Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark

  Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark

  by Lauren Henderson

  one

  ME AND JASE AGAINST THE WORLD

  We’re running as fast as we can in the dark. Holding hands, our breath coming in quick spurts. Down a gravel path, the heels of our trainers crushing the stones against each other, sharp grinding noises each time we land and push off again. Onto tarmac, for a few short steps. Behind us a man is bellowing like an angry bull, and we know he must be chasing us, though we can’t see him. Our ears are full of the yelling and the sounds of our own feet, our own breath, as we race away through the night.

  And then, finally, grass beneath our feet. Open land. We’re running even faster, in great lopes; if we were horses we’d be galloping. Cold night air on our faces, soft yielding soil below, on which we land almost silently. I think of werewolves in books, how they can race through forests so fast it’s almost like flying, their paws barely touching the ground. That’s how I feel as I run and run, my hand in Jase’s, our strides matching each other perfectly even though he’s much taller than me.

  It’s like when I’m running in my dreams, sprinting so fast I feel I’m almost about to take off. Someone’s chasing me, but they’ll never catch me, because my feet are winged.

  But even in my dreams, I’ve never run like this with Jase.

  His father’s yells are receding now, bare wisps of them carried on the air, reaching us across the stretch of untended grass that runs along the side of the barns. He tried to run after us, but we left him far behind. I picture him bending over, hands on his thighs, wheezing for breath, his face an apoplectic red.

  Jase wheels and turns and I follow him effortlessly as he swings to the side of the last barn, ducks, dropping my hand, and pries away a loose board from the wall of the barn.

  At first we were running blind. When Jase’s father sneaked up on Jase and me kissing goodnight, shone a torch on us, and yelled all kinds of things that I never want to hear myself or Jase called again, we took off like startled rabbits, straight into the dark, only our knowledge of the school grounds saving us from running straight into a wall.

  But by now, my eyes have recovered from the torch beam and grown accustomed to the dark. There’s a waxing moon, a fat unfinished white crescent low in the black velvet sky, and thousands of tiny white pinprick stars; luckily for us, it’s a clear night.

  So I can see what Jase is doing as he lifts a second board away and props it against the side of the barn, making a gap wide enough for even him, with his broad shoulders, to clamber through. And I can also tell that out here it’s as light as day compared to the pitch-black interior of the barn.

  Jase is already halfway through, entering sideways, careful not to catch himself on a snag on the boards. He turns his head to me, his golden eyes bright even in the darkness, and holds out a hand.

  “Scarlett?” he whispers.

  But it isn’t really a question. He knows I trust him. He knows I’ll take his hand and follow him into the barn, even if the opening is as dark as the hellmouth and I have no idea what’s waiting for me inside.

  Right now, I think I would follow Jase anywhere he asked me to.

  Because right now, it feels like me and Jase against the whole world.

  I wriggle through the gap without any difficulty. Jase’s hand is warm in mine, guiding me as I step cautiously over a board and onto the packed-earth barn floor. He snaps open his Zippo lighter, and a small circle of light around us shows me the looming yellow side of a tractor to our left. Beyond that is what looks like the big ride-on lawn mower that Jase and his dad use for the endless maintenance of the Great Lawn, tracing perfect green stripes up and down its length.

  “This way,” Jase hisses. He wraps his arm around me and guides me over to the back of the barn, where a wooden ladder is propped, leading up to sheer blackness.

  I don’t hesitate for a moment. I’m shinnying up the ladder before he can even tell me that’s where we’re going.

  It’s a hayloft. I crawl out onto the wooden platform and get a mouthful of the nasty scratchy stuff immediately; I’m coughing it out as Jase hauls himself up behind me.

  “God, you climb like a monkey,” he says admiringly. “One minute you were there, next you were gone.”

  “It’s my special skill,” I say, grinning, but he can’t see me smile. He couldn’t climb the ladder with the Zippo on, and up here it’s so dark I can barely spot my hand in front of my face.

