Model wears: red Squier Fender guitar, lipstick by Kate Moss.

Tenth

Late summer festivals are Oakley's favourite thing. Especially when Jess is there, with her dimples and her cigarettes in the back pocket of her shorts. There's thunderclouds coming over, but he can't bring himself to feel afraid. He'll just hang here in the balance, and maybe fate will find him.

Nine

It's hot. The sun is beating on the roof of the fruit cage, but where it filters down to Ruby, it's dappled gently by raspberry leaves. The warm sweet scent of crushed fruit is all around her, and when she goes home tonight it will linger still, on her coarse linen sheets, until tomorrow morning's shower. Not far from her, Oakley is picking raspberries and placing each one in the blue punnets like it's made of gold. His hands are stained red.
Ruby takes a deep breath, and then another. It's possible she's never felt so alive, so in the moment. She closes her eyes and prays.

8

The dolphin wind chimes dance in the sea breeze, clattering together dully. A storm is racing across the sky from the east, waves pounding on the beach, but it's still warm and sunny here. The storm won't be here till nightfall, when Ruby will go out, and the dusty streets will be cobbled under pelting rain, and that certain smell of a hot country doused in water will rise into the air. She'll wear her red dress, the one with the ruffled hem, and she'll take a pretty dark-skinned boy home.
The photographer tells her not to move.
"Just like that, Miss Ruby."
The amber ring on her finger was her mother's. She wore it every day, and sometimes after Denise's marriage was ended, Ruby would steal into her room and slip the worn silver band onto her too-small finger, still warm from her mother's body.
The dress is Ruby's own, and she knows it as well as her own body, by now; every frill, every crease, every jewel, every seam. Peter had it commissioned especially for the engagement photographs.
It makes her blood pump harder to know that he suspects nothing.

Seven

Emily wore her golden hair loose. The first time Peter saw her, it was blowing in the wind as she leaned over the side of her father's boat, as shining and brilliant as strands of pure gold. He loved her for that, instantly, just for being so beautiful and bright in a world that had only seemed dark.
Emily and her father sailed around the world. That day Peter saw them docking at Falmouth, they were returning from a six-month journey all around the Mediterranean. Emily returned laden down with tiny gifts for her mother and sisters: little terracotta statues, enamel earrings, crystallised lemon slices, preserved black sausage, startlingly coloured hand-woven shawls.
Disembarking, she dropped a shawl, and Peter grabbed it before it could blow into the water in the fierce offshore wind. That day, he drowned in her green eyes, and he's never come up for air; but Emily sails on, her love for adventure greater than any before or since.

SIX

Her father calls this sort of time 'high hay days'. It's a good name, she thinks; all the world seems golden and slow and hay dust floats on the heavy air. The hay piles high on the trailers and they sway at five miles an hour down the roads, leaving sticks of straw caught in the hedgerows. Her brother stands on the top in the field, hauling each bale into place as her father throws them up to him. Their forearms are scratched and swollen with hay mites. This is the time of year she loves the best. She takes a sip of her lemonade, and squeezes his hand.

Five

Her stockings have run a ladder during the night. Her skin smells like cigarettes and other women's perfume. Her toenails are candy-apple red, matching her lipstick. She tastes lime and vodka on her tongue. There's ice on her fingertips and nose, and a glow on her wide cheeks. Throughout the long night, she'll be by herself, but she's never truly alone.