Curve Ball

by Charlotte Stein

  He doesn’t even look my way, which pretty much seals the deal. I hallucinated it. The heat and the apologies and the hair touching sent me round the twist, and now I’m living out a sex life that didn’t happen with a man who’s currently talking about biscuits.

  No really. I swear to God, he’s talking about biscuits. They’re not even euphemistic biscuits, either, with a secret code-like hint of what he just did to me. A Kit-Kat would have said so much, here, but he’s discussing custard creams.

  Custard creams! The least sexy of all the teatime treats.

  ‘I always think they taste like pineapple,’ he says, even though they totally don’t. Their subtle custardy flavour has probably just been altered, by something else he recently ate – like the half-demolished paella still on the table, or the warm crusty bread they’ve eaten with it, or I don’t know … Maybe my vagina.

  Does my vagina taste like pineapple? It could be that this is the code word, I think, though if it is he’s being very guarded about it. He’s still not looking at me, and now he’s talking about something even less related to random sex.

  ‘Remember that time we blew up your grandma’s toilet?’ Steven’s saying, which is practically a double whammy of non-eroticism. There’s an elderly person in that sentence, and a device that whisks away your waste.

  It’s of no use to me whatsoever, so I just sit back and half-listen to a story I’ve heard a thousand times before. Steven had found some fireworks stuffed in a skip, and convinced Jason they should set them off in our grandma’s massive cast iron bathtub – for reasons they still don’t seem clear on.

  ‘It was because it seemed safer,’ Jason says, but Steven disagrees.

  ‘No no no. It seemed cooler.’

  ‘So you just lied about it being the only way to contain the explosion.’

  ‘Of course I lied about it. When have I ever wanted to contain an explosion?’

  He has a point. He’s always the one shaking the champagne bottle, instead of gingerly easing out the cork. When someone needs a fork jamming into a plug socket, Steven will be there for them. I’ve seen him blow up hair dryers while trying to fix them; I’ve watched him fire himself out of a cannon that wasn’t designed to fire people out of it.

  Yeah, that’s Steven, all right. Raring to get things started, ready to plunge into danger, always wanting to drag my brother with him. And of course my brother is all too willing to go along with it. Of course he is – without Steven, he’d just be a boring bank manager now, with a mortgage and a middle-class wife.

  And then it hits me, in a large unsettling jolt.

  That whole scenario I’ve just described … It could equally apply to me. It all sounds very familiar: timid little mousy Judy, and Steven seeing how far he can push things, how far he can take things, before I break just like my brother. He certainly pushed things to the limit down there in front of the bar.

  Or did he? Maybe that was just a taster – the warm-up before the big challenge. Because that’s what it looks like to me, now. Like he saw a challenge, and couldn’t resist going for it. In fact, that idea makes so much sense I’m momentarily giddy with it – I almost blurt it out to him right there in front of polite little Kimberley and the brother who almost definitely believes I’m still a virgin.

  ‘So that’s why you buried your face neck-deep in my vagina!’ I want to cry out, like I’m suddenly Miss Marple and he’s the master criminal.

  Only much weirder and more sex-based than that.

  Lucky, really, that I manage to restrain myself. Instead of shouting bizarre accusations that don’t make any sense, I nibble on a bread stick and stew inwardly, while they continue with this conversation about nothing that actually matters.

  God, if only Jason knew.

  I don’t think he’d be laughing it up with Steven about Gran chasing them around the living room with a frying pan if he did. He once went deathly pale when a high school boyfriend accidentally brushed my bottom with his coat, so I doubt he’d be happy and carefree about this.

  Especially after Steven has turned the conversation on to other things.

  Namely:

  ‘I just wanted to impress the 17 girls I was dating.’

  And all right, he doesn’t say 17. But everyone knows that Steven is a revolving door of women, which is bad on a number of levels, here. The first level is that Jason is never going to like the idea of a revolving door of women being anywhere near me. And the second level is that the door is probably not going to be near me for long, because it’s already swung around to the next 17 girls.

