I will die a thousand deaths.
I’m already flatlining now. My face goes hot for what feels like the eight-hundred-millionth time, and I try to act as if I haven’t seen his hands, even though they are fixed in a weird frozen position about an inch from me. But then if I haven’t seen them, he can just draw them back and we can go about this in a different way. He might have a complicated series of pulleys and levers in his back pocket, and we can just winch me onto the bike.
But then he goes and talks and ruins it.
“I could, uh…” he says, the end of his sentence trailing off in a way that should make this less awkward. Now no one has outright stated what he has to do to help me and how that is making both of us weirdly uncomfortable. Everything is kept nice and polite.
Only that isn’t the case at all. If anything, the absence of the actual words is making things worse. I flush even hotter thinking of all the things he could finish on: do you, have you, lick you, take off all your clothes. But somehow the fact that the real end seems to be basically asking permission is the best thing of all.
I don’t have the slightest problem saying yes.
Though maybe I should have, considering what he then does. At the very least I should have prepared myself a little more, before he goes in for the kill. A few calming breaths would have worked wonders, in keeping all embarrassing sounds inside my body. I could have gotten away with a slight snort and a panicked squeeze of my butt cheeks.
But instead I come close to a squeal.
He gets hold of me around my waist, which is bad enough on its own. I was expecting a tentative touch of my elbow rather than anything so intimate—and it is really, really intimate. I can feel his thumbs stroking into the hollow just above the curve of my ass, and his hands are so big they almost meet around my middle. They surround me more fully than most people manage with a whole body hug.
But it’s the next part that really puts me over the edge.
He just lifts me right off the ground, as though I weigh no more than a thimble. For a second I know how all the thin girls in movies about happy cheerleaders feel, and I simply don’t know how to react to that. Now is not the appropriate time to be feeling like a happy cheerleader. I’ve spent the entire last year trying to achieve that state of being by wearing the right clothes and doing the right things.
It shouldn’t come because a punk lifted me onto his bike.
And yet it does it does it does. Oh my God, it does. The sweetest feeling of fitting in that I’ve ever experienced comes at the hands of a guy my only friend would hate. And it is a good, good feeling. My whole body tenses and turns to syrup at the same time. My breath comes out of me in a rush—or at least it tries to. My tensed jaw and squeezed-together lips are sort of in the way, so I guess technically I don’t almost squeal.
I just breathe really hard through an opening the size of a microbe.
All of which he thankfully pretends to ignore. He hands me a helmet and puts on his own, and gives me a little tutorial on what to do while on a bike. Basically it boils down to sitting still unless we’re turning, in which case I have to lean in exactly the right way or perish in a burning fireball of death.
Or at least that’s what I hear. He doesn’t really say it like that—he’s got this lazy, deep-as-an-abyss accent that makes everything sound practical and safe, and he points and gestures in all the right places. Really, I should be calm right now, but I can’t be. In a second we’re going to be pressed together on a machine that goes a thousand miles an hour.
I’m hyperventilating before he even gets on the thing—though I think I disguise it well.
Then less well, once he actually climbs aboard.
You see, he doesn’t get on the way I was expecting. He does absolutely nothing the way I was expecting. I’m starting to think he comes from some insane land where everything is opposite, and this is the final proof—he sits behind me, instead of in front. Here I am, preparing my hands for the moment when they will have to grab his waist, and my lady parts for possible contact with his body.
And he just does this.
I didn’t even think this was possible—unless maybe you’re a little kid riding with a parent. Which I guess this is kind of similar to when you really think about it. He must be six foot seven if he’s anything, and I barely graze five foot four. He is probably a whole foot and a half taller than me, and if I never thought about that before, I certainly do now. I think about it so hard I almost miss the sheer thrill of his next move.
His arms make a goddamn cage around my body.
I could lean my head against his right biceps, if I were so inclined. And I am inclined. I am so inclined I have to squeeze my nails into my palms just to stop myself from doing it. His skin is just so creamy-pale and soft over those insane muscles. And the muscles themselves twist and rope all the way down to his wrists in such an amazing manner.
How can I be expected to take my eyes off them?
Every time I try, something else catches my attention. He has a cuff on his left wrist and these rings on his fingers—row upon row of them that I surely should have noticed before now. Lined up they almost look like silver knuckle-dusters, all battered and dented and studded with the strangest things. One of them actually seems to have a vein of green running through it in a pattern that seems far too pretty, but I don’t get the chance to assess for sure.
I can’t, because he kicks the engine to life right when I’m leaning in to get a better look. After which, the rings on his fingers are the last thing on my mind. The roar alone is enough to distract me. The shift of him behind me is enough. But holy shit the feel of it. Why did no one tell me that a motorbike feels like this between your legs?
It actually seems to purr against parts of me that are barely used to a hand. Then just as I’m letting that sensation sink in, he sets off down the road. He gets the bike going at quite a clip, and suddenly that purr is something more. It turns into a kind of insistent thrumming, too intense to bear. If we carry on like this I’m going to do a very bad thing.
