This Secret We're Keeping (10 page)

But Jess didn’t seem to think I was a moron. ‘I think you’re cool,’ she murmured. It slid out of her mouth like a confession. ‘We all do. Haven’t you noticed how we’re always trying to get your attention?’

You’re flirting with me, Jess
. I almost said it out loud, just in
case she didn’t know, because she did emanate that type of natural charm which meant this wasn’t entirely outside the realms of possibility. I thought perhaps I should call her on it, tell her to stop – but the crazy thing was, I pictured myself reaching out and grabbing her hand while I said it so she didn’t feel too embarrassed. Given the context, this had the definite potential to make me either a glaring hypocrite or a rampant opportunist, so I opted to be neither and simply shook my head instead – an effort to dispatch a plasma blast or similar to break up the gradually snowballing thoughts in my mind.

Misreading my headshake as a wordless reply to her question, Jess tilted her head down slightly so that she was looking back at me through dipped eyelashes, and said, ‘Well, we are. All of us. All the time.’

It was then that a flicker of suspicion brought me up short. Only a couple of months ago, she’d told me that everybody was messing about because they couldn’t understand a word I was saying. Since then I’d been genuinely trying to slow my lessons down, with a noticeable uptick in good grades, I’d thought. Now she was telling me they played up because they thought I was hot. Which was it?

Is she fucking with me?

‘So if you don’t have tattoos,’ Jess was saying now, ‘do you have a six-pack?’

(I did, as it happened, along with biceps that popped nicely when I flexed them. I was proud of my physique, and grateful to my dad for the DNA, because I actually did precious little to warrant it aside from lifting a few weights now and then, and steering clear of crisps. But none of that mattered now, because I was starting to think my hospitality and – let’s face it, my gullibility – were about to turn around and bite me on the arse.)

‘Is that a bet as well?’

She went very still and blinked at me.

‘Is that why you came round here, Jess? This is all a bet, a joke?’

It took only a couple of moments’ silence for my sense of conviction to collapse dramatically. Jess’s face – a perfect, compact heart that angled gently at her chin – began to crumple and flush; and straight away, I wished I could scoop up all my words and stuff them back into my mouth where they belonged.

‘No,’ she said eventually. Her voice shrivelled to the decibel level of a small creature attempting to avoid predators. ‘I told you, nobody knows I’m here.’

I’d got it wrong. She’d been attempting to flirt and flatter me, not shaft me – though it was becoming increasingly difficult to decide which was worse. ‘Sorry,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s just, sometimes, those girls you hang around with –’

‘The Witches?’

I stared at her. ‘What?’

To my relief, the dimples made a tentative comeback. ‘I know that’s what you call us.’

‘Them,’ I stuttered, ‘not you. Them. What? How do you know that?’

‘I saw it on your notepad, last week. You’d written: “Wednesday. Witches flicking rubber bands. Again.” ’

I inhaled deeply. There was something about this girl. It was like she was one step ahead of me the whole time.

‘Them,’ I repeated. ‘Not you. I like you.’

‘I like you too.’

I swallowed, wondering for a moment how best to correct her before deciding the mistake was mine, not hers. I needed to watch my words.

‘I just meant,’ I said, to clarify, ‘that you’re better than those girls. You shouldn’t stoop to their level.’

‘I don’t,’ she said simply. ‘I just sit with them.’

It was a fair point. I liked a girl with a logical view of the world, and Jess definitely had that. It was just a pity that this gift for sound reason seemed mysteriously to evaporate when it came to basic arithmetic, but I was working on it.

In the brief pause that followed, Jess plucked several times at the ring pull on her lemonade can, a gentle, rhythmic
thunk
. Her fingernails were a shade of hot pink they hadn’t been when I’d last seen her (I would have noticed – we’d been using protractors for what was fast becoming one of my all-time favourite lessons. The girls took a slightly different view, which was essentially that they detested geometry).

‘I’ll take it off before Monday,’ she told me.

‘Take what off?’

‘The nail varnish,’ she said, holding up the back of her hand and wiggling her fingers.

They weren’t supposed to wear nail polish at school, but it didn’t exactly bother me. I tended to let things like that slide, given that I occasionally wore leather to work.

