The Nature of Cruelty (26 page)

I wrap myself up in a towel robe and get into bed with my hair still wet, switching off the light. Ten minutes later the front door opens and shuts, and before I know it Sasha’s entering my room and turning the light back on. She looks exhausted and a little bit drunk as I sit up in the bed. We just stare at each other for a moment, neither of us knowing what to say.

Sasha is the one who breaks the silence first. “I looked through Alistair’s whole house for you. Your phone was going straight to voicemail. Eventually I figured you’d gone home.”

“Yeah, I…” My voice cracks. “I’m an idiot for running off. I’m so sorry for walking in on you like that.”

She pulls the scrap of an old receipt from her pocket and begins rolling it between her fingers. “I suppose I have some explaining to do,” she says quietly, not meeting my eyes.

I hate that she feels the need to explain herself. I can practically see the shame radiating off her, and she has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. “You don’t have to,” I tell her gently. “It’s nobody’s business but yours. That being said, I want to know you, Sasha. You’re my best friend.”

She laughs joylessly, shaking her head and looking up to the ceiling. “You know, there were so many times when it was on the tip of my tongue to tell you, but then I’d always chicken out.”

“Well, that’s understandable. We all get scared sometimes. Look, stop standing all the way over there. Come and sit beside me,” I say.

She seems wary, but eventually she slips off her shoes and walks over to the bed, sitting down on the side I never sleep on. I expect her to start talking again, but she doesn’t, so I take it upon myself to keep the conversation going.

“So why did you chicken out? You know I wouldn’t see you any differently just because you’re gay.”

She lets her head fall into her hands. “Ah! I can’t even hear you say it. It feels too weird,” she mutters.

“Now you’re being ridiculous. It’s not weird.”

She turns and gives me a look. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act all modern and non-judgemental.”

I laugh gently. “But I am modern and non-judgemental.”

“You know what I mean, Lana. It’s patronising.”

“Okay, well, that wasn’t my intention. So is it because of your dad that you never told anyone? Because you think he’d, like, disown you or something?”

She rubs at her arm. “Ugh, this dress is so uncomfortable. I think I’ll go get changed.” She makes a move to stand up, but I grab her arm and pull her back down.

“No, you don’t, Sash. We’re talking this out here and now.”

She looks at me pleadingly. “Lana…”

“Sasha, please, I feel like you don’t trust me.”

A sigh escapes her as she settles back into the pillows, staring at the ceiling again. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, and yes, a lot of my issues do spring from Dad, but there are other reasons I kept it from you.”

I lean forward. “Such as?”

Her dark eyes flick to me, and suddenly her expression has turned intense. “Such as the fact that I had a gigantic crush on you when we were younger,” she states, almost aggressively.

I stare at her with my jaw hanging open. That was the last thing I ever expected to hear from her.

“Oh, God,” she groans, and tugs at her hair. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I blink several times, trying to make my brain work past the shock. “You…you had a crush…on me?” My voice shoots up a note at the end of the question.

“Yes. I’ve been over it for years, just so you know.” She arches her brow at me wryly. “But when I did like you that way, I was so afraid of telling you for fear I’d scare you off and then you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. Besides, I could tell you weren’t into girls. You didn’t look at them like I looked at them, and then you had that little boyfriend of yours – Ronan.”

I let out a short burst of laughter. “Ronan was not my boyfriend!”

She gives me a tiny grin, and it’s the first sign of humour I’ve seen on her face since we began this conversation. “Maybe not, but you seemed to like him, so I knew you didn’t bat for my team, as they say.”

I smile at her, and it feels like we’re on our way back to being comfortable with one another. “I can’t believe you had a crush on me. I was so skinny and sickly. You have atrocious taste in women, Sash,” I tease her.

She glances at me sideways. “It was the eyes and the hair — oh, and the pale skin. I like girls with pale skin.” It seems like she finds it a chore to tell me this, but she’s trying her hardest to do it, to not be ashamed.

I do my best to rein in my exuberance at the fact that she’s finally being completely open with me. “Mm-hmm. That stripper girl back at Alistair’s was pretty pale. You didn’t run off on her just because I interrupted, did you?”

