Jackson’s are pretty great too.
“I do miss my mum’s hugs,” he admits.
I give him a sympathetic look as he passes me back the bottle of sunscreen.
“There’s nothing like a hug from your mother,” he adds as he walks into the water.
“My mum doesn’t really do hugs,” I confide as I drop the bottle onto a beach towel and follow him in. “I get all of my love and affection from Mellie.”
“Why doesn’t your mum do hugs?” he asks with a frown, submerging himself up to his shoulders.
“She and I have a weird relationship.”
“In what way?”
“She struggles to show love. She never had any from her parents, so it’s hard for her. She was a bit absent in my early years. She was there, but not really. I remember drafting a poem in English once. We had to write about someone in our family and I ended up describing her as a silhouette. Mellie was color and light and rainbows in comparison,” I say with a smile. “I missed her so much when she moved to France, but eventually she had to carve out her own life and follow her dreams.”
I’m trying to give the impression that I’m unfazed by this, but in truth I remember just how much it affected me. At the time, it was really confusing—I felt Mellie had abandoned me—but my mum actually stepped up then.
Maybe Mellie had known that she would. Or maybe she just knew that Mumneverwould if she always picked up the slack.
“My dad feels like a shadowy figure to me,” Étienne confesses.
My attention sharpens. “Do you know anything at all about him?”
“I know that his family wanted nothing to do with my mum after he died. He came from a wealthy background and she was a factory worker. They thought she was beneath him. They sure as hell didn’t want to be burdened with her son,” he mutters.
My chest feels constricted at the look on his face. And then I’m doing it. I’m slipping my hands around his warm neck and our bodies come together beneath the water.
I know instantly that it’s a dud move. I’m too skittish to provide comfort. He seems to sense this too, laughing awkwardly as he pulls away.
My face is aflame as I float on my back, kicking away fromhim. I should know better than to put my hands on him when we’re both next to naked.
It’s a lesson I learned when we were seventeen. I’d been nervous about going in the river so when I tried to swim out to him in the middle, he warned me that I wouldn’t be able to touch the ground.
I went anyway.
“Are you a good swimmer?” I remember asking.
He nodded.
“So if I go under, you’ll save me?”
He grinned and then suddenly he was reaching for me. I gasped with surprise as he wrapped an arm around my waist and drew me against him.
“Relax,” he said as my back connected with his bare chest. “Stay still.”
My heart was hammering as he kicked us toward the shore. It was all over very quickly, but as soon as my feet touched the sand, I wanted him to do it again.
The slickness of his skin, his warm firm chest: it fed an addiction I hadn’t known I was suffering from.
I’d had a boyfriend, Sam, the previous summer, but apart from a few sloppy kisses and wandering hands at house parties, we’d played it safe. Neither of us had been allowed in the other’s bedroom; his parents and my mum had watched us like hawks.
But on that day with Étienne, teenage hormones well and truly kicked in. I sought his touch again without thinking.
“Let me try.”
He let me hold him against my chest for about three seconds before he broke away, looking flustered.