  I turn over to sit on my bum and wriggle back to make room for Jase, hearing him land on the floor of the loft. I don’t manage it fast enough, though, and a second later he’s almost on top of me; he must be on all fours. I hear his hands, his knees, padding on the wood, like he’s a big animal coming toward me. I shiver from head to toe in excitement, tinged with more than a trace of fear.

  Not fear of Jase. I could never be scared of him. But I’m a little bit scared of my own feelings. Of how excited he makes me. It’s so powerful it’s almost like something rising in my throat, almost like I’m going to be sick with the strength of my own emotions.

  And no, that’s not pretty. It’s really raw. This is something that being with Jase is teaching me. Caring for someone as much as I care about Jase, wanting to be with him as much as I do, isn’t like I thought it would be when I had huge crushes on pop singers and actors who played sexy vampires. Just last year, when I was still at my old school, St. Tabby’s, my friends Luce and Alison and I were still obsessively collecting magazines with our crushes on the cover, Googling their names, sighing over pictures of them out running or on the beach.

  And now there’s a real live boy right in front of me on his hands and knees, his warm breath on my face, making my head spin with his nearness, and I’m feeling things I never, ever thought I could feel when I was giggling over magazines.

  “Scarlett,” he says softly. “You’re right there, aren’t you?”

  Jase shuffles forward one more pace, trying to find me in the dark, so close that I don’t even need to reach out to touch him. All I have to do is tilt my head ever so slightly forward, upward, following his breath like a vapor trail until my lips find his.

  It’s a light touch for a moment or two. Like it was when we were kissing goodnight in the courtyard just now, not wanting to get too carried away, a gentle farewell before I went off to finish my English homework for an hour or two before bed. And then all our pent-up frustrations explode, our anger at having to sneak around in the dark when we’re not doing anything wrong, our humiliation at being caught like that by Jase’s dad and the words he called both of us. Two seconds later Jase has grabbed hold of me and pulled me up so I’m on my knees facing him, and we’re kissing as if we’re drowning and going down for the last time.

  He’s squeezing me so tight it hurts, and I’m pressing myself into him till I can feel every inch of him, the zip teeth on his leather jacket, his belt buckle cutting into my stomach, his strong biceps wrapped around my chest. My hands slide down the back of his T-shirt, trying to feel as much of his smooth skin as I can.

  I’ve never kissed Jase this passionately. I’ve only kissed two other boys in my life: once was incredibly romantic—before it went badly, horribly wrong—and once was what Miss Fisher, my terrifying Latin teacher, would call valedictory. A farewell kiss, saying goodbye to something that was over before it ever really began. Something that, for all sorts of reasons, could never, ever have blossomed into anything more.

  So this kiss virtually shatters my world. I didn’t know it was possible to feel broken into pieces but so alive that every nerve ending in my entire body is sparking with fire. Jase throws his head back, gr
oaning, and I twine myself even tighter around him, kissing his neck, his unbelievably smooth, musky skin. I’m thrilled beyond belief that it’s me, Scarlett Wakefield, not seventeen yet and not exactly experienced, having this effect on him. Making him so crazy that he can’t get a word out, just moans and gasps.

  And then Jase grabs my face, his fingers twisting in my hair, pulling out my ponytail elastic, cupping the back of my head, his mouth coming down hard on mine. The sensation is so strong that I’m amazed I don’t burst into flames.

  Jase’s tongue is warm and wet in my mouth as he insistently kisses me, and my tongue is twining around his just like our bodies are. This is faster, harder than anything we’ve ever done before, so intimate, so open that when Jase starts pulling up my sweater, tugging it out from between our bodies, I arch my back to let him have as much access as he wants, and I unzip his jacket and tug up his heavy T-shirt and when we press our almost bare chests against each other, more skin on skin than ever before, it’s so exquisite that my breath catches in my throat and if I could see anything in the darkness, anything at all, it would be stars.