“She’s not a stripper, she’s a burlesque dancer. And yeah, I did run off. I was only with her because I was drunk anyway.”

“Oh. So what about all the man dates you’ve been on? Did you think they’d straighten you out or something?”

“Lana! Jesus. No. I don’t know what I thought. I guess I was just making an effort to be normal.”

“You are normal, you idiot. You don’t need to make an effort for that.”

She moves closer and puts her arm around me, squeezing tight. When I look at her, there’s a single tear streaming down her face. “Don’t cry, Sash. You’ll start me off, too.”

She wipes at the tear. “It’s just, you have no idea what it means to me to hear you say that. To actually be discussing this with you after all these years. It’s like a brick had been tied to my chest, and now it’s lifted.”

I hug her back, and now I am crying, too, my eyes all watery. “I hate your dad,” I whisper past the tears.

“Don’t hate him,” she replies, her voice cracking. “I should be stronger. I shouldn’t care what he thinks.”

“No, he shouldn’t think the way he does. He should accept you no matter what.”

She pulls out of the hug now, noticing that my robe has fallen open slightly. She fixes it for me with a tiny smile. For a second I feel weird, but then I remember that she’s seen me naked a million times before, has slept in the same bed as me countless nights. The moment drags out, but I don’t say anything.

“Do you know what the sick thing is?” she asks after a minute, coughing.

“What?”

“My dad definitely knows I’m gay. I mean, he wouldn’t say the things he says to me if he didn’t. He’s always making it clear he wouldn’t approve. It’s obvious he does it to keep me in the closet, keep me in fear of coming out. That way he’ll never have to deal with it, and he can keep on pretending that he has a perfect straight little daughter.”

“Well, then, maybe you should show him that you’re not going to hide anymore and tell him to his face.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she says, her voice sad. “Robert knows, too. He found out years ago and tried to get me to come out. I told him he was imagining it and that I wasn’t gay.” She emits a joyless laugh. “I know he didn’t believe the lie, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say to him.”

I nod, not informing her how Robert told me all about walking in on her kissing a girl when they were teenagers. Now that she’s mentioned her brother, I suddenly remember that I left him waiting for me at Alistair’s. Well, I’m sure he’s figured out by now that I’m not coming back. Shit, I hope he doesn’t get angry about me leaving him in the lurch. And now I remember why I’d been searching for Sasha at the party in the first place.

“Speaking of Robert,” I begin hesitantly. “I know you told him about me, uh, being a virgin.” I try to keep my voice moderate, considering we’re having a heart-to-heart about something much more important than Sasha informing her brother of my virginity. But I still want to get this out there.

Sasha drags her fingers through her hair. “Ah, shit. Yeah, I did that. I’m sorry. I just needed him to know you weren’t someone he could fool around with and then dump. Anyway, it was good for us to talk, because now I know that Robert is fucking unquestionably in love with you.” She gives me an arch look. “Not sure if I’d consider that something to celebrate, though.”

I gasp. “He said that?”

“No, of course he didn’t say it. Robert’s a puzzle, not an open book. It’d take more than a stiff warning from me to pry a confession like that out of him. But I can tell he does. I know my brother better than he thinks I do, and deep down he’s not the careless prick he likes to show the world.”

“Yeah, I’m coming to learn that.” All of a sudden I’m not upset about her telling him anymore. Now my head is all aflutter with the idea of him loving me.

Loving.

Me.

Robert. The guy I always considered not to possess a heart at all, nor the capability to actually feel anything other than hate.

Sasha turns to me with a humorous expression. “So, the notorious Robert Phillips, crusher of women’s hearts everywhere, is in love with
you
, Lana Sweeney. My sincerest commiserations.”

I shove her in the shoulder, my lips curling into a grin. “Shut up.” I breathe out long and deep then. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be the train wreck you’d expect. Maybe we could be, I don’t know, happy together.”

“I seriously fucking hope so,” says Sasha, with an odd empathetic look in her eye, like she’s already feeling for my future pain.

“Stop staring at me like that,” I exclaim.

“Like what?”

“Like you already feel sorry for whatever monumental way Robert’s going to destroy me.”

“Okay, sorry, I’ll stop.”

