The Nature of Cruelty (24 page)

I move my face into his neck. I love just resting my head in this exact spot. It’s like I’ve been unconsciously mapping him out these past few weeks. His body is a collection of destinations, each one with its own form of comfort or pleasure.

I feel his erection pressing against me through his trousers, and curiosity overtakes me. I touch my fingers to it softly. He groans, his breath heavy on my shoulder.

“I’m not exactly sure…what to do, uh…” I pause, not knowing how to continue.

“It’s okay. I know,” he says, stroking the small of my back.

“No, you don’t know. I…” He muffles me by covering my mouth with one hand.

His eyes meet mine when he says, “Lana, I know you’re still a virgin.”

“What?” The one word leaves my lips more air than sound.

“It came up earlier when Sasha and I were talking,” he explains. “Why else do you think I returned to the party looking delighted as fuck?”

At this I sit up straight, pulling out of his embrace. “Sasha told you?” I whisper.

“Yeah. She wanted me to understand that you’re not like the other women I’ve been with. I already knew that, though. Of course I didn’t know you were a virgin. I didn’t think you were an old hand, either, but I just…well, I don’t really know what I thought.”

“I can’t believe Sasha would tell you that,” I say, my voice quiet but full of hurt. I know it’s not the worst secret in the world to want to keep, but it was mine and she shouldn’t have told him. I never thought she’d do that. She’s always kept my secrets in the past.

“Hey, stop being so skittish,” says Robert, grasping my shoulders in an effort to calm me. “There’s no need to be embarrassed. I told you tonight that I’ve always wanted you, and being a virgin isn’t a negative thing. In fact,” he stops now, a devilish gleam in his eye, “it kind of makes me hard.”

“Well, I am embarrassed, Robert,” I protest, ignoring the last part of his sentence. I’m also upset about Sasha.

“Why don’t I tell you something embarrassing about me so we can be even?”

I glance at him sideways, considering it. “Okay, go ahead.”

He scratches his chin with a pondering expression on his face. “All right, how about this? I used to think about you when I masturbated as a teenager,
all
the time.”

My jaw drops open and my eyes go wide. “Robert! Did you have to tell me that? It embarrasses me more than it embarrasses you, and you fucking know it.”

He chuckles. “Okay, so maybe I do know it. It’s still worth telling you to see that pretty blush on your cheeks. Besides, I don’t understand how you can be embarrassed about anything in front of me, considering I had my tongue on your vagina five minutes ago.”

I cover my eyes with my hands. “You’re evil,” I mutter.

He crawls over my body and braces his hands on either side of my head. “That’s why you like me so much,” he states, before his voice dips even lower. “It’s also why you get so wet for me. I’ve wanted to taste you for a
really
long time.”

“I should go find Sasha and talk to her,” I say, and he seems annoyed that I’m not indulging his dirty talk.

“Wait until tomorrow. She’ll probably be too drunk for talking by now.”

He moves in and lazily kisses the hollow of my neck before giving me a soft nip with his teeth. I don’t expect to feel it all the way down to the base of my spine, but I do.

“She might not be drunk,” I say, shifting away and trying to spot where he threw my underwear. Eventually I find them under the bed. “I’ll go and check.”

Pulling on my knickers and my dress, I turn back to see Robert strewn across the bed, shirtless, looking like a lazy tiger. His eyes are hooded, and his lips are bent in a smirk.

“You don’t need to run away from me, you know,” he says, eyes perusing my body hungrily.

“I’m not running away. I’ll come right back if I can’t find her.”

Now his expression lights up with amusement. “Oh, should I wait here like an obedient little sex toy, then? I’ve got you sussed, Lana Sweeney. You’re a ‘love them and leave them’ kind of girl. I feel used.”

I pick up a pillow while slipping on my shoes and throw it at his head. “Shut up.”

“The abuse!” he calls jokingly after me as I leave the room.

I go downstairs, but I can’t see Sasha anywhere. Eventually I spot Alistair and ask him if he’s seen her. He tells me he thinks she went up to the second floor with a couple of people to play a game of poker. I nod and then traipse my way there, but it seems empty. Eventually I hear movement in a room at the end of the long hallway, so I go to check. Upon opening the door my eyes widen in shock, because I’m certainly not looking at a poker game.

