The Things That Make Me Give In (17 page)

Through the nothing light, she grins at me. She grins even wider when he tells her to go on and get down to her knees.

For a long time I just watch, from somewhere outside myself. The top of her head isn’t so different from mine – the same reddish-brown hair, the same skinny shoulders in a too-thin T-shirt. But she’s thinner than me and not as good at taking all of him into her mouth – she really needs some instruction. Her technique is sloppy and though it’s arousing to watch – that little mouth stuffed full of cock, too much spit everywhere making everything shiny – he should really tell her. He should guide her.

But he doesn’t, so I do. I put my hand on the top of her head, into the hair that looks like mine. I push her forward just a little bit, and then back again, jumping a little when she groans. I think about how much
I
like it, to have someone’s hand in my hair while I suck their cock.

It’s not so hard to do.

‘You like that?’ I ask him, but his eyes are closed and his head is back. He’s jerking his hips forward and so I force her to work her mouth in the same rhythm. I tell her to suck harder when he does not, and to use her tongue when he keeps quiet.

It’s easy, being in charge. But I still wait for him to order me, before I get to my knees. He orders me to kiss her, and I obey that, too. We kiss around the straining stem of his prick, moaning like proper little porn stars, giggling when he calls us good girls.

Or at least Shona giggles. I just keep on sucking and licking, exploring everything I can find with my tongue – and that includes her perky tits. They just look good enough to eat and
I have to, though it pays off when he grunts at me to continue. ‘Yeah,’ he tells me. ‘Suck her nipples.’

While she squeals and gasps.

He takes himself in his hand as we get busy ignoring him – soon she’s fondling my breasts and we’re kissing for real – but he doesn’t jerk off for long. He’s got better things in mind, it seems, than what I’m imagining – his come striping us as we kneel before him, kissing and groping each other. Instead he orders us both to get up and bend over.

The idea of a spanking simmers through me, but I guess my guy is all grown up because again he thinks totally for himself. He lifts our skirts when we’re happily settled in position and tugs Shona’s panties down as she tells him just how horny she is.

Strangely, though, I don’t feel as hot. I don’t think I do. I want him inside me again, but the thing is – I think I’m going to have to wait for it. He’s definitely going to fuck squirming, squealing Shona first.

But he surprises me. He’s just full of them, today. He yanks down my panties and pushes into me quickly, though through the curtain of my hair I see him fondling her at the same time. He has his fingers in her pussy – something she isn’t complaining about. She just keeps babbling that this is so hot, this is so hot, as he holds me one-handed by my hip and fucks me hard.

‘Kiss her,’ he orders me roughly, and, though his thrusts are making me stumble and I’m hobbled by my panties, I grab her by the back of her neck. I thrust my tongue into her slack mouth.

She’s practically mindless by now, fucking back on his fingers like he’ll disappear if she doesn’t hurry. I know how she feels. Sometimes I think he’ll one day just melt away, made too mad by all this fucking weirdness and my total badness and everything else. He should probably know by now that I’ll never screw him over.

If I did, everyone would know just how bad I am. That, and
he’d be gone. He’d be the real kind of mad, that there’s no comeback from.

‘Oh, yeah, honey, I’m gonna come,’ he says.

Shona whines that he hasn’t fucked her, but he doesn’t seem to care. He just bucks against me really hard, filling me up and setting me off.

I think of the word
honey
as I shake and shudder, wishing that Shona’s mouth was his.

We don’t see each other for a while after that. I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised that I don’t see much of Shona, either, though I find out pretty quick that she keeps making plays for him. Real plays, away from me and silly bribing games. Though I don’t know how silly they were – I can’t think of them without flashing hot. Without kneeling on the floor in my house, and picturing him over me.

Though I don’t tell him that when I see him next. He picks me up as I’m walking home from the Gas and Guzzle. He tells me that I should really be wearing something more on my legs, when it’s so cold out.

It feels odd to be sitting in the front of the car.

‘You’re an idiot,’ I say, though I don’t know if I’m saying it in response to his suggestion. My legs do feel pretty cold, after all. I should probably wear jeans more often, even if it is cool having his eyes on my bare skin.

