Kiss of Death (15 page)

I’m pretty impressed at his confidence, especially when I see how high the car’s slanted up onto the bank; but no one else seems to think there’s anything dodgy about how Ewan’s parked, and he’s managed to get us right in the center of the cars, next to a ruined house that serves as a marker for where we head into the woods to find the party. Other groups are converging to where we’re standing as Callum pulls a six-pack of beer out of the front seat and swings it up onto his shoulder, together with his violin case slung on a strap. Ewan’s pulling stuff out from the boot. I glance at the old stone house as we pass it; the back’s all crumbling, shored up with rusted steel struts.

“Wow,” Taylor says as we walk down a dirt track wide enough to accommodate us all, side by side. Trees cluster densely around us, ancient oaks with trunks as thick as the width of Ewan’s car, silver birches with spindly dark branches silhouetted against the sky. The moon’s coming out from behind a cloud, and its light shines ghostly silver-gray. In the distance, I can hear the rhythmic thump of drums, the faint sweet wail of a saxophone, and my heart starts to beat with excitement, as fast as it used to before a gymnastics competition.

A real party. A real teenage party. Not like Plum and Nadia’s parties, where they’re so busy pretending they’re twentysomething sophisticates, listening to jazz and drinking martinis, that everyone gets really insecure because they’re trying to act like people they’re not.

Here, we’re all down-to-earth. Literally. As we get farther down the path, I gasp, because the trees fall away, the area widens out, and I see why this is called a quarry party; we’re in a bowl, trees to our left, but a sweeping semicircle of high stone to our right, tall as a ten-story building, craggy and rugged. A huge bonfire is burning in the center of the bowl, and people are sitting all around it; up on the sides of the quarry, people are perched, the occasional small fire glinting high up on the stone rocks, incredibly dramatic. Music rises with the flames; someone must have rigged up a basic sound system with a generator. I hear it humming quietly under the amplified strum of the guitars and drums. Nothing loud, no rock tunes; this is a much more tribal kind of gathering, I can tell already from the atmosphere. It’s mellow and very chilled, people talking quietly, making their own music in their own small groups, cooking marshmallows on the fire.

“It’s kind of postapocalyptic,” Taylor observes. “Very cool. My brother Seth would love this.”

“We usually go over there,” Callum says, leading us round the bonfire to a sheltered spot at the base of the quarry cliff. A big dog bounds across the path, followed by another, panting, two mutts playing happily in the dark.

Ewan has an old blanket, which he lays out on the ground, revealing a pair of bongo drums wrapped inside it.

“We brought some wine, too,” Callum says a little shyly, setting down what he’s carrying. “Girls don’t always like beer, do they?”

“
I
like beer,” Taylor says, plopping down on the blanket, popping a can of beer, and reaching for one of the bongos. She looks over at me and winks. “Now,
this
I’m used to,” she says. “Sneaking beers when the adults aren’t around.”

“Man,” Ewan says respectfully, sitting down next to her. “You’re hard-core.”

“Better believe it!” Taylor says as Ewan pulls the other bongo in front of him and crosses his legs around it.

Callum and I sit down too. I’m glad I have tights on under my jeans; the ground’s hard and cold, and they give a much-needed extra layer of warmth. He unscrews the cap of the wine bottle and hands it to me. I tilt it to my mouth, misjudge the angle, and get a mouthful of warmish cheap white wine. I choke and swallow simultaneously, and end up having a coughing fit.

Callum’s undoing the locks on his violin case, but he stops to pound me on the back.
God, how obvious could I make it that I’m not used to drinking?
I think, embarrassed, but it’s surprisingly nice to feel Callum touching me, and I relax almost immediately. And he doesn’t try to put his arm around me; when I stop coughing, he goes back to taking his violin and bow out, and I sit there, the wine burning its way down my esophagus, my head spinning, trying to work out how I’m feeling about this situation. Taylor and Ewan are already drumming their fingers on the bongos, setting up a light, steady rhythm. I had no idea Taylor could play the bongo, but that’s Taylor for you: she loves being a dark horse.

Callum’s tuning his violin, beginning to coax a sweet, soft, melancholy tune from it. Perfect. I wriggle back a bit till I feel the rock face against my back so I can lean into it, and close my eyes.

