He's thirteen the first time she kisses him. It's long after Danny, after the trial, after that beautiful day at the beach where it all began—or ended, depending on how you want to look at it—and it seemed like there was hope for everything to be okay again. He should have known better.
He's thirteen the first time she kisses him. It's only on the forehead, when he and Freddy and his mum are saying goodbye one day after spending the day with the Latimers. He knows it's meant to be sibling like; he thinks he can remember her having done that to Danny a few times before. She's doing it for him because she can't do it for Danny anymore. It's meant to make him feel safe. And it does. It really does, but he swears, even days afterward, he can still feel her lip gloss on his skin.
.
He's sixteen the first time she fucks him. He's been in love with her since he was a little boy, and when he'd gotten old enough to understand what fucking even was, he wanted to do it with her. He wanted her to be his first time. It was supposed to be magical, but this is tragic. This is her still trying to find a way to understand how a little boy could be killed so horrifically by a man that wasn't supposed to do that. By his own best friend's father.
She fucks him on the floor of his bathroom at four in the morning when she's visiting her parents over holiday. She's shivering when she climbs in his bedroom window, so he takes her to the bathroom, pulls off her mittens, and runs hot water over her hands. It's a trick his mum taught him when he was little and Danny was his best friend and she was the unreachable angel on the top of his Christmas tree. She looks at him at one point, eyes surrounded by smudged black because she's crying—when did she start crying? And then she reaches out for him, pulls him by his shirt collar with her wet hand and crashes her lips onto his like it's the only thing she has left.
There are so many layers to remove, so many barriers to her. He loves her. God, he loves her. Her skin is ice cold by the time he finally gets to touch it, all of it. She is ice cold the whole time, but he is sweating, burningburningburning. Beneath her, he comes too hard and too fast, but this only seems to please her because she closes her eyes and smiles despite her tears—was she crying the whole time?
She dresses fast, too fast, and crawls back out through his bedroom window and into the dark night. He finds her scarf behind the toilet and puts it onto the pillow next to him when he goes back to sleep.
.
The first time he sees her after is Boxing Day, when he and Freddy and his mum go to the Latimers' to celebrate Christmas. She doesn't look at him the whole time.
He sees her infrequently after that. New Year's. Easter. A bit over the summer. And then the cycle repeats. And then he's eighteen and going to Uni in London and he sees her walking down the street one night and she is beautiful but sad but still beautiful as she walks into a club with a few mates. So he calls up his roommate and tells him he's ready to finally start partying.
She's still there by the time Jack shows up with some blokes, and he thinks he has to be so, so lucky to spot her as soon as he walks in. She's on the dance floor all by her lonesome, and he wants to be beneath her again. Or on top of her. Or beside her in bed running his fingers along her cold spine. He just wants to touch her bare skin again and again and again and he thinks maybe if he never got to touch it that first time two years ago, he wouldn't be craving it like this. So hungrily. He's fucked since, not a lieu of girls or anything, but some. He thinks that no matter how many girls he gets to touch, to be inside of, he'll never be satisfied because they aren't her. Their eyes are never the right shade, and if they are, they look at him instead of through him. They don't make him think about bodies wrapped in plastic to be found by unsuspecting beachgoers. They don't make him think about his father and his broken mother and his confused little brother who doesn't remember the world before Joe Miller was a killer let free and their mother was an unstoppable force, doesn't remember Danny. They don't make him think about Danny. They don't make him think at all.
It takes a lot of liquid courage for him to dance anywhere near her. Even more for him to grab her by the waist and pull her so close that their chests are touching, that she has to look him in the eye and know who he is. And when she figures it out through whatever drug-induced haze she's currently under, she takes his face between her palms and stands on her tiptoes to smash their lips together. Jack comes to tell him everyone is going back to the dorms, but he's waited two bloody years for this to happen again. He is not leaving now.
He thinks at one point she's going to try and get him off right there in front of everybody, rubbing her palm on the front of his trousers to create friction, but this isn't enough for him anymore, not even when it's her. So she pulls him by the belt to the bathrooms, and he fucks her so hard against the wall, she's got bruises in the morning. And he's not the little virgin boy-next-door he was last time. No, this time she comes twice before he lets go. He owed her one.
.
She takes him home. She takes him up to the flat she shares with four other girls and two blokes, and pushes him down onto her bed. He thinks she's going to climb on top of him and ride him hard into the mattress, give him another taste of the memory of his first time, but she doesn't. She pulls off her clothes, begins the walk to her bathroom, her spine screaming out for him to touch.
"Flat's empty," she says softly. "You coming, or what?"
She thinks he's going to try to fuck her in the shower. Maybe take her from behind this time, fog up the place even more, but he doesn't. Instead, they both just wash up, him spending an enormous amount of time tracing her spine with his forefinger.
.
In the morning, she kisses him tenderly, with a sad look in her eyes that he doesn't want to understand.
"this isn't healthy," he says before she can.
"this isn't right," he says before she can.
Because she makes him think about bodies wrapped in plastic to be found by unsuspecting beachgoers. Because at one point, when he was thirteen and lost, she kissed him on the forehead like the little brother she dreamed of still having. He leaves. And then he sees her infrequently after that. New Year's. Easter. A bit over the summer. And then the cycle repeats.
.
He's old and jaded and married and she's old and jaded and married but not to one another. He looks into the eyes of a woman who can make him forget, if even just for a second, that his father is a killer. And it's enough.