“Sasha! That’s not making me feel any better.”

“Hey, calm down. I promise to interfere and drag you away from him before that ever happens. But just so you know, most people are made of good and bad. And most people are capable of keeping the bad much smaller than the good, but Robert, well, he has a hard time doing that.”

“I want to help him do it,” I confess.

“And maybe you’ll succeed,” she says, squeezing me tightly around the shoulders.

I need to change the subject, because I can’t think about Robert anymore tonight. I have so many images of him with his mouth between my legs swirling in my mind that I feel like I might pass out if I let a single other thought of him play through my brain.

“Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. There’s a whole section of your life I don’t know about, and I want you to tell me everything. Start from the very beginning and leave nothing out.”

Sasha rolls her eyes but seems pleased in a small way. “Well,” she begins tentatively, “the first time I figured out I liked girls was during a P.E. lesson when I was eleven years old…”

We spend the next several hours talking about her hidden life, how she had to live a lie for so long. The bits where I come into the picture make me feel slightly uneasy, but at the same time flattered. The way Sasha describes me as a teenager is the complete opposite of how I imagined myself. She saw me as this pure, beautiful, fragile girl, when at the time I’d felt like a walking mistake marring the face of the planet.

Then she tells me about how she’d try to be with boys and that kissing them felt so wrong it would make her stomach twist. That she lost her virginity to a boy here in London when she was sixteen, and not only did she feel the customary pain of losing it, but she also felt, and I quote, like her vagina was constipated. I screw my face at her use of words, and she bursts out laughing. Then she tells me about how she finally built up the courage to kiss a girl during a holiday in Spain, and how it felt like she was a jigsaw puzzle that someone had finally found the last piece to.

We spend a lot of time crying and hugging one another, and then Sasha leaves to go to her own room, too exhausted to speak any longer. I’m so tired that I fall asleep without even realising that Robert never came home.

My eyes shoot open at eight o’clock the next morning when my alarm starts ringing. I forgot to turn it off before I went to bed last night. The sun shines through my window invitingly, so although I feel a whole lot worse for wear after a day and night that involved a tad too much alcohol and definitely too many revelations, I get up and get dressed. I saw a sign for a free yoga class on Sunday mornings in a holistic centre nearby the other day. It starts at nine-thirty so I hurry through my morning insulin and breakfast routine.

I make it there just in the nick of time, and the opportunity to clear my head and relax benefits me no end. Once it’s over I don’t feel much like going home, because Robert could be there, fuming after my disappearing act from the party. I hop on a tube and go to what’s becoming my regular haunt: Speaker’s Corner. It’s more crowded than usual this morning, but I can’t spot Fareed anywhere. Instead, I stand and listen to the chatter around me until I can’t absorb any more opinions. I wonder if there’ll ever come a day when I’m brave enough to express my own.

Making my way home, I drop into a newsagent’s to pick up a few things. On the magazine stand I spy a front cover proclaiming Molly Willis as the number-one most beautiful woman in Britain. I imagine the very same magazine probably featured a gossipy article only last week about her false pregnancy rumours.

Back at the house, I find Sasha’s car missing from the driveway. Robert’s is still here, but he could be out with Sasha, since they sometimes go to their dad’s on Sundays. It’s like they feel obligated or something.

I breathe a sigh of relief when I step in the front door and find the house soothingly quiet. At least I’ve got another few hours before I have to face Robert. Making my way upstairs and into my bedroom, I open the door and stop in my tracks.

Sitting on the floor by the window where I’ve set my books up on a small shelf is Robert. He looks like he just showered because his hair is a bit damp and he’s wearing a navy T-shirt with black jeans, no shoes or socks. He looks stunning stripped down like that. He’s also got one of my books open on his lap and appears to be reading it.

He purposefully doesn’t raise his head when I enter; instead, he ignores me and continues reading. I drop my bag down, slip off my sandals, and walk towards him, falling down to sit beside him on the floor. His eyes are actually moving back and forth, so he’s not just pretending to read, either. He still doesn’t acknowledge my presence, so I rest my head affectionately on his shoulder and reach forward to turn the book over and see what it is. His lips twitch infinitesimally.