19. Drunk #3
‘It’s not? Okay. Then I think we should kiss.
With tongue.’ Briar thinks this is a joke, because it’s certainly delivered like one, but she sways in closer and puts a hand on the sleeve of their overshirt, tugging at the cuff.
She’s got grass in her hair, and the insides of her lips are stained wine-dark like gore in the light from her phone.
Fuck it. Briar’s got all this pent-up something with nowhere to go. And they’ve always had a soft spot for a girl who looks like she’d enjoy making them cry.
Briar kisses Hadley the way they assume she wants to be kissed: decisively, with care but not an inch of softness; a firm hand and a hint of tongue and then a hard stop.
She smells like weed and peppery, floral perfume, and her mouth is a bit chapped, and she kisses back with a sweet, yielding messiness that Briar attributes to the drugs and the booze.
It’s kind of nice. Comfortable. A world away from hands at throats and blood on the tile.
Briar hasn’t kissed many people. There were a few party fumbles, and then a particular girl at school, Emily, solidly built and freckled from spending as much of the year as possible swimming in murky lakes and riding her family’s old pony.
It’d been a four-month stint last summer, literal rolls in the hay once a week, extensive, enthusiastic experimentation, but neither of them particularly interested in each other beyond chemical attraction, which had burned out by winter.
Briar’s not particularly interested in Hadley, either, but that’s probably all right.
‘Yeah,’ she says when they break apart, seeming relatively pleased. ‘Okay.’
She pats Briar on the arm and then wanders back towards the road. When they’re both over the stile, they discover that Tate and Westby have come back for them.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, you’ve kissed Jones!’ Westby says immediately, sounding very put out. ‘What have you done that for?’
‘Just because I haven’t kissed you since we were fourteen—’
‘I’m so gay, Watson! I can’t even be tricked by that butch little outfit you wear sometimes, with the bowling shirt! Close! But no cigar!’
‘I like that shirt,’ says Tate. ‘Cute. Vintage.’
‘I didn’t even want to kiss you in particular,’ Hadley says dismissively. ‘I was kissing everybody, just to piss Buck off, and then it didn’t work so I kissed everybody harder.’
Briar freezes, hands halfway to their pockets. ‘Buck? Alistair?’
‘Christ, we’re not talking about this now,’ mutters Hadley.
She stalks off, a flurry of skirt and necklace and shaggy hair, and they all follow her.
Eventually she turns around, so she’s walking backwards, facing Briar - who’s beginning to understand that although Hadley doesn’t ever want to seem talkative and forthcoming, she can’t help being so anyway, at least under the influence of her favourite substances.
‘Look . . . look. It was like six months in fourth year and he was pretty fucking horrible to me in ways we won’t discuss because it’s just such a massive, predictable bummer.
But I hate him. Like . . . I hope he dies, and that he has a stupid cartoon death, and everybody makes jokes about it on the internet forever.
Shark attack. Helicopter blades. Nutty Putty cave. ’
‘You’re going to nutty in his what?’ Tate says, and he and Westby fall about laughing.
‘Sorry he was a dick to you,’ Briar says to Hadley, falling into step with her as the other two cling to each other’s arms and giggle.
‘Breaking news, heir to the kingdom of hell fucks over stupid, wide-eyed ingénue with great tits.’ She laughs.
She always sounds younger when she laughs.
‘I’m kidding. I was never wide-eyed. I used to get him to buy me cigarettes, because he was already so tall and imperious he never got ID’d at the shops.
I was stupid, but I learned my lesson in the end. ’
‘I doubt you were stupid.’
‘Oh, no, I was. Definitely, definitely. But I’ve never made that mistake again. I’m making new and different ones. Variety is the spice of life.’
Her high, previously so light and bubbly, seems to take a turn as she speaks.
Briar thinks that underneath all her bluster, she might actually be very sad.
They give her a spontaneous, one-armed hug, pulling her into their side, and it takes her quite a while to start complaining and shove them away.
The half-moon appears from behind the trees as they follow the curve in the road, and even though Briar’s had many nights like this - drunk on a silent country lane, walking in staggered step with friends, feeling like a stupid baby and a thousand years old all at once - there’s still something romantic about it, like they’re treading a pilgrimage. So much life to live. So many stars.
Briar and Seb used to stargaze, sober, lying on the lawn of Grove House, pressing their faces together side-by-side and squinting so that they could see the constellations through each other’s eyes.
‘I did apply here,’ they say to Hadley suddenly, in the spirit of spilling painful secrets. ‘Didn’t get in.’
‘Yeah. I figured that one out by myself,’ Hadley says. ‘But I like that you lied, Jones. It makes you much more . . . interesting.’