This Secret We're Keeping (20 page)

‘You’re still freezing, Jess,’ I said with a frown.

‘Warm me up?’

Her words struck me somewhere between my stomach and my groin, and for a few moments, neither of us spoke or moved. But we were both breathing pretty damn hard.

Then Jess lifted her head and put her lips against mine. They felt damp and plump, warm compared to the rest of her. For a couple of perilous seconds I hesitated, balancing on the brink again of fighting what I felt for her – but it wasn’t long before I surrendered, wrapping both arms round her back and drawing her into me, my eyes squeezed shut like I was dropping down the face of a rollercoaster ride. I felt her break free of the blanket and her hands slide up my
back to my shoulder blades as she pushed her tongue between my lips. I let her in, breathing fiercely through my nose like an animal. After that, it took me approximately twenty seconds to muster the good grace to pull away.

We’re talking grace in relative terms.

I was so desperate to say what needed to be said that I started speaking even before her tongue had fully left my mouth. ‘Jess … if we … if this goes any further, we won’t be able to take it back. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I won’t want to take it back,’ she murmured, moving her lips to my neck. ‘Ever. You?’

I swallowed and attempted to focus. My cock was so stiff I was almost tempted to reach down and touch it myself. ‘I’ve been trying really hard, Jess … not to think of you like that.’

‘But you do?’ she asked me, breath hot against my skin. ‘Think of me like that?’

Admitting it was more difficult than I thought.

‘Sometimes,’ I confessed eventually, my eyes shutting against the sound of my verbalized guilt. ‘But I don’t want to.’

The worst part is, deep down I knew exactly what was going to happen. If it’s possible to really and truly lie to yourself, I was doing it right then – because afterwards, I tried to reason that I had only intended to kiss her, that I had never meant for it to go so far.

But if that was true, I would have pushed her hand away when she started to unbutton my flies. I wouldn’t have unzipped her cords and slipped my fingers inside her underwear. I would have decided against clambering on top of her, jeans around my knees. And I definitely would have been a bit more shocked when she’d whipped out a condom from her back pocket.

I think deep down I knew that I was her first. And yes, as her maths teacher with a decade on her in years, I was well aware that this made it far, far worse.

And so it began. I was captivated, enraptured, unable (but also unwilling) to stop what we had started – and the fact that Jess was forcibly being relocated to London after Christmas made everything seem more urgent somehow. Her imminent departure meant that justifying my recklessness was marginally easier – but the prospect of losing her, now that I had found her, was also what kept me awake at night. I would find myself wide-eyed at three a.m., blinking into the blackness as I tried to conjure up ways to keep our relationship going after she moved (my masterplan, in the end, turned out to be a fairly unimaginative combination of forward planning, late-night trains and cut-price motel rooms). The idea of her being taken so far away from me already felt wrong, like an abduction in broad daylight I was powerless to prevent.

Our last night together in Norfolk was to be 22 December. School had broken up a week earlier, I hadn’t seen her for several days, and now we had merely a few hours of alone time left before Jess headed off to east London the following evening. I was trying not to think about that part too much, because whenever I did it brought a curdle of dread to my stomach.

I was freezing my nuts off (again), shivering outside Jess’s mother’s house like a stalker with a drink problem, waiting for Jess to come out. We’d said seven.
Where is she?
With the amount of dubious skulking I’d been doing of late, I was surprised nobody had yet become suspicious and reported me – at which point I’d probably have been forced
to whip out my Hadley Hall credentials and claim I’d heard this was a really good street for researching right angles or something.

Then the sound of a door banging and light footsteps against gravel. She was almost upon me before I could make her out in the darkness.

‘Hi,’ she whispered, standing on tiptoe to plant a kiss against my numb lips. ‘Sorry. My mum’s not well.’

