by Jill Mansell
Chapter 40
Wasn’t it? Dan’s mouth was dry. Apart from anything else, he’d been the one who had bought the rope from the hardware store, carried it all the way down here, and climbed the tree to tie it securely around that branch. He’d done it so they could take a running jump from the top of the slope, swing out over the water like Tarzan, then launch themselves through the air and into the lake. He’d gone first to test it out, and everyone else had followed his lead. It had been the highlight of that long, hot summer, providing countless hours of fun and resulting in their meeting place being renamed the Leap.
They would have kept doing it too, if Kyle hadn’t had his accident, making a catastrophic error while attempting that double somersault.
Instead of releasing his grip on the outward swing, Kyle had held on too long and let go on the return one, but had gone for the double somersault anyway. Everyone had seen him cartwheel through the air, then land on the very edge of the lake in less than three inches of water.
The sound of him landing—it had been a hideous combination of watery splash and bone-crunching thud—was something Dan knew he’d never forget.
“It was an accident,” Lily said. “Poor Kyle. Scary at the time, though.”
It had been bloody scary. Kyle had lain there on his side, white-faced and clearly in tremendous pain. It had taken twenty-five minutes for the paramedics to locate and reach them, but it had seemed like hours. Dan had knelt in the water beside him the whole time, not daring to move Kyle’s crumpled body. Instead, he’d kept the injured boy’s head slightly elevated so the water didn’t flow into his mouth.
Once the paramedics had arrived, they’d strapped Kyle onto a stretcher and, with some difficulty, managed to carry him back up the hill to the waiting ambulance. The next day the rest of them discovered he’d sustained multiple fractures to his pelvis.
Kyle had spent the next couple of weeks in Cheltenham General Hospital and the remainder of that summer recuperating. His parents had then relocated to somewhere in the north of England, so he never returned to their school, and none of them ever heard from him again.
“I wonder what he’s doing now,” Lily mused. She made a face. “I wonder if he made a full recovery.”
“Of course he did.”
“You don’t know that. He might be hobbling around on sticks. Or in a wheelchair.”
“Don’t say that.” Dan felt sick.
“He could be, though,” Lily said. “We just don’t know. Poor Kyle, he was a funny little thing, wasn’t he? Always so desperate to fit in with the rest of us, but he never really did. God, and his mother was scary.”
“When did you ever meet his mother?” Kyle had only arrived at the school six months earlier and had lived several miles from Stanton Langley, in a village called Compton Drew. As far as Dan was aware, none of them had encountered his parents.
Lily reached over for the box of raspberries, then lay back and rested them on her flat stomach. “It’s a secret.”
He turned his head to look at her. “What?”
She popped a raspberry into her mouth. “OK, it was a secret. I’m sure he won’t mind me telling you now. He invited me over for tea at his house one day.”
“He did?” Dan paused. “Is that the secret? Are you sure you want to work for MI5?”
“Sarcastic.” Lily gave his ankle a gentle kick. “He asked me to pretend to be his girlfriend, if you must know.”
“Seriously? Why?”
“His mother had been giving him a hard time, wanting to know why he wasn’t going out with anyone. Poor Kyle. When he told me, I couldn’t believe she’d be like that. Then I met her, and she was worse. The first thing she said to me was ‘So you’re Kyle’s girlfriend? Thank goodness for that. We were beginning to think he was gay.’”
“Ouch. What a witch. And she actually meant it?” Dan said in disbelief.
“Oh, definitely. She was a horrible woman.”
Now he felt even worse. That poor kid. “And presumably he was gay.”
“Nope. He said not. He told me he was straight but shy. And he was only sixteen, for crying out loud. Can you imagine how awful it must have been, having your mother come out with stuff like that?”
“So you just went over to his house for tea and that was it? She was convinced?”
“I went over there four or five times. His mother ended up really liking me.”
“But there was never anything going on between you and Kyle?”
“Of course not. We just held hands a bit and pretended to be boyfriend and girlfriend for a few weeks. Then we broke up.”
“I can’t believe you did all that,” said Dan.
Lily shrugged. “No big deal. I felt sorry for him, so I helped him out.”
“You’re actually quite a nice person, deep down.”
“And you’re actually in danger of getting rolled into the water.” Lily gave him a playful nudge.
“I’m amazed you never mentioned it before. All these years and you kept it to yourself.”
“Maybe because it was no one else’s business. And if you’d found out, you’d probably have made fun of him.”
Dan smiled; he loved that Lily had resisted the temptation to tell a story that would have been amusing and shown her in a good light. She was also right about the making-fun-of-Kyle bit. Well, prior to the accident, at least.
They both gazed out over the lake in companionable silence for a couple of minutes. Following that day, the farmer who owned the land above this side of the lake had put up a No Entry sign and, rather more persuasively, installed a bull in the field. He’d evidently also cut down the rope hanging from the tree. Since then, none of them had been back. Until today.
“Oh, Coral called earlier,” Lily said. “It was lovely to hear her sounding so happy. She’s having a fantastic time in Grimaud.”
“That’s great.”
“I’m so glad we managed to persuade her to go. And she’s painting again… What are you looking at?”