  Any way you look at this whole situation, I am totally screwed.

  ‘My favourite of your many conquests is always and forever Melanie Martin.’

  ‘Meeee-laaaanie,’ Steven says. He even closes his eyes in memory of Melanie’s flawless face – those pouty lips, those blue eyes, that raven hair! It’s really no wonder I spent that summer trying to apply Clairol Number 47 to my own dull brown mess. ‘Man, she was a peach.’

  Ugh, does he have to talk about fruit, now?

  I’m already aware that I’m a mouldy potato, Steven, all right? You don’t have to start talking about other women to convince me that five minutes ago was just some terrible mistake. I get it. A blind, feeble monkey would get it, by this point.

  And yet still, he continues.

  ‘Or what about Donna Lincoln?’

  Ah, Donna Lincoln. I once found him making out with her in my Dad’s shed, right smack in the middle of me feeling like I was totally over any crush I’d ever had on him. I’d just started college, and was full of adult, college sorts of things. He was still a laddish loser, working at the local swimming pool, drifting from this to that.

  Whereas I … Well. I was refined, and intelligent, and classy. I didn’t have time for men like him, in their silly T-shirts with their ridiculous hairdos and their terrible taste in anything.

  And then I’d seen him with someone else, and eaten my own heart out like it had a honey centre. I’d chomped on that fucker until there was nothing left – or at least, I’d assumed there was nothing left, at the time. But apparently it’s grown back in the intervening years, fatter and fuller and more prone to him than ever.

  And worst … I suspect he knows. I think he knew. He waited until the perfect time, and then he struck like a cobra. Now I’m just as much a mess than ever, only it’s even more painful than it was before. How can it not be? This time I’ve had a little taste of him, a little hint of what it could be like, before he snatches it away with things like this:

  ‘Dear, dear Donna. She had legs up to her face.’

  I do not have legs up to my face. I barely have legs up to my hips.

  ‘And lips like pillows.’

  In fairness to me, my upper lip is pillow-like. It’s just my lower one that’s letting the side down – though I suspect he doesn’t care. This is a very pointed “I made a mistake” sort of speech, and I know it.

  He couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d drawn a diagram.

  ‘Not to mention her arse.’

  He doesn’t need to say what made her arse so special. I can see it in my mind’s eyes, so much perkier – and more importantly – smaller than mine. And even if I couldn’t, my idiot brother is here to make things worse for me.

  ‘I too would mention her arse, if I was not sat next to the most beautiful posterior in the history of the world,’ he says. And though I know, rationally, that he’s just paying Kimberley a compliment – probably because she’s been rolling her eyes for the last five minutes – I can’t help seeing it as a dig.

  My brother loves me, and wants to protect me, but he’s never understood what it’s like to be less than svelte. He once bought me a rowing machine for my birthday, in all earnestness. He thinks being plump is a character flaw, and right now I agree.

  I feel so flawed I could fall through the floor.

  ‘Kimberley would concur, if she’d only seen it.’

  ‘I probably wou
ld,’ Kimberley says. ‘Was it akin to two apples in a plastic bag?’

  Both men laugh, of course. I’m wondering what my arse would be equivalent to. Two melons? Maybe some oddly shaped potatoes? I lean back against the canvas chair I’m in and let my eyes drift closed – as though I’m tired. But really it’s just so I can better picture the fruit and veg aisle in Asda. And maybe eventually manage to tune this conversation out.

  ‘Oh, it was better than two apples.’

  ‘More like – tennis balls,’ my brother says, now that he’s got the green light to discuss another woman’s bottom in front of his wife. He’s really lucky to have someone like her – someone so restrained and refined and yet still willing to have a laugh.

  Who could ask for more than that?

  ‘Tennis balls?’ Steven says, and then he’s laughing. They’re both laughing. ‘Your arse metaphors stink.’

  ‘Actually it’s arse similes.’

