I’m going to tell Jem, I decided. That I’m sorry and that before, I was scared and stupid, but actually, I’d like to be together, and if he’d like that too, then I’d like to find a way to make it work.
Because I want it to work. I want him, really. And actually, there’s a word that I’ve never really said before about a boy, but I think I might—I could?—I feel as though I do.
I couldn’t sleep all night because of it.
A bit because it felt funny to sleep in a bed with Peter knowing that I want to be with someone else and also just because I really wanted to tell Jamison.
I’m up before the sun, which I never am. It also means I’m up before Peter, which somehow casts the world in a curious light I don’t know much about.
I think he wakes everything up around here. As I creep out of the tree house, not just the boys are sleeping, but so are the flowers and the woodland creatures. The suns are still tucked away, cosy beneath the horizon.
I creep down to the dock and untie the rowboat.
The water is still, mist hovering above it. It’s not entirely dark because of the four moons, but it mostly is. I’m not trying to beat the light. You can’t anyway. It always wins. Peter will wake soon, he either will or will not notice my absence, and whichever way that goes, it won’t affect what I’m about to do. I’m going to do it regardless.
I’m about halfway across the harbor when I hear him.
“Hello down there,” he calls, a little confused.
I look back and up, and there he is, Jamison Hook, sailing the Golden Folly, staring down at me with a confused smile.
“Oh.” I blink up at him. “Hi.”
He looks so handsome. Brows low, hair falling over his eyes and blowing in the barely there wind, his cheeks flushed, mouth sun-kissed, which I love. I don’t remember his mouth looking this colour yesterday, but it makes him look all the dreamier, so I’m pleased for it.
He gives me a confused smile. “I was just on my way to ye.”
I give him a proper one. “Me too.”
He nods his head at his ship. “Want t’ come aboard?”
I gesture to my little rowboat. “Do you want to come aboard?”
His face pulls, and I smile up at him playfully.
“I’m joking. Throw me down a rope.”
He sniffs a laugh and tosses me down a rope. I stand on top of the big knot at the bottom of it, and he pulls me up to him with an ease that makes me swallow heavy and my heart fall down a flight of stairs. He offers me his hand as my feet find their place on the deck, and our hands linger a few moments longer than they need to in one another’s.
I glance up at him, feeling shy. I pinch my bottom lip nervously. “You look nice,” I tell him.
His face falters. “Dae I?”
I nod, not looking away from him. “Fresh or well rested or something.”
He laughs. Sort of a weird laugh, I suppose. A bit bewildered, or something.
Either way, he doesn’t return the compliment. I’m hardly offended though, as I don’t suppose he could in good conscience. I damn well didn’t sleep a wink last night and am quite sure my face lives to tell that puffy, tired little tale.
“I wanted to talk to ye,” he tells me, face looking serious, and my eyes skip a beat as I nod.
“And I you.” I blink over at him, my eyes blooming like the flowers that are doing so right now on the mainland as Peter strokes their chins awake. “You go first.”
I shouldn’t care to tell him I have feelings for him first needlessly, not when he’s about to tell me himself.
“Right.” Jamison gives me a tender smile and sniffs, amused, nodding to himself. And then he shrugs. “We’re a fucking mess, you an’ me.”
Have you ever been caught in an emotion? Where you’ve been feeling something so heavily and so intensely, and then there’s a sudden change in the emotional atmosphere, and you feel your face, feel the way you’re holding yourself change, feel the smile fall off you like old fruit on a tree that’s past its picking day?
I let out an unsure laugh. “Are we?”
Jamison gives me a wry look. “I like getting in yer head. I like making ye jealous. I like riling you up.”
“Why?” I ask, and I hold my breath to puff myself up so he can’t see me deflating on the spot.
“I dïnnae ken.” He shrugs like it’s a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. “I think we just bring out the worst in each other… dïnnae ye think?”
“Oh.” I stare at him blankly for a few seconds, then I look down at my feet to make sure they’re not actually sinking into the ground, that I’m not really draining away between the cracks in the floorboards of his ship, that it’s just how I feel inside my body. I clear my throat. “I suppose. Maybe.”
“It’s fun getting a rise out o’ye.” He gives me a weak shrug. “It feels good t’ annoy ye, have ye chasing after me.”
I give him a despondent look. “Charming.”
He smirks a little. “Sorry. But forbye”—another lift of the shoulders—“yer a pretty girl, and it’s good to have yer attention—it feels good—but I ken yer not here for me.”
The breeze picks up, and it blows around us. This time yesterday, it would have blown me into him, had me huddling in to have him keep me warm, but today it just cuts me through like a knife.
“Right,” I say, and there’s no air in my words.
“Aye?” he asks, eyebrows up and maybe a little hopeful, and I wonder if he’s waiting for me to correct him, but how could I?
“Um.” I stare at him and swallow. “I—right.” I can’t correct him. I can’t even hold my hand steady right now.
Jamison nods and gives me an easy smile. “It’s just a game, you an’ me.”
I swallow. “Okay.”
His face falters, and I shake my head.
“I mean—” I clear my throat. “Yes.” I nod instead. I’m not making sense.
“Good then,” he says, but I can’t tell if he means it.
