Asking For Trouble (24 page)

‘But I can’t,’ I said, when the threat of tears had gone. ‘You don’t understand, Jen. I can’t walk away and just forget it all. It’s . . . I know that’s not good, but I can’t help it. I know he said some rotten things today, but I can’t believe he meant it. He was angry, wound up. And, yeah, maybe he overreacted to me going in there, but maybe I shouldn’t have been so nosy. I dunno. It was just a weird one-off. And everything else . . . it’s, it’s good. I’m not ready to finish things. I’m so immersed in what we’ve got going. I can’t help that and I wish I could.’

Jenny tried to conceal a weary sigh. I could tell she was tiring of all my buts. A silence fell between us,
starchy with friction, and for a while we just drank our beers. Jenny fixed herself another roll-up.

Then Jenny said, ‘Look, maybe the way to get him out of your system is to end it. OK, so it might be painful. But in the long run, it’s got to be for the best. Sooner or later it’s got to end. So do it now before this guy really oversteps the mark.’

‘But I can’t,’ I protested. ‘It’s too compelling. The sex, the game, the not knowing what’ll happen next. It’s not just him I’m gripped by. It’s the game as well. I know you think it’s weird – me being a closet sleaze-bag –’

‘Each to their own,’ Jenny shrugged. ‘I’m not going to judge, am I? I just think there must be a better way of exploring these fantasies of yours. And I don’t understand why you didn’t do it before – when you were with someone you cared about. Someone you trusted and loved.’

‘Too late now,’ I said.

‘Then wait,’ she urged. ‘Wait until some guy comes along who makes your heart sing. Save it all up, and wham. You’ll have a great time. Mr Right won’t believe his luck.’

‘I don’t think it’d work,’ I said disconsolately. ‘It’s . . . I just see it as separate from love. That’s part of the buzz.’ I dropped my voice as a glass-collecting barmaid passed our table. ‘We don’t do ordinary stuff or open up about our feelings or, or make love. That was the deal. Keep it simple and pure – sex without complications. And I get off on that idea, of sex that’s detached, whorish. Or I did. It’s . . . I mean, we’re just playing a game together. That’s all. We’re not emotionally entangled and –’

‘But you are, Beth,’ insisted Jenny. ‘You are emotionally entangled. Maybe he isn’t, but you are and that’s not a good combination. It’s not a good basis for this, this
game
, as you call it. He could really exploit that. He’ll treat you like shit and you’ll keep going back for more. It’s crazy, completely crazy. I mean, like this afternoon, if
he thinks he’s got away with behaving the way he did then maybe next time it’ll be worse. Much worse. Get out of it, Beth. End it. Dump him.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Oh God, Beth,’ murmured Jenny, looking at me with worry and suspicion. ‘You want it worse, don’t you?’

I shrugged and began splitting the corner of my beermat.

Jenny released a long breath and slumped back in her seat, shaking her head reprovingly.

‘You’re asking for trouble, Beth,’ she said. ‘You really are.’

ILYA SENT ME
some white flowers – a great big bunch of furled lilies, sprigged with tightly budded carnations and some spiky flowers I couldn’t identify. They were delivered in a box by a flower delivery-man carrying a clipboard.

In my flat, I read the accompanying little card: ‘My finger’s really sore. Guess I got off lightly.’

It was written in big round letters and there was no name there. I mentally added ‘from Ilya’; but ‘from Karen, the seventeen-year-old whose job it is to write these cards’ seemed more appropriate.

I was livid.

If the flowers hadn’t been so infuriatingly beautiful, I would’ve chucked them in the bin. But I didn’t have the heart; they hadn’t done anything wrong. And they hadn’t even lived yet. They were still in bud, swollen with promise.

I wasn’t too bothered that there was nothing like ‘sorry’ or ‘forgive me’ in the card – although it might have been nice. But ‘sorry and forgive me’ are only words and the whole package was basically saying the same thing; it was just spelt differently.

And I hated the way it was spelt. It was dull, thoughtless, bland, anonymous and insulting.

What was I supposed to think? Oh, how wonderful, he’s gone to the effort of sending me flowers, so deep inside he must have a warm and tender heart?

Well, I didn’t. I just thought, He’s gone to the effort of getting his credit card out. Big fucking deal.

I didn’t contact him. I didn’t phone to say thanks or ‘Hey, let’s talk’ or ‘You nasty, vicious, cheating bastard, what the hell were you playing at?’

