Twisted Summer (15 page)

“Didn’t he already go surfing today?” said Taylor.

“What, there’s a limit?” I rolled my eyes at him.

“Get him to teach you.” Esmé pinned her book to the sand as the breeze ruffled the pages again. “If he can teach Danni to surf, he can teach anybody.”

I leaned over her, my fingers toying with her bikini top ties. “I think what Es is trying to say is that she wants some privacy to ravish me.”

“Oh.” He coughed, hauling himself up. “Oh. Sorry.”

“I was joking, you twit.” I grinned at him. “But yeah. Alone time. Girl time.”

He shot me a thin-lipped, apologetic smile before trawling off toward Gabe, who’d already put his surfboard against the rocks and was checking out the waves.

“Nice save, pixie.” Esmé rolled over and rested on her elbows. “He creeps me out.”

“He just thinks you’re hot.” I dropped a kiss on her arm. “Because you are.”

She craned her neck to look back at Taylor and Gabe. “They’re not allowed to think I’m hot.”

I laughed. “We went over this earlier.”

She tutted, but rolled on to her side to push up against me. Snuggled together, we carried on reading, pausing occasionally to sip water.

The best thing about sunglasses is that nobody knows what you’re looking at. This meant I could stare at Gabe as long as I liked and Esmé didn’t have to know about it. He stood propped up against his surfboard with his arms folded, chatting away to Taylor. Next to each other, it became apparent how similar their builds were; Gabe was thicker, sturdier, but when the hell did Taylor fill out like that?

Two soft, warm hands gripped my shoulders and dragged me down to lie on my side. Esmé caught my bottom lip between her teeth and sucked gently. I mewed in surprise.

“Fuck it,” she whispered. “I’ve had enough. Reverse psychology—let’s just give them the show they’re after, and then maybe they’ll stop staring.”

“
Oh.”
Oh.
We shed our sunglasses and with them, our inhibitions. If she was going to touch me like this, I’d let her think the guys stared because we were lesbians…not because Taylor wanted to screw her and Gabe wanted to screw me.

Our kisses deepened. Esmé’s nipples grew stiff against mine, and she made soft little sighs of pleasure as I pushed my thigh up between her legs. I couldn’t see, but I knew Gabe was watching. And jealous. Maybe I should’ve felt like I was betraying Esmé, but I didn’t. I felt like I betrayed him.
I’m warning you, Danni. Behave yourself.
Even then, with this cute girl’s tongue in my mouth and her feathery strokes over my belly, I heard the way his voice dropped to say that…and I whimpered.

“Pixie.” She panted warm air against my collarbone. “I need to stop.”

“Aww. And we were performing so well.”

“It’s too much.”

I kissed her again. “I’ll make it up to you later, you big attention whore.”

“Shush, you.”

“Oh, crap.” I peeled myself away from her, sitting up. “They’re coming over.”

“What?” She glanced around and groaned. “They’d best not be after joining in!”

Turned out Gabe had a you’re-in-trouble stare just like Mum’s. Creepy. To anyone else, he was just squinting under the bright sun, but I knew that look. How much had I pissed him off? He’d still be there waiting for me tonight, right…?

“Not surfing?” said Esmé.

“Waves are a bit rubbish. We thought we’d come see what you were up to.” Gabe glanced at me. “If that’s okay.” He plonked himself down on Taylor’s towel, his carrier bag landing beside him in a crunch of glass-on-glass. “I brought goodies.”

Taylor followed him down to the sand, grinning. “He brought beer.”

“You were going to surf drunk?” I said, incredulous. And slightly worried. After last night, I knew he was unhappy, but—

“I was not.” He pouted. “Well. One never hurts.”

Taylor dug around in the bag and pulled out bottles of cider. “You girls want?”

Esmé swallowed as if to voice her disapproval. She was such a goody two-shoes sometimes. I knew I shouldn’t, but the bottles were damp with cold, and it was so frickin’ warm…

“Esmé will have one,” Gabe said, reaching for the bottle opener. “Won’t you?”

“I—uh—” She didn’t want to refuse him. Him and his annoyingly useful charm. “Why not?”

Taylor took the opener and twisted lids off for all of us. We sat in the sun with the cool glass bottles against our foreheads. The chilled fizz of the cider coated my tongue, sweet and fresh and heady. Taylor must have relaxed a bit because he only looked at Esmé’s chest once, and that was when I brushed the sand off her left breast. I didn’t even think, it was just reflexive—but then Gabe’s
behave-yourself
glare returned in a flash of jealous warning, and I recoiled into my towel.

“This is more like it, eh?” said Taylor.

“I suppose my book was getting a bit abusive of the third person narrative.” Esmé nudged the paperback now splayed on the sand. “Crappy plot, too.”

Taylor choked on his cider. Esmé purring
third person narrative
nearly melted him into a sticky, wasp-seducing puddle of boy fudge. Baha.

“You like that stuff?” he said, awed.

“You mean books?”

“I mean, English. Literature. Criticism, pulling things apart and getting the ideas and just—” He clasped his hands together as if trying to smother an invisible fairy.

“He means he’s a book geek. And apparently so are you,” I said.

“Oh.” Esmé shrugged. “A bit, maybe.” She wouldn’t give him the pleasure of any more words than she had to. I’d have laughed if it didn’t feel mean.

“Taylor would choose books over girlfriends,” I teased. “In fact I think he did, once.”

“I was eleven!” he protested.

Gabe laughed, deep and throaty. “Tell me it wasn’t for a copy of
The Hardy Boys
.”