Well, this is sort of unexpected,
I think.
It feels like we’ve paired off, Taylor with Ewan, me with Callum.
There’s a subtle shift that happened as soon as we sat down, positioning ourselves on the blanket.
Did the boys do it deliberately, or was it just by chance?
Instinct tells me it’s the former; there’s something self-consciously aware about the way both Ewan and Callum are sitting, their bodies turned toward Taylor and me, blocking off the other pair. Transforming us into two couples rather than four friends.

I would have seen this coming if I hadn’t been so absorbed in the tangle of my situation with Jase. When Callum and I stood in the cemetery together, looking at that tombstone, I knew that we were both remembering that kiss at the airport, the moment when our mutual resentment and suspicion finally melted away like clouds burning off in the sun. Leaving the truth in clear sight: that we’re very attracted to each other.

I love Jase. But Jase isn’t here. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know if he’ll ever contact me again. Maybe not. It’s quite likely that I’ll never see Jase again, that he’ll never come back to Wakefield Hall; that we’ve broken up for good.

I swallow hard and tell myself to be strong. I’m not passive in this situation: I have choices. I can wallow in misery, or I can focus on whatever positives I can find. Like telling myself that if I’m alone and boyfriendless, that also means that I’m free to do what I want. Kiss who I want. And no one can blame me for it.

I explore the idea, tentatively, feeling the shape of it. Just for now—while we’re up in Scotland—how would I feel if Callum tries to get closer to me this evening? I really doubt that he and I could have any kind of long-term thing, not with Dan’s death, and its aftermath, lying between us. But goodness knows, I can’t even imagine a long-term thing with another boy now, not with the breakup with Jase so raw and fresh.

And if I ever do manage to find another boy I want to get serious with, I reflect with a sudden, welcome flash of humor, I’ll do my best to pick someone whose family and mine aren’t tangled up in a horrible mess of murder and grieving.

Yeah, why don’t you try that, Scarlett?
I think, my mouth beginning to twist into a wry smile.
Try going out with a boy who doesn’t have a single ghastly family skeleton rattling in the closet—just for a change?
I’m smiling full-on now, even though no one can see in the dark, cracking myself up with my own black humor.
Oh, I don’t know if I possibly could. I mean, what would we have to talk about if someone in his family hadn’t killed someone in mine?

Callum shifts, stretching out his legs, and the movement brings him fractionally nearer to me, his calf almost brushing mine. I look over and meet his eyes; he’s staring at me, and I’m blushing, though, again, it’s mercifully hidden by the night around us.

How would I feel if he tried to kiss me tonight?

The idea sends a warm flood of excitement into the pit of my stomach. I draw up my knees and hug them, feeling suddenly very exposed and vulnerable.

But not in a bad way,
I realize, surprised.
Not in a bad way at all.

It’s weird, looking back, to see how much my life has changed. This time last year, if you told me I’d have two hot boys interested in me, I’d have slapped you round the face and told you to pull yourself together. But back then, I would have thought it was the absolute summit of my dreams to have kissed boys like Callum and Jase: like standing on the top of Arthur’s Seat with the wind blowing round me.

And now, exciting though it is, it’s also unexpectedly painful, because the fact that I’m sitting here contemplating kissing Callum again means that Jase and I truly are no longer together. How can I help but see that the whole situation with our families is just too hard for him? The worst part is that, though I struggle with it, I can’t even blame him for the way he feels. If I were in his shoes, I don’t know how I’d react. Being fair, I have to admit that if I were Jase’s friend, rather than his ex-girlfriend, I might well tell him to put the past behind him, leave Wakefield Hall and all its awful memories for good. And if that means leaving the Wakefield girl behind too … well, there’s always a price to pay.

So I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. There’s no point hiding from the truth.

I look at Callum’s wide shoulders, his head tilted to one side on his violin as he plays; he’s glancing at Taylor and Ewan, his tune melting into their rhythmic beat, the poignant, minor-key song he’s playing perfect for my mood. As if he’s read my mind; as if he’s playing the sound track to this moment of my life.

It’s so beautiful and sad that I have to shut my eyes so I don’t cry. I lose myself in the tune, the bright gold flames of the bonfire flickering through my closed eyelids, and I drift off into a haze that must be sort of what meditation feels like; when I come to with a start, the music’s over, Taylor’s laughing happily, and Ewan is pushing the wine bottle against my hand.

