The first afternoon in Ibiza,
the sun was only the sun.
Hot, obviously.
Stupidly hot.
The sort of heat that makes the pool tiles look wet
even when they aren’t
and turns every British person
the colour of something that should’ve been taken out the oven twenty minutes ago.
We were meant to be saving ourselves for the party boat.
Instead, by half twelve, Bridey had ordered cava,
Disco was drinking something blue
that came with three straws and no dignity,
and Angel was photographing her own knee.
“Why your knee?” I asked.
“The light’s nice.”
“It’s a knee.”
“It’s a nice knee.”
That was Angel.
She always knew where the camera was,
even when there wasn’t one.
She could be half asleep, face-down on a sunbed,
and still somehow arrange herself
like somebody had paid her to be unconscious.
She wore a white bikini that afternoon,
tiny enough to make you wonder
whether the rest had gone missing in customs.
I was under the parasol in a shirt,
factor fifty shining on my arms,
a hat big enough to interfere with air traffic.
Disco looked over her sunglasses.
“Casper, you look like you’re waiting for the vicar.”
“I’m Scottish. This is beachwear.”
“You’re actually getting whiter.”
“I’m reflecting the sun back at itself.
Doing everyone a public service.”
They’d called me Casper since university.
It wasn’t even cruel.
It was accurate.
I don’t tan.
I go from milk bottle
to furious ham
and then straight back to milk bottle again,
usually with three weeks of peeling in between.
Bridey was beside me, pulling at her bikini bottoms.
“Do I look fat?”
“Yes,” I said.
She stared at me.
“No, obviously not. Jesus.
You’ve asked seventeen times.”
“I feel fat.”
“You had two croissants.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re getting married, not being weighed for market.”
Angel held out her phone.
“Can you take one of me?”
“I’ve already taken about forty.”
“Those were before the drink came.”
“The drink’s the size of a plant pot.”
“It changes the vibe.”
I took the phone.
Angel lay back, one knee raised, chin turned slightly,
her mouth open just enough
to suggest either sex
or mild dehydration.
I knew that look.
We all knew that look.
She’d used it online, in magazines, on hotel balconies,
and once in second year
while sitting on our kitchen worktop
with a rugby player between her legs
and me trying not to laugh because he’d left his socks on.
Nobody mentioned him much.
He’d turned out to be a complete prick.
Not tragically.
Just in the boring, everyday way men sometimes do
after convincing themselves they’re the main event
in a story involving two women far more interesting than them.
All four of us knew what had happened that night.
Nobody brought it up.
Same as nobody brought up Angel kissing me
in the bathroom two nights earlier,
or her hand disappearing under my skirt
while Bridey hammered on the door shouting,
“The taxi’s here and I am not paying waiting time
because you two have become lesbians again.”
We weren’t.
Not exactly.
We were just old friends
who sometimes got drunk
and forgot where friendship ended.
“Lower angle,” Angel said.
“I’m not lying on the floor.”
“Casper.”
“Angel.”
She grinned.
And then I heard him.
Stay.
I lowered the phone.
“What?”
Angel didn’t answer.
Her eyes were shut, face tilted upwards.
There wasn’t anyone near us.
A waiter stood by the bar polishing glasses.
Two children were trying to drown an inflatable unicorn.
A man in Union Jack shorts was asleep
with his belly pointing directly at God.
That was it.
No mystery Spaniard.
No voice close enough to belong to anyone.
Still, I heard it again.
Turn over.
Angel rolled onto her stomach.
Not sharply.
Not like she’d been told.
Just slowly, lazily,
as though the thought had occurred to her naturally.
I took another photo.
“Your arse looks good,” I said.
“It always does.”
“Healthy confidence.”
“Years of training.”
She had a lovely arse.
There was no point lying.
I’d seen it in bikinis, dresses, mirrors, photographs,
and pressed against the wall of a student flat
while the rugby player made a noise
like a wardrobe being moved downstairs.
Bridey sat up.
“Take one of me.”
“You hate photos.”
“I hate bad photos.”
The heat shifted across her.
You look thinner in this light.
Bridey went quiet.
Just for a second.
Then she pulled her shoulders back
and handed me her phone.
“Portrait mode.”
Disco was scrolling through her ex’s profile.
She’d blocked him that morning,
unblocked him over breakfast,
blocked him again by eleven
and was currently inspecting the story
of a woman she claimed not to care about.
The sun touched the freckles on her shoulders.
Nobody has ever really seen you.
She stopped scrolling.
Looked up.
Smiled at nothing.
That was when I decided the sun was a man.
Not a god yet.
Just a man.
Fernando, I called him in my head.
Early forties.
Too tanned.
Gold chain.
White shirt open three buttons lower than necessary.
The sort of man who says my darling
before asking your name
and has spent twenty years confusing confidence
with never being told to shut up.
Angel reached behind her neck
and untied her bikini top.
“Oh, here we go,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just warning the pensioners.”
She pulled it off.
No fuss.
Angel got her tits out all the time.
They were online.
They were in hotel mirrors.
