I flipped open the top and squirted some onto the palm of my hand, before slapping some on my back, contorting myself to try and reach that difficult spot directly between my shoulder blades. I quickly became aware that he was finding my one-woman game of Twister highly amusing.
‘What?’ I laughed.
‘You need longer arms,’ he said.
‘Or someone to do it for me.’ The words had spilled from my mouth without thinking and I flushed in mortification.
But when I dared to raise my gaze, he was looking at me. I couldn’t move. I was hypnotised. I simply watched as he straightened his spine, put down his pen and came to kneel behind me.
The first thing I felt was his hand brushing aside my hair, arranging it carefully over my shoulders and catching any strays. I felt light-headed while he picked up the bottle and squeezed cream onto his palm as I sat, immobile, my breath caught somewhere in my throat. Before his hands had even made contact with the hot skin on my back, goose pimples had swept up my arms and my belly had begun to somersault. He worked systematically, smoothing the cream over each nub of my spine, gliding both palms across to my shoulders. Something in my joints loosened. The way he moved was not rushed, but neither was it too leisurely. He seemed acutely aware of the innately sensual nature of this act and clearly didn’t want to overstep any boundaries. He may even have worried that I might not be liking this . . .
Butdamn, did I like it. I liked it so much that I’d lost the ability to breathe.
As his fingers slid underneath the straps of my top, I felt like I’d been drugged and every muscle in my body was liquifying one by one. I had an awareness of holding in a long sigh, one I dared not release, because with it, my pure, unadulterated pleasure would be extravagantly revealed. All I could do waslower my head as his fingers moved to the side of my neck, working my ligaments, loosening me from the inside out.
I dipped my chin at one point and glimpsed at the shape of his muscular knee through the denim of his jeans. I urgently wanted to know what those legs looked like underneath, to touch them in the same way he was touching me. I truly wanted it never to end. But there reached a point when he simply ran out of skin. He withdrew and wiped his hands on his forearms, leaving little half-moons of cream stuck in his hairs. I turned to look at his face.
‘Thank you.’
My voice sounded unlike my own, as if I’d just burnt my tongue. I shuffled around to face him and his mouth parted like he was going to say something but nothing came out. He lowered his long-lashed gaze to my lips and when he raised them again I could see the heat of desire right there in his expression. He looked almost like a different person.
I don’t know who initiated the kiss, only that we were soon on our knees, my arms around his waist, his hands cupping my face like in the end credits of a movie. The feel of his mouth was like nothing I’d ever experienced.
He knew exactly what he was doing. He had an instinctive understanding of the way to move his tongue against mine or gently bite my lip in a way that would make me light up in a flare of pleasure. He knew how to raise the temperature of every little bit of me: the skin on my neck, the inside of my thighs, that mysterious place hidden deep and low in my core.
There wasn’t a soul around but we wouldn’t have noticed anyway as we lay down on my picnic blanket, entwined, the denim on his thigh pushing in between my knees. In the gaps between kisses he whispered sweet nothings that made my whole body sigh – about how soft I was, how lovely, how much he’d wanted me since that first day in the park . . .
‘I wish you weren’t going to America,’ he whispered, trailing kisses on my neck. ‘I want to do this all summer.’
‘I’ll be back soon enough,’ I replied.
If he’d asked me to stay right then – to abandon my trip altogether – I’m not entirely sure I’d have said no. But he didn’t. And I completely failed to understand the reason why – or guess what was coming. I was so caught up in longing that the idea he wasn’t feeling it as intensely as me – that this was just a meaningless little kiss – didn’t occur to me, at least not until long after the event.
‘Maybe we could write to one another?’ I suggested.
He didn’t answer immediately, instead turning my hand over in his palm and beginning to stroke his fingers along my heart line. Eventually, he lifted it to his lips and pressed them gently against my wrist.
‘What if you meet some big American hunk and decide he’s a better kisser?’
‘Unlikely. That was a very good kiss.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’ he grinned, as we sank into another once again.
Life as a camp counsellor didn’t stop from the moment I flew into the US and, given that I was sharing a cabin with six nine-year-old girls, opportunities to sit down and write – let alone the carefully crafted prose I was planning – were almost non-existent. But I finally did so on my first day off, just a week after I arrived, sending letters to Sam, my parents and Jeff – already eager for their replies.
When I reversed the charges on a call home a week later, Mum told me theirs still hadn’t arrived. I’d later learn that this was standard – air mail between both countries took anything between seven and ten days. I cursed the fact that Sam and I hadn’t exchanged phone numbers. I think we’d both known the cost would be prohibitive and, besides,wasn’t there something inherently romantic about the idea of letters anyway?
Eventually, while Jeff wrote back and so did my mum, correspondence from Sam was not forthcoming. I checked with the camp staff member who’d offered to mail my letters, who confirmed that all three had definitely been sent. I continued to wait. And wait. I nearly drove myself nuts theorising as to the reasons for his silence. I told myself that things happened to letters all the time. Postal strikes. Hurricanes. Someone in the sorting office having a bad day . . .
I decided to write a second time. But still, he did not respond. And I was finally starting to get the message.
My first instinct was that this was all my fault. I’d cast myself in the role of some star-crossed lover or elevated my status to that of ‘steady girlfriend’ when I was nothing of the sort. We’d made out. That was all. My assumption that it had meant something felt suddenly and ridiculously childish.
I don’t mind admitting I was heartbroken. But as time went on something else started to filter in. Irritation, possibly even anger. Not just at Sam but myself. I’d been planning this trip for years. Was I really going to let him ruin my summer? I decided I simply couldn’t let that happen. Not when everything else about the trip was already so wonderful.
Despite having little or no previous experience of looking after kids beyond the odd babysitting stint, I’d been surprised to discover how great my charges were – sweet, fun, energetic. I became close with a girl called Tamar, another counsellor from Chicago and, after camp ended, she invited me to travel across the country in her beaten-up Subaru, staying over in various family members’ spare bedrooms.
But the end of the summer was always looming and, three and a half months after I left, I flew home to the UK. I’d never been to Sam’s house and, at first, found myself actively avoiding the street where he lived. I don’t think I even went tothe park, unable to bear the idea that I might bump into him there with another girl. The idea that I might stumble across him one day in London – now I’d gone and accepted a place at Goldsmiths – was bad enough.
