This Secret We're Keeping

by Rebecca Done

  Jess put a gloved hand out to touch me, but I shook my head. I really did look like a wino now, only one who’d located the off-licence and discovered it to be shut: I had started jigging edgily from foot to foot, partly to keep warm, but mostly because I was feeling really agitated.

  ‘Is this about Miss Laird?’ I asked her.

  Jess looked nervous too, but it was hard to know if that was because of something Sonia had said or because my consternation was catching. Eventually she nodded. ‘Yes.’

  A little bud of fear bloomed inside me. I knew we didn’t have much time – as soon as Sonia noticed that both Jess and I were missing, she’d be through here like a shot, broken ankle miraculously healed like a cripple on the Sabbath.

  ‘Does she know?’ I asked Jess.

  ‘I think she might do.’

  ‘Fuck.’ I ran a hand through my hair. It felt damp from the cold. ‘What did she say?’

  Jess exhaled steadily. ‘I made that stuff up about being afraid of heights.’

  I admit I was privately relieved to hear that, because it hadn’t really made sense to me before. ‘Right.’

  ‘Miss Laird’s been trying to get me on my own ever since we left Norfolk. So I thought … might as well see what she wants.’

  An open mind to engaging with Sonia – red flag number one. I bit my lip. ‘Okay.’

  Before now, I’d always thought it was a good thing that Sonia was about as subtle as a cockerel at dawn, because this generally meant it wasn’t too hard to keep one step ahead of her. But I had a horrible feeling that I was about to watch that particular theory crash and burn, in a manner not dissimilar to the stick man who’d had the misfortune to venture up the staircase to my left.

  ‘Um, so I sat with her in the square, and I just started telling her about my mum, and Debbie. You know – all the personal stuff I could think of. I wanted her to think I was cool with talking about … well, anything.’

  This was a tactic that made sense, because Sonia was a stickler for boundaries, and everybody knew it. Even Lorraine teased her about it from time to time. She carried a ‘Teacher Not Friend’ key ring and referred girls to the school nurse if she found them crying. Sonia would never have started making conversation with Jess about her personal life unless she thought it was going to give her something she really wanted. Such as priceless leverage over me.

  ‘And then … she just asked me.’

  I felt in that moment as if I’d been shoved very firmly off the top of the Campanile, which probably explained why I shut my eyes.

  ‘She asked … about you and me?’ It was beginning to feel as challenging to form words as if I was, in fact, hurtling through the air at terminal velocity – but I had to know.

  Jess let out a little gasp, which only served to exacerbate the sensation that I was about to hit the floor face-down at speed. ‘No! Not that. Just – whether I had a boyfriend.’

  I opened my eyes and, to my relief, everything looked calm and still. ‘That’s it? Just … a boyfriend? Not me?’

  She nodded, her face still pink from the cold. ‘Yes, that’s it. She didn’t mention you at all.’

  I leaned back against the wall and tried to think, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been, thanks to the repetitive strain of piped-in chamber music being spat sporadically through a pair of cheap defective speakers above our heads.

  ‘And what did you tell her? When she asked you that?’

  ‘I said I wasn’t interested in boys. I told her I wanted to focus on school.’

  Sensible.

  ‘And she said …?’

  ‘She said that was good. But then we couldn’t talk any more because Mr Michaels tripped over her crutches coming down from the tower and they started arguing.’

  Normally this would have made me smile, but today I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything other than deep unease. From out of the cheap imitation frescoes framed with gold plastic on the opposite wall, Sonia’s face began to loom, and she was the one with the smile on her face. But it was a sickly triumphant smile – the sort that made my heart pump faster, and not in a good way.

  ‘I think she knows something’s up, Mr L,’ Jess said then, in case I was thinking we were out of the woods, which I wasn’t. (In fact I was wishing that Brett had been looking where he was sodding well going, because it sounded as if Sonia might have had more questions up her sleeve had they not been interrupted by his clown feet.)

  Jess reached out to touch my arm, but I shook my head. ‘Better not,’ I murmured, shrugging her off as gently as I could. ‘Someone might be watching.’