Dan smiled. “You.” While she’d been gazing up at the sky, he’d thought it was safe to study her profile in the early-evening sunlight: the angle of her cheekbones, the dusting of freckles across her nose, the sweep of her gold-tipped lashes above the clear whites of her eyes.
“Why? Do I have something on my face?” She rubbed her hand vigorously around her mouth. “Is it crumbs?”
“It’s OK. You’re fine.” It wasn’t something he could say out loud, but Lily’s mouth really was his favorite mouth in the world.
“Have you heard from Patsy?”
She was still watching the sun filtering through the branches. Her hair was spread out across the grass beneath her head, and a ladybug had just landed on her pink bra strap. Was it a good sign that she had asked?
“I had a text this afternoon. She asked me if I thought you missed her.”
Silence. Dan realized Lily must miss Patsy but couldn’t bring herself to admit it. After a few moments he said, “She also asked if I thought you’d ever speak to her again.”
Lily swallowed. “And what did you say?”
“I told her I didn’t know. I thought I might ask you this evening.”
“Hmm.”
“What does hmm mean?”
“Honestly?” She sighed. “Oh, Dan, you know me. I’m not the not-speaking-to-someone type. But I still can’t believe she did it. All these years, she didn’t tell me he’d been here. She had no right to keep something like that to herself. If she hadn’t slept with him, she’d have told me; I know she would. But she needed to cover her tracks so she kept it to herself. Every time I think about it, I just feel…” Lily clenched her fist and pressed it against her chest. “It makes me feel sick.”
“I know.”
“I can’t help it. She did a bad thing.”
Dan nodded. �
��Have you ever done a bad thing?”
“Of course I’ve done bad things. But not that bad,” said Lily. “Nowhere near.”
“Go on, then. Tell me some of your not-so-bad things.”
“OK.” A glimmer of a smile. “Well…I made you some cheese on toast once. I dropped it facedown on the kitchen floor, and there wasn’t any more bread left. So I scooped it up, smoothed all the melted cheese back over the top with a knife, and sprinkled it with black pepper so you couldn’t tell anything had happened.”
“Did you also spit on it?”
“What? No!”
“In that case,” Dan said, “I forgive you.”
He wouldn’t have minded even if she had.
“Thanks, I feel so much better now.” Lily shot him a sideways look. “Is this your attempt to make everything all right? Because I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Come on, is that the worst thing you’ve ever done? I mean, seriously?”
“Right. I’m trying to remember.” She concentrated hard, then said, “OK, I bought two cushions in a supermarket once, and the cashier made a mistake and only charged me for one of them. I should have told her, but I didn’t.”
“Oh my God, I bet you felt really terrible about that,” Dan said.
“I did! Oh…” She realized he was making fun of her. “Shut up. I did feel bad about it.”
“Now tell me the very worst thing you’ve ever, ever done. And please don’t say it was the time you put an empty potato chip bag in the green recycling bin.”
Lily reached out and pinched his wrist, then gave the matter some thought. Finally she said, “Just after I’d passed my driving test, I reversed the van into a postbox and smashed the brake light. I swore to Coral and Nick that I’d seen a red car reverse into the van, then drive off.”
“And did they ever find out the truth?”
“No.”
“So I could tell Coral when she gets back from France.”
Lily gave him a look. “You could. But it’s hardly a life-changer, is it? Is that why you’re doing this?”
Dan wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing; he was kind of freestyling, making it up as he went along.
“Your bad things aren’t bad enough.” He topped off his glass of wine. “You’ve never even told a string of lies and broken some guy’s heart.”
Apart from mine. Which doesn’t count.
“Sorry,” Lily said. “If only I had a secret double life as a serial killer. Go on then, what’s the most awful thing you’ve done?”
Dan tilted his head to look at her. This was the bit he had decided to tell her.
“Oh dear.” Lily’s eyes were bright with anticipation. “Too many to choose from, I suppose. Hard to narrow them down.”
“It was my fault that Kyle smashed his pelvis.” Now it was Dan’s turn to feel a bit sick; he’d actually said it out loud. At last.
Chapter 41
“What? No, it wasn’t. I was there,” Lily said. “I saw it. He got his timing wrong, that’s all.”
OK, time for some brutal honesty. Aware that his was a story that decidedly didn’t paint him in a good light, Dan took a deep breath. “He got his timing wrong because he was terrified. I’d told him he had to go for the double somersault, and if he didn’t do it, we didn’t want him tagging along with us anymore. I said if he wimped out, that was it. He’d be out of the group. And I saw the look on his face. I knew he was petrified, but I let him go ahead and try it anyway.” He paused. “So that’s why it happened, and it was all my fault.”
“Wow.” Lily was staring at him, incredulous. “Why? Why did you say that to him?”
Oh, the crying shame. Not just of having done it, but of revealing his own behavior to Lily.
“I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t like him that much. He was quiet and awkward, and I used to catch him looking at me. He used to watch you too, all the time. It creeped me out a bit.” It had actually creeped him out a lot. “I suppose I thought it would either force him to go ahead and do it and make him more interesting, or get him to leave our group. Which most of us would have been happy about.”