‘Yeah, I figured you thought that,’ he replies. Stupid stupid Sheriff Brook.

‘So maybe you should do something about it. Maybe you shouldn’t be such a fucking goodie-two-shoes know-it-all.’

‘You think I’m a know-it-all?’

He chuffs. Shakes his head. Yeah, I think he’s a goddamned know-it-all.

‘I think you’re a pathetic walkover.’

I can see him clenching the muscles in his jaw. He slaps the wheel, hard.

‘Is that right? And I guess I shouldn’t be, huh? I guess you know exactly how I should be – maybe you’re the know-it-all, what do you say to that?’

He isn’t looking at me, but I look at him. I spit words at him. ‘You should be more like Wade was. That’s how you should be.’

I’m practically snarling, as he pulls up in front of his house. Not my house – his. He turns the engine off and suddenly I don’t want to look at him any more. Now he’s looking at me, and I’m staring straight ahead into the darkness.

‘You want me to be like Sheriff Wade? That’s what you want?’

I don’t say anything, though. So he just keeps on staring at me, way angrier than he has ever been. He seems like a different person suddenly, so different that I want to reach over and put some mirrored sunglasses on him.

‘OK then, Starla. I’ll be Sheriff Wade. I’ll be a real fucking tough guy with you, and tell you what to do. How about that?’

I close my eyes. Finally. Finally. I close my eyes and sit very still, so that I can hear every little piece of what he’s going to say.

‘Go in the house. Go in the house and sit at the table. Got that? Go in there and sit at the table and, when I come in, you’re going to eat the dinner I make you. And if you don’t . . . if you don’t, Starla, I think I might have to get real angry.’

‘How angry?’ I ask, but the words are faint, very faint.

‘So angry that I don’t know what I might do. I might have to tie you to the bed, and gag your dirty mouth, and leave you there until you’re about ready to die from wanting it so bad. Because that’s what you are, right? A horny slut who wants it so bad.’

‘I guess so.’

‘I guess so what?’

‘I guess so,
sir
.’

‘Now go on in there.’

I don’t want to. I don’t want to be inside his nice house with all his furniture that probably smells good and polished and clean. Like him. Likely he’s going to make me a really
wholesome dinner, because that’s how he is. Wholesome. He’s so wholesome that he makes me sick.

But I guess this is only fair, after all. I’ve made him do bad things. Now he’s going to make me do good. It’s a fair trade-off. Maybe after dinner we can swap again. Maybe one isn’t good and the other bad, because he seems to like both and he’s a real goodie-two-shoes. He’s a real pill, a pain in the ass, a buzz-kill.

Why don’t I feel like my buzz has been killed? Instead, I get out of the car and walk into the house. And when I can’t force myself to sit at the table, he cracks his hand against my ass. And when I can’t eat his stupid dinner, he cracks his hand against my ass. And when I can’t fill out my college application forms – oh, Jesus, I get it then.

I get it all the time.

And when he’s bogged down with paperwork and doesn’t want to push for those reforms or that disciplinary, or maybe just because, I say to him, ‘If you let me off, I’ll do whatever you want, Sheriff. I can be and do anything, anything at all. Just say the word, and I’ll be real good to you, I promise. I’ll be good.’

THEY TALK ABOUT
everything. She knows they do. She knows whether he’d pick green, or maybe blue. She knows how his day has been. What he’s about to eat for dinner and all the bits in between.

They are in each other’s life completely. There isn’t anything they can’t talk about – and maybe that’s because they’re the best of friends.

Or maybe it’s because most of this is done over the phone.

There are no rolled eyes over the phone. No awkward touches that shouldn’t have been, no need to hug or shake hands or any of that nonsense. She likes the strange tunnel of mere noise, almost as though he’s pouring words into her, stripped of everything that could make them uncomfortable or painful.

She can make up her own version of him. If he doesn’t talk for a moment, he hasn’t lost interest. He’s just dropped the phone, or taken a sip of tea, or turned his bath on. There’s no glancing at some other person, bored. Everything is concentrated, tunnelled, focused on each other.

And then, of course, there is his voice. That almost flat tone, in which every slight emphasis sounds electric. That dark metallic taste, as though he’s secretly an evil robot. He’s HAL, telling her that he doesn’t want to do this, but it’s for her own good.

