“Ah, there’s the Isabel I know and love.” Smith grinned and it was taut as cheese wire, just so I didn’t get the wrong impression about him mentioning the L word.
“So your new hairdo, is that the big surprise?”
He shook his shorn head and stepped to the left with a grandiose sweep of his arm, which he couldn’t quite get away with. He’d been blocking my view of the most dilapidated excuse for a car I’d ever seen.
It had been a mustard color in a previous life, but now it was hard to see where the rust ended and the car began. I checked to see if it actually had wheels because there was a good chance it was mounted on bricks. In fact, there was a good chance it would get towed away before the end of the weekend.
“It’s cool,” I said brightly. My enthusiasm was as rusty as the hood. “It’s really cool. Really, really cool.”
“You think it’s lame,” he said flatly, as if what I thought was suddenly his new criteria for whether stuff was good or not.
“I don’t! I like it. It’s very quirky.” I pounced on the word triumphantly. “And the leopard skin steering-wheel cover is a nice ironic touch. It is ironic, I hope?”
“A hundred percent ironic,” Smith assured me gravely. “And a hundred percent roadworthy.”
I must have looked pretty doubtful because he gave me another reproachful look. “I’d already decided that if you were more or less pleasant, I’d take you out for a drive,” Smith said, fishing the keys out of his pocket and dangling them from one finger.
“And have I been?” I loved the way he totally called me on my bullshit. Didn’t try and understand me; I just was, and he let me know it.
“Kinda fifty-fifty,” he decided, unlocking the passenger door and holding it open so I could gingerly climb in.
I watched Smith walk around, pausing to stroke the hood in this caress-y way that would have got his face slapped if the car had suddenly turned into a girl. I shifted onto one buttock to avoid the spring that was digging into me and tried to take little breaths so I didn’t get asphyxiated by the smell of mildew.
“For God’s sake, do you have to be so rough with it?” Smith yelped when he finally got in to find me wrestling with one of the door levers, which I fervently hoped would open one of the windows.
He leaned over me so I could smell the pine-fresh, clean boy-ness of him, which was far more pleasing to my olfactory nerves. His arm brushed against my breasts and I could feel my face turn red as I stuck my head out of the now open window.
“So, where do you want to go?” he asked me, turning the key in the ignition—and what do you know? It actually started first time.
“Surprise me again,” I said, leaning back in the seat and inhaling great whiffs of fresh air.
We drove along the coast road in silence. I liked watching him drive. Liked watching the muscles in his arm flex as he shifted the gear. Liked the little put-put sound of the car climbing up the cliffs. I even liked hearing Smith mutter and swear under his breath about the ineptitude of every driver on the road who wasn’t him.
We’d been going for about an hour and I was lulled into this almost doze, when I recognized the smooth grass lawns and the splendidly maintained, brilliantly white rain shelters along the Promenade.
“Eastbourne?” I spluttered.
“Eastbourne,” he echoed with a decisive nod of his head, a smile ghosting across his face.
“This is where old people come to die.” As far as the eye could see were blue rinses and walkers, blazers, and thermos flasks as hordes of septuagenarians slowly ambled along. Then something else occurred to me. “What’s the collective noun for old people, anyway? A flock of geriatrics? They probably can’t flock too well, what with the arthritis. A pride of geriatrics? Probably more like it, all banging on about how they fought in the war and . . .”
Smith laughed. And it was a proper laugh, not his usual snide chuckle. “There’s always something going on in there, isn’t there?” He took his hand off the wheel so he could tap a finger against my temple, stroking the tiny dent in the bone where Felix had thrown a cricket bat at me during his most infamous snit.
I sighed because he didn’t know the half of it. He didn’t even know, like, the tenth of it. “Oh, hey! Mini golf! I love mini golf!”
And I’d crossed the line where I couldn’t or didn’t want to be cool anymore. Not for that afternoon, anyway.
So we sat on a bench and looked out to sea and talked to Ida and George, who were visiting from Nantwich and celebrating their golden wedding anniversary. I even let Smith feed me chips so soaked in salt and vinegar that they made my mouth sting, then let him kiss it better before I totally kicked his arse at mini golf. I even did my victory dance with the put. Or a modified version of it that mainly involved holding it high above my head and slowly twirling around, while shouting at him: “No! I’m not just the winner. I’m the outright winner, say it!”
He refused, shaking his head and brandishing his golf club at me. “God, I’ve created a monster. I’m never playing anything competitive with you again. I bet you’re even worse at Scrabble. You’re one of those really annoying people who puts down like, three tiles and makes four different words and never opens up the board?” he teased, swinging my hand before wrapping his arm around my shoulder as we walked back to the car.
“Pretty much, and you don’t even want to begin to know what I’m like when it comes to Monopoly.”
“I’m making a mental note to hide all board games from you.”
