We’ve been there for two days when I see her. Dad and Christine are off chasing tourist traps with matching baseball caps and sunblock-shiny noses, lukewarm bottles of squash rolling around in the backpack and crushing the storebought chocolate cookies, the decades-old canon SLR camera slung over Christine’s chest while I’m on the beach sipping a secretive frozen margarita and stealing glances at a girl in a banana-yellow bikini. She dog-ears her page in the battered paperback she’s been reading and sinks her bare feet into the warm sand, tugs on a loose linen shirt, and ambles over to me.

“Can I have a sip of that?” she asks, plucking the cocktail glass from my hands before I’ve had the chance to reply. Her name, it turns out, is Anneliese. She has no idea what book she’s reading because she picked up the copy at a local market and the entire thing is in Latin, which she didn’t take in school, but maybe this will be a way to learn it. She asks me if I’m bored, because I look it, and whether I’d like to go for a swim with her.

I drain the rest of the margarita so fast my brain freezes over and trail her into the water. I’m not sure what to say to her, but the silence doesn’t seem to bother her. She floats on her back and I watch the gentling of her jawline, the faint twitches of her wet eyelashes. Her skin shimmers under the sun and I ask, “Aren’t you scared I might drown you?”

She’s quiet for a moment long enough that I’m about to apologise and swim back to shore. Then her eyes open and she looks right at me. “Should I be?”

“I wouldn’t,” I say unnecessarily. “Obviously.”

“Hm.” She closes her eyes again and floats for another minute before, “Would you like to?”

I suck in a breath. My chest doesn’t expand the way it usually does, instead it grows very cold. And, at the same time, very warm. “Of course not.”

“Hm,” she says again. Her eyes are still closed, which feels like a smoke signal of sorts, which feels like a way to suggest that if I wanted to, I could quietly close the short distance and hold her head under the surface. Which I do not want to, naturally. I don’t think of how her eyes would cloud with panic or bliss and how her limbs would flail around me. Or how it would feel to pull her back up for air and kiss her as she’s heaving for breath. “Well, then.”

Her toenails, I notice, are painted yellow to match her bikini. Her shinbones are very long. In a flash, she’s no longer on her back, but suddenly upright next to me. Her hands settle on my shoulders. “Do you want to play a game?”

I breathe in. My hands close around the dip of her waist, which feels illicit, just like all my other thoughts do. “What game?”

“What you said,” she says, not much more than a whisper, as her mouth glides up the column of my throat. I kick my legs to stay afloat. I clutch her tighter. “I could see it,” she says, “how you looked at me.”

In that moment, I feel like a butterfly, caught and expertly pinned in place. “How did I look at you?”

“Why did you ask if I’m scared,” she begins. Her teeth scrape my earlobe. My core is tight and hot. “If not because you want me to be?”

I say nothing as she watches me, as she curls her legs around my waist. Somewhere, my dad is taking a picture of my stepmum in front of a marble statue or an ancient temple and hours from now they’ll ask me how I passed the day without them and what will I say, I don’t know, I met a girl who asked me to hold her head under water? Is that what Anneliese is asking me to do?

She leans even closer. My cunt burns with want. “Show me,” she whispers, dark and wet and carving right through me, her face haloed by the sun and my own headrush of heat, “that I should be scared.”