Chapter 19
Touch me.
Just two words. Seven letters. And they’d been torturing Jude for almost three weeks.
What would have happened between him and Hannah that night if his phone hadn’t rung? How far would things have gone? As he put the last few items he needed into his overnight bag and zipped it shut, he admitted to himself that no distance – no destination – would have felt far enough for him.
He hadn’t wanted to stop. Would never want to stop. Hannah affected him in a way no other woman ever had, or could; he knew this to be true in the same way he knew the square root of pi, or the formula for standard deviation. At this point, it was an immutable law of his existence.
They were living in the same village, physically closer together than they’d been in four years – and yet the distance between them didn’t seem to have lessened at all.
It was a space filled with anger, sorrow and resentment, which seemed to flow from both sides.
They’d agreed that traversing it – trying to find a way through it – was too dangerous to risk when Hannah was responsible for organising their brothers’ imminent nuptials.
Yet they’d discovered their bodies connected across this emotional divide; that their physical attraction remained visceral.
Urgent. Irresistible, as far as Jude was concerned.
He was living proof that microdosing was no cure for chronic addiction.
A single taste of what he’d spent the past four years craving had only made the burn of wanting Hannah fiercer.
As he contemplated the forty-eight-hour ‘shag party’ that was set to begin this afternoon, he found himself wondering how on earth he was going to cope with it.
From what Joe had told him, there’d be a series of outdoors-y team activities (Ed’s contribution to the programme), plus an evening barbecue and a wine-tasting event (Joe’s input).
Hannah would be there throughout, and every cell in Jude’s body seemed to thrum at the prospect of seeing her, speaking to her.
He was past pretending; past trying to convince himself he could be in her presence and not feel half wild with the desire to put his hands on her skin.
And she’d wanted that, too. She’d said it.
Touch me.
He wanted her to say it again. Hearing her ask for it – for him – had been the single most erotic moment of his life.
He sighed and scrubbed a palm down his face, knocking his glasses out of position and emitting a loud groan.
It was of course at this moment that Joe appeared, poking his head around Jude’s bedroom door to say, ‘Are you in some sort of pain?’
‘Something like that.’ Jude sighed, picking up his bag and hoisting it onto his shoulder.
Joe grinned, far too knowingly for Jude’s taste. ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘And you never know – maybe a few days of forced fun will sort you out.’
The venue for the shag party was a former farm on the Derbyshire-Cheshire border, its fields now given over to a range of ‘fun’ activities (about which Jude was mostly dubious), as well as a glampsite.
Glamping, he knew, meant posh camping – but as usual, it turned out he’d underestimated Joe’s propensity for finding the most bougie version of literally anything.
When Jude was shown to the shepherd’s hut he’d be staying in for two nights, he was astonished; it had double-glazed windows that looked out over a large, presumably man-made lake.
There was also a kitchenette, a massive, beautifully made-up bed and a log burner.
When he poked around in the fridge and cupboards, he discovered coffee-making essentials, organic milk and a punnet of freshly picked strawberries.
There was also a sourdough loaf, a pat of locally churned butter and a jar of artisanal marmalade.
His brother, he had to admit, never did anything by halves.
‘This place is . . .’ He found he was lost for words.
‘I know,’ Joe said smugly. ‘But no sharing it on socials. We’re on lockdown until after we leave – at which point I’ll be posting the shit out of everyone’s pictures in return for the hefty discount we got.’
‘You know I don’t even have profiles. I have zero interest in “sharing”,’ Jude scoffed, with a shake of his head. He found the whole idea of social media baffling, though he could concede the maths behind the algorithms fascinated him.
‘That’s for sure,’ Joe said. ‘I’m still waiting for you to ’fess up to whatever happened between you and Hannah on the night of the suit fittings. Ed reckons you argued. I say you boned. Who’s right?’
‘Jesus, Joe, the door’s wide open,’ Jude hissed. ‘And . . . neither of you.’ He somehow managed to keep the words ‘so there’ from escaping his mouth – but only just.
Joe narrowed his dark brown eyes. ‘Hmm. I think that means we were both at least a bit right.’
‘There’s nothing going on,’ Jude assured him, taking no pleasure whatsoever in saying it. ‘Things are . . . fine. Civil. Exactly how I told you they’d be when you interrogated me at your engagement party.’
