31. A Matter of Record
At curfew, Briar and Bastian are outside the diner, kissing against the door of Eugenia’s car.
Hard to say whose fault this is, exactly; Briar had obviously been angling for it, but Bastian had been the one to follow them to the driver’s door and brush his fingers tentatively against Briar’s arm, then their collarbone, and then find their mouth with excruciating hesitancy, which evaporated as soon as the kissing began in earnest. Either he feels he’s mastered any accidental bursts of magic, or decided he doesn’t care.
It probably speaks to some terrible failing of Briar’s judgement that they really do trust him.
Now Bastian’s got Briar pinned against the door, and he’s touching them everywhere as they kiss, hands tracing and retracing paths like he’s trying to recommit them to memory.
Briar doesn’t even think he’s doing it on purpose, not really, but it’s hard not to feel overwrought and shivery when Bastian’s fingers are stroking their hip bones, their stomach, mapping their ribs, their spine, sliding up the back of their neck, sensation sparking like a pleasant fizz of static.
When Bastian tries to push his hand under Briar’s collar, Briar shrugs off their overshirt and lets it fall to their elbows, and catches the exact moment Bastian realises both what he’s doing and the fact that Briar has noticed what he’s doing.
He freezes, then removes his hands completely, and Briar catches him by the wrist and places his palm firmly back on their shoulder.
He still seems too afraid to move - but then Briar bends to his neck, and as their lips brush across the soft hollow of his throat, a nearly inaudible groan is followed by the feeling of a hand closing tight around Briar’s bicep.
Briar did not spend the past few years working out for the sole purpose of impressing Sebastian Wolfe, but right now, it feels like every weight they lifted was leading, inevitably, to the hot gratification of this moment.
‘Do you want . . . ?’ Briar mumbles against Bastian’s jaw. ‘We could get in the car?’
Bastian’s voice is stretched gossamer-thin in Briar’s ear, even as he tries to be scathing. ‘I’m not going to fuck you in the car park of a place called Bustin’ Joe’s.’
‘Didn’t think that was on the table, but good to know.’
It’s not really fair, because Briar feels a bit like they’ve got all of Bastian’s cheat codes.
They know that Bastian used to like to have his hair played with when he was trying to fall asleep; that he was always very tactile, and wanted to feel held.
Briar gathers him up in their arms, and pulls his hair roughly loose from its tie, and knows just how much he’ll like it, even before they feel his breath catch, his fingers falter, the hot press of him hard against their thigh.
Briar tries not to think too much about what exactly Bastian knows about them in return.
A car pulls in blasting soft rock, and they both shy away from the headlights, Bastian leaning into Briar when he could have pulled away.
‘Okay,’ he says, shaking his head distractedly. ‘Let’s go.’
So they get in the car and Briar pulls out of Bustin’ Joe’s, heading for Temple.
Bastian ties his hair up again with a quick snap of elastic and presses himself right up against the passenger side, looking out of the window, seeming disproportionately embarrassed by the whole thing, until he says, ‘Don’t go back to school yet. ’
‘All right.’ Briar turns off the indicator and drives straight ahead at the crossroads.
Bastian shifts in his seat, glancing over at Briar when he thinks they can’t see, and Briar responds by dropping a hand to his knee for a few seconds of contact.
Bastian presses his lips together and says nothing, but he doesn’t move away.
If this had been a real first date, Briar wouldn’t be so bold - but it’s Bastian, and it’s doomed, and if this is going to be their only real chance to touch him, Briar’s going to take everything they can get.
They pull off the road and onto an anonymous stretch of gravel a few miles from school, a scrubby patch with a very broken-down tractor languishing on it, their parking spot shielded from the road by hedge, a dark swathe of wheat stretching into the distance on the other side.
Briar turns off the radio, rolls down the windows and they sit in thrumming silence for a while. It’s a warm night; Briar feels like they’re simmering in it, a pleasant, anticipatory kind of heat.
‘You didn’t fancy me when we were kids, did you?’ they ask.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Bastian draws himself up into his seat and rests his elbow on the open ledge of the window, knuckles pressed to his mouth as he looks out at the field.
‘What? I’m just checking.’
‘No,’ Bastian says tersely. Then he sighs. ‘I don’t think so. It wasn’t like that. But . . . I don’t know. sometimes I felt like we weren’t two separate people any more. Like we’d spent so much time together, we’d become something else.’