They’d been in my hands twice already that week.
Still, the pool noticed.
Every man suddenly needed to look
in exactly her direction
for reasons unrelated to her being topless.
One started rummaging through a bag
that happened to be behind her.
Another adjusted his chair
four separate times.
The sleeping man in the Union Jack shorts woke up
like someone had restarted him.
Angel lay back.
The sun lowered his voice.
Let me see you properly.
Her nipples tightened in the breeze.
She smiled, but it wasn’t quite her usual smile.
That bothered me.
Angel loved being looked at.
She wasn’t ashamed of it.
There was nothing tragic about that.
She knew she was beautiful.
She also needed reminding.
Both things could be true.
I knew because I was old-fashioned enough
to want someone to write me letters,
remember how I take my tea,
wait for me on station platforms—
and stupid enough to keep falling for men
who sent fire emojis at two in the morning
and forgot my surname by breakfast.
Angel stretched one arm over her head.
Fernando warmed her stomach,
her breasts,
the white strip of skin under her bikini bottoms.
He sounded pleased with himself.
I rubbed more factor fifty into my arms.
Disco looked over.
“You’ve done that three times.”
“I enjoy having skin.”
“You’ll go home exactly the same colour.”
“That’s the dream.”
“No tan lines at all?”
“No tan.”
“Not even on your arse?”
“My arse has seen less daylight
than a priest’s search history.”
Angel opened one eye.
“That’s not entirely true.”
Bridey spat cava back into her glass.
We all laughed.
And because we laughed,
I nearly missed the voice turning towards me.
It wasn’t loud.
That was worse.
I can still see you, Casper.
I stopped rubbing sunscreen into my wrist.
The others said Casper like a joke.
Fernando said it softly.
Like he’d been waiting all morning
to get me alone.
I shifted my chair deeper beneath the parasol.
The shade didn’t feel as cool as it had before.
“You all right?” Angel asked.
“Fine.”
“You’ve gone pink.”
“That’s my natural glow.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s either rage or heatstroke.
Give it time.”
She laughed and reached for my drink.
Her fingers brushed mine.
There was nothing unusual in it.
Angel touched everyone.
But her thumb stayed against my knuckle
for half a second longer than it needed to.
The sun noticed.
Of course he did.
Men like Fernando always notice
when women want each other.
They think it’s happening for them.
You’ve always wanted to be chosen.
I picked up the factor fifty again.
“That’s enough,” I muttered.
Bridey looked over.
“What is?”
“Sunscreen.”
“You’re arguing with it now?”
“I don’t like its tone.”
By three o’clock we were on the party boat.
Everything after that came in pieces.
The harbour slipping away.
Music too loud to talk over,
so we shouted directly into each other’s mouths.
Salt drying on our legs.
Plastic cups of something sweet
that tasted like melted ice lollies and bad decisions.
Disco dancing on a bench
while checking whether her ex had seen her story.
Bridey forgetting to hold her stomach in.
Angel standing near the front,
white bikini top back on but badly tied,
hair whipping across her face
while she filmed herself against the sea.
On her phone screen, she looked golden.
Perfect.
Like the afternoon had been arranged around her.
Outside the screen,
her shoulders were already going red.
None of us felt ourselves burning.
That was the clever part.
The wind made our skin feel cool.
The sea spray kept landing on the sore places
before they knew they were sore.
Every warning arrived disguised as relief.
A bloke from Manchester asked
whether Angel and I were sisters.
“No,” I said.
“Girlfriends?”
“Only when convenient.”
Angel put her arm around my waist
and kissed my cheek.
“Very convenient,” she said.
The man laughed too loudly.
Fernando laughed as well,
somewhere inside the heat.
To Bridey he said:
Smaller.
To Disco:
Someone will regret losing you.
To Angel:
More.
And to me, hidden under the awning
with my shirt buttoned over my bikini:
Not yet.
I drank the rest of my cocktail in one go.
By sunset,
we thought we’d got away with it.
The sun dropped behind the buildings
and everyone clapped
as though he’d done something kind.
Back in the hotel room,
the burns came out.
Bridey took off her dress
and made a noise normally heard
when people discover spiders in the bath.
“My shoulders!”
Disco inspected her nose in the mirror.
“Do I look burned?”
“You look like someone’s flicked ketchup at you.”
“It’s only one side.”
“That’s worse.
You’ve been grilled unevenly.”
Angel stood in front of the wardrobe mirror
wearing only her bikini bottoms.
Her shoulders were scarlet.
So was the top of her chest,
apart from two pale shapes
where the bikini had briefly covered her.
“Oh, fuck,” she said.
Bridey looked over.
“You’re a lobster.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“You’re a sexy lobster, if that helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“A lobster with subscribers.”
“Still no.”
We were drunk enough to find everything funny
and sober enough to know it would hurt tomorrow.
Disco tried rubbing aloe onto her own back
and nearly fell into the wardrobe.
Bridey discovered a blister
and announced she was naming it Colin.
Angel sat on the edge of the bed.
I squeezed aloe into my palm.