  Obediently she withdrew and took a step back, glancing around the lobby as if she was worried there might be clones of Sonia hiding behind the polystyrene popes.

  I took a couple of breaths that did nothing at all to calm me down. ‘Listen, Jess … we’d better not be seen together for the rest of the trip.’

  I saw her swallow back disappointment, and it truly broke my heart. She’d been so excited when I first told her I was coming to Venice and, like an idiot, I’d made it worse by feeding her all sorts of soppy Valentine’s-inspired stories about how romantic Italy was.

  ‘If Miss Laird asks you any more questions, I just need you to tell her you think she’s being inappropriate. Okay?’ I didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘Jess – okay?’

  She nodded twice in quick succession. ‘She’s being inappropriate.’

  ‘And the same goes for Lorraine. Miss Wecks. Inappropriate. You’re being inappropriate.’

  She nodded again. ‘Why Miss Wecks?’

  ‘Because Miss Wecks is no better than Sonia. They’re both sly as fuck.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ she breathed then, by which she probably meant I was coming across like I needed mental health intervention.

  ‘Just don’t talk to either of them. Don’t say anything else.’ It came out much more harshly than I’d intended, but there was no time for me to backtrack because our over-enthusiastic waiter had returned, this time to move us on by waving his menus at our legs like we were lethargic cattle as he gabbled furiously in Italian and gesticulated wildly at the stick man sign. It was time to go.

  I exited the restaurant while Jess disappeared into the toilets. As I made my way across the cobblestones, shading my eyes against the bright winter sunshine with one hand and casually pretending to admire the beautiful stonework of the Rialto Bridge, I thought with escalating anger about what Sonia was turning me into. I had become, over the course of a lunchtime in February, the sort of man who whispers, Don’t breathe a word, it’s our little secret into the ears of young schoolgirls. The thought of what a twitching, edgy pervert I was now made me feel physically sick.

  Sonia’s hawk eyes followed me all the way back to my chair. I could feel the strength of her stare through the dark armour of her sunglasses.

  ‘Point me in the direction of the toilets, Matthew,’ she said loudly enough for everyone to hear, as soon as I’d sat down. ‘I’m bursting.’

  I was bursting too, I wanted to bellow at her, but with rage. How dare she try to interrogate Jess? I looked after Jess, made her happy. Who was Sonia to start whipping out the intimidation tactics? I suddenly felt almost immeasurably protective of Jess, like I might just be forced to pluck the shitty little bottle of olive oil from the middle of our false-marble table and break it over Sonia’s miniature beehive out of pure fury.

  But instead, with all the self-restraint I could muster, I simply shrugged and said, ‘Sorry, no idea. I went in there to chat up a waitress.’

  ‘Ha!’ Brett exclaimed, slamming the table with his palm, making our sad little selection of soft drinks jump. ‘I fucking knew it!’

  Did you? I thought, not altogether disappointed that Brett saw me as capable of such brazen audacity. From somewhere within my peripheral vision, I could make out Jess rejoining Anna a couple of tables away.

  ‘Brett,’ Lorraine hissed at him, her voice pure ice, ‘would you mind keeping the expletives
to a minimum please? This is a school trip.’ (Like any of us could forget it. There was no other scenario on earth that would see me sharing a table at a pavement cafe with Sonia Laird and Lorraine Wecks next to one of the world’s most romantic landmarks.)

  ‘Oh, pipe down,’ Brett snarled at Lorraine.

  ‘I thought,’ Sonia said, speaking over them but talking to me, her voice almost quivering with triumph like she was about to play her ace card, ‘you said you had a girlfriend, who you loved.’

  Brett let out a snort that should have projected cola all over the front of Sonia’s cream coat, had he had the foresight to fill his mouth first. ‘What? Landley doesn’t have a girlfriend. He’s more tragic than I am.’

  I tipped my head quizzically at Sonia. ‘I don’t remember saying that. When did I say that, Sonia?’

  Sonia went slightly pink as we both recalled her standing in my living room dressed as Sexy Santa with her slightly saggy, milk-white belly, wearing her stupid skyscraper heels, telling me she loved me. I gave her my best Don’t-mess-with-me eyebrow-raise.

