“Yes,” he says after a reflective pause. “Yes, it will be easy to see Flora again, Margot.”
And I don’t know whom I envy more: Harry for being able to see Flora in Paris, my sister for being able to see him. The silence tautens. The wind blows a skim of pale rose petals across the water. “Well, I’d better go.” I scramble to my feet, inelegant now, the magic I felt earlier in my dress gone, used up. “I need to check on Dot.”
His hand shoots out, coils around my bare ankle, making me start. “Will I see you before you leave?”
“I . . . I don’t think so,” I stutter, baffled by his hand, the urgency of his question. “We go back to school on Sunday night.”
His fingers tighten around my ankle. “I have to see you again, Margot.”
I wonder if I’ve misheard him. Nothing makes sense.
“I can’t stop thinking of you.”
A dangerous, excitable heat starts to spread through me. For the first time in my life, I get a taste of the power that Flora must take for granted, and it feels like a weapon, one of Perry’s hunting guns, heavy, unwieldy in my hands. I don’t trust myself with it. “I . . . I should go back.”
“Sit. Sit with me a little longer, Margot. You have to.” His fingers release my leg, one by one, and I think back to the beginning of the summer, the way he put my fingers around the cool metal cup of beer that evening, the way it all started. “Please?” he says more softly, remembering his manners.
I sit down gingerly beside him again, careful not to be too close, an unprepared understudy shoved into the lead role, torn between a giddy joy and a sense of foreboding. The rules have all been broken. “Don’t you love my sister?” I ask cautiously, concerned for Flora.
“I suppose.” His voice is distant, as if Flora lives in a different part of his mind altogether, has nothing to do with any of this. “But I dream of you as I dream of her, Margot.”
He dreams of Flora. He dreams of me. He dreams of hundreds of girls. He will not remember this in the morning. He is drunk. He is a rogue. Maddeningly, this does not make me like him less.
“And now you are in here.” He taps his temple, like he blames me for climbing inside it. The mood pitches: I wonder what I’ve done wrong. He slams one fist into his palm, the slap resounding across the water. “Damn. What was in that whiskey?”
“I’m a little tipsy, too, Harry,” I bluster, embarrassed on his behalf. “Really, it’s okay. We can forget . . .” I watch his hand rising in slow motion through the night air. When it touches my cheek, the curve of his warm palm fits perfectly, and I cannot help but lean into it, just for a moment, just to see what it feels like, closing my eyes, smelling the cigarettes on his fingers and feeling bits of me slip loose.
A distant rumble. Another. The sound of a storm splitting the sky.
“Look what you’ve done, you sorceress.” He throws an arm around my shoulders, heaves me closer.
I laugh as rain starts to fall, small drops at first, as unimaginable until a few seconds ago as his arm about my shoulder. Lightning flashes over the trees, turning the garden silver and black. If this is all that will ever happen, it is enough. Just this. The thunder, the rain, the weight of Harry’s arm against my neck.
“Come on.” He grabs my hand, leads me into the garden, bristling, snapping, dripping, alive in the wind and rain, nothing like the gentle English garden we’ve grown used to this summer. We start walking away from the river, the meadow, the irreconcilability of Flora. But it’s hard to see where we’re going, like we’re walking at a slant into a tilted universe, the garden changing character with every step. Paths don’t fork where I remember. Hulks of topiary rise unexpectedly, megaliths on the lawn. I try to tune my ears to the sound of my sisters’ footsteps, ready to pull my hand from Harry’s. And I am sure I can hear something, a twig snapping, a shuffle in the shadows. But the sounds stop when we do, and I wonder if they’re nothing so much as the sounds of my own conscience.
We run beneath a huge tree, enchanted, a private tent full of forgotten sounds: water funneling along leaves, dripping through branches. Harry is behind me, his arms tightening around my waist. I suck in my breath sharply, don’t pull away as I should, the warmth of his body spreading through the cold wet cloth of my dress. I’ll stand here a while, I tell myself, then I’ll go. Nothing else will happen.
“May I have this dance?” Without waiting for my answer, he starts to turn me slowly, then faster, until I am spinning round and round, my dress kicking up, the rain flying off, the world, too, faster and faster until we skid and fall laughing to the blanket of leaves and beechnuts beneath the tree. As we lie there, I think of how Flora and I would play that game when we were little, spinning each other like tops. And how I’ve gone from that sister to this, and I feel a wash of shame, try to get up. But he rolls on top of me, presses a knee between mine.
There is a thrill at his surprising drilling weight, a need for it, the way it takes away my responsibility. “I must get back . . .” I start to say, but the distance between our mouths closes. I taste river on his tongue, whiskey, wine, and honey. His hand is running up my legs, along the back of my thighs, toward my knees. I tense, wriggle, trying to get his hand away, to save him from recoiling.
Harry is stronger than me, more insistent. He lifts my skirt, holds my legs at the ankles, and, as if he’s noticed the patches, knows exactly where they are, he starts to kiss behind my knees. I cannot breathe, paralyzed with horror, waiting for his inevitable disgust. But it doesn’t come. He continues to kiss, his mouth soft and wet and forgiving, kissing away all the years of scratching and discomfort, the names in the playground, the shame of school showers. I open my eyes, cry out, the sky spins. It is the most physically profound thing ever to happen to me.
I lift my head, peer down my body to look at him, the sight of us together, his eyes half-closed, unreachable, glazed with lust. He grabs my hand and places it on the stiffness in his trousers. I fumble at his belt, reach for the sex beneath it, shocked by how gristly, springy, and alive it is. Freed, it slaps against my legs, trying to find a way in. His mouth is everywhere, biting my lips, my breasts, and the rain is escaping through the trees, and then I hear it, his whispered voice, rasping, “Audrey.”
I push him back, panting. “Did you just call me Audrey?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he mumbles, kissing my neck.
“No!”