  ‘Well, excuse me. I don’t have a degree in literature – just the degree in how to describe a woman’s body. And I’m pretty sure tennis balls never come into it.’

  ‘Then what does come into it?’

  ‘Anything round and soft. Clouds, marshmallows …’

  ‘So she had an arse like a marshmallow?’

  Steven’s laughing so hard now he can’t speak, which is perhaps my favourite state of his. His eyes always crinkle into these perfect little cartoon-a-like stars, and usually he actually squeezes some tears out. I used to live for those tears.

  But I’m already crossing him back off my “things I’m crazy about” list. It’s going to be hard this time, I can see it. Maybe even harder than it was when I first realised we were in two different leagues, and that he would never see me as anything other than his friend’s sister.

  But I know I can do it. I just have to focus on other things – like the lights over the harbour, so pretty in the darkness, and the gentle lap of the water against the boat. I’ve had a good time, I think. I should see all of this as a positive, as a little taste of heaven.

  Things can get back to normal, now. They can return to reality. All I have to do is keep tuning and tuning and tuning things out, and in truth I’m almost there. I’m just a millimetre away from it, when he speaks again.

  ‘Seriously, though … All the girls, all of those clouds and marshmallows … None of it really matters to me any more.’

  ‘So you’re turning a new leaf for the tenth time?’ Jason asks, as though we’re momentarily one person. We think the same thoughts and voice the same questions and roll the same eyes.

  Steven Stark will never change, and we both know it.

  ‘Nah … I’m just finally admitting the truth, to myself,’ he says, and I can’t help it then. In spite of everything – the running away, the ignoring me, the butt talk – he has my attention again. I suspect he’ll always have my attention, no matter what I try to tell myself.

  But for once, it’s OK.

  It’s OK because Jason asks in this quiet voice what that might be, and Steven replies, ‘That there’s only ever been one girl for me.’

  Before looking directly into my eyes, as though he’s never looked away.

  Chapter Five

  I can’t afford to read too much into his stare. But I’m unable to think of anything else either. My brain absolutely refuses, on pain of death. I threaten it with books by John Grisham and rusty forks inserted into the ear, and all to no avail. It carries on bothering me with Steven Stark’s heavy and pointed look well into the middle of the night, and beyond.

  It’s four in the morning before I get any sleep, and even then it’s not the normal kind I’m used to. My head is full of weird, unsettling dreams about massive men with searchlight eyes, and really obvious metaphors. For example, in one of them I’m trying to run away from a monster that looks exactly like me, only bigger, but I can’t because the ground is made of jelly.

  I don’t think I need Freud to decipher that one. But I’d be happy if he were around, because at least then I’d have someone to tell me to snap out of this – probably in a really angry German accent. No one can carry on making a mess of things when someone’s telling them not to in an angry German accent.

  Unfortunately, all I’ve got is this suffocating boat and my blundering brother’s voice calling down from the deck, just as I’m nodding back off. God only knows what time it is now, though I’m guessing it’s far too early to either a) sound so cheery or b) be enthusiastic about sightseeing.

  ‘I’m going to buy a hat,’ he declares, as though hat buying is the most exciting enterprise in the entire world and I should really know about it, while I groan and try to bury myself under the pillows.

  Of course, doing so only makes me hotter. But hotter is preferable to conscious, and I persevere. I burrow and swaddle and generally turn myself into a suffocating, half-sleeping mess, and eventually I doze. However, it’s a strange and fitful sort of thing – so I suppose it’s no surprise that I don’t know where I am or what’s going on, when I turn over and see Steven standing there. For one brief, dream-addled moment I’m sure he’s escaped from my unconsciousness, and is about to attack me with his searchlight eyes. And then some sense filters back in – though sense isn’t much better.

  It suggests I must have sleepwalked into his bedroom, despite all evidence to the contrary. I’m laid down and he’s stood up; I’m still tangled in my own sheets; I can see the bar behind him. And yet I’m almost certain that’s what must have happened. Why else would he be standing so close to me while I’m half-unconscious? I can almost feel his thigh touching the back of my hand.