I stare over at him and wonder in this sinking way whether he ever actually knew me how I felt he may have or whether that was a stupid hope I fastened myself to because I’m just a girl. He can’t have known me how I thought, because if he did, he would have seen it—it’s right here on the surface. None of this is good.
He lifts his eyebrows again, a bit hopeful. “Because we can be friends now.”
“Right.” I nod, smiling tightly. “Friends.”
He nods back and gives me a pleasant look. “Is that what ye were coming here t’ say?”
There’s a fraction of a second reaction delay to my response, and I wonder if it’s obvious and he knows I’m lying.
“Yes.” I do one emphatic nod. “Exactly. Yes.”
“Good then.”
“And also, sorry.” I flash him a smile. “For being a brat yesterday.”
He gives me a quarter of a smile. “Yer a wee brat every day, so…”
I give him a weak, empty laugh. It sounds like a few pennies rattling around in a tin can. Something innately pitiful about it, although you can’t quite put your finger on exactly what.
“Jam?” says a girl’s voice from behind us.
I look past him to a girl standing outside his bedchamber.
“Oh, hey,” he says reflexively.
She’s quite beautiful. Dark, curly hair. Rather olive skin. Pink lips, and I realise his lips I’d been admiring just before—it wasn’t the sun that had kissed them, it was her. Her legs are bare, so are her feet. Her hair’s all disheveled, and they’ve obviously—obviously—just had sex.
But do you know what? That’s not even the worst part. The worst part? She’s wrapped up in his coat. The one I love. The one that I think means something to me and I thought to him, and as soon as he sees she’s in it, he looks over at me, but my eyes aren’t his anymore. They belong to the sea now.
For me, want feels like being kicked in the stomach, but anguish feels like pain shooting through my fingers down into my nerve endings. I feel it in my bones, where he feels want—which I think he must have never truly felt for me. I feel that now.
The girl eyes me carefully for a moment before she looks over at him. “Where are we?”
He gives her a smile. “I just needed t’ catch up with a friend about something.”
She stares over at me again, and I raise my hand awkwardly.
“A friend.”
“Go back t’ bed.” He nods his chin at her. “I’ll be ri’ there.”
My mouth falls open, and I shut it quickly, absentmindedly pinch my lip between my fingers until I taste something salty.
Jamison looks back at me, and his face falters. “Ye hurt yer lip.” He reaches for me, and I dodge his touch. Something like hurt or offence rolls over him, and I’m glad for it. He clears his throat, looking uncomfortable now. “Can I give ye a ride back?”
“Oh no.” I shake my head. “I’ve got the boat.”
“A tow then?” he offers, eyebrows up.
“Nope.” I shake my head as I walk back towards the rope. “The water will take me.” I flash him a quick smile. I need to get out of here before he sees me crying.
He offers me his hand. I pretend I don’t see it and dive off into the ocean, beg the water to wash how my heart’s stinging away, but it doesn’t. Not as I climb into my little dinghy and stare up at him. We say something to each other with our eyes, but I don’t know what it is because we don’t know how to talk to each other, and I don’t think we’ve ever been on the same page.
I’m just a game.
I put the paddles in the water and make one big stroke, and the water and the wind do the rest for me. They carry me the whole way back to the home I thought I left this morning.
It’s a pirate thing, I think—he gets into my head sometimes, that’s all. Being around Jamison pulls the rug from under me; everything I’m sure of when he’s not around becomes so uncertain the second he’s in a room, but that doesn’t mean anything other than he’s good at making me feel uncertain about myself, which isn’t even a good thing! Why did I think that was a good thing? It’s actually a terrible thing. Jamison is a terrible thing.
I’m not ready to go inside when the boat pulls up at the dock. I don’t know how to yet face the boys I just tried to leave, one of them in particular.
I sit at the end of the dock, my legs dangling in the water, staring at the blue that still feels like a miracle no matter how many days in a row I see it.
I take a deep breath, look up at the sky, and as I do, I see one of the suns rise between two of the moons, and I have this deep revelation that there’s no going back.
If it can’t be Jamison—and it can’t be—then it must be Peter. What can Jasper England do for me now that I’ve known this life? These boys? The wind in my hair, the ocean giving me rides home, secrets that live inside a volcano. Anything else now would feel like half a life, and I don’t want half a life. I just want one here. Whatever that might look like.
I take another staggered breath and wipe my face.
“Girl?” Peter says quietly from behind me.
I look back at him, and he’s frozen there, eyes wide with nerves.
He creeps towards me the way you might move towards a frightened animal. “Girl, why are you crying?”
I give him my bravest smile. “It’s the grown-up things, Peter. They keep coming for me.”
He sits down next to me, eyes heavy and sorry for me. “Okay.” He takes his sleeve and wipes my nose with it. “Want to go up to the cloud? You could put them away.”
I shake my head, my eyes filling up again. “Not this time.”
“I don’t understand.” He pulls back. “You’d rather be sad?”
I bite down on my bottom lip. “I just need to feel them for a moment.” I flash him my bravest smile. I need to remember them so I don’t go back to him.
A moment, I tell myself. And then I’ll put them away forever.