realised where we were. We were on the island – the sea had swallowed the land. I looked around. I was alone. They’d all gone. I was stuck there, forever screaming.
‘Ella?’
With a jolt of panic, I was wrenched back to now, back to the hard shed floor, Max’s heavy body on top of me, waiting for the pain I knew was coming.
‘Ella?’
I was panting. ‘Just do it, Max. Do it, please. I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready.’
But I wasn’t ready. I was crying. The only thing I was ready to do at that moment was vomit. And just as he pulled away from me, a thick surge raced up my throat.
‘Oh God,’ I managed to squeak, lunging for the open shed door as everything I’d eaten that day erupted from my mouth before I’d reached the nearest bush.
How to Kill a Moment, by Estella Grace Newhall.
For the next minute, the only sound was me yacking into a yucca. When I was done, I looked behind me. Max was sitting on an upturned flowerpot. Naked and embarrassed, just like Adam. And there was I. Naked and embarrassed, just like Eve. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll get our clothes.’ He stood up, snatched up his sodden boxers from the path and walked back towards the pool.
I followed him. ‘I feel better now.’
He turned around, his eyes as sad as I’d ever seen them, and grabbed his trousers from a bronze giraffe’s ear, scrabbling them on. A plastic sachet fell out of his back pocket. I picked it up, but before I could look at it, he snatched it away.
‘What was that?’
He stashed the packet back in his jeans. ‘Condoms.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t have any?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I hate that I keep doing this to you.’
‘All you had to say was no!’ he yelled. ‘Have I ever pressured you? Why do you even lead me down the road if you can’t go there?’
‘I thought it would be OK this time.’
‘You thought that last time. And the time before that. And every time, we end up like this – having a massive barney.’ He trailed off and scratched his head on both sides, like he was trying to scratch his brain out. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
He was so angry. He’d never been this angry before. I saw what I was doing to him, his strange fury, and I hated myself even more. I started gathering up my clothes. It wasn’t until I’d laced my trainers and he was sitting on the edge of the pool with a roll-up that he spoke again.
‘I Googled it,’ he said, reaching for my hand. ‘Genophobia. It’s a proper thing.’
I sat down next to him on the edge of the pool. ‘Is there a cure?’
He rubbed his mouth and reached for my hand. ‘Don’t think so.’
‘We’ll be OK though, won’t we?’
He surrounded me in a hug. ‘Yeah. ’Course we will.’
‘Did you talk to anyone about it?’
I didn’t want to talk about it, but I was finding it more difficult to keep it to myself. The relationship was becoming so one-sided. He started sexting me just before Christmas last year – this picture of him naked except for a bath towel, and a text saying Wanna see beneath, my beautiful? Wink wink.
I didn’t know how to reply. I’d seen his you-know-what a few times before but it was never something I wanted to see, and certainly not in an excited state. So I kept sending back jokey answers, like No you’re all right, I’ve just eaten. Wink wink.
Then he sent back I’m in bed, just thinkin bout my baby.
So I sent back I’m in bed trying to remember if I put the bins out.
So he stopped, just like that. I liked the kissing and the hugging. I loved tiny, insignificant things we did like playing Round and Round the Garden on each other’s palms. I loved us playing with each other’s hair and I loved how he always sent me text kisses first thing in the morning and last thing at night – but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t want dicktures, I didn’t want sex aids he said he’d order me off the internet or him nibbling my neck or pressing against me. For me that was love with a grenade attached – it said I love you so much, I want to hurt you.
If things had been different, maybe it would have turned me on. Maybe we’d have booty-called each other from our beds, like he said his mates did with random women on Snapchat and Skype. But things weren’t different. Things were the way they were.
I had a bit of a meltdown about it at training the next morning.
‘Come on, don’t let me down, keep going, work through it, work through it…’
The sweltering sun attacked us like a baying crowd as we climbed the east-facing slope of Brynstan Hill. My body did as Pete was yelling at it to do, but my head was everywhere – on the white butterflies shimmering through the long grass, the sheep lying in the shade, the tractor ambling along in a faraway meadow. The distant cars. Hay bales wrapped in shiny black plastic, like large body bags.
‘Come on. Push it, Ella, push it! All the way now, all the way…’
Sweat streamed down my face, and the taste of tiny flies and hot hay clogged my nose and my throat. Pete pushed me harder and harder up the hill, until all my willpower left me and I stopped and bent over to grab my ankles and catch my breath.
‘What are you doing? We’re nowhere near the top yet,’ he panted.
‘I’ve had enough,’ I gasped, reaching behind me for the Evian in my rucksack.
‘Come on, just a bit further. You’ve got to punch through it.’
I shook my head, chugging down the cool water like I’d crossed a desert. ‘I don’t want to do any more today.’ I swigged again and bent over, every muscle torn up and my lungs aching when I breathed in or out. ‘I hate this damn hill.’
‘You have been keeping up with your diet, haven’t you?’
I said nothing, wiping my face on my T-shirt hem.
‘You’re sluggish today. Perhaps we should look at reeling back on the carbs.’
‘OK, I had a day off yesterday. My dad made me a bacon sandwich. It’s not a crime.’
Pete Hamlin had been our school’s Teacher You Most Want to Bang – they called him the Pied Piper, cos wherever he went there was always a line of girls following him. I wasn’t interested in him that way, but I could see that he was good-looking. He was twenty-five, with a big, happy smile, and he spoke with a posh accent, like he’d done ten years’ training with the Royal Shakespeare Company. We talked a lot. I knew he wanted to move back to London, that he liked going to see plays but hated the cinema, even that he still carried a picture of his ex-girlfriend in his wallet. We’d run up Brynstan Hill like coach and student, but we’d come back down as friends, chatting about music and books.
‘Come on then. Back at it.’
I shook my head. ‘This is as far as I want to go today.’
‘That’s not an athlete talking,