I haven’t quite been able to summon the right words to express just how much this gesture means to me, so we’ve been sharing silence on a blanket beside my mother’s gravestone for the past two and a half hours.
Now and then, and without speaking, he’ll reach across and squeeze my knee, and then go back to reading as though it’s a perfectly normal Friday afternoonactivity.
I never felt more . . . at peace, and I realise I could live a thousand lifetimes, fundraise for a million charities, and still I wouldn’t have done enough to deserve this boy’s friendship.
25
Saturday 29th August 2026
Lando
The Bonnie Marie bobs gently on the water. It’s the Saturday of the bank holiday weekend, it’s boiling, and everyone who’s anyone is out parading along the harbour, taking in the last of the summer, and drinking to the end of the warm, light evenings.
Restaurants and bars are overflowing with al fresco diners, and folk line the embankments and jetties, dangling their legs over the edges as they sip rum-based cocktails and bottles of Italian beer. The air smells of coconut sun cream and barbequed meat, and the bass from a hundred different speakers and the chatter and laughter of friends fills the sky.
Serasi is due to return to Cambridge for the final year of her history master’s next week, and Harry will be starting up training again for the Bath Centurions. It’s the last weekend we can all hang out as a foursome, and we’re currently chilling out on my dad’s Sunseeker yacht, which is moored up in PooleHarbour. I’m not allowed to sail it because I’m a twenty-year-old fuckhead with no respect or regard for anyone else’s property, and we’re talking about a million pound boat here.
Since Daisy and I had our talk four months ago, and since Harry and I decided we would keep our friendship on a platonic level, we haven’t even so much as kissed.
Okay, we have snuggled. But really, who can blame me? Harry is very snuggleable, and even though I sometimes feel his reactions to our snuggles—against my hip or ass—he never tries to take it any further.
Which must be killing him. It’s killing me, and I don’t get the same urges that he does.
He’s staring at me from the other side of the aft-deck dining table. Every now and then he shoots Serasi and Daisy a glance like he’s waiting for something bad to happen, or to get told off for being too close to me. The girls are sunbathing on the bow deck, and despite the rapid descent of the sun, the pair haven’t moved for a good few hours.
“So, your dad named the boat after your mum?” Harry says. He takes a sip of his champagne.
Beside us, the professional chef my father hired to cook burgers packs up her things and carries them out to her catering van nearby.
Originally, my dad had planned to spend the bank holiday on his beloved yacht with his slightly less beloved wife, Juliette, and his even less beloved son, moi, but at the last minute he was called away to Sofia in Bulgaria for some definitely non-reschedulable reason. So he asked if I wanted to make use of it with my friends. It was a no-brainer.
“He loved her. My mum, I mean,” I say as though defending him, but I don’t know why. “I’m sure he loves me too, but he just . . . doesn’t show it in the way most parents do, I guess. He’d rather chuck a bunch of credit cards at me than pull himself away from work shit for ten minutes.”
“I’m not complaining. I’ve never been on a yacht before,” Harry says, swirling the Veuve Clicquot in his glass. He flashes the girls another furtive glance.
“Why do you keep looking at them?” I ask.
Harry rubs his lips together. Pauses. “Do you think . . . if we get them pissed enough, they won’t see us sleeping in the same bedroom?”
“Harry Ellis!” I pretend to be shocked. “Maybe.”
We had loosely agreed that Daisy and Serasi would take the master stateroom, while I would sleep in the VIP guest room, and Harry would have the third one with twin single beds. Only because Daisy was insistent we shouldn’t share.
“Lan. Boats, sunsets, booze? . . . It’s all sounding a little too romantic,”she’d said.
“No, not romantic at all. It’s a party boat if anything. But I only have three friends, so it’ll be a teeny party. We’ll get wrecked up, though, babes,”I’d replied.
She’d agreed to come after that, but only on the condition we all attend as friends and nothing more. Still, she’s been sucking Serasi’s face nonstop since we arrived, so it’s alright for some.
“It’s probably for the best if we don’t share a bed,” I say.
“No, you’re right. We definitely can’t let anything happen between us,” he says, and then winks at me.
“How many glasses have you had?”
Harry shrugs. I love tipsy Harry. He’s one of my favourites.
“Oh, before I forget. I did a thing for you . . .” I say. I’d been working on something for Harry for a while now and had finally made headway. The hardest part was being subtle, but not too subtle. “Don’t be mad, but I found Lionel’s IG account and we’ve been messaging back and forth for a while.”
