But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share “Hamin-Ra” even if we decide to do just that.
I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his pants as though yeah, none of us were ever going to find them. None of us were ever going to say come on, come on, where’s your tale, Cam?
“Probably,” I say, but Wade laughs, then, and says, “Oh, she knows. She knows for sure, she’s got it with her!”
And I hate him for that too. Now they’re after me to read it and no, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, and then I have to tell them why and it’s mortifying somehow. It’s like pulling a tooth. Out of my vagina.
“The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.”
It’s more than smutty—it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.
Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.
“Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.”
But Kitty goes one better than that.
“I always knew you wanted to write porn,” she says, in between hilarious, hilarious laughter. “All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.”
Oh, Lord.
“I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?” I say, but then Wade has a go too.
“I think you kind of did.”
And then even worse: “I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.” Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wineglass.
Definitely half-cut.
“See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,” Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.
“We went to the same university!”
“Yeah. Yalevard.”
“There’s no such place.”
“Harvale, then.”
“That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.”
Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.
Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.
It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.
“But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,” Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.
Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.
“I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.”
“Your stories were always like that, Allie,” Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. “But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.”
OK, maybe not a traitor, exactly. Maybe more like a really evil partner in crime who drags you down with her, into disaster. In all my many dreams of how this reunion would end up going—minor explosions, someone killing someone else, nervous breakdowns—none of this ever featured in even the tiniest, remotest sense. I didn’t even imagine myself ending up in bed with Wade, really, because whenever I let myself want something it almost never happens.
Did I do the opposite of wanting this chat about sex stories?
“Yeah, also guilty,” Wade says, and I rack my brain trying to think of where they crammed all this boiling lust into tales about being a pig who could fly (Kitty) and a cyborg from the future (Wade).
Maybe the pigs and the cyborgs had a lot of sex I just don’t know about.
“It’s OK, Cam, you don’t have to put your hand up for this one,” Wade adds, and my brain automatically makes an odd little dinging noise. As though it’s decided to tally up all the little digs Wade’s going to get in about Cameron, for no apparent reason. “Everyone knows that you’re not a part of our dirty perverts club.”
Seriously. Were they like this before? Because that last part seems even meaner than the first bit, as though Wade would like nothing better than to slice Cameron right out of our group forever, for some end I can’t quite see.
I can’t see it so much that I’m compelled to say something in too big and too funny a voice, as though I can just smooth everything over by being ridiculous.
“Hey, how do you know he’s not a dirty pervert? You seem really perverted to me, Cam, I swear.”
By being really ridiculous. Because in truth, there isn’t a person on earth who seems less sexual than Cameron. I’m sure Mother Teresa was more adventurous with her lovers than Cameron is with his. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen him with someone I could loosely term a “lover.”
He probably has constant, epic sex with the robot girl he’s built.
Annnnddd…now I feel mean. Especially when he then says: “Thank you, Allie. Your faith in my perverted-ness is very…welcomed.”
He actually does seem heartened too. When I look at him he’s getting really close to smiling in this strange, almost-definitely-drunk way, and after a couple of long, weird moments have ticked by I find my mind rolling back and back to that word he used.
Welcomed. And the pause he had before it, as though he had a couple of other contenders before he settled on something so mundane. Though for the life of me, I can’t think what other word he could have slotted in there. What replaces welcomed, easily? Pleased? Sweet?
And then my brain throws up arousing like an insane hiccup, and I move along quickly.
“OK, so, maybe I liked to occasionally write about sex-ghosts,” I say, but it comes out less funny and more wounded than I intend. And Wade spots it, which is weird because he never used to. He never used to know when I’d taken a mortal hit and was down for the count.
“Hey, what’s the big deal?” he says, and there’s this creamy, smooth note of conciliation in his voice that sounds weird. Weird, but not exactly unwelcome. “We’re all grown up now. We can be perverts if we want to be.”
“I didn’t care about being a pervert before, quite frankly,” Kitty says.
Of course, my mind flicks to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers in the bed next to mine, in our tiny dorm room. Though I’ll admit, my mind sometimes goes to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers when I’m busy plunging the toilet or waiting for a kettle to boil, so it’s no real commentary on the things we’re talking about now.
“So where are the stories, Kit? The dirty stories, about something other than magic balloons that get lost?” Wade asks, and Kitty heys!
Then tries to hurl a cushion at him and fails, miserably.
“I wrote loads mo
re than kids stories, you doof. I wrote fabulous tales of rip-roaring sexual adventures the likes of which the world has never seen.”
I can well believe her. One of her postcards just had the word “five-way” on it in big letters. Is five-way even a word? I’m not sure and largely felt too afraid to ask.
“Yeah?” Wade says.
And then he does something that makes my stomach kind of flip-flop. As though maybe I’d just thought this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.
It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with “one-way” on it in big, fancy glitter letters.
“Like this story?” Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.
No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it subtext.
Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: “Ooooh, he’s a magician!”
Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.
“You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,” I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.
“Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck,” Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house, he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.
And the L-word’s loose. So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.
“Why do you think he did?” Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say…heated—though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.
But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.
Sharing what we never shared before.
Though when I think about this idea, my stomach stops flip-flopping and drops out of me entirely.
“Because he had no one else,” Cameron says, finally, and though Wade starts blathering on about Scooby-Doo and Kitty wants to know why he wanted us to stay here for a month first, then, if it was just about him being a lonely old bastard, I think Cameron’s right.
I think we were his family, once. And maybe he just wanted his family to come back together, in some sort of wildly eccentric and completely inadvisable fashion. One that makes Wade say: “There’s a curse on the house, and a month is what it takes to possess us all and make us kill each other.”
