The Santiago Sisters

by Victoria Fox

  ‘No, it’s fucking terrible. Fuck me harder.’

  He slammed deeper, hotter, faster, her pussy drenched around him.

  ‘Get your tits out,’ grunted Lysander, who was partial to tits.

  Simone managed to unbutton her blouse. Lysander yanked down her bra, revealing one breast. His gaze went syrupy at the sight and he caressed the pouch, still perky despite her age. She arched beneath his touch, lithe as a cat.

  ‘You know what’s going to make me come,’ she moaned, on the brink of ecstasy. ‘Make it happen, you dirty fucking bastard. Nail me there.’

  He didn’t need to be told twice. Obediently, Lysander coursed down to that rim of skin, fingers still soaking from the honey pot. He eased his index finger inside, then his thumb, feeling her tight passage loosen around him.

  ‘Whatever you say …’ he murmured, ‘… Mummy.’

  Simone cried out.

  Wow, she must be pissed at something. The only time Lysander had gained rear entry was last winter, after his dad had backed the SG1 Range Rover into the front-drive ornamental fountain. Marvelling at the bulging tip of his cock, Lysander poised it against the knot of her arsehole and then, like a knife, sank in.

  ‘Oh my God, yes,’ sighed Simone, as they fell into rhythm.

  This was what she needed. She needed to hurt, to be punished—to be a bad girl and a wicked wife. Nobody told Simone Geddes how to behave.

  She would do whatever and whomever she wanted. She’d earned her right.

  16

  Argentina

  Calida

  Do not contact me again. I have no desire to hear from you.

  Everything in your letter reminds me of why I hate it there and why I love it here, and Simone taking me away was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have a new name now, and a new life.

  You told me that you never wanted to see me again. Well, you got what you wanted. Why should I care how you feel? I meant every word I said that night. Daniel will never look at you because you are desperate and embarrassing—and ugly. That’s why Simone chose me, not you. That’s why she’s my new mother. She knows you’re ugly. Everyone knows you’re ugly, including Daniel. When I flirted with him, he told me as much. You should give up, Calida.

  And you should give up writing to me. I don’t want you. I’m not your twin sister any more. If this doesn’t prove how I couldn’t care less, you’re even more deluded than I thought.

  Don’t write again. I won’t read it.

  Tess.

  Every afternoon, Calida rode the bus into town, and found refuge in the place she always had: her photographs. At the library, she hid with a book, focused on it utterly and lost herself in its faces. She had come with Diego once; they had borrowed this volume and taken it home and looked at it every night. The pages were thick and shiny, the images huge—of cracked golden deserts and lush, tumbling waterfalls, of the ice-white Arctic and the glinting green ocean. But the ones that captured her most were the portraits; the mix of distrust and fascination those subjects held against the camera. For that instant, Calida was looking right into those people’s souls and they were looking back. They were seeing each other. It was time travel. It was magic.

  Leaving the library one evening, she sat on a wall by the wide-open lago. Across the turquoise water, the crags of her family’s land rose in white, snow-capped peaks against the crystal sky. But there was no family left. It belonged to her alone.

  My land.

  Strange to think of it that way—and, as she did, an uncomfortable sensation came over her. She felt surrounded; tied to the dying acreage against her will, drowning in it, suffering for it, carrying its weight on her seventeen-year-old shoulders and buckling beneath its demands. Meanwhile, Teresita had escaped. She was released, freed from responsibility and able to forget it in the blink of an eye.

  It wasn’t fair. Nothing about this was fair. Calida had never been so aware of her limitations. Her inadequacies. How she would always play second to her gorgeous, terrifying sister, and always be the one left to pick up the pieces.

  Teresita—Tess—had made that clear. How stupid she had been to rip open that letter with such excitement, such hope, when all it contained was poison.

  Calida made her decision at the start of September. It was the only way.