I’m going to moan. I’m almost moaning now.
And then he turns onto the highway and all is lost.
I swear to God, it’s like being shot out of a gun. I thought he was going fast before, but I was wrong, so wrong. This is what going fast feels like, and it is beyond anything I can reasonably process. Fuck moaning—I think I make a sound like someone being brutally murdered. Or at least, I would make a sound like that.
If there was any oxygen left in my body to do it. Shock steals most of my breath, and the force of the wind against my chest just does the rest. I think a giant is trying to crush me with one immense hand, and even after that sensation abates, there are still so many others to contend with. That insane thrumming carries on, right through my sheer terror. It mixes with everything and makes this big mess of arousal and fear.
And of course it gets worse when I realize what I want to do.
I want to grab him. He said I could grab his thighs if I thought I was falling off, but how on earth can I do it now? The very idea of putting my hands there fills me with feelings I don’t want to be feeling. It makes me think I should just try wrapping my arms around him somehow, but is that really any better?
I’ll still be touching him an awful lot. And even touching him this much is way above my pay grade. Just the barest hint of his broad chest against my back is enough to make me go all weird and hot. When I shrug I can almost feel what could well be a pectoral muscle. It might even be his right nipple.
If I do anything more I think I might go mad.
But the good thing is I don’t have to. Just as I’m getting to the very pinnacle of my panic, he puts a hand on me. And he does it so carefully, with so much tender hesitation. No wandering toward places he shouldn’t go or accidental groping of things I always want to keep off-limits. He simply reaches back and squeezes my upper arm—like he knows. He knows how full of eight hundred fearful feelings I am.
And
he can’t talk, so he does the next best thing.
He makes a gesture that says that sentiment in silence. He comforts me without words, in a way I should hardly be able to believe or accept. Yet I do believe and accept. My whole being seems to slow down, each knot of tension unraveling bit by bit. By the time he lets me go I am as calm as a summer ocean.
But more than that…I can enjoy what this is. Suddenly I can see so many things—like the green-and-black blur of the trees on both sides of us, and the rattle of the road so close to my feet. I could stretch out my leg and burn the rubber off the sole of my sneaker, or lose an entire layer of skin. I saw a program once about a man who had his whole foot flayed by doing something similar.
Yet somehow my response to this is not fear. It can’t be, because I know the exact shape and form of fear. I see it standing in my bedroom doorway all the time, looking over all of my things to see if any of them are out of place. I see it in the second hand of a clock as it beats down to the point where I will be in trouble, and this isn’t in any way the same as that. This is pulling madly at the corners of my mouth and filling me up with all kinds of strange urges—like the one that says Put out your hand. Put out your hand and feel that giant pushing against your palm.
Of course, I can only manage the tiniest of tests. I just let my fingers uncurl a little to my left and barely outside the bars of his arms. But the very fact that I do it at all is some kind of miracle. I’m not even sure if I did anything like it on the back of that lawn mower, yet here everything seems so different. My whole world seems different, and it’s obvious why.
I trust the man behind me. For once in my life I trust someone. I think he would say if I was on the verge of hurting myself. He would probably bark it out, but he would definitely do it. And if I even came close to falling, he would make every effort to catch me. I know he would, and that knowledge is the real reason I feel this new feeling.
I even understand what it is now.
This is what unadulterated, unfettered joy does. Finally, finally, I get why people woo-hoo without even thinking about it. Pleasure punches you in the stomach, and you just have to. You smile without meaning to and hold out your hands without wanting to and suddenly you’re squeezing the arm of a surly biker.
But it has to be done. He needs to know that this is the most exciting, wonderful thing that anyone has ever done for me. That he is more amazing than he probably even knows, just for making me start to understand myself a bit better and know what everyone else has been feeling all these years.
I thought I had felt it when my father died, and suddenly we had money and time and all the choices in the world, but I was wrong.
I’ve been in the dark all along.
Now everything is light and everything is lovely—for a little while at least, but honestly a little while is enough. If I asked for any more than that I would probably seem greedy, and I don’t want to be. I want to be happy for all the things I have and grateful for all the things I’ve got, and I swear to God, I am. Things would probably have been better for me if Mum hadn’t died so young and Dad hadn’t done such a terrible job taking her place and Tommy wasn’t reacting the way he is to freedom.
But things could also be worse. They could be worse, couldn’t they? Let me be happy for a little while longer, I beg, even though I know I have to face facts. I have to face one clear and incontrovertible fact, in particular.
He has a swastika tattooed on the inside of his arm.
Chapter 5
I don’t think it helps that the bar he takes me to is a nightmare from the bowels of hell. There isn’t even a road leading up to it. Instead there is this rough dirt track through a tunnel of solid forest, ending in a mud pit that might be a car park. And as for the building itself—it hardly passes for a building at all. The roof seems to be sliding off the top of what is essentially a log cabin, if log cabins were mostly piles of broken wood.
