may we all be so lucky ✨

"Why are you walking backwards?"

"Well, I want to properly face you while we speak," he explains with a crooked grin. "And I cannot very well ask you to walk backwards in a dress."

"What if you run into someone?" Sophie asks.

"I am trusting you to give me ample warning," Benedict tells her.

"He's going to trip and die," Eloise comments as she falls into step with Sophie.

"We have only been married a year, I do so hope he delays death," Sophie jokes.

"I can walk backwards, I am not entirely useless," Benedict tells them.

"Disagree," Eloise tells him jokingly.

"We could walk arm in arm," Sophie offers. "I would much rather hold onto you, and then if I have something to say to you, I can lean up and say it."

Benedict thinks about that, trips a little and then nods. "Yes, I think that will do."

Sophie beams as he falls into step between herself and Eloise. She takes his arm and cuddles in.

"Oh, god, you two are atrocious," Eloise groans.

His fingers found the dip above her jeans first. Automatic, gravitational, the way his hand always found a pencil during a lecture or a brush during a blank thought. He pressed his palm flat against her lower back, where the fabric ended and bare skin began, and the warmth of her soaked through his hand like sunlight through glass. She didn't flinch. She didn't even acknowledge it; she just kept talking to Penelope about something — a sample sale, a designer he should probably know but couldn't name right now because his thumb was tracing the ridge of her spine and it was genuinely, physiologically impossible to hold two thoughts simultaneously when Sophie Baek's skin was under his hand.

He dragged his thumb upward slowly, following the groove between the muscles of her back, counting vertebrae like rosary beads. Her skin was ridiculous. Absurd. The kind of smooth that made him want to grind up every tube of titanium white, yellow ochre, and cadmium red he owned and start mixing from scratch because clearly he'd been painting skin wrong his entire life.

She leaned into his hand. A micro-adjustment that could have been posture and could have been permission.

His palm spread wider. He rubbed a slow circle between her shoulder blades, his fingers skating up to the nape of her neck where the halter straps crossed and knotted, then back down to the warm dip of her lower back. Up again. Down again. The repetition was hypnotic. Self-soothing, almost, if self-soothing involved someone else's body and a borderline public indecency charge.

"Benedict." Alfie, sprawled on his stomach with a can of Saint Monday balanced on the grass beside him, lifted his sunglasses. "You good?"

"Spectacular."

"You've been rubbing her back for five straight minutes."

"Have I?"

"Like a man polishing a very expensive car he can't believe he's been allowed to drive."

"That's a disgusting metaphor and I reject it entirely."

"You're doing it right now, while rejecting it. Your hand hasn't stopped moving."

It hadn't. His fingers were tracing the line of her ribs, feather-light, skating the edge of where the fabric sat. Sophie took a sip of her drink and said, without turning around, "He does this. It's like living with a very large cat who's discovered a warm surface."

"I am not a cat."

"You literally kneaded my back in your sleep last night."

Celia cackled from somewhere to his left. Colin, mid-construction of an absurd four-meat sandwich, grinned at him with the brotherly delight that meant this would be brought up at Christmas. John, who'd been chatting to Hazel, tipped his beer in Benedict's direction with a small, knowing smile. Even Eloise, deep in a monologue about the gentrification of Hackney Wick that she'd been delivering at Penelope's patient, nodding face, paused long enough to give Benedict a withering look.

He should stop. He was going to stop. He was a grown man with impulse control and a basic understanding of social—

The sun hit Sophie's shoulder, and the slope where her neck met the muscle was exactly the shade he'd been trying to mix for weeks, a warm bronze with an undertone of something almost copper, and the smell of her caramel and pistachio body butter mingled with cut grass, and she tilted her head slightly to the right, exposing the full, catastrophic line of her neck, and his brain simply dissolved.

He leaned down and bit her shoulder.

Gently. A soft, close-mouthed nip, his teeth catching the muscle, his lips pressing warm against her skin for one, two seconds.

Sophie went completely still.

The silence lasted approximately half a second before the park detonated.

"OH MY GOD." Hazel, loud enough to startle the labradoodle. "Did he just— Celia, did you see that? He bit her. He bit her."

"Like a vampire," Celia confirmed.

"In broad daylight," Alfie confirmed, sitting up. "At a picnic. During hummus hours."

