Sleepless Nights by Sarah Bilston

him, wringing the water out of my hair. I turned around. He was unfastening his sailing gloves and stripping off his life-vest. “You’re a good sailor,” he went on, grinning. “You’ve got good intuitions, you know?”
    “Have I?” I started to say, eagerly, then flubbed it, stumbled over the words, and blushed again and again in spite of myself.
    All in all (as I explained to Alison, in a hastily dashed-off e-mail when we arrived home, the words flying out of my fingers), it’s a good thing he showed his true colors on the way home. Really, a very good thing indeed. Or who knows where things might have ended up!
    15
    Q
    H ey, dude, I’ll catch you later.” Paul shook hands with Adjile; his lips touched Lily’s smooth brown cheek. “Thanks, guys. That was a great day.”
    “Always welcome,” Lily replied, laughing, and then she turnedtoward me, her extraordinary eyes sparkling. “And it was so nice to meet you and your sister. I’m always amazed when I meet sisters who actually get along. My sister and I hated each other when we were children. To be quite honest, I don’t think much of her now, either! Such a catty little thing…”
    We walked toward Paul’s car, her light arm linked through mine. “Have you two always been friends?” she asked curiously. I was acutely conscious of the smallness of her body as we walked, her narrow waist, her tiny feet, her lustrous hair gleaming in the late-afternoon sunshine. She seemed almost to fly over the rocks. I had to work not to stumble.
    I looked over toward Jeanie, and grinned, a little embarrassed. “I think we united against a common enemy as children: Alison, our other sister,” I explained. Alison is hard to describe to new people; I thought carefully for a moment about how to characterize her. “She’s the middle one. Always too self-confident. Married a minor aristocrat, so now she gets to throw a bit of mud at a wall and call it ‘art.’ No one likes to challenge her, of course, so she’s become very—well, smug as an adult. Even more superior. She’s competitive as well, although she hides that part of herself from everyone but us.”
    “Really? So there’s a third. How funny,” Lily remarked. She looked up. “Isn’t she terribly jealous right now?”
    Funnily enough, this view of things had never occurred to me. “I don’t think so,” I said. “No, not really. Alison has far more important things to do than think about us. Great Sculpture to complete, for one thing. Of course, her stuff is terrible, isn’t it Jeanie? Just terrible!”
    “Now you sound more like a sister!” Lily laughed, handing me into the car. “Sisters see through each other like—like tigers through smoked glass. I think I heard that somewhere. Okay, so I get it now. Alison’s the odd one out. Well, I hope to meet her one day. Finish the puzzle. Put all the pieces together.”
    “Not likely,” I returned laughing, still trying to exchange glanceswith Jeanie, who had her back to me and was fiddling awkwardly with something under her nails. There was a strange flush on her cheeks. “Alison came out to see me a few months ago, while I was pregnant, and she made it very clear she’d have better things to do for the next decade than visit again. Jeanie and I don’t get on with her terribly well, so we don’t really care.”
    Tom passed Samuel in to me while Paul, now changed into a pale linen shirt and trousers, helped Jeanie into the front seat. “I can manage, thank you,” she said, sounding slightly pent up, as he slid his hand beneath her elbow; Paul shrugged.
    “Of course. Whatever,” he returned, coldly brusque, pouring himself into the front seat.
    It was a small moment, but such is the strange chemistry of conversation that it somehow seemed to poison what followed. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but once the final good-byes had been waved, and our hosts, arms around each other, had receded into the darkness of the starry evening,