And he didn’t contact me either. Fine, I thought. We’ll have a practice run at cuttlefish, see how I get on without you.

I might’ve been asking for trouble, as Jenny had said, but I certainly wasn’t prepared to go and beg for it.

Besides, I was busy. I had some hot sex to sell.

The bars and clubs on the seafront are under the arches where, in the olden days, fishermen used to hang out, mending nets and puffing on pipes.

The arches are still there but the fishermen are a bit thin on the ground.

In some of the bars, the vaulted stone ceilings are a feature; other clubs do their best to hide them. The club we were in had a warehousey feel to it and the dance-floor crowd shimmered and pulsed under a kaleidoscope of lights.

‘Hot sex. Two quid,’ I shouted over the pumping music as some guy with turquoise-blonde hair approached the group I was with. I thrust a flyer into his hand. He took it, raised his eyebrows in a show of mild interest, said ‘Cheers’, then I resumed my loud conversation and he started one with someone else.

That’s the trouble with Brighton and flyers. You could hand out slips of paper saying ‘Baboons Fuck Live’ and people would just nod and put them in their pockets or chuck them to the ground, depending on how polite they
were. And they wouldn’t think much about it. And, if they did, they’d just think ‘Baboons Fuck Live’ was some local band or a new club night. Or they’d think it was the real thing, but so what? It’s Brighton. Anything goes.

Word of mouth was the best publicity machine. So I’d started the ball rolling by telling lots of people about the gritty reality of Hot Sex. I seemed to have whetted quite a few appetites, but at that stage in the evening I was wearying of it. So I was easing up on the sales pitch and starting to enjoy myself.

I shouldered my way through the crush, back to base, where Jen, Fiona, Ellie and a bunch of others were clustered around a tall, chrome table, all shouting in different directions.

‘Vodka for the pimp,’ yelled Jenny drunkenly, holding up a glass for me.

I took it and drank, making loud chit-chat with some guy I vaguely knew who thought he was a poet.

Then a voice close to my ear barged in with: ‘All right. Beth, isn’t it?’

I turned to face this young and beautiful, peroxide-blond guy who had a sleeper in one eyebrow. He was jerking his head in time to the music, doing his best to appear cool and casual while awaiting my response.

He was familiar but I couldn’t place him. But then lots of people say ‘hi’ to me – because of the club – and I can’t place them. So I just returned a bland smile.

‘Luke,’ he hollered, and he began drumming away on the table-edge, his whole body bobbing to the beat. ‘We were at the beach together. A while back. Just chillin’.’

For a moment, I thought he meant The Beach as in the club. Then it clicked. Ah, he means the pebbly thing with the sea at the bottom.

I caught Jenny watching us. She gave me a wicked little grin because one of her many solutions to the Ilya saga was for me to find another lover, take my mind off things.

So I gave Luke a wide, welcoming smile.

‘Hot sex?’ I said, raising my voice and offering him a flyer. ‘Two quid?’

He grinned, took the flyer in one hand and combed his other hand through his softly spiked hair. ‘That’s cheap,’ he said, briefly leaning closer because of the music.

I leant forward, and in a loud voice, said, ‘Well, that’s the kind of girl I am.’

‘So how old are you?’ asked Luke, as we crunched quickly over the pebbled beach, away from the lantern-lit esplanade with its big arty sculptures and cluster of bars.

‘Thirty-six,’ I lied, my ears still ringing from the noise of the club.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You don’t look it. I’ve never been with someone so old before.’ He took a couple of sideways skips, grinning in the moon’s half-light as he made a mock inspection of my face. ‘Straight up? Are you really thirty-six?’

‘No,’ I said, my feet sinking into the shingle as I hurried to catch up with him. I gave his waist a playful nip, relishing the feel of hard, youthful muscle. ‘I’m thirty. Still in my prime.’

‘Yeah?’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, thirty’s pretty cool. Makes you my oldest woman by four years. So who’s the oldest guy you’ve ever been with?’

‘Er, there was one bloke called Methuselah,’ I replied. ‘He was pretty old.’

‘Yeah?’ said Luke. ‘Weird name. How old was he then?’

‘Oh God,’ I said, and I pulled him to me. ‘You are fucking lovely.’

And he was: good-looking, empty-headed, complete slag.

If I was going to kick the Ilya habit then what nicer way was there of doing it? I figured Luke could be my
methadone substitute while I weaned myself off the hard stuff. But there was no way I would get addicted to him. He would be just sex, in the way me and Ilya were meant to be just sex.