"In front of my charcuterie," Penelope added, typing on her phone, probably live-tweeting to her followers. "I hand-selected that bresaola."

"Benedict." Colin set his sandwich down. "Mate."

"It was barely— I just—" The heat hit his ears first. Both of them, simultaneously, a furious crimson that climbed upward and outward until his entire face was, he was certain, the colour of Penelope's sun-dried tomatoes. "It was a— I was looking at the— the light was—"

"He's blaming the light," Eloise said flatly. "He bit his girlfriend in public and he's blaming the light."

"The light was doing something to her shoulder—"

"The light." Eloise closed her eyes. "Everyone, the light made him do it. The light is the perpetrator. Benedict is the victim here."

"Like a golden retriever," Hazel said, shaking her head. "A golden retriever who sees a really nice ankle and just goes for it."

"I am not a golden retriever. Golden retrievers are—"

"Better behaved," Alfie finished.

"Have more restraint," Colin added.

"Understand the concept of public decency," Eloise contributed.

John, who had been watching the entire spectacle with quiet amusement, leaned over to inspect Sophie's shoulder. "You've left a mark."

Benedict looked. A faint red crescent on her skin, with a small smudge of Carmex beside it. He wanted the canal to rise up and take him.

Sophie, through all of this, had remained perfectly still. Her drink in her hand. Her face angled slightly away. Her ears were pink. When she finally turned, her expression was serene in the way that meant she was exercising superhuman restraint over whatever was happening underneath.

"You done?" she asked.

"I am so sorry—"

"You're not sorry."

"I'm mortified."

"Those are different things."

She was right. He was mortified and sunburnt at the ears and absolutely, fundamentally, not sorry at all.

"Right!" Colin stood, brushing crumbs off his shorts with the kind of energy that was seizing control of a deteriorating situation. "Frisbee. Now. Before he escalates to a full mauling."

The group split. Colin, Alfie, and Celia on one team; Eloise, John and Benedict on the other. Sophie, Hazel and Penelope stayed on the blanket. Sophie claimed a shoulder injury. Benedict did not miss the irony.

The frisbee game was barely governed by rules or physics. Alfie threw overhand every single time with the unearned confidence of someone who'd never once completed a successful throw. Colin played like there were scouts watching. John was effortlessly good, plucking the disc from the air with one hand and flicking it back with a neat sidearm. Eloise played like she was settling a personal vendetta.

Benedict played like a man whose girlfriend was lying on her stomach twenty metres away with her chin propped on her crossed arms and the full, sunlit expanse of her bare back pointed directly at him like a weapon. He missed two easy catches, ran into Eloise, and took a frisbee to the side of the head that Celia swore was accidental.

"FOCUS," Eloise shouted.

"I'm focused."

"You've been hit in the head, you nearly flattened me, and you're looking at the blanket again. That's the opposite of focus. That's anti-focus. That's the heat death of focus."

"I'm just checking—"

"You're checking out your hot girlfriend. We know. The entire park knows. The labradoodle knows."

They played until the light went amber and the Saint Monday went warm. The group drifted back in stages, flopping onto the grass, reaching for whatever was left of Penelope's spread. Benedict's shirt was damp with sweat, his hair stuck to his forehead, and he'd grass-stained both knees, which Sophie would have something to say about later because they were her favourite jeans on him, on account of what they did to his bum.

The group was packing up. Penelope was stacking Tupperware. Alfie was trying to fold the blanket into a shape that fit inside his backpack. Hazel was telling a story about a man on the Northern line. Everyone was standing, milling, half-paying-attention.

Sophie appeared beside him.

She leaned against his arm. Her hand slipped into the back pocket of his jeans, her palm warm through the denim, and she squeezed. Not casually or ambiguously. A full, firm, intentional grip on his arse that sent his entire nervous system into blue-screen-of-death.

He made a quiet, strangled sound — the kind of noise that would have been socially annihilating if anyone had been listening.

No one was listening. Thank god.

She pressed her lips to his cheek, quick and dry, and the caramel of her body butter and the strawberry on her breath hit him at the same time. "That's for the bite," she murmured. Then she was gone, walking over to Hazel and Celia, her loose jeans sitting low on her hips, the triangle straps of the halter catching the last of the sun.

She didn't look back.