  On recent nights, she had taken to sleeping outside. It was too painful to stay in the bedroom she’d shared with Teresita; remembering, as children, their conversations long into the night, shushing each other and tittering beneath their blankets whenever they heard their papa passing outside. Under an empty, star-crusted sky, she could let the earth cradle her, its vastness swallow her up. She closed her eyes and imagined Daniel coming to her, lying down next to her, more addicted to him than she had ever been—worse, stronger—and finding her soul at peace only within these imaginings.

  Tonight, in the shadow of the veranda, she closed her eyes. She pulled the covers up over her waist and parted her knees beneath, sighing as she tumbled into her fantasy. Her hand travelled down to the soft nest between her legs.

  Come to me, Daniel, she silently begged, picturing him so clearly.

  She could feel the warmth of his body alongside hers, as if it were happening; could feel his fingers on her back as they traced a languid circle. His breath warmed her neck. Calida would turn her head, just a fraction, until their mouths found each other in the silent, sweet-scented dark. Daniel’s kiss would be hot and taste of the rain. She could feel his teeth and the mystery of his tongue, which hesitantly touched hers, and then, finding encouragement, filled her mouth. Daniel’s hand would move from her stomach, down behind the ridge of her jeans. Deftly, he would unbutton and tug the denim down. His palm hovered over the mound of her cotton knickers.

  Calida’s finger plunged into the pit of her heat. She lifted her hips to meet it.

  Is this OK? She could hear his voice. See his eyes, full of concern.

  Yes. Oh, yes.

  Have you done this before?

  No.

  Do you want to?

  God, she did. Calida plunged her fingers deeper, rocking back and forth on the tingling bud that sent her wild. I want to, she pictured herself saying; yes, I want to …

  Daniel would start kissing her neck, his lips soft and slow, practised and confident. She summoned the feel of his penis, rock-hard against her stomach, as his mouth found a path to her breasts. In her dream she was as generously endowed as Teresita. Daniel would suck, squeeze, and lick her nipples. His hair would be near white in the moonlight and she would run her fingers through it, draw it in so she could inhale him, felt the soft shells of his ears and the bristly stubble of his jaw.

  You’re beautiful, she heard him say. He would look right in her eyes, and she would know that he meant it: even if he were wrong, he meant it. So beautiful …

  Calida gasped beneath her touch. She could feel his cock filling her palm, solid and strong and pumping through her fist. She needed it inside her.

  Daniel kissed her stomach, moving lower, until finally he met her wetness with his tongue and she eased on to him, his lips soldered and his tongue swirling in deep circles. Her moisture doubled, running and dripping between her legs. Over every ridge and cleft he tended until she was blind in a fever, her head spinning.

  I want to have sex with you …

  Calida was ready to come. Her fingers shook and her hips bucked and thrashed. She imagined Daniel kneeling between her legs, his thighs spread, his cock stiff, and her pale ankles hovering on either side. Throwing her head back, she reached for him and drew him down. Daniel would put a hand there to guide himself.

  Clasping his backside, she pulled him in.

  They would fall into a fast, pounding pace—he driving through her in heroic strokes, lifting her buttocks to draw her closer, pulling back so he was upright on his knees. He would clasp her breasts and massage them together, leaning over to draw one stiff nub into his mouth and then the other. In her mind, she watched, fascina
ted, from this angle able to see his hard-on engaged with and then withdrawn, engaged and withdrawn … Daniel would push himself up on his elbows, increasing his pace, finding a new angle and shattering her with it. Calida gripped his wrists.

  She could feel them. She could feel him.

  She was coming.

  The sky vanished, the land flew away, the ocean crashed over her and it was all chased by a brilliant, dreadful sensation that she was powerless to stop. Bucking against her own fingers, she smothered the urge to cry out his name as she toppled one surge over the next, plummeting her into spheres of pleasure that killed her over and over until she was panting for breath and every part of her body was sated.

  She blinked to the sky, catching her breath, waiting for her vision to restore.

  Minutes passed.

  ‘OK if I sit?’

  His words threw her bolt upright. Daniel, the real Daniel, came round the side of the house. How long had he been there? Had he seen?

  Panic engulfed her.

  No. He couldn’t have …

  ‘Sure,’ she croaked.