  I must have done it. In fact, I’m so sure for a second that my face flushes. Or at least, it would have flushed if it were not already so full of heat and colour. It’s almost like a fever, I think – this fire-y feeling, pressing against the insides of my cheeks. Though I sort of know, even in this dazed state, that it isn’t just because of the sun. It isn’t even embarrassment.

  It’s something else. Something about the way he’s looking at me, as I lie sprawled all over my bed. I’m only wearing a thin little vest – an item of clothing I found adequate, when there was no danger of him ever coming in for a closer look. But it now seems appallingly immodest, almost completely transparent and barely-there. The straps are like spider’s webs, and they don’t contain the swelling curves of my breasts. I know they’re spilling out the sides and over the neckline.

  And worse – in the night the whole thing has twisted and ruffled up. He can see my stomach – a pale curve in the gloom – and probably a bit too much of my right hip. I’m sort of half on my side and half on my back, so the winding shape of my body is pretty easy to make out. It’s made even easier by how far my little sleep-shorts have slid down.

  I must be a horrifying sight.

  It’s just that he doesn’t look as though I’m a horrifying sight. He looks like he’s just seen a ghost, if ghosts were known for being really arousing. And I know that arousing is the right word too, because while I’m still in this stupor I grope him with my own eyes in return, and I see a lot of things I don’t know how to process.

  He’s breathing very hard, for a start. And his face is like mine – his cheeks are bright with a kind of fever. They almost make me want to jump up and get us both a cold compress and some Calpol, followed by some vigorous lying down, maybe.

  Though I suspect childhood cures for mild illness won’t cure a massive erection.

  Because he has that too. He’s just kind of stood there, over my bed, with a massive erection. He doesn’t even try to hide it, the way I probably would if I were in his position. I feel like I should hide something now, even though it’s impossible to see what I’ve got. Ladyboners aren’t a real thing, I tell myself frantically.

  And then I’m calm.

  Or at least as calm as I can be, with a gigantic ladyboner.

  ‘Steven,’ I start to say, but then it’s like before. It’s like before when he did – that.
I’m almost afraid to form complete sentences, in case it breaks this strange spell. This is what it must be like to be attracted to someone, and feel they’re attracted back, I think, but that seems so crazy I don’t want to disturb it.

  He’s not attracted to me, I know it.

  He’s just touching my bare hip with the tips of his fingers because I had a smudge there. He wanted to rub it off, and in all honesty he’s doing a great job of it. After a while, he puts his whole hand into the effort.

  While I forget to breathe, briefly.

  I have to forget to breathe, briefly. Firstly because I’m kind of terrified, but also because I’m sort of afraid that if I do take in oxygen, I’ll somehow disturb the insane trance he appears to have fallen into. And though I am many things: nervous nelly, complete weirdo, owner of a self-esteem so low it could pass for a potted plant, I’m not so foolish that I can tell myself I don’t want this.

  In fact, I’m currently telling myself the opposite. I really want this to go further, and apparently I want it so much that I’m willing to reach up and grab his T-shirt – you know, just in case he decides to run away again, before I get what I’m after. Basically, if this is going to be my only chance at fucking Steven Stark, if tomorrow he’s going to be ashamed and embarrassed, then quite frankly I’m going to make the most of it.

  Thankfully, he seems to like this idea.

  He seems to like this idea a lot.

  The second I get a fistful of that T-shirt, he does something I’ve only previously never imagined happening in any of my daydreams about him – mainly because it seemed so unbelievable it wasn’t actually worth picturing in my head.

  So it’s a thrill to have it actually occur. It makes my insides leap 50 feet in the air, just to feel those soft, soft lips pressing gently against mine. Then pressing harder against mine. And then oh God then he parts them, a little bit, and everything is so slippery and warm and full of this desperate kind of fever.