Stonemouth (10 page)

‘Meh,’ I said, waving one hand. ‘Yeah, but no. Definitely not.’

‘How do you know if you haven’t tried?’

‘Dude, I haven’t tried chlamydia, but I don’t want that either.’

Ferg placed one finger gently on my chest, just below the hollow of my neck. ‘I might be able to do you something of a favour, young Gilmour,’ he told me.

I looked down at the finger, still resting on my skin. ‘Ferg,’ I laughed, ‘are you hitting on me?’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘But I do demand a kiss.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘Just one. A token price, for the service about to be rendered.’

‘Ferg, you’re my best pal—’

‘More than Josh?’

‘More than Josh, probably, though don’t tell him, but yes. But I don’t want to kiss you.’

‘I know you don’t
want
to; I’m asking you to fucking pucker up and bear it, for your best friend, for somebody who’d love to
be more than that but is reluctantly resigned to
never
being any more than that, and also to make me feel better. And to provide some small, trivial, purely symbolic payment for the favour to be conferred, as aforesaid.’

‘Drug coming on, is it?’

‘Yes. Please don’t change the subject. Kiss me.’

‘What is this favour?’

‘Can’t tell you. Might not work, might not happen. If it doesn’t you’ll never know. If it does you’ll thank me later. Don’t be a cunt, Stewart; kiss me. I swear it’ll lead to something better, or at least the chance of it. Take it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But no tongues.’

‘Of course tongues, you idiot,’ Ferg said, grasping me by the back of the neck and bringing our mouths together.

I did sort of open and there was some tongue action, but I was distracted, wondering if we could be seen from the fire. We both wore jeans and white or pale shirts, so we might be quite visible, even though we were a few minutes’ walk away. What if Ellie saw this? She’d never fancy me. Would she? Ferg and I were sort of side-on to the fire. I thought about manoeuvring us round so one of us had our back to the fire, making a smaller target, as it were. Ferg’s face was quite scratchy and his breath smelled of smoke. My mouth was a little dry, probably because of the pill, despite the amount of Ferg’s saliva that his poking, rolling, probing tongue seemed to be bringing with it. This actually wasn’t quite as gross as it might have been, but it was no turn-on either. Nice aftershave – Ferg always had good aftershave – but still that very scratchy sensation. I wondered why girls ever let boys kiss them.

Ferg pulled away with a sigh. He’d raised himself a little to sort of kiss down on me but now he came off his tiptoes, back to level ground. He shook his head and sighed again. ‘No, your heart really isn’t in it, is it, my love?’

‘Neither’s anything else,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘Sorry.’

Another sigh. ‘You can be such a lunk sometimes, Stewart.’

‘Sorry.
But, dude, I did let you kiss me.’

‘Oh, let’s head back.’

Later, when we were mostly all pretty much blissed out and the fire was smaller, quieter, more orange and red rather than yellow, and the music had gone all old-school trancey and a few couples had drifted off to the nearest dunes holding hands and blankets, Ferg was talking to Ellie and Josh.

I talked to various people – only about half were left, and half of them looked fast asleep – then sort of drifted off to sleep myself for a short while, then woke up and saw that Ferg was still talking to Josh and Ellie.

I wandered off to the rough area of long dune grass where we’d all agreed to pee, came back, washed my hands in the diminishing, retreating surf and found the three of them laughing.

‘Come on,’ Ferg said to Josh, and they both rose. ‘It’s a challenge.’

‘Where to?’ Josh asked, holding one hand over his eyes as he looked down the beach in the darkness.

‘To wherever one of us can’t run any more and has to stop for breath, or gets a stitch or something.’

‘We could end up back in town!’ Josh laughed.

‘Yeah, right,’ Ferg said. He took the packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, threw them and his phone to me as I approached.

‘Look after these. No peeking at my contacts.’ He looked like he was about to take something out of his back pocket too, but changed his mind.