  Brett turned to me. ‘So? Did you get her number?’

  I thought about it for a couple of seconds; thought about what I could say that would piss Sonia Laird off the most. In the end I accidentally-on-purpose picked up her drink, slung the last of it down the back of my throat, snapped a breadstick in half and said, ‘Nope. Changed my mind. Her tits were too small.’ Then I looked pointedly at Sonia’s chest while Brett fell about in hysterics next to me, laughing so hard it was a wonder he didn’t give himself a heart attack.

  Even Lorraine Wecks allowed herself the very faintest of wry smiles. Sonia, however, simply sat there quite still, her face frozen and dark, like a lake iced over in winter. Even while I was laughing I had a horrible sinking sensation that on this occasion I might have taken it, as my mother would say, a step too far.

  For the rest of the trip Sonia refused to speak to me, which suited me fine. I created my own reliable routine of dutifully allowing Lorraine to boss us all around with her clipboard and raised umbrella during the day, before thinking about Jess while masturbating furiously in the shower early evenings, then trying very hard not to stare at her over dinner every night (which thankfully was made easier by the presence of Brett, whose entertaining approach to inhaling his spaghetti al pomodoro was a bit like watching a six-month-old with a bowlful of puréed carrot).

  Eventually, on our fifth night in Venice, perhaps mistaking Sonia’s post-Rialto wall of silence for sheepishness, I became foolishly willing to run risks again. I caught Jess’s eye as she was leaving the hotel restaurant, and she hung back, pretending to peer into the darkened windows of the gift shop while I grabbed a print-out of Lorraine’s itinerary for the following day and strode towards her with it. ‘Did you get this?’ I asked her loudly, waggling it in the air, pleased she’d tucked her own version out of sight in the back pocket of her jeans.

  She could clearly sense my desperation. ‘I’ll be out the front at midnight,’ she whispered, whipping the itinerary out of my hand and coolly stalking away from me to catch up with Anna Baxter.

  We walked briskly in silence for five minutes or so, hands stuffed safely in our coat pockets, staring straight ahead like we were MI5 agents on our way to a hit. Venice at midnight in February was eerily quiet and dark, the only sounds an occasional clicking of footsteps and the gentle slapping of cold canal water against stone.

  ‘Here,’ I whispered roughly, desperately, as we reached a deserted square. The place was overlooked by an amphitheatre of tiny windows, so I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of sight with me into the arch of a building, hoping that its occupant wasn’t planning to leave or arrive via the front door within the next ten minutes or so.

  ‘We can’t be long,’ I whispered. ‘If they find us both missing, we’ll be in the shit.’

  Seeming to take this as her cue to hurry things along, Jess started to kiss me, hungrily. ‘Don’t worry,’ she breathed. ‘I crushed diazepam into Anna’s vodka before we left.’

  With some effort, I pulled away from her. Though happy to ignore the teacher in me shouting, Vodka? What the hell were you doing with vodka?, I did think it was probably wise to follow up on the prescription-drugs-cocktail revelation.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Despite myself, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her mouth. Stop, Landley. We have to make sure Anna Baxter isn’t dead in her hotel room.

  ‘It sends you to sleep,’ she blinked, like that explained everything, which it didn’t. ‘I stole some from my mum before we came. I thought it might come in handy.’

  Jesus. I knew Jess was organized, but I hadn’t quite anticipated plotting to the degree of knocking her friends out by force-feeding them muscle relaxants.

  ‘I haven’t had any,’ she assured me then, eyes wide.

  ‘But Anna has? Jess, that stuff is really dangerous.’

  Jess frowned. ‘No, it’s not. My mum does it practically every night. Has done for as long as I can remember.’

  Oh, fucking hell. She thinks it’s normal. ‘Jess, that’s kind of the point,’ I said gently. ‘Your mum’s system is used to that stuff. Anna’s definitely won’t be.’

  She shook her head, like there was something I wasn’t getting. ‘Me and Debbie have both done it before.’ She shrugged. ‘We were fine.’