She has no idea what might be for her own good, but the phone calls do help. They help with seemingly inconsequential things, like not letting your social skills atrophy.

That’s what he says to her as they make potted-beef sandwiches in tandem, thirty miles apart. She can’t remember the last time they made potted-beef sandwiches while not apart. Or any kind of sandwiches, really.

That’s what she says to him, as they watch old episodes of
Poirot
together and try to guess who did it first. While also thirty miles apart.

And then when it’s finished, they listen to each other getting into bed, and sighing contentedly, or at least in a way that seems contented. At which point Roy will say to Olive, ‘Good night, Ol.’ And Ol will say to Roy, ‘Good night, Roy.’

And both of them will think, just before they go to sleep: thirty miles isn’t really that far.

But thirty miles
is
far. It’s so far that Olive has forgotten what Roy looks like.

Of course, she remembers that he has a very expressive face – sort of like a silent-movie star – but maybe that’s because she’s recently watched a lot of silent movies. Undoubtedly he will be picturing a lot of naked film stars instead of her, because he’s been watching a lot of faintly rude movies.

It’s research for a movie sex-scene website he’s building for someone. Not because he’s unbearably horny, or anything. She’s not about to read anything into that slight hitch in his voice when he describes sex scene three in that movie about lots of people artfully fucking.

They both have busy lives, doing busy jobs that keep them very busy. Busy, and at home. Thirty miles apart.

Roy designs websites. Olive writes articles on knitting and other such nonsense. Knitting and websites keep people very busy, or so she’s heard. None of this has anything to do with any issues she or anyone else might have.

Just because Roy has barely taken his hands out of his pockets in public for ten years doesn’t mean he has problems.
As he tells her, one evening. And lots of people wear gloves constantly. Miss Marple, for example.

And it isn’t so strange that she hasn’t made eye contact with a man for almost the same amount of time as he’s gone without touching skin to skin. She has reasons, she tells him. They go way, way back to when seemingly every man in college couldn’t stop staring at her slightly-smaller-than-the-other-one eye. And her huge breasts.

He tells her that one of her eyes is not slightly smaller than the other. But he always tells her things like that. He’s her warmth, her reassurance. He’s very convincing, even though he hasn’t seen her in so long that she’s sure he must have forgotten what she looks like.

But that’s OK, because she’s forgotten his face, too. They’re both shrouded in the same mystery, even as they share every living thing about themselves. He asks her to let him hear the sound of her shaver drawing its way up her slippery-with-foam legs. She listens to him wash between his toes.

It’s a natural progression, what they come to. It is. But even so it startles her enough to make her almost knock her laptop off the bed.

She feels that they are honest in all areas of their lives, so it’s important to be just as honest in this one. Why should she lie about what she’s recently been writing for
Scandalous
magazine? It isn’t any different from the article she read him on good sweater-knitting practice.

Both are about processes. It’s just that one is more about bodily function-y processes. The good kind. Not the going-to-the-toilet kind.

But after she’s read him the first fake reader’s-wives-type tale, he is very quiet. More quiet than he was for ‘Knitting Through The Ages’ and ‘Knitting: It’s Not Just For Grannies’. She actually agonises for a moment. The tunnel is about to be closed. No one wants to know that
Scandalous
magazine
doesn’t print true-life tales of debauchery – that in fact they’re made up by hopeless shut-ins with one eye slightly smaller than the other.

And their friendship is built on potted beef, knitting,
Poirot
. Elderly things. Not sex.

Though it’s unfair of him to assume the elderly never have sex, she feels.

But then he says, ‘Wow.’ She can tell he means the ‘wow’, too, because half the word seems to disappear into a crackle of near-sound. W–w. And then he tells her that he’s seen a whole other side of her. A good side. A fascinating side! Why, she’s practically a pentagon of sides. An octagon.

This is very much like that time she confessed that she preferred sardine spread to potted beef.

When he tells her good night at the end of that day’s phone call, she suspects that his voice sounds warmer than usual. They’ve opened up whole new sides. The tunnel is still thirty miles long, but now it’s at least ten miles wider.