I shook my head like,
Don’t worry about it
. ‘I never saw you, remember? You were never here.’

She smiled happily in response, like I’d confided something in her. ‘Of course. I can keep a secret, Mr L.’

‘You shouldn’t be keeping secrets at your age,’ I insisted, ‘and you definitely shouldn’t be here on a Saturday night. You should be out having fun.’ I thought about it. ‘Or, you know – in studying.’

‘I could say the same for you. Why are you all by yourself on a Saturday night?’ She took another sip from her drink. ‘I didn’t actually think you’d be here when I knocked.’

As a rule, I hated to let people down – and the fact that I’d failed to live up to Jess’s baseline expectation that I would turn out to be a normal human with somewhere to be on a Saturday evening was a bit annoying. On the other hand, I quite liked the idea of myself as the pensive maths teacher, staying up late into the evening to drink beer, be alone with my thoughts and do great things with calculus. I thought that persona had definite enigmatic potential.

‘Well, I had plans for tonight,’ I informed her. ‘But they fell through.’

She smiled. ‘With Miss Laird?’

‘Jess …’ I said, and then shook my head and started laughing. ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘What?’ She started laughing too. ‘Miss Laird fancies the pants off you, it’s so obvious. She’s always staring at you in assembly.’ And as she spoke she gently admonished me for being the object of Sonia’s affection with the lightest of playful shoves to my right pectoral.

Even I was surprised by how hard I found it to resist reaching out and shoving her gently back.

Fortunately, Jess continued talking, which gave me a few seconds to gather myself. ‘I watch Miss Laird all the time,’ she was saying. ‘She’s always looking at you and trying to sit next to you and following you to the staffroom. She tripped up the other day, chasing you in her stilettos.’

Despite myself, I laughed again. ‘Tell me that’s not true.’

Jess grinned back at me, like she loved to make me smile. ‘It’s one hundred per cent true! She dropped all her books. Running after you,’ she added, in case I’d not caught this bit the first time.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not reciprocated.’

‘How come?’

Because I was enjoying myself, and because I suspected it would make her laugh, I was tempted to tell Jess all about my night with Sonia at the restaurant. But I realized how it might have looked: even Sonia, who’d been very much in attendance on the most bogus date in history, was utterly convinced that my forced participation was irrefutable proof of my lustful intent – despite the fact she’d virtually had to abduct me in order to secure it.

Plus, Sonia was a fellow teacher, and much as I would have loved to tell Jess about her retching into passing flower beds, I knew it wasn’t fair. Mackenzie was a firm believer in sticking together, and would even occasionally go as far as to describe us as one big family – usually on Friday mornings during the rousing motivational speech he delivered off the back of his one and only coffee of the week. I wouldn’t have taken it quite that far, but it was hard to come up with a meaningful argument against the general sentiment.

So instead I just said, ‘Not my type,’ as neutrally as I could.

‘Oh. What’s your type?’

‘Complicated,’ I said.

I knew as soon as I’d spoken that it was a poor choice of word. I must have been trying to articulate what I’d always suspected, which was that Sonia was pretty vacuous, with nothing going on underneath all that blusher and mascara and bright red lipstick. Yes, she was more than capable of making her presence felt – but I was pretty sure that beyond her maniacal tendencies, her head was just an empty space. On the few occasions I’d attempted to engage her in proper conversation at the pub, before everything had kicked off between us, her limited contribution had been to sling back oversized glassfuls of warm white wine and agree with every
word I said. I wanted something deeper. It didn’t have to be an ocean, but it had to be more than something so shallow it barely counted as a puddle.

And why wouldn’t I want complicated, for God’s sake? I was living on my own in North Norfolk, teaching at an all-girls private school and hanging out with other teachers. I had never really travelled, or ridden a motorbike, or jumped out of a plane, or done anything that could be seen as remotely remarkable. My risk-averse parents – well-intentioned as they were – had always persuaded me to walk on the safer side of life. If I was honest, I’d actually been feeling for a while that my life was in a bit of a rut – so, right now, complicated was just up my street.

I did not mean her.