‘Okay,’ I said, stopping and looking down at Ellie. She glanced up at me from her blanket with a sort of wary smile.

She was holding a white handkerchief. She let it go.

‘Go!’ she said, and the guys raced off. They disappeared beyond the fire’s dimmed glow in seconds. The first thin sliver of a new moon let you see where they were for about half a minute, but then they were gone, lost to the darkness somewhere between the
ghostly creasings of the breaking waves and the sensed round bulk of the line of dunes.

It seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I sat down beside Ellie.

‘Okay?’ I asked, leaving it open whether this meant, Okay to sit down? or How are you?

‘Hey, Stewart,’ she said, making more room for me.

I put my hand over my eyes, the way Josh had, looked into the darkness. ‘Nope, disa—’ I started to say, as she said,

‘What are you shield—?’

We both stopped. ‘I was saying—’

‘Oh, I was just—’

I sighed. ‘Sorry. What … what were you saying?’

She looked amused. ‘I wondered what you were shielding your eyes from.’

‘Ah, yeah.’ I squinted up to the near-nothing moon. ‘Hardly moonlight. The fire. Your radiance?’

She looked at me. I shrugged. ‘You’re facing the fire.’ I told her. ‘I guess you must just have a high albedo.’

She looked startled, though there was just enough of a delay for me to think she was loved up, or on something. I was kind of coming down by this point.

‘I must have a high what?’ she said. ‘How would—?’

Shit. First we talk across each other, clumsy as children at their first dance, then I produce the most stilted, pathetic, over-the-top compliment known to teen-kind and then I come out with a technical term – a fucking technical term from
astronomy
, for the love of God. How to chat up a girl, Stewart. Oh – dear holy fuck – and now I’ve just realised she thought I said she must have a high
libido
. Oh for fucking fuck’s sake. Why wait for a girl to shoot you down in flames when you can do it so easily yourself ? Don’t just shoot yourself in the foot, Stewart, wait until it’s lodged firmly in your mouth first.

‘Albedo,’ I told her. I had my eyes closed by now. I couldn’t bear to watch this. ‘It means—’ I paused for a moment. What did
it mean again exactly? It referred to how much light an object reflects, I was fairly sure. The moon: it has quite a high albedo, so it looks white. The romantic moon. Oh, give up. What was the point?

‘Shininess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Something like that?’ My eyes flicked open. She was gazing up, towards the moon. ‘Like … hmm.’ There was so little moon to see, you almost had to know where to look.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I was as impressed with girls who knew this sort of shit as your average girl was unimpressed with guys who did. Brains as well as beauty. Oh, fuck; I’d already fallen in love with her peerless good looks, her flawless skin, her stunning figure and the bit between her legs and now I was falling for the bit between her ears as well. I was fucking doomed.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering when we’ll see them again.’ I nodded. ‘Josh and Ferg.’

She looked to where the guys had disappeared.

‘Could be a while,’ she said, smiling.

It was an odd smile; maybe a little sad, wistful, something like that. She glanced back down the beach again. She made a single, gentle gesture; just that thing that’s not quite a laugh, when your diaphragm contracts. It raised her head and shoulders briefly, then let them fall again. There might have been a soft noise like a ‘huh’, but it was so faint that – even though the only other noise was that of the distant waves breaking – I suspect I imagined rather than heard it. I hadn’t even noticed the music had stopped.

‘Could be quite a long while,’ she said, almost dreamily. Then she lay down on her side, one arm beneath her head. Her long fair hair was dry now, and spilled around her head and over the shadowed golden skin of her arm. She stretched, yawned: catlike, completely unselfconscious. Her eyes were half open.

‘Do you want me to …?’ I nodded to one side.

‘Do I want you to what?’ she asked quietly.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to go?’

Her
eyes opened a little further, and I was regarded, studied. ‘Why,’ she murmured, ‘do you have somewhere else you have to be?’

I laughed quietly. ‘Not as such.’