“Did you nod off?” he says. “Were we that bad?”

“Oh no, it was great!” I take the bottle and swig at it, more carefully this time, just a small mouthful. “I actually went into a sort of trance,” I confess.

“Cool,” says happy hippy Ewan. “That’s exactly what we were going for. Enchantment.” He says this last word in a trippy voice, and flickers his fingers at me in a spell-casting, fake-magician way that has Taylor honking.

“Idiot,” she says, shoving him playfully.

“Jeez, you’re strong,” he says, rubbing his upper arm. “Hey! Want to do the circuit?” He jumps to his feet. “Walk around the bonfire, maybe take the bongos, see if there’s a jam session we can join?”

“Cool!” Taylor jumps up too. She ducks down to grab the bongos. “Let’s head over there.” She points to the other side of the bonfire, where a large group has gathered around the amplifier.

I didn’t know Taylor was so confident with boys,
I think.
Or at parties. Or, come to that, with bongo drums
. But we’re so sheltered at Wakefield Hall, so cut off from the world, that I just haven’t had the opportunity to see what she’s like in a normal setting. And I forget that she has a brother, a pretty cool, jet-setting brother capable of passing himself off as a playboy at smart parties in Venice, no less. It makes complete sense that with an older brother like that, Taylor would be much more comfortable hanging out with boys than I am.

“We should really stay here,” Callum says, laying his violin in its case. “To, you know, watch our stuff.”

“Yeah,” Ewan agrees, voice artificially serious. “That stuff won’t watch itself.”

He takes one of the bongos from Taylor, who says something to him as they walk away that makes him snuffle with laughter.

“They get on really well,” I observe to Callum.

“Yeah,” he says thoughtfully, looking after their figures as they disappear into the dark. I was implying that I thought Taylor and Ewan were getting together—hooking up, as Taylor says, though I’m never sure what that means, exactly, how far hooking up goes. But that’s not how Callum sounded. He doesn’t seem convinced, and I wonder why.

Silence descends, and I fidget awkwardly. I’ve been alone with boys a few times now, and even that limited experience has taught me that silence is necessary, essential, even, so that the mood can shift into something different; something charged with excitement and possibility.

And then I feel that shift happen between us. It’s palpable, and I realize I’ve forgotten to breathe; my rib cage is tight, my stomach feels hollow. I look at Callum, which is maybe a mistake, because even though I can barely see his face, with the fire flickering behind him, I know that we’ve made eye contact. It’s like an electric shock.

I reach for the bottle of wine, and simultaneously, Callum leans over to pull a can of beer off the six-pack, our movements almost synchronized. He moves the beers that are left to the edge of the blanket, propping them against his violin case, using that as a way to end up sitting next to me, his leg now firmly touching mine. Clearing his throat, he pops his beer can open.

“So, um, I was right,” he says, drinking a little.

“Right?” My voice comes out higher and squeakier than I would like.

“About girls not liking beer,” he says, turning to look at me.

I have the bottle uncapped, but there’s no way I’m tilting a nearly full bottle of wine to my mouth in front of him when he’s this close to me. I’ll look ridiculous, like an alcoholic. So I hold it clumsily beside me, and say:

“I’ve never tried beer, only cider. So I don’t know.”

“Want to try?” He holds the can out to me, so close now that he hardly needs to move much. I twist the cap back on the wine and take the can from him, our fingers brushing against each other, my heart jumping as we make that contact.

I lift the can to my lips, bubbles rushing out at me, the taste sour and sharp and yeasty.

“Ugh!” I grimace, and Callum, seeing my reaction, laughs and takes the can back from me.

“It does taste weird the first time,” he admits. “I should’ve told you.” He pauses. “You’ve got froth all over your mouth.”

He reaches out and smooths some of it away with his thumb. Testing my reaction, seeing if I’ll pull back, say something quickly, turn away to grab the wine instead.

But I don’t. I turn my face up to him, and wait.

He lowers his face toward me, slowly. I close my eyes, my heart beating almost louder than the drums that are pounding by the bonfire, making the ground below us throb with their rhythm. I smell the beer on his breath as his mouth comes down on mine, taste it on his lips, and I must admit it does put me off for a moment.