I shivered slightly because of the breeze coming off the sea. Or maybe it was because this flirty banter was just tripping from my mouth and it made me feel like I was walking around naked. That would be naked and completely exposed, if you really wanted to work the metaphor.
“You’re cold,” he stated, linking his fingers through mine. “Actually, I’m upgrading that to frozen. You should have said something.”
“I’m fine.” And I was. It’s funny but I’m cold a lot now. I looked it up on the Internet, and it’s another amusing by-product of my fun lack of sleep, along with a faint feeling of nausea most of the time.
“Is that fine as in ‘I’m really trying not to make a fuss because I’ve been on my best behavior all day and I don’t want to jinx it?’ Or are you going all monosyllabic because you’ve used up your entire word quota for the week?”
I gave him a significant look from under my lashes, which he met without flinching.
“Okay, I’m getting chilly,” I conceded, and I had a sudden brain blip as an image flashed up of me curled around him, under the funky-smelling covers of his bed. Then I wouldn’t be tired or cold.
“See, that wasn’t so difficult,” Smith said approvingly. “You’re really coming along nicely.”
“Don’t fucking talk about me like I’m some pet project you’ve got on the go, like growing watercress or . . . I don’t know, studying the life cycle of a stickleback.”
As he unlocked my door I noticed that a seagull had, well, relieved itself on the roof, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Smith because he was talking. Saying words about me that if it had been anyone else, I’d have taken their head clean off their neck.
“Don’t you get it yet, Isabel? You are my pet project,” he said without a shred of humor, hands on either side of my shoulders as I leaned against the car and found myself unable to look away from his intense, blue stare. “You can be as pissy and bitchy and unpleasant as you want, but it doesn’t matter. I’m so onto you.”
“Onto me?” I croaked and didn’t that turn of phrase conjure up all sorts of intriguing thoughts?
“Yeah. Your whole push me/pull me routine is really textbook, ” he drawled. “You think that if you’re mean, I’ll just run true to type and tell you to fuck off. And then you can feel all validated and have no excuse to actually, y’know, interact and have human emotions because you’re so sure that every other person in the world is a useless, uncaring bastard and you have proof.”
�
�I don’t think that,” I began angrily. “It’s just people are . . .”
“Shut up,” he said sweetly, kissing me slowly to take the bite out of his words. “Even you can’t keep up the bitch goddess act forever, this afternoon being a case in point,” he murmured against my lips, before pushing me gently into the car.
And it wasn’t true, what he said. Not really. It wasn’t that I was testing anyone. I didn’t need to, because I’d already given up on people as a lost cause. They all let you down in the end, whether they meant to or not. Even Smith would in the end. But right now, he was rummaging on the backseat for a rug, which he tucked around me.
“Shall we go back to my place so I can take your clothes off?” he asked conversationally.
I forced myself to stay calm and serene. “Sounds like a plan,” I said in a steady voice.
As soon as we got inside the door, he was tugging me up the stairs, even though a sharp voice called from the living room, “Smith! Aren’t you going to introduce us to your little friend?”
I had a vague impression of a mop of white-blonde hair and a mocking smile, but I was still in a state of forward motion as Smith snapped out, “Piss off, Jane.”
He rolled his eyes at me as he pulled me across the landing. “You can meet her some other time. Though there could be a copyright issue on the whole bitch thing.”
“It’s not very nice to call me a bitch when you want to”—I took a deep breath— “have sex with me.”
“What do you want me to call you? Darling? Sweetheart? Cutie?” he purred, yanking me into his room and kicking the door shut.
“You could call me Isabel,” I suggested dryly, and he pressed me up against the wall and murmured my name before he kissed me.
And then I didn’t have to think about anything anymore. It was all feeling. So I just became this creature made up entirely of all these separate sensations: the scrape of Smith’s teeth dragging against my bottom lip, his warm hands on my cold skin, the edge of the bed hitting the back of my knees as he danced me across the room, and then the curious, clumsy grace of it. Of how it turns you inside out and back to front so you say things that you think you’d never ever say and your body twists into shapes that shouldn’t be possible and your eyes are screwed tight shut . . .
“Hey, hey, Isabel,” he said to me in a voice that was impossibly tender. “C’mon, open your eyes.”
I peeled my eyelids back and stared blearily up at him, his face going fuzzy around the edges as he leaned forward and kissed me, sweetly, softly like I wasn’t a girl who’d just done what I did but as if I was someone he walked home from school every day and never let him get past first base.
And I was learning fast that what you said in these moments didn’t count and couldn’t be thrown back at you later on. “Hold me,” I pleaded, and he was already holding me but he wriggled one hand free so he could brush the hair back from my face, and it was too much effort to keep my eyes open.
