. She couldn’t blend out the faintly orange line that skimmed her jaw no matter how hard she scrubbed at it.

“What’s all that on your face?”

Hannah zipped her brand-new cosmetics bag closed.

“Just a bit of makeup.”

“I didn’t think you liked wearing makeup.”

“I just wanted to try something.” Hannah stuffed the bag back into her bedside drawer. “Can’t I try anything new without you commenting on it?”

Her mother held up her hands in mock defeat.

“Fine,” she said. “I won’t comment on anything I notice around here.”

“You should have told Josie I’m not here,” said Hannah. “I don’t want to see her.”

Her mother folded her arms across her chest.

“What’s going on with you two?” she said. “I usually can’t keep you apart.”

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t seem like nothing to me. Have the two of you had a fallout?”

Hannah winced without meaning to. A fallout sounded so childish.

This was bigger than that. A distance that Hannah could feel expanding between them, an embarrassment when she would think of how Blake would see Josie.

She was so unlike the Draytons, so unlike all the people that Blake was friends with.

Hannah was ashamed for thinking it, but it was there now, impossible to suppress.

“She just… you know.” Hannah shrugged. “Seems a bit childish lately.”

Her mum laughed.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re in too much of a rush to grow up sometimes. One day you’ll look back and wish you’d hung on to being a child a little bit longer.”

“Mum. I’m seventeen.”

“The in-between years,” her mum said knowingly. “I remember those.”

She picked up a discarded T-shirt from Hannah’s bed.

“You and Josie are inseparable,” she said. “Don’t let growing up come between you.”

Hannah stood, her limbs stiff as if they had absorbed some of her reluctance.