“Turn round.”
She looked at me.
“Bossy.”
“You’re bright red.”
“You like me bright red.”
“I like you with an intact outer layer.”
She turned.
I rubbed the gel into her shoulders.
She hissed.
“Cold.”
“That’s generally what aloe does.”
“Your hands are freezing.”
“You said that at uni.”
The room paused.
Not properly.
Just enough.
Disco was the one who broke it.
“He really was a dick, that bloke.”
“The rugby one?” Bridey asked.
“We’ve only shared one rugby player,” Angel said.
“So far,” said Disco.
Angel glanced back at me.
I kept rubbing aloe into her skin.
There were details from that night
we could still remember too clearly.
His socks.
Angel biting my shoulder
because I’d started laughing.
The way he’d messaged her afterwards
and not me,
then messaged me three weeks later
as though we might not have compared notes.
Men sometimes forget women speak to each other.
It’s how they manage to stay confident.
I moved my hands lower,
careful around the strap of Angel’s bikini bottoms.
Her skin was hot beneath my palms.
All afternoon the sun had told her
how beautiful she was.
Now she was sore
and I was the one trying to reach the bits
she couldn’t reach herself.
There was no seduction in it.
No camera.
No golden light.
Just aloe,
sticky fingers,
and Angel muttering, “Ow, ow, not there,”
while I told her to stop being dramatic.
That was love, probably.
Not the grand sort.
The useful sort.
Bridey pointed at me.
“Casper.”
“What?”
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Turn round.”
“I’m not showing you my arse.”
“We’ve all seen your arse.”
“Not sober.”
“Debatable,” Angel said.
I turned anyway.
Disco leaned down.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
Bridey tugged the waistband of my shorts down
a fraction.
“Oi.”
“You’ve got a mark.”
“From what?”
Disco bent closer.
“It looks like a heart.”
Bridey snorted.
“A shag-me stamp.”
“Branded by the sun,” Disco said.
“Fernando’s fingered you.”
They all started laughing.
I did too.
“What a lovely way to find out,” I said.
“Three drunk women staring at my crack.”
“It’s not your crack.”
“It’s crack-adjacent.”
Angel got off the bed.
She came closer.
The others were still giggling
until they noticed she wasn’t.
Then the laughter slowly went thin.
Bridey stopped first.
Disco leaned in again.
The mark sat just above the waistband,
on the right side of my lower back.
A little red heart.
Not a vague one, either.
Not two patches that happened to touch.
A proper heart.
Small.
Neat.
Tender.
The skin around it was pale.
No sunburn.
No strap line.
Nothing to explain it
except maybe the edge of my shirt lifting
when I’d reached for a drink,
or sunscreen rubbed away by the chair.
That’s what I told myself.
Angel lifted her hand.
Her fingers hovered above the mark
without touching it.
I watched her in the mirror.
She looked worried.
And something else.
Not anger.
Not quite jealousy.
Just a tiny flicker
she’d have denied if I asked.
All day the sun had been looking at her.
Now he’d left something on me.
“What did that?” she asked.
“My shorts, probably.”
“Your shorts aren’t heart-shaped.”
“You’ve not seen the label.”
Nobody laughed.
Angel’s fingers stayed where they were,
barely an inch from my skin.
The room had gone quiet
apart from Disco’s phone playing music
from underneath a towel.
Outside, the balcony doors reflected us.
Four women in a messy hotel room.
Half-dressed.
Burned.
A little drunk.
Bridey holding the aloe.
Disco with one red side of her face.
Angel behind me, topless,
her hand suspended over my back.
And me looking at that stupid little heart.
I touched it.
It was warm.
Not hot.
Not impossible.
Just warm enough
to make my stomach turn over.
I should’ve been frightened.
I was.
I should’ve felt disgusted.
Part of me did.
But underneath that
was something I didn’t want to name.
A small, embarrassing thrill.
Because I’d hidden all afternoon.
I’d covered myself.
Stayed in the shade.
Made jokes.
Pretended I didn’t care
who was looking at Angel
or whether anyone looked at me.
And still—
somehow—
I had been noticed.
Angel met my eyes in the mirror.
I smiled.
Only a little.
She didn’t smile back.
But she understood.
That was the trouble with Angel.
She usually did.
Behind us, Bridey opened another bottle.
Disco found the hotel-room crisps.
Someone shouted about chips.
The music got turned up.
The room became loud again,
ordinary again,
safe enough for the moment.
But outside were six more afternoons.
Six afternoons of white heat,
cold drinks,
pool water,
and pretending not to listen.
Fernando would be there.
Of course he would.
Men like him are patient
when they already believe the answer is yes.
I knew what he was doing.
I knew that being wanted
wasn’t the same as being held.
I knew the sun would never stay
to cool the burns he gave us.
Angel was still watching
as my fingers rested over the heart.
I smiled at her again.
A proper smile this time.
And somewhere beyond the black balcony glass,
though the night had already come,
I could almost feel him waiting.
Not because he cared.
Because he knew
there were six afternoons left.