It’s some sort of office room, and lots of folders have been shoved off the desk. The red-haired stripper from earlier is lying on the surface of the desk while Sasha braces herself on top of her in nothing but her underwear. She’s got her hand inside the stripper’s pants, and her mouth on her nipple. At the sound of my entrance, her head whips up in surprise, and the moment drags out as we just stare at each other like we’re strangers.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble, adrenaline rushing through my system, before slamming the door shut and rushing back down the stairs.

Interlude III
– Robert

March 2005.

I
haven’t spoken to Lana in six months, not since I got really drunk last Halloween and ended up kissing her when she’d been coming down the stairs. That kiss was too much. After all this time fantasising about doing it, it felt so good it was scary. Of course, straight after it happened I made it look like one big joke at her expense.

I shouldn’t have done that. I should have just let her know what it really was: me releasing all of the pent-up attraction I’ve been harbouring for her for years. That way I could give up the games and just, I don’t know, just love her like she deserves to be loved. The problem is, I’m not sure if I’m even capable of loving a girl without hurting her in the process. In the moment I like causing her pain, but then afterwards I just feel like a piece of crap. I’m like this addict who will do anything for a hit, but when the high wears off and sickness closes in, all I have left is pain and regret.

Now I’m at the tail end of a resolution I made not to interact with her at all if I couldn’t do it in a way that didn’t hurt her, because she doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of my fucked-up need to mess with her head.

Mum says I’ve gotten even broodier than ever this year, and that it’s some feat since I was already broody to begin with. She has no idea of the reason for my brooding.

It’s been a lesson in willpower. Inside I feel like I’m being torn in two. One half of me loves her too much to saddle her with a prick like me, and the other half doesn’t care — it just wants to be near her, to feed off her emotions.

I go about acting like I’m so far above her she’s not even worthy of my attention, when really my life orbits around her very existence. I listen to her voice echo through the walls from Sasha’s bedroom when she’s visiting our house, wait avidly for a glance of her walking down the corridor at school. It drives me insane to always be around her yet have to pretend like she doesn’t exist.

Sometimes I’ll catch her watching me, and she’ll have this look in her eyes, a look that says every time I ignore her, it shatters her inside. But maybe I’m just imagining it, because deep down I need her to be suffering just as much as I am. At least that would mean I’m not the only one who feels this agony.

I’ve been with so many girls in the past couple of months that I’ve lost count. Every time a new one comes along, I pray that she’ll make me forget my obsession with Lana, but it never happens. The emptiness of my sexual experiences only works to emphasise her absence.

When I glance down, I realise I’ve torn a chunk out of the frayed material on the armchair in my mum’s front living room. Sasha and Lana left for the beach two hours ago, and I’ve been sitting here all that time, trying to control myself and not rush down there to see her in the water.

I jolt upright when I hear their giddy laughter filter through the open window. Peering through the blinds, I see them walking back to the house, soaking wet. It looks like they jumped into the sea with their clothes still on. Just as they walk through the garden gate, I rush down the hall to my room, not wanting to be around Lana in all those wet clothes. It’ll be too hard not to throw her over my shoulder and carry her to my bed.

She’s only fifteen, so it’s fair enough for me to guess that she’s still a virgin. I feel like a dirtbag, especially considering the amount of time I spend thinking about changing that fact, about being her first. Then other thoughts enter my head,
like what if she’s not still a virgin?
There’s this short little nerdy boy in her class that she’s always hanging out with called Ronan. That I even know this loser’s name denotes the depth of my obsession. What if she let Ronan have sex with her during the summer holidays when I was away living with Dad?

I practically chip a tooth as my jaw clenches, just considering it.

Footsteps sound up the hall, and then I hear Sasha’s bedroom door fly open. I press my ear against the wall, listening to them.

“I can’t believe you threw me into the water like that, Sasha!” Lana exclaims. “It was freezing cold. Look at how my teeth chatter.”

