The Things That Make Me Give In (24 page)

He hisses out a ‘yes’, before delivering the capper: ‘I want to decorate you.’

Of course, she knows what he means. He wants her to lick him and rub him and maybe rub himself until he comes all
over her tits – or, better yet, he wants to fuck her tits until she’s covered.

Her clit pulses once at the thought.

‘Go on, then,’ she says, and he does, licking a stripe of spit down his palm before taking his cock in hand. He glosses it nicely before settling his thick length between her breasts, just as she had thought he might.

It’s alarming that it hardly takes any effort at all to push her plump tits together and make a tunnel for his shaft. He feels slick and sticky and solid in the space she makes, and when he pumps his hips just once, experimentally, she is certain she can feel every ridge and twist of him.

She can’t decide whether to watch his cock or his face. The plump red tip looks like a jewel between the creamy mounds of her breasts, and when he pushes forward she can see the strain in the rigid flesh. The liquid gleaming in the thin and then open slit.

She can’t remember ever being so close to a cock for so long, without it being shoved into her mouth. But he doesn’t seem to mind whether she parts her lips for him or not. Each time she lets him have a little lick he groans for her, until the groans are all she considers.

She licks and licks and licks, to make some more. He tastes like something sweet and all burnt up, and she wonders if she tastes the same when he sucks his own fingers and eyes her greedily.

So greedily that he can’t seem to stop himself stretching back – as flexible as she had imagined – to push a finger into her pussy, thrusting gently and in time with the movements of his hips and his cock. When he adds a second, she can’t stop her hips bucking. They form a strange chain, a linked twist and curl of pleasure, him pushing her forward with his fingers and her pushing down to let his cock slip and slide through her tits.

It doesn’t seem as though they can help each other without losing something, and yet she feels hot ripples of sensation
rising through her anyway. He seems to feel the same, because he gasps and groans and grunts for her, just begging for a response.

She responds when he jerks suddenly and spurts over her breasts and throat. There isn’t a lot, but some of it still spatters against her cheek and her tongue. She blinks and lurches away, shocked, but that shocked feeling doesn’t linger. It transforms itself into something else, instead, twisting and tingling in her gut to make an almost-orgasm.

Almost, but not quite.

No – she only comes when she turns her head for no reason at all. The door doesn’t bang and neither of them hears someone come in, but she turns her head anyway.

To see Alan. Alan, who was almost a couple with her. He’s just in time to see her get the most beautiful pearl necklace, and, when he gapes in shock at such a gift, she grinds herself down hard on Gabe’s fingers.

The necklace lies cool and slick around her throat. Her body aches and arches and comes, comes, comes.

Alan is gone, and she isn’t running after him. Of course, she couldn’t, with bodily fluids all over her and no clothes on, but it feels odd just the same. She is expected to run after him, she knows. She is expected not to be on the floor in the first place, doing things like this.

She moves to get up. Caresses the slickness he has left on her skin, briefly, before rubbing it away. Pulls her bra on, her shirt on, her coat on. Puts her hair back the way it was.

‘I knew,’ he says, and she hears it clearly this time. She hears the shaky, blissful tone to his voice, too. ‘I knew you’d be like that.’

She can’t turn and look at him. Instead she remembers when she was awkward and unconventional herself, back in high school. She never did things
all the time.
She never felt confident or tough or any of the things she’s painting him with suddenly.

He is the outsider, she thinks. I’m on the inside, and he’s looking in at me.

‘I knew you were nothing like them,’ he says, and she feels her heart pounding, pounding, to think that there might be other races. Lots of races, a future built out of all things strange and unconventional.

She turns, and he smiles bright and sharp. He says, ‘I was just waiting for you to be that little bit different, you know? I knew you were different, on the inside.’

IT DID SOMETHING
to him. Everyone knows that. He’s falling apart at the seams; his edges are being devoured. He was always a blurred and strange sort of guy. Now it’s too much and soon he will be found drunk or dead over the body of a prostitute. Or he’ll wander naked through town and perish from hypothermia, or he’ll ram his car into a brick wall at 500 mph, or he’ll, or he’ll, or he’ll . . .