“Like I’d read that steaming heap. We were here, actually. On holiday. I was talking to this girl I’d met, and we were—” He did quotation marks with his fingers, “—going out. We were just chatting and stuff—”

“And holding hands,” I supplied.

“And holding hands.” Taylor half-smiled. “Anyway, we were on this rock, standing up to watch these birds make a pattern in the sky or something cheesy like that. We lost our balance and she went head-first into the sea.”

Esmé frowned. “Gosh. You got her out, right?”

“
I dropped
Animal Farm
into the water at the same time. I had about five seconds to choose, and…” He paused, sighing with shame. “I went after the book.”

We split into factions immediately: Esmé with her open mouth, and her disgust that mirrored Taylor’s; Gabe and I, trying to stem our dirty chuckles.

“That’s legendary,” said Gabe, clutching his wet-suited self.

“It’s horrible!” Esmé cried.

I shook my head. “You weren’t there. It was hilarious. And the water wasn’t deep or anything—she was okay.”

Taylor took another gulp of his drink to avoid Esmé’s accusing eyes. “She did cry. Only time I ever made a girl cry, and it was over a book.”

“I’ve never made a girl cry,” said Esmé, sharing a secret little smile with me.

I’d done it to her. I stood her up not long ago, left her hanging on the end of an empty Facebook conversation because a certain someone called to say that he couldn’t let me go. Someone like—

Gabe cleared his throat. “Oh, I’ve done it. Here as well. Just like Tay.”

“Go on then,” said Taylor. “Can’t be worse than what I did.”

“Well.” He readjusted himself, sitting cross-legged, and the glare of the sun fused around his profile to cast a fuzzy glow. “Back then, Mum and Dad used to come up in the weeks before Easter because it was cheaper. Definitely wasn’t beach weather, so they took us looking for crabs and plants and stuff—we’d be here in our wellies and knitted jumpers.”

“Sexy,” said Taylor.

“You bet. Anyway. Used to fall around Earth Day, and the local conservation group always had events on and things. I made friends with this Welsh girl—her dad ran the group—every year, we’d have a kind of thing going on. Our parents teased us something rotten. I hit thirteen though and I’d never even kissed her, despite knowing her for years. One night we all got together for this newt spotting thing—”

“Newt spotting?” I snorted. “How romantic.”

Gabe winced. “Precisely.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Esmé said. “Newts are kind of cute.”

“
The attractiveness of newts aside, we were all hunched up in sleeping bags, waiting for these newts to come out. Our parents were getting squiffy and they’d let us have one beer each. She didn’t even like it—she was just taking tiny sips, pretending. Our parents really ramped up the teasing. They were like,
go on, just give her a kiss. Don’t be scared
.
Be a man, go in for the kill.
It seriously got to me. I should have just laughed it off, but I got so wound up about it that I ended up shouting
I don’t bloody want to kiss her!
” Gabe put his face in his hands, and now Taylor was the only one tittering.

“I can see how that’d make someone cry,” Esmé said. “It’s bad enough when you’re older, but when you’re thirteen…”

“
Well. Yeah.” Gabe sighed. “She was mortified. I was mortified. I cried too, actually, but not until much later when we got back to the lodge—because I really
did
want to kiss her, but she’d never have believed it after that. And there was no way I was doing it in front of our parents anyway.”

I wrapped my arms around my knees. “That’s the most cringeworthy thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

Gabe gave a bitter little laugh. “Yeah. Fucking Earth Day.”

Taylor nodded. “Fucking newts.”

“So was that the only time, Gabe?” Esmé said, her eyes wide and curious. “Or have you repeatedly yelled obscene things at girls you fancied?”

“What, you mean, did I make any more girls cry? I was a moronic teenage boy. Of course I did.”

“But not recently,” she teased.

It was probably just me. Had to be. But in that moment, it felt like the clouds blotted out the sun and the wind turned cold.

“Recently?” Gabe’s eyes narrowed, and just like last time, it wasn’t because of the bright light. His silver-gray pupils focused on me as they dilated, stretched by an oily gleam of guilt and desire. “Now that would be telling.”

I don’t experience emotions in the same order as other people. I’m screwed that way, really. If I was a normal person, when Gabe went all possessive on my ass earlier and started making me feel bad for touching
my
girlfriend, my first reaction would have been anger—full on, hell-hath-no-fury, bitch
please
rage. He abandoned me. Blanked me. Cut me off. How dare he try to twist all that to his advantage?

But I didn’t feel that way. It didn’t even occur to me to be angry until we were making dinner; when I kissed Esmé’s shoulder, he cleared his throat so loudly you’d think he was auditioning for a Listerine ad. No, instead I spent the entire afternoon guilty for making him feel bad. All I knew was that if he’d turned up with someone else and put on that little peep show on the beach, I’d be glued together with nothing but snot and tears.

So while Esmé sliced chicken and peppers and wittered on about the sex appeal of newts (I may have that wrong), my thought process went something like this:

oh God he looks miserable

chicken smells good. Smoked paprika?

No, he really does look miserable

WELL MAYBE THAT’S HIS OWN FUCKING FAULT

Can’t stand it, need to touch him, even if he is a prick

I mean, I’m a prick too when you think abou—

ooh, is that Esmé’s nipple?

Who has better nipples, Esmé or Gabe?

Esmé’s are more ethical, they would never leave me out for the wolves like a frickin’ Chinese baby girl

Not like HIM

How dare he look at me like I’m murdering a puppy every time I touch my girlfriend?

And what the hell is up with all the cider he’s drinking anyway?

Chicken DOES smell good. Needs garlic though

Oh God I’ve turned him into an alcoholic

And I love him I love him I love him