‘That was not an interrogation,’ Joe said. ‘I merely asked a few pertinent questions, the answers to which were already quite obvious.’ He let out a long breath that somehow managed to sound both weary and aggravated. ‘You do realise that, if you’re not careful, you’re going to fuck this up again?’
Jude felt his irritation with Joe heightening. ‘There’s nothing to fuck up, Joe. Hannah and I aren’t even friends.’ Again, the truth of the statement gutted him, and he resented his brother for making him say it.
‘Really? I guess we’ll see,’ Joe said, supremely unbothered that Jude was annoyed with him.
‘The two of you are paired for the activity competition. You’ll work together on every challenge between now and the end of the party.
There are eight teams of two – selected entirely at random – and the team with the most points on Friday wins. ’
‘You are fucking kidding me,’ Jude said, hating that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to punch Joe or thank him.
On one hand, his brother might be the most devious bastard he’d ever encountered.
On the other . . . he was going to get to spend a lot of time with Hannah, one to one, which it would be pointless to claim he didn’t want.
He was eager for whatever scraps of her he could get, even if they’d ultimately leave him starving.
‘I assure you, I’m quite serious,’ Joe said blithely, descending the steps of the shepherd’s hut to stand on the grass below. Then, as if delivering a parting shot, he gestured to his right and said: ‘Hannah’s in the cabin next door, by the way. Happy shag party!’
If Jude had been asked before today, he’d have said he was bound to be awful at clay-pigeon shooting – and he’d have been absolutely right.
Hannah, by contrast, was horrifyingly good. Her competence with a shotgun did something surprising and unspeakable to his insides, and it was entirely down to her that they ended the party’s first activity only halfway down the leaderboard.
Jude wasn’t an especially competitive person – a fact that endlessly frustrated his mother – but it stung to feel he’d been worse at this than almost everyone else.
The two exceptions were Viola Mills, a fashion influencer friend of Joe’s who had a manicure so elaborate she could barely pull the trigger on her gun, and Lewis Clarke, another semi-celebrity who ran a gaming YouTube channel.
Well used to taking out a broad range of targets on screen, he’d been irate that he could barely hit a single one in real life.
‘Sorry I was so shit at that,’ Jude said to Hannah as they trooped away from the shooting range in the direction of the bar. Ed had declared that, now there’d be no more gun-toting, the drinking part of the day could commence.
‘You weren’t that bad,’ Hannah said, trying and failing to keep a straight face.
‘Come on. It was embarrassing,’ he argued. ‘Whereas you were so good I’m actually a bit concerned you’ve got a sideline as a hit woman. Is wedding planning just a cover? Are you secretly in MI5?’
Hannah laughed. ‘No, but I do have twenty-twenty vision, which probably helps.’ She pointed at his glasses. His prescription was pretty strong, and he’d been wearing them since the age of three – both facts that Hannah, unlike most people in his life, knew.
‘Good point,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t actually thought of that.’
‘Maybe the next challenge will be, like, “solve these twenty simultaneous equations”,’ Hannah said. ‘You’d have to carry me through that one.’
‘I’d refuse.’
‘You bloody would, too,’ Hannah said, as they entered a tent that they discovered had been set up like a pub.
‘“It’s better for you if you actually understand it, Hannah”,’ she sing-songed, parroting the sort of stuff he used to come out with when he tried to help her with anything mathematical.
‘You never did my homework for me, no matter what your mum said.’
‘What?’ Jude asked, as he and Hannah both accepted pints of local cider from a smiling barman. He realised his tone must have been sharp when her cheeks went pink. She took a careful sip from her overfull glass, like she was trying to put off answering him for as long as possible.
‘Hannah?’ he probed.
She put her glass down on the bar and sighed heavily.
‘You know she wasn’t my biggest fan. We both knew that, the whole time we were .
. . anything. Occasionally she’d come out with something snide – always when you weren’t there to hear it.
An accusation or a comment on how poorly matched we were, just to make sure I didn’t forget. ’
‘Jesus,’ Jude said, utterly staggered. ‘And this was when we were still at school? When we were kids? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’ He felt furious, but guilty, too – and he realised not a single part of him doubted that what Hannah had said was true.