  “There’s a couple of blankets in the corner,” Jase mumbles against my mouth. “I kip down here sometimes when Dad’s cutting up so much I don’t want to go home. We could lie down, get a bit comfier. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”

  I totally believe him. But that’s the trouble: right now, I want him to do everything. Anything and everything. I can’t ask Jase to be stronger than me; that would be completely unfair. It’s myself I don’t trust to keep me safe, because I want Jase so badly I’m scared I’ll just keep kissing and kissing him till both of us are in way, way over our heads.

  I want to lie down on some blankets in the hayloft with Jase more than I’ve wanted anything in my life before. More than I wanted to find out who killed Dan, the first boy I ever kissed.

  And I wanted that very badly indeed.

  I’m fizzing. I really am on fire.

  “Whoa!” Jase jumps away from me slightly, though it’s actually more of an awkward shuffle because we’re on our knees. “You just buzzed me.”

  I look down at my sweater, pulled up to just below my bra. Zipped into its side pocket is my mobile phone, which I set to silent. It’s vibrating madly to let me know that someone’s ringing me.

  Here’s the very sad thing about my life: I don’t have many friends. In fact, I only really have one. I lost Luce and Alison when I chose to hang out with the popular girls instead of staying loyal to them; I crossed a street and changed my entire life, and I don’t blame them for not forgiving me for my betrayal.

  And now that I’ve been buried alive at Wakefield Hall Advanced Security Collegiate Prison for Young Ladies, the school in the countryside that my grandmother runs with an iron fist in an antique-lace glove, I haven’t made many new friends. It isn’t easy, when your grandmother’s the headmistress. Or when you can’t confide in anyone about the truth of the circumstances behind your having to leave your old school and come here, because you were involved in the death of a boy you were kissing who dropped dead at your feet, and you’ve been utterly and totally forbidden to talk about it.

  My only friend is called Taylor McGovern. She’s American, tough as nails, and like me, she doesn’t quite fit in to Wakefield Hall’s highly refined, madly academic atmosphere. She knows all my deepest darkest secrets. Apart from Jase, she’s the only person who might conceivably be ringing me at this time of night.

  And since Taylor knows I’m out with Jase, she wouldn’t ring me unless it was incredibly, mind-bogglingly urgent.

  Which means I have to answer the phone.

  “Sorry,” I say to Jase, dragging the phone out of my pocket and hitting the Answer key.

  “Scarlett!” Taylor says in a rush. “Look, I’m really sorry to be calling when you’re on a date, but it’s about Plum.”

  My heart sinks to the barn floor, a good thirty feet below me.

  Plum Saybourne. My nemesis. Five foot nine inches of chestnut-haired, green-eyed, designer-clad evil incarnate.

  This is going to be bad.

  “She’s got hold of this book she found in the school library,” Taylor says. “Some kind of etiquette guide. There’s pictures of you in it and she’s showing them to everyone.”

  No no no no. This can’t be happening. How could I have forgotten about that bloody etiquette guide?

  “I’m coming straight back,” I say grimly. “Where are you?”

  “Pankhurst dorms,” Taylor says succinctly. “Meet you at the front door.”

  I click the phone off. In its light, for a moment, I see Jase, his handsome face frowning in disappointment.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say sadly. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Your aunt?” he asks.

  “No. A girl called Plum. She’s pretty much my sworn enemy.”

  “That posh girl with the furs and the Merc?” Jase pulls a face. “Snobby cow.”

  “Jase! I’m posh!” I protest nervously.

  Jase Barnes’s family has been the Wakefield Hall gardeners for generations, living in a tied cottage on the estate. While I’m Scarlett Wakefield, the heir to the hall, daughter of Sir Richard Wakefield. Jase and I haven’t ever talked about it, but I think we both assume that the reason his dad is so against our being together is the huge class difference between our families.

  “You’re posh, but you don’t look down on working people.” Jase takes my hands. “That’s the difference. You don’t have a snobbish bone in your body. I’ve seen that Plum around a couple of times when I’ve been working in the grounds. She’ll flirt with me, all right, but if someone like me actually took her at her word and asked her out, she’d sneer at him like he was dirt on her shoes.”

