The Things That Make Me Give In (11 page)

‘I need
you
, Colin. I need you. Just you, as ridiculous as you are. I’m happy to have your filthy, dirty, disgusting ridiculousness. I’m lucky to have it, and I don’t want to make any one come around so that I can’t have it any more.’

He bursts out laughing. Of course he does. That’s who he is. But he’s also someone who kisses me suddenly, exuberantly, before standing so that he can jump up and down on the bed.

I have no idea what kind of picture anyone could take of that: two naked people, one jumping and scampering like an imp, the other not covering her bubbling laughter.

I don’t think my bland and boring husband is going to come up and kill us. But it would be worth it, for pictures that could never be hung over the mantel.

HE’S THE MOST
adorable little creature, really. That streak of clumsy shyness just begs her to unravel him, slow inch by slow inch. His eyes, on the other hand, don’t need unravelling. They’re completely naked already.

He watches her from across the dinner table, as wary as a faun without the youth. Even when he’s busy passing the bread to her dad, or making small talk with her mum about the weather and the fishing, his eyes stay on her. He’s just waiting for her to do something awful.

She wants to put her tongue in that little barely there dimple in his chin, and he knows it.

Sometimes that openness leaves his eyes, and instead they flash angry warnings at her. Warnings such as: don’t you
dare
move your foot any higher. But as her dad grumbles good-naturedly about the fish Norman caught, and the fish he himself didn’t, she gets her toes past his knee. The table’s very narrow. It doesn’t take even a little sinking down in her chair to do it.

Another inch or so and she’ll be at that very interesting bulge in his very boring chinos.

See, that’s the thing about Norm. He’s so down-to-earth and by-the-numbers. He’s an accountant. He has a very nice, but very dreary sort of Yorkshire accent. He likes simple beer and simple food and simple programmes on the telly. His favourite, she knows, is
Countdown
.

But those swimming trunks he wore the first day they got to this lovely cottage by the lake were positively obscene. Even
handsome Mark from marketing wore great big shorts when the team all went swimming together. Even her old boyfriend Greg didn’t like to wear less than boxers in public.

But not boring old Norman, her dad’s best friend. He wore teeny tiny blue things, almost as though he wanted to show off his interesting bulge. If she hadn’t known how boring and timid he was, she would have thought it a dare. A boast: yeah, I look slight and insignificant, but not in the underpants department.

But it can’t have been a boast or a dare, because he seems terrified by any overture she makes. By this point she would have felt decidedly unattractive and spurned, if it were not for the occasional biting of his lip, that noise he makes in the back of his throat, that desperate look in his big puppy-dog eyes.

That open-mouthed stare he gave her when she came in from the rain, soaked through! Of course it had been entirely unintentional. She’d liked the look of him in those blue trunks, but hadn’t really thought of doing anything about it. Doing is for brave and naughty people, not for girls who still holiday with their parents at the age of twenty-five.

But she had come in wet from the rain, and his eyes had devoured her, all pleased and hungry and nervous at the same time. It was only when she went upstairs that she had realised how see-through her peasant blouse had become.

It was like being touched by a live wire. It shocked her, and seemed to fill her up with electricity. A man had looked at her with real desire. A handsome man, too. Her delight at teasing him peaks when she thinks about how quirkily handsome he is, and how little he seems to know it.

When he smiles, his whole fairly sombre face becomes cheeky and scampish. There is something moody and masculine in his features, like a boxer who was just too slight to make it. He makes great stubble, and sometimes his mouth seems to be almost pouting beneath the weight of that sombre sullenness.

She loves that he strictly side-parts his dark hair. She wants to muss it up with wandering hands. Her hands have become very daring of late, and like to wander all over until he blushes and blusters.

He’s blushing now, as her toes climb higher.

He’s quite a bit younger than her dad, so there’s not really anything wrong with it. It’s not like some old man leching over someone’s sweet young daughter. And yet his reaction makes her feel that it’s almost like that. Like she’s doing something very wicked indeed.

Like he’s doing something wicked, even though he’s not doing anything at all.