God knows. He’s hanging on to nothing that she can see.

Everyone says he was shot. Sometimes they say he was shot in the groin. Sometimes he wasn’t shot at all and instead his best friend exploded. He saw children wandering war-torn streets without any arms, he has burns all over his body, he came across something like Auschwitz and now his soul is pitted with darkness.

They say all of these things, but he never speaks, so it’s not as though any of it can be confirmed. Or even hold a grain of truth in the first place.

She knows at least that he looks tired, and melancholy, and ever so faintly bored. As though he’s going to give up soon, under pressure of dullness. How can real life ever compare to the horror of being tortured by hooded terrorists in a place she’s never heard of?

He doesn’t have any right to look much more handsome than she remembers him being, back when they once clumsily dated. There’s still a taste of him in her mouth from all that wet kissing in the back of Michael Berritson’s Ford Fiesta – like
spearmint gum and cherry cola. Sometimes like chips and gravy. They are all now flavours she associates with an aching, unfulfilled excitement.

She
almost
goes over to him in the Fox and Badger.
Almost
. Just to say hello and how are you and jog his memory about their vague dalliances. But then she thinks of the word
vague
, and how fairly popular and interesting and oddly handsome he was even then, and can just about hear him saying: ‘And
who
are you, again?’ – in that way that suggests the ‘who’ is something he found on the bottom of his shoe. What can blundering once-kissed her know about war and sadness and being interesting?

Nothing. Nothing. The back of the Fiesta and the naughtily drunk rum and his hand, slipping beneath her jacket . . . all of it means nothing. She didn’t know him at all or have anything really to do with him, and this is proved when he catches her.

He catches her in a place she had never suspected was his. He was always too cool, too closed, to have a place like this – a strange little shed in the middle of the woods, filled with odds and ends.

She had figured that it belonged to someone – there was a rusted padlock in the grass when she came across it, as though it had given up the ghost and fallen at some point. But the place had been undisturbed, suggesting that no one had known it was there.

No one except grizzled old Mr Larbeck, who she had imagined was the owner. He had died last winter, which neatly explained why the place was empty and untouched. Plus all the music, all the music that suggested an angry and probably disaffected man – The Cure and Depeche Mode and The Manic Street Preachers.

But she supposes Jamie Packer is disaffected enough, and always was. He certainly looks disaffected when he walks in on her in his secret cave of wonders.

She immediately jumps out of the second-to-last piece of furniture in there – an old armchair, badly upholstered in bobbly green. The other item is a bed, made out of practically nothing. She recognises, now, that the sheets and pillows are arranged in military fashion. He came home that one time before he shipped out somewhere, and this is how he must have left it: with that little taste of the army.

It also occurs to her that he
lives
here, or is about to once more. On returning he had stayed in the B&B, but she can’t remember where he used to live, after his weird mother died.

Here, she thinks. Here, in this lair in the middle of the woods.

She feels her face heat until she is sure she is about to melt alive. God, how intrusive this must be for a man who, even when he was just a lad, couldn’t say a word about himself.

Old habits, she thinks. I bet you wish old habits died hard.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he asks, his directness blunting any words she might have said, like
I’m here because it’s mysterious. I’m here because I bet my subconscious guessed this was your place, even if I didn’t
.

‘What are you doing in here, Kes?’

Christ, she remembers being called by that name. All that shortening and riffing on people’s surnames, the odd names that barely adults give to each other. They changed Kesley to Kes, and demanded to know where her bird was. He’s the same: people used to call him Packs.

She thinks, I won’t speak. If I don’t speak, he can’t pin anything on me and then march me out to the execution block and put a bullet in my hooded head.

Everything seems to be about hoods.

‘What are you doing in here, Kes? Do you know – do you
remember
who I am?’

He says it faintly as a celebrity might say it, just as she had expected. But the word ‘
remember
’ brings the whole thing down a notch.

‘I’m sorry,’ she blurts.

His expression – demanding, but not too fierce – freezes over. He has very cold eyes and always did, but they seem even colder now.