Standing on the open beach, we exchanged a greedy, tongue-probing kiss. It was a warmish, cloud-streaky night, with a pretty decent-sized moon, and there were a few people dotted around: little ragged crowds, laughing and screeching; couples lying side by side, snogging and groping.

But it didn’t matter: they were either drugged up or drunk. I was pretty out of it, too – not enough to have regrets in the morning, but enough not to care if someone saw us.

I let my hands roam greedily over Luke’s body. I caressed the sweat-damp flesh under his big, droopy T-shirt, then pushed down past the waistband of his low-slung combats. I’d already worked out that there was no underwear beneath so, straight away, I got Luke’s naked, upright prick. Desire tore through me, urgent and demanding, and, as I curled my fingers round that warm, rigid shaft, Luke moaned into our kiss.

Back at the club, I’d been covertly massaging his groin under the table. The crotch of his trousers was baggy enough for me to mould the fabric to his prick, and I’d felt every twitch and stretch of his growing erection.

My ferocious flirting had unsettled him at first. As I’d chatted away, he kept on trying to adopt a vacant, disinterested look. He would scan the room, his head nodding with the music, as if my small talk was just too dull for him and that being felt up in a nightclub was a run-of-the-mill event.

But eventually he’d relaxed and got into the swing of things. He’d started rubbing my skirt along my thigh, telling me how much he fancied me, how my lips were really gorgeous, and lots of standard chat-up rubbish like that. But at least that rubbish had been better to listen to
than his earlier rubbish – an enthusiastic monologue on skateboarding and how he’d once gashed his knee really badly because pads are, like, so uncool.

He’d got slightly flustered when I suggested he go to the gents to buy a pack of three. ‘I can’t,’ he’d hissed, with a downward glance. ‘I can’t buy condoms when my dick’s like this.’

Sympathetic to his plight, I’d done the dirty deed myself.

‘Come on,’ I urged, breaking the embrace and grasping his hand. ‘Bit further along.’

We hurried and stumbled, searching for somewhere less exposed, away from people and the CCTV cameras on tall spiky poles.

My sex was pulsing with wet heat and Luke had a boner to die for. I was frantic to get those two things matched up. Our encounter had the inevitability and sweet simplicity of a primary-school sum. I had only a couple of niggling worries: one was that he might come too quickly, in legendary young-bloke style; the second was that he might, deep down, be a truly sensitive soul who was tiring of casual sex and hoping to strike up a more meaningful relationship.

I needn’t have worried on either score.

We hurried back up to the soft yellow lights of the walkway because one of the stone groynes that divide up the beach was about to halt our progress. Ahead, close to the paving, there was a kind of boat park – a long, rectangular patch of boats stacked this way and that, their masts angling high.

‘What about there?’ said Luke. ‘We could hide between some boats or, like, get in one.’

‘Nah, too close to civilisation,’ I countered.

To the right, above the arches and beyond the wide road, was the floodlit Grand Hotel, its white elegance and wrought-iron balconies gleaming in the night. It looked like a glossy cardboard cut-out of a splendid
wedding cake. Next door was the red-brick Metropole, stern, foreboding and shadowy. It looked like a Victorian prison.

The road stretched along the coast, a row of orange-dot street lamps that got tangled up and confused with the bulbs of the broken West Pier.

To the left was unadulterated night – well, almost unadulterated. The piers, one behind us, one in front, twinkled out, casting faint silver patches on to the water.

But apart from that, it was sea and sky – vast and exhilarating in a scary kind of way. The sea was inky and the cloudy moonlit sky was all marbled in blacks, greys and blueberry jams. You could see the line of the horizon. France was out there somewhere. There was a strange compulsion to all that darkness, a force of gravity that sucked you towards it like a black hole.

So we turned and headed seaward. The shingle shelved steeply at one point and the pale groyne rose up like a wall to our left, cutting off the nightlife we’d left behind and offering us something in the way of privacy.

‘Here,’ I said, sinking to the ground.

Further down the slope, frothy waves somersaulted on to the beach, crashing in and making gentle slushy noises as they dragged back their haul of tiny stones.

But we weren’t talking
From Here to Eternity.
The air was sharp with the tang of mulchy seaweed, and there was a cool, damp feel to the spot I’d chosen. The pebbles were huge – more like rocks – and they scraped harshly against each other as we banked down. It was damned uncomfortable.