Everything is rotting and in various states of ruin, right down to the sign above the door. I think it might have once read After Dark, but as most of the letters are missing, it’s kind of hard to tell. That flickering neon shape might be a K. There’s a dusty bulb next to it that could possibly pass for an R—though determining for sure is pretty much the last thing on my mind. How could it be otherwise?
He has a swastika on his arm.
This amazing guy, who I was just starting to trust, is some kind of neo-Nazi. And even if he isn’t—even if there is a much better explanation for it than that, I can’t feel anything but queasy. Mainly because I don’t think there can be a much better explanation.
People just don’t have things like that put on their bodies by accident. But let’s say his friends got really crazy one night and decided to play a prank on him. Let’s say they’re real assholes and he wants nothing to do with them anymore. Why hasn’t he had it removed? At the very least he could cover it up. A well-placed bandage would do the trick. The occasional wearing of something with long sleeves would cover his shame.
Yet he isn’t doing anything of the kind. He’s just walking around with it right out there. I’m not even sure how I didn’t notice it before, considering its position on the inside of his right forearm—but then I guess that’s what happens when you’re kind of afraid to look at someone most of the time. I just didn’t want him to think I was ogling his massive arms, and now I’m paying the price for my own ridiculous neuroses.
I am stuck in the wilderness with a Nazi.
In fact, it may well be worse than that. He tells me to wait while he goes inside to see if my brother is there, and just as I see him disappearing through a door that’s hanging off its hinges, my phone buzzes in my pocket. It buzzes and I answer it with my head still full of a thousand ways I can negotiate this in a calm and reasonable manner—it’s okay, I’m telling myself, it’s okay, just act like you never saw it and get back to civilization and your safe little goals and desires and pretend all of this never, ever happened.
And then I hear Tommy’s voice on the other end of the line.
I hear him saying: “Hey, I’m at your dorm. Where are you?”
At which point I know I am in serious, serious trouble. I have to hang up without even answering him. My body is shaking too much for me to make any kind of sense. My mind is shaking too much for me to make any kind of sense. It seems to have gone all blank and dark, which is probably normal for people who don’t worry all the time, but it certainly isn’t for me.
I rely on that worry to propel me through disasters with some kind of rush of panic, and instead all I’m getting is silence. More than likely it’s the silence of someone who knows they are going to die. That must be why he’s brought me here to this place that Tommy has probably never even seen. He thought I looked too Jewish and now he and ten of his friends are going to emerge from that hellhole and shove me into the wood chipper.
Or maybe worse.
Dear God, what is worse than the wood chipper? I have absolutely no idea, but I know I really don’t want to stick around to find out. I may have gone AWOL inside, but I can still run. Maybe I can even make it to the end of the dirt track, if I get a quick enough start. The motorway isn’t that far from here—I could flag someone down and tell them a neo-Nazi tricked me into being in the movie Fargo.
They would understand.
I hardly understand, but that’s all right. I don’t have to. I just have to bolt down the dirt track as though the hounds of hell are after me. And when I hear him shout, I have to keep going. His legs are ten times longer than my entire body, and he could probably run down someone twice as fit as me, but that doesn’t matter.
All that matters is pumping my arms and legs in a way I’ve never pumped them before. Several times I almost hit myself in the face—that’s how hard I’m running. My breath sounds like there’s a cheese grater down my throat. Every muscle in me is suddenly on fire.
But let it burn, I say to myself. I would let every inch of myself burn down to nothing if it jus
t meant I could get away. I didn’t know, you see. I didn’t understand how much my pathetic life meant to me, until I had the idea of it being snatched away. Suddenly I see all the things I could possibly be—not just the picket fences, but all the things I was never allowed to enjoy or appreciate.
I want the chance to be me. I want it so much that the moment I know he’s gaining on me I do something totally insane. But really, what choice do I have? There is no way in hell I’m going to make it to the road. I can practically feel his boots thundering on the track behind me. In a second he’s going to snag the back of my hoodie, and when he does, it will be game over. So I just fucking swerve.
I hurl myself into the mass of trees and brush to my left, not caring about the steep drop down. Because holy shit, it is a drop. You could call this a hill only if you spent your life looking for bigger and bigger thrills. For one delirious moment my feet are barely touching ground, and I am deathly certain I’m going to tumble and then barrel down into the mess of brambles at the bottom.
But then I get my footing. My sneakers find solid ground.
And I keep fucking running. God only knows where I’m going, but I’m plowing my way toward it anyway. Branches lash my cheeks, and several times I almost break my ankles on sudden lumpy sections of ground, and I just don’t care. All that matters is escaping, to the point where I almost do something extremely stupid.
I just don’t see it, that’s all. I’m too amped on adrenaline and full of thoughts of that fucking wood chipper. Every time I blink I see that swastika behind my eyes—so really, isn’t it just a little understandable? Anyone in the world would do insane things in order to get away from a Nazi. No one waits around for the Nazi to explain.
Not after they’ve taken you to the cabin from Evil Dead.
Never Loved Page 5