peacocks as she was, wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, sitting on the bench with a folded
blanket beside her, in a white dress with orange and yellow daisies. And buttons
all the way down the front, he noticed, which was Jess all right. But none of them
undone, as he also noticed, which was Jess too. Available (her word for it) but
not so as to tire a man out, unlike some girls, so he'd heard, most likely from Wal.
But only heard. He didn't know, he'd never done anything like that, not even in
Alex where there must have been a fair bit of it going on.
Seeing her now, he knew why. Why he never had, except with her. There would
have been no point to it. As for the blanket, all that was coming back too. They'd
gone up the Beacon to be together in summer like this, on an evening like this and
a month before they were due to be married. Being together, well, they both knew
what they meant by that, promises-to-wait or not. Jess had said, I'm not lying
on any old grass though, I'll catch my death. Excited, nervous, eager to oblige,
he had fetched the blanket out of the attic. Whereupon Jess told him he wasn't
going to carry that either, not up the Beacon, everyone would know what was intended,
she said, making him laugh and then laughing herself, so he'd had to wrap it round
his chest under
