Page 68 of High Season

“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.