‘Do you want to go?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Then don’t.’ Her eyes closed and she nestled down under her towel and blanket. ‘Keep me company,’ she said sleepily.

I opened my mouth to speak, then her eyes were open again and she said, ‘It’s all right; not trying to seduce you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, sighing heavily but still smiling. ‘That’s a pity.’

She tutted, shook her head a fraction. ‘You guys,’ she said, laughing lightly, closing her eyes. ‘Just stop it. Here,’ she said, lifting one corner of the blanket, her eyelids flickering as though trying and failing to open again. ‘Come and keep me warm. I’ll spoon against you.’

‘What if Josh—?’

‘Ha!’ she said, quietly dismissive. ‘Wouldn’t worry about Josh.’ She sounded sleepy again. She flapped the blanket edge. ‘Come on; getting cold.’

It was probably as well her eyes were closed. My grin must have been splitting my face. I did as I’d been told and cuddled into her, under the blanket, my back against her front.

‘S’better,’ she said, on a sleepy sigh. Seconds later she was asleep, breathing rhythmically against me, her breasts a gentle pressure against my back, her arm over my waist. I had a raging erection, of course I did, which it would have been great to do
something
with, but, fuck it; no matter where this was going from this point on, this – right now, right here – would most assuredly do.

We woke up to a cool grey morning, and to what were probably meant to be knowing smiles, plus various yawns and stretches and a few hung-over groans.

The fire was a dead black circular scar on the empty expanse of
sand, but the smell of frying bacon and the sound of sputtering eggs came from a smaller fire somebody had started near by. I’d rolled over. Ellie smiled at me.

‘Sleep okay?’ she asked, blowing some hair away from her eyes.

‘Never better,’ I lied. Now, my cock was about the only bit of me that wasn’t stiff.

‘Same here,’ she said, then sat up, flexing her arms and upper body. God, you could fall in lust with this girl’s shoulders, even before you lowered your sights a little. She glanced round at everybody else, then down at me. ‘People will talk, you know,’ she said, arching one eyebrow.

‘I should be so lucky,’ I told her. This made her laugh.

‘Thank you, Kylie.’ She moved one hand through the tawny mass of her hair, scratching idly. She raised her head, sniffing. She looked down at me again. ‘Hungry?’

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I told her, after the tiniest of pauses, holding her gaze.

She closed one eye, regarding me suspiciously, then laughed. ‘Mm-hmm,’ she said, then unfolded herself upwards, standing. ‘Well …’ She pulled the towel around her like a skirt.

She held out one hand to me, to help me up.

Oh, you beauty, I thought.

‘I’m a fucking idiot,’ I breathed to myself when I saw Ferg and Josh coming back along the beach together. They weren’t quite holding hands, but something about the way they strolled along, either too casually or not quite casual enough, made it obvious. I’d only started to suspect when I noticed they weren’t there by the side of the fire when Ellie and I woke up.

I looked at Ellie, standing talking and laughing with one of her girlfriends by the only other four-wheel drive still left on the beach. Round her shoulders, she wore the blanket we’d slept in; there was cloud, and a chill wind off the grey sea.

I finished my eggs and bacon, wiped the plate and thanked Logan,
who’d provided the breakfast. I went up to Ellie just as her pal moved off. ‘That’s the boys back,’ I told her.

She looked round, nodded. ‘So it is,’ she agreed. She held my gaze, smiled.

‘About you and Josh,’ I said, after a few moments.

‘What about me and Josh?’ she said.

‘There’s a party at Maddy Ferrie’s place tomorrow night.’

‘I know.’

‘You were … going?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Josh?’

‘He was going to pick me up.’ She looked over at him again. ‘That was the plan.’

‘Well, I wondered if I could take you? Could I pick you up? Instead?’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you could.’

‘D’you think that would be all right with Josh?’

She looked at Josh and Ferg as they approached. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that would be fine with Josh.’