Lily was frowning. “But…I never heard you say anything mean to him.”
“I didn’t. Apart from that day. I just came out with the challenge on the way down there and wondered what he’d do. I actually thought he’d chicken out.” Dan shook his head. “Obviously I wasn’t expecting it to end the way it did.”
“And Kyle never said anything. I visited him in the hospital, and he never told me.”
“He didn’t say a word to anyone,” Dan agreed. “I knew it was my fault. He knew it was my fault. And I’ve felt guilty about it ever since.”
“Poor Kyle. I wonder what happened to him.”
“I know. I’ve thought about that too.”
“As bad things go, that’s a pretty good one, though,” Lily said.
“Thanks.”
“I haven’t done anything like that.”
“Clearly not. If you had, it might make it easier for you to understand how it feels.”
“OK, see that little bit of rope dangling up there? Climb up and swing from it,” said Lily. “Then let go and land on those rocks. I’m ordering you to do it.”
“You’re joking,” Dan told her, “but I’m serious. I think you should do something you’d feel guilty about.”
Lily bit into a ripe strawberry and thought for a moment. “Don’t make me go shoplifting. I won’t do it. God, imagine getting arrested.”
“Hang on, you’ve got a—” Dan stopped himself as the thought struck him. He’d been about to tell her she had a ladybug tightrope-walking its way along her narrow, pink bra strap. Stunned, he let the new thought rattle and swoop through his brain like a micro roller coaster. OK, now this was something he genuinely hadn’t planned in advance, but would Lily believe him? And should he do it?
More to the point, did he dare? And if he did, what would it do to him?
“I’ve got a what?” Lily was still waiting for him to finish the original sentence. She peered down at her front, then wiped the corners of her mouth once more.
“Here, let me.” Sliding closer and half sitting up so the arm he’d been supporting himself on was now free, Dan carefully coaxed the ladybug off the satin strap with his thumb and nudged it into the palm of his hand.
“Oh no, you can’t be serious.” Lily was shaking her head. “I’m not killing a ladybug. Don’t ask me to do that.”
Despite himself, Dan started to laugh. The way her mind worked never failed to entertain him. “I’m not asking you to murder a ladybug.”
“Oh. Well, good.”
As if it had had quite enough of this kind of dangerous talk, the ladybug spread its wings and flew off.
And now Dan was no longer laughing. His heart was bumping crazily against his rib cage at the prospect of what he was about to do. He’d known Lily long enough and well enough to know for sure that she’d never been unfaithful to a boyfriend.
For starters, there hadn’t been that many of them.
Secondly, it simply wasn’t in her nature to be underhanded. It would never occur to her to even be tempted.
“OK,” Lily said. “What are you thinking?”
She was still lying on her back with her hair spread across the grass beneath her head. Dan sat at her side, gazing down and breathing in the faint fresh scent of her shampoo. “How about if I ask you to do something that wouldn’t get you arrested?”
“Like what?”
“How are things going with you and Eddie?”
“Great,” said Lily.
“Where is he now?”
“That’s a stupid question. You know where he is. New Zealand.”
“And you’d never cheat on him. You just wouldn’t; I know that too.”
&nb
sp; Lily made a what-are-you-on-about face. “No, of course I wouldn’t.”
“OK, so…what if you kissed someone else?” Dan looked at her. “Would that make you feel guilty?”
“Yes.”
“It wouldn’t have to wreck your relationship, though. And he’d never know about it. You wouldn’t tell him, nor would the other person, who you know you can absolutely trust. It would just be between the two of you. Completely private.”
He could see the pulse flickering at the base of her throat, the sheen of her skin there, the movement of her neck as she swallowed. Then her gaze locked back on him, and she said, “So you’re saying it’s something I could do that would make me feel ashamed of myself, and then I’d understand what it felt like to have done a bad thing.”
“That’s pretty much it. Seems like a logical plan to me.” He smiled fractionally.
The silence stretched between them. High above their heads, birds were singing to one another in the trees, and from across the lake came the sound of a car driving up through the village. Closer to hand, a bee buzzed among the clumps of wild celandines and dog roses.
Finally, her voice husky and barely above a whisper, Lily said, “It’s not just Eddie who mustn’t know. You have to promise not to tell anyone else.” She swallowed again. “Anyone at all.”
Oh God, it was going to happen. It was actually going to happen.
“I promise.” Dan nodded slowly. “And you know you can trust me.”
“Go on, then.” Her dark eyes huge, her breathing uneven, Lily reached up and lightly touched the side of his face. “Let’s do it.”
He lowered his mouth to hers, hesitated for a second a fraction above it, then closed his eyes and made the first contact. His lips brushed against hers, and he felt her tremble…which was quite a feat, considering the amount of turmoil engulfing his own body right now.
Oh, but this was something he’d longed to do—had dreamed of doing—for so many years. Was it any wonder his hormones had gone into overdrive? He was kissing Lily, properly kissing her at last, and the reality of it was every bit as dizzying as he’d hoped. Her lips were soft, she tasted of summer and strawberries, and her fingers were sliding around the back of his neck…
