“Come on-” she’s so close to me I can taste her breath. For one mad moment I think, I hope, that she’s going to kiss me. And then she pulls away. She takes a step backwards.
“What?” I blink at her blankly. I feel as though I’m slowly waking from a deep sleep, my head still fuzzy.
“Come down to the beach with me babe-” she holds my hand, swinging it gently. Her voice is cautious, soft. As though I might simply say no. As though I might drop her hand and leave her alone on the edge of the world. I don’t though. I don’t even want to.
Her eyes flicker downwards, almost closing. I really, really want to kiss her, but I don’t.
“Come on then-” I try to smile. I don’t know whether it works or not. I want to pretend that my heart isn’t beating scarily, shockingly fast. But I know that she can tell. And I know that maybe she’s just as scared as I am. Maybe even more afraid. I don’t know. She glances up at me, so I squeeze her hand tighter. I want to reassure her, and I think it works, because I can see a shadow of her dimples playing in her cheeks. She raises a hand to scrape her hair out of her face.
Then she starts to walk away from me, along the cliff top, leading me towards the tiny, overgrown footpath that leads down to the cove.
“You cold?” I ask her quietly as our trainers hit the saturated, clay-like soil. I can see goose-bumps on the back of her neck. She doesn’t look at me.
“Maybe.” She breathes. The clay soil is slippery and slick with rainwater. It’s hard to balance, because I’ve got no grip on the soles of my converses. The thick gauze looks strangely exotic here, as though it would be more at home in some north African desert than a rainy stretch of English coastline. Even the heather looks different. I’m used to see it blushing purple on the distant moors north of Bradford. Right now it scrapes at my legs, pricking miniscule beads of blood onto my skin. The salt in the air stings at my cuts. Cheryl’s nails are jutting into the back of my hand, her eyes fixed down as she focuses on not falling. The noise of the waves is growing closer and closer, reaching an unsteady crescendo until I can barely hear my own heartbeat, until I can’t even think.
And then our trainers hit the slippery greyish sand of the beach. Scrunching below our feet. Cheryl finally lets go of my hand, but I can still feel the imprints her nails left in my skin. I can still feel the tiny droplets of her warm sweat on my palm.
She walks across the wet sand towards the roaring grey sea, so I follow her. It’s not far, and I worry vaguely that the tide will come in too fast and leave us stranded. In some other life, I’d say no. I’d say that I was cold and this was a stupid idea. In some other life I’d turn right around and go sit on the sand dunes. But I don’t. She stands right above the waterline, her dark eyes as restless as the iron grey sea. So I stand right beside her. And I look out across the endless miles of crashing grey water. The spray spits onto my skin. The wind whips through my hair, like tangling, desperate hands. It makes me feel very close to alive.
And yet somehow, the world feels too still. I wonder how we’d know if the world just suddenly stopped spinning. Even the deafening waves sound oddly muted now. The colours around us all slur away into a thousand shades of dim grey. She’s still real though. I think somewhere above the crashing waves, I can hear her breathing.
“We could swim” she murmurs. She barely opens her lips. Are her words slurred? I don’t know. I don’t really know anything anymore.
“We could” I agree. I don’t even pause. I don’t even think about it.
“We would swim to...” she scrunches up her face, thinking hard.
“America?” I suggest.