He just sits there, while she rubs her toes over the growing bulge in his trousers. Her dad wants to talk about accounting stuff with him, but he seems less and less able to concentrate on things like words. His eyelids shutter delightfully when she licks melted butter from her knife, using all the slow, deliberate intent of someone with a soft, warm body beneath their tongue.

Soon, she thinks. Soon I’ll take him.

As though he’s something to be taken, to be possessed, a possession that belongs to her, bright and dark at the same time, in the middle of these boring wilderness holidays.

She doesn’t honestly think it will go beyond teasing. He won’t do anything, she knows, and she can’t see herself taking it any further. But then she goes out to the pub with her parents, and they leave Norm behind. He wants to stay at the cottage and read a book and likely be free of her tormenting him.

But she stops her dad halfway down the half-made road to civilisation, and feigns sickness, and gets to walk back to the cottage while they drive off to get stewed.

When she gets back, Norm is standing in the middle of the kitchen in just his T-shirt and boxers, with his face trapped inside his jumper. She knows he is trapped, because he is
blindly searching for something in one of the kitchen drawers. Only his nose and mouth are visible, below the makeshift jumper mask.

‘Are you going out to fight crime?’ she says, and he jerks as though stung.

‘Lita,’ he says, and then very quickly after it: ‘Where’s your dad?’

She lets the kitchen door close, and he jerks to hear that, too.

‘They’ve gone on to the pub. I wasn’t feeling well.’

He pauses. She can see he’s now got a pair of scissors in his hands.

‘Are you still not feeling well?’ he asks.

‘No. I feel much better now,’ she replies.

He visibly swallows, but tries to stay light-hearted.

‘I’ve gotten stuck inside my jumper,’ he says, half-laughing. ‘The little hooks are caught in my hair.’

She remembers what the little hooks look like. A row of detail on a fisherman’s jumper. The kind of thing only a non-fisherman would wear.

She giggles, and he purses his lips. The goofy little half-laugh cannot be maintained.

‘Do you want me to cut you free?’ she asks, and he nods, and then holds out the scissors.

She doesn’t make a move, however. She waits, and waits, and watches his yummy mouth. After he clearly feels he’s been waiting a long time, he takes a step forward. Hands out in front of him, like a zombie or a mummy.

‘Well?’ he says. ‘Are you planning on cutting me free or not?’

When she doesn’t answer, he takes another step forward. Feels the air in front of him for signs of her. His lips part, then purse together again.

‘Lita?’

‘Marco,’ she says, and he tuts at her.

‘Now come on. Don’t play silly buggers.’

‘Marco,’ she says, and dips out of the way to avoid his reaching hands.

‘Lita, I can’t see a bloody thing. At least cut me out of this if you want us to play silly games.’

‘You’re supposed to say Polo.’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

‘Don’t be a sulk, Norm. If you catch me, I’ll set you free.’

His mouth quirks in what might be the beginnings of a smile, but he gives no more than that. Well, no more than continuing to sort of play, fingertips sifting through the air to find her. While he sifts, she pulls her T-shirt over her head. When he almost bumps into a chair, she giggles and unhooks her bra.

She dodges again, and this time he turns deceptively quickly, almost catching her arm.

‘Nearly had you then,’ he says, and now he is smiling. She supposes even accountants occasionally like to play a bit of a game.

‘I better not say anything else then, had I?’ she says, and he turns quickly, this time half-laughing again when he snags her wrist.

‘Gotcha!’

He seems genuinely jubilant, she thinks, or at least he enthusiastically searches her empty left hand for the scissors and then goes for the right, only to brush her bare body with the back of his arm. Immediately he stops dead as though struck, and tries to jerk away from her while still holding on to her right wrist. The smile sags out of his face.

‘Where are your –’ he starts to say, sounding cross and bothered, but then he puts out a hand tentatively. She watches him judge the distance and the places where things might be, and her body tightens with anticipation.

Of course she knows he’s not going to outright fondle her, but to see his hand reach out like that and stir the air in front of her breasts as though about to cup them – it thrills through her. Before his hand judges the spaces and places correctly, and finds her shoulder.

She knows what he’s searching for: her T-shirt. He rubs the bare skin as though willing it to be there, and then his mouth tightens.