‘Yeah. I know that you mean,’ Briar says. ‘I probably fancied you, to be honest. As much as a kid can. Just didn’t know what that felt like. And you were . . . so much more to me than that.’
Bastian’s speaking into the sleeve of his cardigan when he says, ‘I was?’
Briar wants to just say obviously, but when they look at Bastian, so still and soft in the frame of the window, they feel like they owe him something real.
‘Yes. And I’m sorry if I didn’t always show it.
I’m bad at that. After you left . . . I was sad about it for years.
’ The impermanence of this thing between them makes the unsaid sayable - a strange liberation, like the removal of a splinter, a clean relief.
They feel . . . lighter. So they add, ‘I’m still sad about it. ’
Bastian is still looking out of the window. ‘Better to be sad than . . .’ He turns to Briar. ‘I mean, would you really rather have known? About December?’
No. Yes. Briar doesn’t want it to have happened at all. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Bastian says. ‘About what happened, and . . . how you’re doing. Sometimes I was worried my father might have taken too much - that you wouldn’t remember me at all.’
‘Oh, I remembered you,’ Briar says. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I’ve gone a day without thinking about you.’
He’s dangerous, Briar thinks, as Bastian’s body unfurls from his seat, shifting back towards Briar again. And you’re lying to him. Bad move.
But he’s touching Briar’s knee, mirroring Briar’s hand from before - so Briar takes off their seatbelt and releases Bastian’s, too, and then fumbles with the seat lever until it jolts back into a reclined position.
They’d imagined this might be smooth; instead, Bastian hisses ‘Jesus,’ and glares up at Briar from their near-horizontal position with catlike umbrage.
‘Sorry,’ says Briar. ‘Not my car.’
‘What? Whose car—?’ Briar cuts him off by kissing him, and Bastian makes a sound of affront that’s completely undermined by the fact that he’s opening his mouth and lifting his hips and trying to press every part of himself flush to Briar as they crawl on top of him.
A bit of gravel by the side of the road doesn’t seem like much of an improvement on the car park of Bustin’ Joe’s, but Bastian’s previous misgivings don’t seem to apply.
He shrugs out of his cardigan and pulls his own shirt off between increasingly desperate kisses, and is reaching for the buckle of his belt when Briar stops him, moves his hands up and away and then takes it off for him.
‘What do you want?’ Briar asks.
Bastian doesn’t hesitate before he reaches for Briar’s shirt and says, ‘I want to see you.’
Briar strips off their overshirt at once, is reaching for the hem of their tank top to do the same when Bastian sits bolt upright and says, ‘Fuck, no, stop.’
So Briar stops, confused, and watches with equal confusion as Bastian scrambles for the door handle and lets himself out, pulling his shirt back on as he goes.
He’s taken a few steps into the field by the time Briar catches up.
‘Hey,’ Briar says. ‘I’m sorry. If it’s too much, I can—’
‘It’s not you,’ Bastian says, cold and vacant. ‘It was me. I wasn’t careful enough.’
Briar pauses, then realises. I want to see you. An order, instantly obeyed. ‘I would have done it anyway.’
‘Neither of us can know that for certain,’ Bastian shoots back, his voice clipped. ‘And that’s not . . . that’s not how I want to do this.’
This isn’t how things are supposed to go. It would be so much easier if Bastian were demanding and unscrupulous, the villain Briar has built him up to be - both hurting each other, different but equal. Damned together.
Now they stand apart, and when Bastian goes to get back in the car, he shies away from Briar’s proffered hand, like he’s worried even the slightest contact might betray him.
Briar climbs into the driver’s seat, suddenly so weary, and drives him back to school without saying another word.
After dinner the next day, Evie the pip spots Briar from across the cloisters and comes hurrying over, looking harried beyond her years.
‘Hello Briar,’ she says. ‘No new bruises.’
‘No,’ Briar says, discomfited by her perceptiveness.
Her hair is tied into two neat plaits, secured at the ends with pink hair ties sporting little plastic cherries that click as she walks.
Briar wonders if one of the other pips did it for her.
There must be something of the dystopian novel spirit, over in their bunks.
Budding bonds like the one between Tate, Westby and Hadley being forged in fire.
‘Does that mean you’re having a good week?’
Briar manages a weak smile. ‘Yeah. It’s going okay.’