  Daniel lowered himself next to her, his elbows hooked over his knees. She could tell from his expression, lost elsewhere, that he hadn’t witnessed her actions. Relief didn’t come close. She watched his back, the sliver of skin between his jeans and T-shirt, and thank God it was dark because her cheeks flamed at the memory of what she’d been doing. ‘I have something to tell you,’ he said. ‘About Teresita.’

  Oh no. Calida didn’t think she could take it. Tell me you didn’t …

  ‘It was my fault,’ Daniel said. ‘Teresita came on to me that night in my cabin. You interrupted us. Do you remember?’ Mutely, she nodded. ‘I told her afterwards that nothing was going to happen between us. I liked someone else. I can’t help feeling that’s what drove her away—or played a part in it, anyway.’ She heard him swallow. ‘I wanted to tell you. I don’t want to keep anything from you, Calida. Ever.’

  Calida digested this. There was someone else.

  Of course there was.

  ‘It was nothing to do with you,’ she told him. ‘My sister made her own choice. Nobody forced her to do it. Besides, I wasn’t blameless. Teresita hated me.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true. I ruined her life. That’s what she told me.’

  There was a long silence. ‘I know what it’s like to be told that,’ Daniel said.

  Calida waited.

  ‘My father used to tell me that, pretty much every day. That I was a waste of air—that I’d never amount to anything … He beat me up so bad he broke my arm. That’s why I ran from home and why I’ll never go back. He beat up my mother and then when she left he beat up on me. He beat me up every day. He was a drunk.’

  Calida pushed herself up to a sitting position. Daniel’s admission was a sheet of glass between them and she didn’t want to say anything in case it broke.

  ‘Then, when I turned sixteen, my father hit me and I didn’t fall. For the longest time, I just kept standing. It hurt, just like all the other times, but I didn’t let him know. So he backed off. And I went to him and I lifted him against the wall, and I came close and I said to him, real slow: “That is the last time you hit me. Do you understand? If you hit me again, I will kill you.” I meant it. I meant every word.’

  Calida held her breath.

  ‘He had a temper,’ finished Daniel. ‘That was all.’

  ‘How badly did he hurt you?’ she asked.

  ‘He put me in hospital. Pulled a knife a few times. It wasn’t anything compared with what he did to my mother. I don’t blame her for going. I would have.’

  She touched his arm. He flinched. ‘Why didn’t you leave before?’

  ‘I stayed for her. Without me, she’d have died. Then, when it was just the two of us, he beat me more than physically. He made me believe I would never succeed, never matter to anyone. I shouldn’t have been born. I was nothing. No one.’

  In the dark, a tear escaped from Calida’s eye. ‘And did he?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hit you again.’

  ‘No, not after that—he knew the next time would be the last time. He never hit me after he realised I was big enough to hit back. He was a coward.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I haven’t heard a thing since I left that place and that’s fine by me. Sometimes you have to get out to save yourself.’

  Calida closed her eyes. Was that what Teresita had done?

  Daniel lay down next to her, and took her hand. He took a deep breath, exhaling as if this was a truth he had kept inside for too long.

  ‘I’m glad I told somebody that,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad, too.’

  Calida stayed awake, Daniel beside her, unable to follow him to dreams.

  She gazed up at the host of bright stars, the stars of her home, until the sky turned from pitch to purple to lilac, the lip of the sun rose above the horizon, and dawn broke over the rugged orange peaks. All night, a storm swirled in her head.

  You’re desperate and embarrassing and ugly.

  Daniel told me as much.

  You should give up, Calida.

  The shame of her masturbation mocked her, the idiocy of it. How when Daniel had lain beside her, confided in her, it had been so like her fantasy that for a moment she almost believed he might kiss her. But she was a friend to him—nothing more.

  She never would be.

  No man would ever want to make love to her like that. No man would ever do those things with her … least of all the man she wanted most in the world.

  There was nothing to stay for. Nothing left.

  Careful not to disturb him, Calida rose and went back to the house. She dressed, showered, and quickly, quietly, packed a bag.