I was familiar enough by now with Jess’s home situation to understand that she didn’t mean a common cold. ‘Is she going to be okay?’ I took her hand in mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze (well, that’s probably what it felt like to Jess. In reality, it was more of an adrenaline-charged excitement spasm brought on by seeing her out of school hours again. Yep, I was the teenager, not Jess, as evidenced by my involuntary bodily functions and propensity to scuff about on street corners after dark like I was trying to make a bit of extra pocket money dealing Class-B drugs. I was aware that all this was less than ideal, given that I was a maths teacher at a private school and not a delinquent from the local comprehensive, but the fact remained that I didn’t have a clue how to change the way I felt about her. Literally – I had nothing).

She took in a sharp breath. ‘You’re freezing!’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Hand-in-hand, we started walking briskly towards the car, and I gave silent thanks yet again to the local residents’ committee for campaigning so vehemently against the proposal for street lighting put forward by the council last spring. The darkness meant we had a chance at least of slipping away unseen, like thieves.

‘It took ages to get her off to sleep,’ Jess was saying. ‘And quite a bit of diazepam.’

I attempted to ignore the sharp flash of anger in my
stomach at the thought of Jess being forced to soothe her own mother to sleep each night. ‘Jess,’ I said then, though already I was praying her reply would be no, ‘do you want to stay with her?’

Jess stopped and stared at me in dismay, like I’d just suggested slipping dog waste through local letter boxes for kicks. ‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘My sister’s with her. She’ll be okay.’

I firmed my grip on Jess’s hand, and this time the motion was smooth and voluntary. She looked up at me and grinned, something she did a lot when we were together, which incidentally was already a major factor in my moral quandry. She didn’t ever appear troubled, concerned or abused when she was with me – just stupidly happy. It never once struck me that she was reluctant or fearful. And that made it hard for me to feel that what we were doing was wrong: because it didn’t
feel
wrong. If I thought about it logically, of course, I knew how wrong it was – there were laws against people like me for a reason – but it never
felt
anything other than completely and utterly right.

We reached the Golf and climbed in, pausing to share a kiss across the handbrake in the frigid air. Jess moved a hand to my leg. ‘Not here,’ I breathed, pulling away from her. ‘Not here.’

She smiled and turned to fasten her seatbelt. I was really anal about obeying the law whenever we were together in the car; and the run-up to Christmas, when the police liked to people-bait by pulling them over just for the hell of it, was making me super-nervous. I stuck religiously to the speed limit, and was getting increasingly obsessive about checking my headlights and tyre tread before picking her up. Sometimes I would even walk round the car two or three times before driving it, to ensure everything was in order. I wore
driving glasses, maintained the correct braking distance and slowed down well ahead of red lights. I could only hope that Jess appreciated my reasons for behaving so neurotically and didn’t just think the Highway Code really turned me on or something.

I reached into the back seat and pulled out the bunch of carnations I had waiting for her. White and hot pink – the same combination I had picked out for her twice previously, which both times had made her beam with pleasure. I would happily have paid double the price just to see the smile they brought to her face.

I drove out to the edge of town, past the long driveway that led to Hadley Hall and towards the beach. Between us, we had the tide times pretty much down pat by now. This was out of necessity rather than a casual interest in oceanography: we had been forced to reassess the suitability of the cottage as a meeting place after Mrs Parker had enquired about Jess one night as I was returning from work. I had muttered something about private tutoring before scuttling indoors like a cockroach and spending the rest of the night in a sweat-infused panic, rehearsing my little speech for the police over and over in my mind. To my shame, I even had a tenner and a stack of maths text books permanently arranged on my coffee table, so if the knock ever came, I would be ready.

Worse, I’d practised my defence in front of the bedroom mirror, crinkling up my forehead again and again until I felt I had conveyed the appropriate combination of shock and innocence. To my eternal shame, I had briefed Jess too.

Yes, private tutoring
, she had repeated, blinking.
I’m sorry – should I have told my mum?

But, as yet, not even my worst fears had been terrifying enough to make me end it with her. Occasionally, overcome
with guilt, I would promise myself that the next time we were alone together, I’d finish it: no negotiation. But then I’d see her in the flesh, and she’d take my hand and start chattering lightly about her day and cracking her stupid little jokes that I loved, and all my best intentions would melt away. I was, as it turned out, the very epitome of weakness. Newborn babies had more gut resolve than me.

