I start unbuttoning my shirt. “Then we’d better be quick.”
She breathes out a laugh. Looks over her shoulder, once. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay,” she repeats, suddenly bold. She reaches over her shoulder, tugs down the zip to her dress. Pulling off the straps, she lets it drop like liquid onto the grass. She’s beautiful in bottle-green underwear, her skin marked with maple-brown tan lines from long days spent outdoors. Shesnakes across to me, takes over unbuttoning my shirt. We’re laughing, my undressing now a team effort.
I kick off my shoes while Callie unzips my trousers, flicks open my belt. And now we’re running hand in hand in our underwear down the sharp slope toward the lake. Kinetic with momentum, neither of us stops before hurling ourselves into the water. It’s deep-sea cold, a smack of liquid nitrogen. As we resurface we’re hooting and gasping for breath, kicking wildly. We splash and thrash, like fish fighting capture. But though we’re drenched and ridiculous and struggling to fill our lungs, our eyes collide and we start laughing again. We laugh so hard, we must be in danger of drowning. So we begin to kick instinctively for shore.
Eventually our hands meet mud. We haul ourselves onto the bank, membranes of pond weed attached to our calves. We’re both winded, unable to speak.
Rolling onto our backs, we look up at the stars. We’re panting like animals, brains and bloodstream recovering from the shock.
I’m first to speak. “How was it for you?”
“Mind-blowing.”
I turn my head. Her hair’s heavy with water, a glistening dark mass on the grass, like seaweed on sand. “Really, that good?”
“We’re going wild swimming,” she says, “you and me. We’ll join a club. Do they have wild-swimming clubs? We could do this every weekend, just us, together.”
I lean over and kiss her, run my hand down her body. Across that beautifully bizarre tattoo that makes me adore her all the more. “You cold?”
She shivers as I unravel a weedy rope from her leg. “Yeah.” Then, “I want this to last forever. This moment, right here, with you. I love you so much.”
My skin shudders and twitches.
She tips her face up to mine. “Don’t let me say anything else.”
I push a wad of wet hair away from her face. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to scare you.”
I want to tell her that nothing she says could scare me. But I’m not sure it’s true.
The distant palpitation of the disco bass line drifts over from the Great Hall. A DJ from Italy, apparently, helicoptered in.
Callie slings one hand behind her head. Angles her face to the darkness, like she’s searching the sky for the Milky Way. “Because it is scary. How strongly I feel about you.” She announces this lucidly, voice crisp in the warm air.
“I know.” I bend down to kiss her again. “It scares me too.”
51.
Callie
Next day, the morning sunlight is bleach-hot on my skin, a cutlass through the parted curtains. Joel’s notebook is lying by his hip, so I guess he must have had a dream last night. He doesn’t tell me unless he wants to, and I don’t always ask.
“I’ve found you a club,” Joel whispers.
“Hmm?” My head feels like overkneaded dough. I’ve just about managed to make us both a cup of sachet coffee with scant UHT before climbing back into bed.
“A wild-swimming club. Look.” He props his iPad up in front of me. “They meet every Sunday morning throughout the summer.”
I shut my eyes. “Oh, God. I remember.”
“Do you remember the lake?”
I groan.