‘You should be. Get out.’

Her stomach turns into something fluttery and insubstantial, and tries to fly up her throat. Christ, Packs. She knew he would be like this – knew that she meant nothing at all to him and hadn’t really cared, because what is a summer spent snogging, anyway? – but still. It’s a hard thing. They never even said goodbye to each other and neither felt that loss; no childish promises were made. They didn’t write each other’s name on their pencil cases.

But still. She thinks of him with something like affection.

‘I –’

‘You’re trespassing. Go on.’

The melting has reached critical mass. She thinks of the books of poetry in here, and the words of tumbling bumbling crazy love underlined. God, he must be so embarrassed. It had seemed like a thrilling discovery at the time; now it is just a gross intrusion that she knows he feels those words, somewhere inside him.

‘I’m really sorry, Packs,’ she says, and blunders towards the door. Oh, she has probably only increased his dislike of people intruding into his space. He probably lay in a ditch the size of a Mars bar with seventeen other men and never got over it.

But when she is almost out and away, he says in that clipped too-firm voice of his, ‘Wait. Wait. What?’

Of course she doesn’t want to wait. But that ‘what’ makes her wonder about what other appalling things she might have done. It’s a ‘what’ that suggests she has said something awful, and she can’t leave without explaining the awful thing she has said without knowing it.

Or having him explain why it is awful.

‘What did you –’

‘I just –’

She can’t finish her interruption. He looks so irritated that she has cut into what he was about to say that she pinches her lips together mid-sentence. The urge to speak again rises as the silence creaks its way onward, but finally he stops flicking his gaze around at everything but her and says, softer, softer, ‘I haven’t been called Packs in a while.’

Her mind flashes briefly on the idea of a codeword. She has said the codeword, and now he isn’t angry any more.

Though maybe he still could be. War is hell and has turned his temper homicidal and on a knife-edge.

‘Well . . . I . . .’

‘Do people still call you Kes? I didn’t know if I should call you Kelly or not. I didn’t –’

‘No, no – it’s fine. Kes is fine, it’s great. I can’t call you anything but Packs anyway, so . . .’

‘I’m sorry – about –’

‘No really, God. I didn’t know this was your place and if I had –’

‘You didn’t know?’ His brows meet high up in the middle and he stops pulling at the sleeve of his pea-green wax jacket. ‘Oh. Oh, I just thought . . .’

It’s all right that he trails off. It’s obvious what he just thought. Probably that she had held a secret torch all of these years, and sought out his lair, and kissed all of his books. Her face reheats.

‘If I had known I would never have come here,’ she says, and he nods and nods.

‘Of course, of course,’ he says, which is even more confusing than he usually is. So he
doesn’t
think she came to snog all of his books? Then what? Why was he made angry by the idea of her knowing this was his place?

‘I’ll go.’

‘No, really. Really, it’s fine. How have you been, Kes?’

Her stomach has settled, but it still flutters. Only now it seems more like her poor aching heart, aching over his. How
awkward he sounds! As though only barely aware how to behave in social situations. Clearly his mind told him that he’s supposed to ask a person how they’ve been.

‘Good,’ she says, while her own mind orders her not to pity him in any way. No pity. No sad little ‘I’m so sorry that you had such a terrible time over . . . there.’ How does she know that he had a terrible time?

Except of course that it’s obvious.

‘You look very well.’

Her vocal cords try to force words into her mouth:
you don’t. You look like shit. You look like someone cut you open and filled you up with nothing. A handsome nothing, but a nothing nonetheless
.

‘You look . . .’ she starts to say, and then, to her eternal mortification, ends her sentence: ‘. . . handsome.’

Thank God that he barks out a laugh, and then, with a frankness he doesn’t usually have, says, ‘Really? I thought I looked like shit.’

Perhaps it’s that he’s smiling. He always did have a lovely smile – all the better because of its rarity. It usually looked so odd on his face, and it’s no different here. The melancholy never leaves his eyes and yet the smile brightens him anyway, makes him more accessible. It was always a triumph to make Jamie Packer smile.