This time, Kitty manages to hurl a cushion at him. She even kicks one little leg out at him, and misses by a country mile.
“You dick! I’m already not going to sleep tonight, thinking about people watching us.”
“People watching us?” I say, and Kitty turns her head almost 360 degrees to shoot the weirdest look at me. It has nothing to do with the content of my words, though, I know, and everything to do with the fact that me and Cameron say said words at exactly the same time. We even use the same incredulous tone—or we would have, if I had a gun-metal voice like his.
“Well yeah. There must be people watching us. Checking that we’re staying for the month, you know? Making sure we’re doing the ‘renovations.’”
“The place doesn’t even need renovations,” Wade says, and he would know. But Cameron’s still stuck on this idea of being watched.
“No one is spying on us. The solicitor even said to me that a clause like that wouldn’t hold up—that we didn’t have to stay if we didn’t want to.”
We all go silent, then. Though I can practically hear what everyone’s thinking, anyway—so why are we here? What are we all doing here, if we don’t have to be? None of us have jobs that we need to rush back to, and there’s a nice healthy provision been made for us, but even so. Even so, what are we doing in this old house again, reliving old memories?
“So,” Wade says. “Back to my story?”
I can see he’s just raring to plunge right into it—which makes my palms inexplicably sweaty and puts my heart somewhere up around my throat—but Cameron pulls him up short. He points out that none of us have any candy, and I’m almost certain he does so for the same reasons I would, if I’d have thought about it.
To stall Wade from reading out the Story of Probable Depravity.
But then he comes back too quickly with a bag of actual red licorice, the staple story food of the Candy Club, and then I’m not so sure. Plus he kind of looks at me as he passes by to the kitchen, and there’s something about his expression, something hazy in his bottom-of-the-ocean eyes, as though summer heat has hit the water and everything is melting away.
And then Wade starts talking, and I don’t know whether it’s Cameron’s strange smoky stare or the words of this obviously filthy story that make me feel suddenly warm and liquid between my legs.
Though I think the latter has a running start.
“He thought about licking her cunt when he brought the pair of panties to his face, even though he didn’t want to. He wanted to think about nice things, cute things, because she was a real lovely girl. Her eyes only ever laughed at him kindly, and her sweet mouth seemed to have no edges. She did nice things, like slipping an arm around him when he felt down—despite the fact that no one else ever seemed to know if he was down or not.
“But she did. And now he was in her room, going through her things. All of her panties and bras and other stuff besides that he’d never suspected she’d have. She had something that looked like a see-through teddy, and when he rubbed it over his cheek it felt liquid-soft, like maybe it would melt if he kept doing dirty things to it.
“Even so, he ran it over the stiff ridge of his erection—plainly visible through the material of his jeans—and thought about doing that same thing with her inside it. She’d be all spread out on the bed with the silk clinging to her curvy body, and he could get on her and slide his cock over every inch.
“The thought alone made him sweat. He could feel his stiff cock pulsing against his zipper, and longed to take it out. But then the door sounded down below, and a new kind of feeling sprang through him’’
I know just what Wade’s perverted character means. A new sort of feeling is springing through me too. Wade pauses to snap off a bit of red liquorice, but other than that he seems completely unfazed by all of the cocks and cunts and, oh my word, I don’t think I can take the heat in here. I think I need to get out of the kitchen, even though I’m not actually in one.
Where has he gotten this stuff from? Is this real? Something about it sounds it, but I can’t imagine Wade sneaking into some chick’s bedroom to sniff her panties—and especially not this new Wade, all smooth and creamy-voiced and too-slick.
In truth I can’t imagine anything at all, because the bottom half of me has been dipped in warm honey and I can’t seem
to breathe out. I keep breathing in, but nothing’s going back out again.
And he continues! Kitty is kind of squirming on my lap and I dare not even look at Cameron, but Wade only goes and carries on.
“Fear. She’d come back early from the poetry recital. Any second, and she was going to climb the stairs and find him here, lurking in her most private space.
“He did the only thing he could: he opened the door to her adjoining bathroom and slipped inside.
“However, this action presented a slight problem. Once in there, he had the urge to shut the door tight and lock it—maybe he could tell her he’d desperately needed to go, or something like it—but by the time he’d thought of it, he realized two things. One—an excuse like that wasn’t going to fly. And two—he couldn’t safely shut the door right to without her hearing and knowing he’d gone in there only a moment before she arrived home.
“It just wasn’t watertight. Which was how he found himself in her bathroom, staring at her through a crack in the door, willing her to leave before anything worse happened.”
I don’t want anything worse to happen. Kitty has a hand inside her blouse—I know she does, without even looking down. But I don’t blame her because my own nipples feel like two great big glaring points, sticking right through my jersey for everyone to see. I wish I’d worn a thicker bra, but really, who could have predicted this?
Does he somehow psychically know I’m this horny? Can anyone else feel it, vibrating off me in waves? I’m sure I can sense some kind of strange heat emanating from Cameron, but maybe that’s just because he’s so massive and I’m so turned on.
God, I’m this turned on before he’s even gotten to the good stuff.
“It was almost a slap in the face when she stripped out of her clothes before doing anything else. Of course he tried to look away, but it was useless. Here was the object of his lust in just her bra and panties, and both items barely hid a thing.
“When she turned he could see the groove between the rounded, glorious cheeks of her ass, just visible beneath her plain white of her underwear. His mind went automatically to the most lurid thing he could imagine—stroking a finger over that shadowed crease, or even filthier—sticking his tongue there and licking and licking until she begged him not to stop.
Telling Tales Page 3