by Anna Chillon
At my insistence, Vincent told me about him, and he did so with great admiration and sorrow. He told me how Aaron had convinced his parents to take him into their home, he, the son of a criminal and suicidal lawyer. At that time, Vincent was unhappy and always ready to argue, but Dad had treated him patiently and affectionately, like a real brother. It was only thanks to Aron that he hadn’t ended up on the streets, he said.
All our chats, even the most serious couldn’t keep us apart, we always ended up looking for physical contact. We touched and embraced gently, Vincent was careful not to hurt me because I was already sore. Or at least he tried at first; when I started to get back to normal, I noticed immediately how he turned it around, how much I teased him, looking for a stimulus that could quench me.
The problem of teasing him was that I had to accept the consequences.
It didn’t help taking the mickey out of his manhood seeing him sweeping the floor. Even worse, I told him about my encounter with Simon, how he’d tried to kiss me, which had made me confess that I was in a relationship. Even though I didn’t return his advances, it all cost me three quarters of an hour of play fights on the bed, in which I ended up succumbing to his sweet and sweaty pestering.
Between sighs, confessions, laughter and groans, another weekend went too fast, sin filled. And on Monday I got out of gym because of my period, so I could hide another little trace of my jealously guarded secret love.
***
On Tuesday, our philosophy professor was absent, so we had an hour free. I confided to Zoe that I’d made a decision. I would tell her who I was seeing after talking to him about it. I would do so if she promised not to judge me or mention it to anyone else. I made her swear on herself because I knew she was very superstitious.
She didn’t hesitate to do so with her hand on her heart, and she was so happy that she couldn’t resist telling me that she’d had sex with Tim for the first time, the weekend just gone.
It had happened in his car; she wasn’t sure how much she liked it, she’d found it exciting and rather chaotic. But he was very delicate and very kind. Tim had kept asking her if she was OK every minute and she’d told him to hurry or she might lose courage. The best part, however, was after, when they had cuddled tightly.
“Was it like that for you the first time too?” She asked, sitting at the next desk to mine the following lesson, physics. The teacher was a deliberately distracted type, tolerating the slight background hum of his lessons as long as he didn’t have to raise his voice. And she was anxious to know. “Not really,” I revealed, scribbling on a sheet. “My my first time was a bit different.” I remembered the desperate need, the fear, the screams, and the immensity of what Vincent was doing to me. I put my pen on the notebook, scratching the page with black streaks. I sighed. “It wasn’t very gentle, maybe I cried a bit, but...”
“What do you mean you cried? Did it hurt that much?” She asked quietly, grabbing my hand to keep it still.
“What about you?”
“No. At least not to enough to make me cry.”
“I didn’t cry from the pain.” I cried for everything other than the pain.
“Then why?”
“I can’t tell you. I was scared…”
“He scared you? Oh, I knew he was a bastard, otherwise you would talked to me before about him.”
She was as apprehensive as a mother and sometimes I loved her for it, but it was a friend I needed this time, not a mother.
“Please, if you say that I’ll never talk to you about him! He’s not a bastard, I wouldn’t have stayed with him otherwise.”
She seemed to accept that and our secrets continued to focus on that topic every time we had the opportunity. The next morning, however, the only thing she told me was that Tim was going to come and get her at the end of school. She didn’t talk to me anymore and she replied in monosyllables.
At that point it was my turn to be worried about her. When she left the classroom to go to the toilet, I asked for permission to leave immediately after her. I followed and waited in front of the washbasins.
“Is everything OK with Tim?” I asked. “You haven’t argued have you?”
She barely gave me a sardonic smile and washed her hands.
“Will you come home with us today?” Something had upset her, it was obvious. “Sure, but tell me what happened.”
“Not now, I’ll tell you at yours.” She left me in the toilets wondering what could have happened to her and what Tim had to do with it.
I made a lot of hypotheses, far from the truth.
At the sound of the bell, side by side, but without speaking, we left the building and approached Tim's BMW. He was leaning against the door and immediately took Zoe in his arms as if to console her. She had on one of her best jumpers, she’d done her hair so that it fell in waves over her shoulders, and she had put on her new lip gloss and colour changing varnish. I realized that she had made herself up for him.
At that point the passenger door opened and Simon came out wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up.
I greeted him coolly, worried about how I looked, combing my hair with my hands. I no longer wanted him as a boyfriend, but I still wanted him to like me.
