Chapter Text
The day had been still, but a wind grew as the fire died in its pit, blowing in from the sea. The girls yawned, shivered, and said their goodnights one by one, Britt taking Sander with her, Noor feeding him a wistful look as she let Zoë draw her away by her hand. Then went Moyo and Aaron, clapping him on the back, one merry pat on each shoulder blade, Moyo still chewing the final s'more, into which Aaron had managed to cram four marshmallows and three-quarters of a bricklike bar of chocolate. “Don’t stay up too late, you lovebirds!’
Jens was the last to leave, credit to him. But not much credit. "You good on drowning the coals before turnin’ in, bro?” he’d said, getting to his feet while rubbing his arms.
“Sure.” Robbe had continued staring into the endlessly curling waves, picking with thumb and forefinger at the knee of his jeans.
Maybe Jens had hesitated for just a moment, half a moment. But he’d asked nothing more. “‘Night then.” And then there was just the tiny fingernail of moon, the ocean, and him.
*
“Fuck,” he says aloud as he taps his phone alight. It is somehow still only two-fifteen. He feels like he’d fallen asleep for six hours instead of one. His neck is cricked from the chair, so he pulls himself from it and plops directly onto the sand. Instantly, its damp chill leaches into him. Grunting, he gropes for another blanket, doubles it over the one he’s already folded over his shoulders, and heaves to his feet, making not for the cabin behind but the dunes ahead, where the tall grasses reply to his sighs with their own.
Noor had still been awake last night when he’d crept onto the top bunk at two, and her hands hand gone around his neck and he’d begun sweating like he’d just sprinted a 5-k, so dazed with fatigue that he thought she knew, that somehow she’d found out, and was about to strangle him for stringing her along.
But she had just wanted to kiss, and then she’d put her hand over his and tried to put it on her breast where it was warmest right over her heart, letting his thumb skim over her nipple along the way. We should sleep, he’d mumbled. When that didn’t work, when she got his other hand too and started putting it up her shirt, he’d added, feebly, the others—the guys, and thank God, Aaron had given a huge snort and woken himself up right at that moment. And then he’d pretended to immediately fall asleep, holding himself perfectly still until he heard Noor’s breath, coming at first quick and indignant, drift slowly into the tiniest of snores. They should’ve been cute as hell. Were cute as hell, objectively.
He should’ve been having a great time. This was a great time. Objectively.
He should’ve been enjoying the shit out of this week, before the usual scramble of exams and projects before winter holidays. Objectively.
*
The wind tastes crystalline with salt and cold. He sucks a few deep breaths of it as he drops to the sand again, shrouded among his blankets. Apart from the hiss and boom of the water and the soughing grass, it is deeply quiet. He imagines himself buried in the sand, a relic; swallowed by the tide, a wreck. He lets his sore eyes shut again. Another half-hour should do it.
*
There’s someone’s hair under his chin, soft against his lips. It is so dark. The fragment of moon has been overwhelmed by clouds, through which the stars glow only faintly. He blinks, squeezes his eyelids together hard. It’s hard to tell the difference between his eyes open and shut. Yet he still feels sure that the hair is pale. The blankets are rucked beneath him, being pressed with him into the dune. His shirt’s being peeled up but the cold, instead of stinging, feels like a heavy kiss against his flank. A palm cradles his nape, strong, warm as blood. Fingers, creeping across his ribs, creep toward his breastbone, too firmly to tickle. Short and slightly uneven nails skirt the crest of his ears, the line of his jaw: it’s not her hand. It’s not her.
He hears a sound, a little whimpering sound, and realizing that it’s coming from himself makes his skin prickle and his pulse jump. The neck pressed against his cheek smells like tobacco, like peppercorns, like charring bread; he inhales and inhales until his head is light, too frightened to move, in case he scatters all of this—the scent filling his throat, the skin meeting his, the scritch of a sideburn against his collarbone—like a mirage.
The hem of his shirt reaches his nipples, a tide of goosebumps in its wake. He starts clearing his throat, mouthing a name, but there is the barest huff of a laugh and the hand that isn’t her hand closes softly over his mouth and is then replaced by parted lips that aren’t her lips and a wetly roving tongue. His yelp of shock is swallowed whole.
There’s nothing else to do but to kiss back, so he does.
*
At first he thinks he’s at home, in bed—not the bed in the apartment, which he still thinks of as the new place, onto which sunlight streams slantwise from the first moment of dawn, but his old bed, narrow, with the dinosaur stickers still clinging to the headboard, in the narrow house that his father and mother had bought together long ago. The milky gray color around him is exactly like the tint of early morning filtered through the weathered curtains, white stars against once-black folds, that hung over the window at the foot of that bed.
Then the cold bursts the illusion and he shivers upright. A band of as-yet faint light low in the overcast sky silvers the edges of the dunes, the lapping tide, his knuckles on the chilly sand, and the sedges standing tall and still like a dark solid wall. The blankets have fallen open around him, and he’s thrashed the sand so much onto them that it’ll take a serious whacking to get them remotely clean again.
His phone, jabbed awake, glares accusingly, too bright: five thirty-seven. He’s got time to get back. Not even Amber will be awake for another two hours at least. The crick in his neck is worse, and he must’ve slept funny on his left arm, because it’s all pins and needles. Stiffly, he pulls his hood overhead, then, reaching down to hike up his jeans, flinches: they’re damp through and sticking to him.
Disgust breaks over him like a whitecap, even as the smell of pepper and smoke lingers between his teeth. He shakes his head, grits his jaw, rolls to his feet, and, dragging the blankets around him, staggers toward the showers.