This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  Her breath made a wistful sigh against my neck as she spoke, and I felt my skin become studded with goose pimples, though not from the cold. I realized then that Jess had become like a tiny shooting star across my black imagination, destined after Christmas to vanish into darkness, leaving only the glimmer of a light stream to mark her path.

  I looked down at the top of her head. All the snowflakes had melted into her hair, leaving it flecked with little spots of damp. I thought about telling her what I knew of Italy, which was that my grandmother’s family lived in Tuscany. They were in the alabaster trade, and owned a rolling estate in the countryside stuffed with olive trees and sunshine. Alabaster, apparently, could afford you quite a nice lifestyle if you played it right, and from what I’d heard, my dad’s uncles and cousins had done just that, and now spent most of their time dining al fresco, eating gelato and drinking Chianti. (Quite why my father had opted to stay in England after university rather than head out to Italy was anyone’s guess. For my part, I was convinced that I’d be a lot more suave and a lot less idiotic if I lived in Tuscany and had made it big in alabaster.)

  But there was something about describing all this that felt a little too much like telling her a bedtime story. So, instead, I ended up mumbling, ‘It’s just … it’s really hot out there. You’re so pale, you’d burn. You’d need sun cream.’

  Jess seemed to think this was hilarious. ‘I thought you were going to tell me all about the wine and the architecture and the language and the history! I can see why you became a maths teacher!’

  I smiled. She was right. And then I felt relieved, because it was obvious now that she definitely didn’t think I was trying to be smooth, or charm her. Somewhere along the path of my paternal bloodline, my Italian DNA had clearly gone MIA.

  She nudged into me then with what could have been an elbow – though given that all her various body parts had now been welded into one by the blanket, it was hard to tell. ‘So why did you become a maths teacher?’ she asked me.

  ‘As opposed to an English teacher?’

  ‘As opposed to anything.’

  I wanted to say it was because I’d hoped to do some good in the world, but then again, the question was coming from a fifteen-year-old girl who was somewhere in the region of my left pectoral, and with whom I already had two illegal kisses to my name. ‘Well,’ I ventured, deciding to opt for a response slightly lower down the hypocrisy scale, ‘I guess I thought I might be good at it.’

  ‘You are.’

  I looked down at her against my shoulder and smiled. ‘Ha. No offence, Jess, but your grades are fairly consistent in suggesting otherwise.’

  She smiled back up at me with her eyes. ‘Well, if I’m going to be a chef, that won’t matter, will it? I only need to be able to cook.’

  ‘You’ll need maths if you open your own restaurant. Who’s going to do your books?’

  ‘Well, maybe I’ll just call you,’ she said teasingly, with a grin.

  We were quiet for a few moments then, and I tried to concentrate on the sight of the snowstorm beyond the windowpane as opposed to the feeling of Jess beneath my arm, the closeness of her form against me. From somewhere under the lino, the water pipe was starting to slowly heat the seat of my jeans, and I was about to ask her if she was feeling any warmer when she turned her face up to mine and murmured, ‘What are your parents like, Mr L?’

  ‘My parents?’ I repeated.

  She nodded against my chest. ‘Do you get on?’

  I hesitated, but I couldn’t pretend. ‘Really well,’ I told her, feeling almost guilty about it. ‘I mean, they like what they like, but we’re really close.’

  ‘I’d love to meet them,’ Jess said, but it seemed like less of a request than a modest ambition to one day encounter a real-life family who weren’t all certifiably insane. ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘One brother. Richard.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  Ah, Richard. Where ambition goes for a quick lie-down, I thought. By his own admission, all Richard needed to be happy in life was a sofa, a TV, the complete James Bond video library and a small circle of like-minded nerdy friends to share it all with. And of these, he already had the lot – so in theory, at least, he was perfectly content.

  I probably used to be a bit condescending about the way Richard chose to live his life, until he pointed out to me that I wasn’t doing such a great job of striking out and doing anything particularly awe-inspiring myself. In a way, I realized, it was me who was the loser, because I wanted to be so much more than I was, whereas Richard was perfectly at peace with his own mediocrity (his words, not mine).

  ‘Actually,’ I said with a smile, ‘Richard’s great. You’d really like him.’

  ‘Is he younger or older?’ Jess asked me.

  ‘Two years younger.’

  ‘Lucky you. Anna’s got younger sisters too. I hate being the youngest. Debbie’s so bossy. Plus she never got on with my dad. She always said I was his favourite.’

  Something about that made me think that discerning an affinity or otherwise with her father had been, until he died, Jess’s quick-fire measure of a person’s character. So far we had her alcoholic mother and slightly strange sister who didn’t get on with him. I was sensing a pattern.

  ‘What was he like?’ I asked her carefully.

  ‘Oh, the best,’ she said simply. ‘He was funny. We used to laugh all the time about really stupid stuff. He was so much fun. Wound my mum up something rotten.’

  She was speaking into the hem of the blanket, the lower half of her face obscured. Only her nose was sticking out, her grey eyes blinking, like she was hiding from something or someone. But that someone couldn’t have been me, because she wriggled an arm free then and reached out for my hand, pulling it on to hers beneath the tent of the wool.

  I turned my head and looked down at her. Her fingers felt icy in my palm. She’d started to quiver with the cold again, shuddering softly against me.

  ‘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 s
o 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.