  I paused then because it suddenly felt as if I was scratching against the surface of a world that until now had only really existed in the shadow-dimmed edges of my consciousness. And, to my shame, that was exactly where I wanted it to stay.

  ‘How did Anna look when you left, Jess?’

  She slid me a grin. ‘She was snoring. What about Mr Michaels?’

  Brett had spent most of the evening sinking illicit Italian beers, and by the time I had tiptoed out of the room, he too was snoring, flat on his back with his mouth hanging open. My only risk had been walking past the peephole of the room next door – given that Sonia probably had one eye permanently clamped to the inside – but it didn’t fly open as I passed. I had paused at the end of the corridor for a good three or four minutes too, in case her plan was to follow me out, which she didn’t. For now, it seemed, we had got away with it.

  ‘Snap,’ I said.

  She giggled. ‘So we’re fine then.’ And then she kissed me again.

  ‘I’m sorry it couldn’t be just us, Jess, on Valentine’s Day.’

  ‘It’s just us now,’ she breathed. ‘Tell me how much you love Italy.’

  ‘I fucking love it,’ I told her.

  ‘We should move here,’ she whispered against my neck. ‘You and me, together. We should move here, together.’

  Afterwards, I thought a lot about why I did what I did next. Maybe it was because she’d just hinted at the two of us having a future together and I was getting overexcited. Maybe it was the high of having slipped out of the hotel without being caught. Maybe it was for that exact reason that I wanted to raise the stakes. Whatever it was, I was apparently determined to push things further than they needed to go, because something about doing that seemed to represent the thrill I’d been missing all my life.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ I told her.

  She blinked at me, giving an involuntary and understandable shiver against the idea of stripping naked outside in February. ‘What?’ she breathed.

  ‘No one can see you. Do it. Strip off.’

  She trusted me, that was the fucked-up thing about it. I was painfully aware that she probably would have done anything I’d asked of her. And I never would have consciously exploited that – yet the words were leaving my mouth like they were entirely unconnected to my brain.

  ‘Go on,’ I urged, almost impatient, and she must have read in my face that I was deadly serious because she bit down on her bottom lip and started to unbutton her coat.

  ‘Fuck,’ I breathed, slamming my head back against the brickwork of the archway a little too hard.

  She dropped her coat in a thick heap on
the floor, kicked off her shoes and discarded her socks, gasping as her bare feet made contact with the cold stone.

  ‘Hurry up,’ I growled impatiently, my cock so hard I knew the minute she touched me it would all be over before it had even begun. The anticipation was fucking incredible.

  She smiled obligingly and lowered the zip on her jeans, bending over to pull them roughly down and step out of them. I watched the shape of her move in her black underwear as she yanked her pale blue jumper off over her head and finally stood there, striptease nearing its climax, her skin white and shivering, her golden hair splayed across her shoulders like she was starring in some sort of shampoo advert, begging me with her eyes to touch her.

  I stayed where I was, like someone had pinned me to the wall, and drank in the sight of her.

  She took a pleading step towards me.

  ‘Take off your bra,’ I ordered, my voice now virtually gravel.

  So with shaking hands she unclipped it and let it fall teasingly to join the rest of her winter clothing on the floor. And she stood like that in front of me for a good ten seconds or so, nipples swollen and stiff against the open air, while I looked at her until she shook, and I thought it was with cold but when I finally touched her I realized it was with desire.

  Jess reached down and unzipped my flies at the same time as I pressed her right back against the wall. She drew a sharp breath of shock as its coldness touched her bare skin, but that didn’t stop her grappling urgently with my belt, letting my trousers fall to the floor. I had a condom in my back pocket; it was a clumsy moment as I pulled down my boxer shorts, ripped off the foil and fumbled to slide it over my cock, all the while kissing her frenziedly. Finally with both hands free I lifted her up and she wrapped her smooth, long legs round my waist. Then, at last, we were fucking.

  Looking back, I think it was then that I first got the feeling we were being watched – but I managed, somehow, to convince myself I was being paranoid. I knew that if I thought too much about that instead of this, the moment would be lost.