I swear. I did not mean Jess.

‘How complicated?’ she asked me then. And that was the moment when everything spun 360 degrees because suddenly her hand was on my thigh. The feeling of her touching me shot straight to my stomach like a lightning bolt, but this time, I didn’t move away.

Conversely enough, the expression on her face was almost one of innocence. With berry-red lips parted ever so slightly, she was simply waiting patiently for my response to the pretty straightforward question being posed by her fingers on my leg.
Yes, or no?

My heart began to pump so urgently it could have passed as the bassline to an acid-house anthem. I knew by then that I wanted to kiss her, but I also knew that I didn’t want to go to prison. In an effort to mobilize my last remaining vestige of self-control, I moved my leg from beneath her hand and leaned forward, hanging my head like I was getting a quick prayer in before everything went sideways. My hair fell
across my face, and I breathed hard for a few moments, my heart still hammering.

Teacher plus pupil equals pervert
was whirling round and round my mind. There was nothing complicated about that little equation whatsoever.

‘Jess,’ I said eventually.

She didn’t respond.

I turned back round to look at her. She was sitting very still, grey eyes wide, waiting. ‘I’m sorry. I think you should leave. This is very wrong. You know how wrong this is, don’t you?’

Her eyes glassed over then.

Please don’t cry. Oh God, please don’t cry
.

‘Don’t you like me?’ she breathed, just about holding it together.

It occurred to me then that I wanted to answer that question by grabbing her and kissing her, just to show her how much I
did
like her – a realization that struck me in the pit of my stomach like the fist of a heavyweight boxer with an anger problem.

Forget it
, I told myself then, sternly.
Theoretically, all this is still under your control
. As the (supposedly) responsible adult here, I had to at least try and claw back some daylight. I’d created this problem by inviting her in and letting her flirt with me before waffling on to her about ‘complicated’ – so now it was up to me to shut it down, and fast. ‘I like you, Jess,’ I said softly, ‘but I’m your teacher, and you really need to leave now.’

‘Actually, I am leaving,’ she said quickly. ‘After Christmas, we’re all moving to London to live with my aunt.’ It was only after she had swept a swift yet shaky fingertip underneath each of her eyes, her mouth slightly ajar, that I realized she was slowly weeping.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry to hear that.’ And I was. ‘How come?’

She slung her head back and stared at the ceiling for a couple of seconds, taking deep breaths, attempting to compose herself. I gently took the can of lemonade from her and set it down next to my half-drunk beer because she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.

‘My mum’s basically an alcoholic, and she can’t cope,’ she said eventually. ‘She needs to go to bed and stay there for about six months, she reckons.’

‘Jesus,’ I muttered.

‘There’s only three weeks left of term,’ she said, looking at me again. ‘And then I’m gone for ever.’

I realized then that I would miss her. I realized that I looked forward to having her in my lessons. I realized that I was chuffed she’d joined maths club. And at roughly the same time as I realized all that, I realized I must also be a class-A, top-grade scumbag, because she had started to very slowly trace her fingers up and down my thigh and I wasn’t doing a thing to stop her.

Jess’s hand began to inch upwards in the direction of my groin. ‘You’ve got to go, Jess,’ I whispered to her, surprised to realize that my eyes were brimming with tears.
Please stop. Don’t stop. Please stop. Keep going
.

She promptly ignored me by leaning over and kissing me, hard.

Instantly I succumbed, grabbing the back of her head with my hand and pulling her against me. Her silken hair ran through my fingers like water, my cock already embarrassingly stiff. I groaned as her tongue found its way into my mouth – sweet and citrusy, sticky with lemonade – and grappled with my own.

She was a strong kisser. She felt experienced. It felt as if
she knew exactly what she was doing.
Irrelevant, irrelevant
, I reminded myself, even as our legs began to tangle together, our kissing becoming more and more fierce.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I groaned into her mouth.

I couldn’t stop my hands from moving all over her body, smothering her in great sweeping motions like I was rubbing her with oil. She had one hand buried in my hair and the other gripping the back of my neck, making me intermittently shudder and adding great shocks of voltage to this unbelievable kiss.