“Oh, shut up, you had fun in the end. Besides, it’s not like I didn’t jump in with you,” says Sasha.

“Have you got anything I can change into?”

“Yeah, put these on. I’m going to go turn on the tumble dryer.”

The door opens but doesn’t shut again as Sasha makes her way to the kitchen. Great, now my willpower is really being tested, because I know that Lana’s getting undressed just beyond this wall and the door has been left open. Without fully thinking it through, I step out of my room as soundlessly as I can manage. The floorboards blessedly don’t creak as I move close to Sasha’s door and peer through the crack.

My heart is thundering. Lana’s standing by Sasha’s bed, pulling her soaked T-shirt up over her body. She’s only got a plain white cotton bra on underneath, but since it’s her wearing it, it’s now officially the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. She started developing boobs about a year ago. Needless to say, I was an avid follower of
that
progression. The bra is wet, too, and I suck in a breath as she unclips it and peels it off, throwing it on top of her discarded T-shirt.

My eyes soak up their fill of her pale naked skin, her pink nipples, as she towels herself dry. All too soon she’s pulling one of Sasha’s hoodies on over her head. It’s way too big for her, almost reaching to her knees, so when she takes off her trousers and pants I don’t get to see anything…else. She quickly gets into Sasha’s leggings, which again are way too big, and then she goes to sit by the dressing table to brush out her hair.

I watch for as long as I can before I hear Sasha coming back from the kitchen. Returning silently to my room, I feel like the luckiest bastard in the world that I got to see all that and wasn’t caught. The image of her topless is burned into my brain now.

I expect I’ll be wanking off to the memory of it for months.

The front door opens and shuts, signalling Mum’s return from her new part-time job at the post office in the next village over.

“Sasha! Robert!” she calls. “I brought dinner home. Come on and help me dish it up.”

“Lana’s here, Mum,” Sasha calls back. “Can she have some, too?”

“Of course, there’s more than enough,” says Mum, and then I hear Lana and Sasha making their way down to the kitchen.

Wonderful. Now I’m going to have to eat with Lana and do my whole ignoring act again. I’m not sure if I can keep it up after what I just saw. It takes me a few minutes just to work up the nerve to leave my bedroom because I keep thinking about locking her in my room and stripping her naked so that I can see her topless again.

The three of them are sitting at the kitchen table, eating the take-home lasagna they sell at the delicatessen next to Mum’s post office. We have it at least once a week, accompanied by Mum’s homemade coleslaw. I didn’t think I’d have an appetite, given Lana’s presence, but strangely I find I’m starving.

There are only four chairs at the table, so I can either take my plate back to my room or sit between Mum and Lana. I go for the former option, picking up the food and turning to leave. Unfortunately, I don’t get very far.

“Oh, no, you don’t, mister. Sit down at the table and eat with your family. I’ve barely gotten to see you at all since I started this new job.”

I sigh and sink down into the seat, practically feeling the warmth from Lana’s body next to me and wanting to soak up every scrap of it. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, and when I open them I find Mum staring at me with that irritating motherly concern on her face.

“What’s wrong? Are you sick? Have you got another one of those headaches?” she asks softly, reaching out to feel my forehead. I pull away from her touch because she makes me feel like a little kid when she does stuff like that, and I don’t want Lana to see me in that way.

Every couple of weeks I get these mind-numbing migraines. Apparently I inherited them from Dad. They’re fucking awful and make me even crankier than normal.

“No. No migraines, Mum. I’m fine, just hungry.”

“Well, eat up, then,” she says, looking relieved.

I feel Lana glancing at me at the mention of the migraines, and I can’t help it, I look at her quickly out of the side of my eye. She’s biting on her lip, and her expression seems sympathetic. I slide my eyes away from her and shove a forkful of lasagna into my mouth, chewing hard.

Mum seems intent on making me the focus of the conversation, as she asks, “How’s that English essay coming along, Rob?”

God, not this again. “It’s not. I’ve decided to leave it unfinished as a form of protest.”

“Robert,” says Mum, serious now. “Protests aren’t an option. You know your teacher hasn’t been happy with your progress. He can have you expelled if you continue to act out.”