He said things, too. Things I’m sure he’d never admit to under the toughest interrogation, and I drifted off to sleep with his voice in my ear, soothing, cooing, so loving . . .
When I woke up he was still holding me, dotting kisses along my neck. I lay there for a minute or two, wondering why I wasn’t freaking about being butt naked in bed with someone equally naked pressed against me.
“I know you’re awake,” he rumbled in my ear. “You make these weird little whuffly noises when you’re asleep.”
“I do not,” I said automatically, and carefully stretched out my legs, which had been tangled with his. “What time is it?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not even eight.”
I sighed a little because really, it was so nice and I could have just gone back to sleep and stayed there till morning, apart from the fact that I really needed to pee and my throat was parched.
“Don’t have to be back till eleven, maybe twelve,” I mused. “It is Saturday night.”
“Wish you could stay,” he said, tracing a line down my spine, and I squirmed away because it tickled, then rolled onto my back, dragging the covers up and clamping them under my arms. “I might . . . I guess I could phone home and see if it would be okay.” I hesitated because he might have just said it to be polite.
But Smith was nodding his head and I missed his rumpled, pillow-tossed hair already. “It’s not like you’d have to say what you were really up to.”
“On one condition, though.” I smiled and his eyebrows were already shooting up in expectation of whatever he thought I was going to say. Not like he was even close. “Make me a cup of tea. Milk and two sugars, please.”
The second he was out of the door, after pulling on his jeans and grumbling about how I was taking him for granted, I shot out of bed, grabbed something T-shirty from the floor, and hauled it on before I dashed into the hall and prayed that the bathroom was the first door I tried.
I peed for England and then, because I’m stupid and sixteen and not anywhere near blasé, I had the quickest shower humanly possible.
By the time Smith shouldered open the door with two steaming mugs in his hand, I was perched on the bed, still slightly damp and about to lie through my teeth.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said when Dad answered the phone. “How are you?” Then I winced because way to act suspicious. I never asked how he was.
“I’m fine, Isabel,” he said crisply to let me know that he was already on to me. “And how are you?”
“I’m okay.”
Smith set a mug down on the nightstand next to me and hovered awkwardly. I made fluttery gestures with my hand to let him know it was all right and realized that Dad wasn’t saying anything.
Usually I make him speak first, just for the small amount of satisfaction it brings me, but it didn’t seem appropriate when I was about to infringe on at least ten of his rules.
“So, anyway, I’m at Dot’s and I was thinking about staying the night.” Not a question, just putting the facts, or the kind of facts, out there and seeing what he did with them.
“Really?” I heard the clink of a glass in the background and then his voice clearer than before. “You want to sleep over?”
“Yeah. At Dot’s, because we’ve just got some DVDs out and we were going to phone for pizza and it’s getting late . . .”
“Forgive me but I find it extremely curious that you’re expressing such a fervent desire to have a slumber party.” His voice curdled on the last two words.
“Sleepover,” I corrected him politely.
“And will there be boys at this DVD-watching, crashing-out fest?”
“What? No!” I held the phone away from my ear and shook it. Then I lowered my voice. “Felix stays over at his friends’ all the time and you don’t give him the third degree about whether they’re going to pool their pocket money for a stripper.”
“You’re hiring a stripper?” he spluttered. “Well, then I insist that you come home immediately.”
“Oh, my God . . .” I started, and then stopped because there were no words.
“I’m joking, Isabel,” he said, and he sounded like he used to. “I am capable of doing that sometimes.”
Smith turned around and grinned at me, holding up a Broken Social Scene CD and waiting for my nod of approval.
“Well, I’ll be home by lunchtime. There’s some shepherd’s pie in the fridge, just take the tin foil off and heat the oven on five for about twenty minutes, and then it should take about . . .”
“I’m quite capable of heating up some dinner,” he said in that same jovial voice. “Have a good time. Please don’t get drunk or smoke or take drugs or do anything foolish. Not until you’re at least thirty.”
It was far too late for that, and I shifted uncomfortably on the bed that I’d had sex on and wished that he wasn’t being so fucking nice when I had never deserved it less.
“ ’Kay. Well, I’ll see you, then. Remember to turn the oven off and leave the dish to soak, otherwise . . .”
“Get o
ff the bloody phone and go and watch your DVDs. Good night, Belle,” he added before he hung up, and it was a slip of the tongue, just an echo of the way we’d been and what he’d used to call me that made me sit there, clutching the phone and feeling like this utterly worthless scrap of humanity.
“You okay?” Smith asked as “Capture the Flag” started to play.
I picked up my tea and pasted on my Sunday best smile. “Peachy.”
He crouched down in front of me. “So your mum’s not around, then?”
I didn’t think he was prying . . . much. It was just a natural conclusion to draw from my side of the phone call. “I can’t talk about it,” I said in a tiny voice.
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