‘Are you completely naked, Lita?’

He sounds stern, she thinks. He’s about to tell her off while blindfolded by a jumper.

‘Are you imagining that I am?’ she asks, but he just tuts again at that.

‘Give over,’ he says. ‘Cut me out of this.’

‘I will if you give me a kiss.’

‘Look, I told you. Don’t play silly buggers. This has all gone far enough. If your dad sees you like this and me like this he’ll chop my knackers off. He thinks you’re still a virgin.’

‘I am.’

‘You little liar.’ He pauses. ‘If you are you’re some strange sort of virgin.’

‘Oooh, you’re cruel, Norm.’

He blunders a little, then.

‘Oh – well – I didn’t mean anything by it, Lita. It’s all right for you to not be a virgin. I mean, you’re old enough and pretty and sexy and what not, I –’

She cuts him short with a kiss. It’s too unbearable to resist with all that adorable talking he’s doing. She sinks into kissing him like falling into syrup, feeling it all warm and like a relief to her aching body. His mouth is soft and warm, and gives beneath hers with as much acquiescence as she could wish for. His hand tightens around her wrist, but the kiss itself is lazy and without urgency.

Outside, it has begun to rain. She only notices because it is suddenly so quiet in the room, so still. They’re barely moving, really.

She pulls away slowly, and just looks at his kiss-stung lips for a moment before reaching for the jumper. He stops her, and puts his hands over hers.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No, leave it.’

She lets her fingers stroke over his cheekbones, presses her thumbs against the barely there corners of his mouth. The scissors lie flat against his left temple.

‘Do you want to pretend I’m someone else?’ she says, and realises that she can still hear the rain because they’re whispering.

‘I – no. No, Christ, no. Help me out of it, then.’

He moves her hand with his, through the ruffly hair at the nape of his neck and to where the hooks are caught. It had seemed like a silly game before, a bit of fun, but now she’s not sure. She’s sure enough, however, that finding somewhere to cut with scissors should not make little shivers of excitement run up her spine and down again, right down between her legs where everything is blooming and growing warm.

She tries to imagine what those naked eyes of his are going to say when she finally gets him free, and her sex pulses in that low-down good way to think of it. It’s not just because he’s her dad’s friend. It’s him. It’s him who makes everything wicked.

She snips where he shows her, and then she helps him push the jumper off. He smoothes his hair, and brushes the trimmed strands from his shoulder. His eyes say:
Please God, let her go on then. Go on, then.
They are unable to resist flicking down to her bare breasts.

‘Feel for my T-shirt again,’ she says, and he smiles. It’s still not quite all the way, but it counts.

‘What?’ he says, and she puts his hands on her bare shoulders.

His smile softens into something lovely.

‘Doesn’t look like you’re wearing one.’

‘What else am I not wearing?’

‘Things that you bloody well should be.’

‘You’re so disapproving. Are you going to disapprove while you’re shagging me?’

His eyebrows shoot right up into his feathery slanting fringe. The side parting has long since fallen down.

‘I’ll not be shagging you,’ he says, but that cheeky grin he seems to have descended into says otherwise. ‘No bloody way, mate. Your dad’ll have my guts for garters.’

‘Your words say no but your lips say yes.’

‘That’s the defence given by date rapists, I think you’ll find.’

‘All right. Your words say no but your penis says yes.’

He laughs with her, then.

‘I don’t know any date rapists that have tried that one.’

She kisses him on the word
one,
so that it comes out
um
.

They’re still snogging when the car of disappointment pulls up outside.

She’s sure that he tries to be good. He’s definitely trying. It’s just that he isn’t succeeding.

It’s obvious that he only goes outside for a smoke at 2 a.m. because he’s waiting for her to come out with him. She lies in bed, wide awake, and waits for the front door to open. Her parents never hear it, because their bedroom is in the back. Of course, they’d hear Norm doing naked things to her in her room, so he has to go outside.

And wait for her to come.

The first time she did, of course he had feigned innocence. No, I didn’t want you to come out here. We were almost caught last time, this is insane. Et cetera.