As I took the road that led to the car park, ‘Nightswimming’ by R.E.M came on over the radio. And at exactly the point I was turning to Jess, to tell her how much I loved this song, she looked across at me and smiled. ‘I love this song,’ she murmured dreamily.

Fuck what everybody else thinks
, I told myself then.
This is real
.

I smiled back at her. ‘I love it too.’

We reached the beach car park, and I parked up at the end of it, switching off the headlights. ‘It’s really cold,’ I said, which was actually a good thing, as it meant we were more likely to be alone. The doggers would be taking a night off. ‘Are you sure you want to walk?’

Jess always wanted to walk. She appreciated any opportunity to get out and see the world – even if it was only the same little corner of North Norfolk, over and over again. She smiled and waggled mittened hands at me. ‘I’m all wrapped up. Let’s go.’

So we made our way to the edge of the footpath, then took our usual sharp left. It was high tide, and from somewhere beyond the dunes I could hear the sea gently working the shoreline. Everything was cold and calm.

Our favoured spot was a bird hide nestled in the shadow of a thick clump of trees, with a view that took in the grazing marshes and, beyond them, the road. It was a place to which birdwatchers flocked during daylight hours – but
after dark, we always had it to ourselves. Admittedly, heading to a bird hide wasn’t quite as exciting as disappearing into the dunes to frolic about in the sand, but it was probably a few degrees warmer and had the added benefit of enabling me to watch for headlights.

Despite it being the more considered choice, I knew that, in reality, the pair of us sneaking off to a bird hide was still up there with checking into a motel that rented rooms by the hour or steaming up a car in a lay-by off a B-road. Jess didn’t agree, though. She always said she thought it was romantic.

I hated to hear her say that, because it only reminded me that she was still too young to know what real romance was if she thought I was spoiling her by bringing her to a frigid wooden hut in the middle of nowhere. I imagined again how she’d view me in ten years’ time, certain that between now and then she would wake up to what a pervert I was and quite rightly begin to hate me – but that only made me more determined to savour the tiny sliver of time we had left together now.

Reaching the hide, I pushed open the door. It was pitch dark inside and utterly silent, just the way we liked it. I lifted one of the wooden shutters and fastened it at the top; it let in a rush of icy air but at least I could hear road noise now, spot lights moving. We straddled our usual bench, facing one another, and I reached out, taking her face between my hands as I always did, and started to kiss her. She shuddered deeply, either with cold or excitement, I couldn’t tell.

‘Wait, wait,’ she mumbled into my mouth, pulling away from me. ‘Get the torch.’

I hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, clambering to my feet and fishing around in the rafters for the torch we had
hidden there a couple of weeks previously. I fumbled with the switch as I sat back down on the bench, my fingers half frozen, and eventually snapped it on. An anaemic beam illuminated our knees and threw a piss-weak glow across our faces.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said then.

I licked my lips. The taste of her was all over me. ‘Okay. What’s up?’

She took a breath, her eyes glistening. ‘I’m not going to London any more.’

I stared at her. ‘What?’ I breathed, my heart breaking into a spontaneous little tap dance of hope.

‘I sorted it.’

Rather worryingly, it transpired that my natural reaction to this was to come out with the same sort of low and reverent whistle as made by my dad whenever someone told him a British coarse fishing record had been broken again. ‘How?’

Jess’s smile was like a quiet plea for my praise, but I knew I had to withhold it until she’d confirmed at least that her mother wasn’t drugged up to the eyeballs and chained to a radiator on an indefinite basis. (Well, maybe not the part with the drugs – we could take it as a given that this was happening as we spoke – but I did need to find out exactly how Jess had managed to pull this off.)

‘Debbie’s always reading my diary,’ she began softly, in the sort of voice I might have used to start reading a children’s story. ‘And then she goes to my mum and tells her what I’ve written.’ Jess rolled her eyes. ‘She thinks I don’t know.’

I nodded, hoping the frozen smile on my face would somehow negate the small swell of fear I could feel in my stomach. Surely she wasn’t about to tell me she’d written
something down about us? Teenage diaries – naively, I’d never even considered it.