  Glad as I am to hear that Jase doesn’t think I’m a snob, I can’t help homing in on another part of this.

  “She’s flirty with you?” I say, my voice rising dangerously.

  “Told me I had nice wide shoulders,” he says, and though the phone light’s gone out now, I don’t need to see his face to hear the smile in his voice. “What, you jealous now?”

  I am. Madly.

  “You do have nice wide shoulders,” I say, trying to sound airy and unconcerned.

  “You don’t need to be jealous, Scarlett.” He wraps his arms around me. “You know that, right?”

  This time our kiss is tender, reassuring. It would be lingering, but I break away because of the alarm bell ringing in my head.

  “I’ve got to get back,” I say regretfully.

  “Okay.” Jase lets out a long slow breath in a sigh of regret. “I’ll stay here for a couple of hours, till Dad’s had enough time to calm down and knock himself out with some more cheap whisky.”

  “Oh, Jase.” I squeeze his hand. I’m an orphan, which isn’t exactly a ton of fun, but whenever I think of Mr. Barnes it makes me realize that there might be worse fates in life. “Do you sleep out here a lot?”

  “When he’s on the warpath,” Jase says. “He’s always passed out by midnight, though. Then I can go back.” He hugs me. “I’d walk you back to school, but if Dad’s still out and about and catches us together …”

  “No, better not,” I say quickly. One encounter per evening with Mr. Barnes is pretty much my limit. “He won’t bother me if I’m on my own. It’s just seeing us together that gets him going.”

  Jase lights his Zippo to show me the way down the ladder, holding it high, away from the straw. We’ve got more than enough drama in our lives already without setting a barn alight.

  I hate to leave him. And I hate just whispering “Bye” as I make my way out through the gap in the boards.

  Because what I really want to say is “I love you.” The words are trembling on my tongue. I want to say “I love you” and then run away, really fast.

  Just in case he doesn’t say them back.

  two

  AN ARMY OF PLUM-BOTS

  I can’t believe I forgot abou
t the “Wakefield Hall Etiquette Guide for Students”! I’m thinking, furious with myself as I sprint across the field, vault over the stone wall, and land on the grassy verge of Lime Walk, back on officially sanctioned school grounds again. Why, why, why didn’t I get rid of it as soon as I realized I was coming here as a pupil?

  Because I was in such a state of misery that when I crawled back here, after I kissed Dan McAndrew and he promptly choked to death because of an allergic reaction, I was barely able to remember my own name.

  And probably also because the entire etiquette guide episode was so horrific I just tried to purge it out of my brain as soon as I could.

  A couple of years ago, my grandmother decided that the young ladies who comprised the current set of pupils at Wakefield Hall Collegiate were falling way below her extremely strict set of standards of conduct and deportment, despite having the aforementioned standards drilled into them every waking minute of their days. She attributed the problem to their home environments. Apparently, parents nowadays simply didn’t know how to teach their children how to behave.

  Her solution was simple and elegant. Who better than Honoria, Lady Wakefield, to put together a Wakefield Hall etiquette guide?

  And who better, in her opinion, than her granddaughter, Scarlett, to pose for the photographs in the guide, demonstrating how to sit on a sofa, skirt demurely arranged over her knees; how to get out of a car, legs pressed together politely; and how to hold her cutlery correctly, fingertips never touching the tines of her fork or the blade of her knife?

  Looking, in other words, like a complete and utter idiot.

  Originally, my grandmother’s idea was to send out a copy of the guide to the parents of every girl at Wakefield Hall when she started her first term. Miraculously for me, however, the move turned out to be one of her rare misjudgments. Her faithful secretary, Penny, told me in confidence that a large number of parents complained when the first batch of guides went out. Although some were apparently grateful for it, the vast majority was insulted by the presumption that they didn’t know how to teach their daughters the proper way to hold a fruit knife while paring an apple.