  Then she stepped outside and watched him a while.

  Remember this.

  It was easier not to say goodbye. It hurt too much.

  She recalled the guanaco her papa had spared, that day she had taken Teresita away so she didn’t have to see. This was a sacrifice, just like that.

  She opened the gate and started walking.

  17

  Paris

  Life at Saint-Marthe improved with Mia Ferraris by her side. Mia was quirky and irreverent, she was funny and silly; she posted notes through Tess’s locker, poems about Madame Fontaine’s beard or her attempts at a slowly improving self-portrait, which she knew made Tess laugh. In lessons the girls teamed up together, and in Games they dragged their heels around the netball court and gossiped in goal about how often they ought to shave their legs, and whether boys liked shaved legs or hairy ones. Mia seemed convinced that they liked hairy ones, but Tess wasn’t sure.

  Mia was the only person she confided in about her real family.

  ‘They did it for the money?’ Mia was incredulous. ‘How could they?’

  Tess shrugged. ‘Who cares? I don’t.’

  ‘You must, though. You must feel sad.’

  ‘Why should I? They made their decision. They didn’t want me. It’s fine.’

  ‘Aren’t you upset?’ Mia frowned.

  ‘No.’ She lifted her chin. ‘I’m better off without them.’

  Just before autumn term began, the school was rocked by news that two jets had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City. Images of burning skyscrapers and billowing smoke filled TV screens; weeping masses and blackened faces.

  ‘My God,’ cried Mia, as she and Tess watched the grim bulletins unfold.

  Tess thought briefly of Calida. She didn’t know why—Calida wasn’t in New York—but the disaster roused old instincts: the urge to reach for her twin in times of crisis, to make sure she was still there, still OK, her other half, or the ghost of it.

  In the spring Tess Geddes turned eighteen, she was sent to stay at the appartement of a Parisian socialite named Madame Hélène Comtois. All the girls at Sainte-Marthe were referred to similar posts
during the Easter holidays, the idea being to learn the refinement befitting their social standing: the poise, finesse and general savoir vivre that marked the difference between girls and ladies. Madame Comtois lived in the 16th arrondissement at the top of an ornate Belle Epoque building, whose interior was bigger than Simone Geddes’ London mansion, only on one floor instead of seven.

  In her youth Madame had been a fashion model, and was now married to an eminent member of the Parlement Français. She was unusually thin and tall, with cropped dark hair and grey, feline eyes, which were obscured by green-tinted circular spectacles that she kept on a chain around her neck. She smoked constantly.

  ‘While you stay under my roof, you live by my rules,’ Madame told her when she arrived. But, three weeks in, there didn’t seem to be many rules to live by. Aside from her evening tutelage in comportment, conduct, and carriage, and the obligation to speak to Madame exclusively in French, Tess was left to her own devices. She took herself to museums by the Place du Trocadéro, and read her book (Le Comte de Monte Cristo, given to her by Madame) in the Bois de Boulogne. She wandered the avenues off the Place de l’Étoile and took the Métro to the Basilica in Montmartre.

  Mia Ferraris called every day. Her best friend was being instructed on La Rive Gauche and her madame was a tyrant. ‘She looks like a steamed pudding,’ said Mia.

  Tess smiled. But even as she wanted to lean on Mia, to rely on her completely, she held back. She kept a part of herself protected, a part that no one could touch.

  ‘She’s wild,’ Tess heard Madame Comtois say into the telephone one night, during one of her many conversations with Simone, ‘but her beauty is divine.’

  The following week, Simone flew to Paris. She arrived with Madame shortly after midday, complaining about the trouble she’d had with changing her euros. ‘Why ever you let the franc go I do not know. We’ll never lose the pound!’

  She had been there ten minutes when she asked to speak to Tess—alone.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Simone matter-of-factly, when Madame had gone next door.

  Tess watched as Simone peeled off a pair of leather gloves and placed them neatly on the cabinet. Her lips were painted red and her recently highlighted locks were pulled back in an elegant chignon. She observed Tess before glancing away.