She thinks of the night before. The shock of his body: the difference of it, the shape of it. His smell. The places where she put her mouth. And she was different. Her body different. The way they moved together. The strange animal noises they made. Afterwards, lying in the dark with this familiar, unfamiliar man, she thought of Nathan. Of how she had forgotten to see him as separate. Forgotten to grant him his subjectivity, to feel his unfamiliarity. Forgotten to acknowledge the animal inside him. Lissa would have kindled the animal in him. And with this thought comes something else: a sort of grief, for her own animal nature, for its own wild desires.

She turns onto her back, and there is only the darkness—the low, intimate sound of her breath.

After a long while she crawls back out to the main chamber, and then pushes herself back out into the brightness of the day. The dog follows her, and they walk along the rocks back to the car. The clouds have lifted, the wind has stilled, the day is clear.

She drives back up the island, past a strip of white sand, the sea gentle beside it, and she is seized with a desire so strong and immediate that she stops the car. She climbs down and walks back along the sand until she is no longer in sight of the road, takes off her clothes, and runs into the sea. She lets out a sound, a shout—of cold, of joy, of exhilaration—as the water lifts her off her feet and slaps her skin.

Cate

SPRING ARRIVES EARLY, AND THE CITY TURNS GREEN. SHE TAKES her bike out of storage and cleans and oils it, and then she bikes up the hill to work—looking at the trees starting to bud and then leaf, the candles of the horse chestnuts that stand by the side of the wide road.

At first it makes her breathless, the climb—she has to stop and wheel her bike several times to make it up the hill. But soon she is feeling fitter, feeling her muscles respond, the air flood into her lungs.

The ride is lovely, but it is when she is driving that she sees it most—out on the back roads, between Canterbury and the coast, the radiant springtime sweep of the land.

Dea was right; the job fits her—two days a week in the office and then a day a week visiting schools. Sam has dropped a day at work, and so they manage the childcare between them, she and Alice and Sam. She likes the teenagers she meets—their attitude, their sass. They give nothing for free. She is working on a plan to get kids from a school in Sheppey to visit the campus, working with the Creative Writing department to publish an anthology of the teenagers’ work.