“Dealing day?” I asked him just to break the silence.
“Yeah.” A telling look told me that something was wrong.
The warden whistled and motioned for us to move away because, as usual, Tim had parked on the pavement without worrying about the traffic.
“Let's get out of here.” Simon got back into the car as Zoe sat next to me in the back seat. I didn’t understand why she didn’t want to sit in the front with her boyfriend since they seemed to be on good terms.
Tim drove slowly down the road. The radio was turned off, leaving the traffic noise as the only soundtrack of that apparently normal scene, but for me it was surreal.
“Look, I seem to be in a car with the Addams family. Do you want to tell me what's going on?” I said, leaning forward a little bit to be heard by the two guys.
“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on, Giada?” When I heard Simon reply with that insolent tone, I started a cold sweat. Zoe had completely turned to face me and was holding on to her ankle with a contrite expression.
“Zoe, what have you got to tell me?”
“Show her,” she urged.
Tim carried on being the mute chauffeur, while Simon stretched out his mobile and there was a picture of me on the display. It was the Friday before, when Vincent had taken me home and left me at the bus stop. I’d got out of his car, and was walking on the pavement.
“I don’t know why I took that picture.” Simon looked forward with his arm leaning out of the window, his hood hindered me from seeing his profile. He tapped his hand on the door, nervously. “Yes, yes, I know: because despite everything I still like you god damn it.”
“Simon, we've already talked about it...” I murmured, weighing my words.
“Yes, but you weren’t honest.”
Zoe leaned forward and slid her index across the display showing me the rest of the photos.
I couldn’t breathe.
I felt my little castle of cards collapse without the possibility of doing anything to stem the damage.
Simon withdrew his arm and clung to the seat relaxing his back, but he kept talking to the street. “I took the first photo convinced that he just gave you a lift and that you were walking home. Imagine my surprise when I saw your mastiff lower the window to call you back. You ran right back to him like a well-trained dog. I wanted to understand why... well then I understood.”
That photo had been taken with zoom and wasn’t very clear, but clear enough to understand what was happening inside the car: Vincent was kissing me holding my head. He’d called me to say goodbye to him properly, I’d stretched myself to the driving seat and he’d caught my neck to fill my mouth. Neither of us had realized Simon's presence on the other side of the road; we hadn’t thought there were any cars or people.r />
I didn’t know what to invent, I couldn’t lie anymore.
Simon snapped. There was so much anger and bitterness on his face. “With him? Really?”
I looked at him and Zoe. “What do you want me to tell you?”
He moved forward and pushed his mobile under my nose. “Is he fucking you? Is it clearer like that?” He shouted.
“Yes, OK?” I screamed back at him.
“You’re getting hammered by him?” He insisted in a loud voice.
“Yes, I said. I do it with him every weekend! Are you happy now?” I was struggling for breath and my hands were trembling. I felt under accusation and unable to defend myself.
Simon gritted his teeth. “Piece of shit,” he spat out. “This explains everything.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? I could’ve helped you,” Zoe said compassionately.
They were so far off that I regretted having even thought about telling Zoe the identity of my lover. I just wanted to be able to go back in time and deny everything. “Maybe I didn’t tell you because I imagined this absurd reaction. You’re off your heads!” I overflowed with exasperation at their stupidity. “Help me with what? What's wrong?”
Simon tossed his hood back in an abrupt gesture, clawed his headrest as if to wrench it out the way to jump on me. “He’s old enough to be your father, Giada! That bastard’s also your Dad’s best friend: they drink together and then he fucks his daughter! Don’t you understand? Wake up!”
“Woah! Calm down!” Tim intervened, stunned by his tone of voice.
He shook his head. “It breaks my balls that she doesn’t realize.”
“All right, but calm down.”
I squeezed the mobile in my hand wanting to delete the photo. “It’s nothing to do with you who I sleep with, is that clear?”
“Giada, they’re saying it for your own good, you know. They’ve got nothing to gain” Tim watched carefully, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
I clenched at the handle of the door with my face red with anger. “You don’t know anything and then you ambush me.”
“I can understand that.” Zoe knelt on the seat. I would’ve like to have yelled at her too, but she contained herself because she wanted to work out how to get me to talk. “I don’t agree, but I understand that an older man could have seduced you. It happens. But if I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly this time? I'm not here to judge you, just to understand and to find out the truth.”
They’d discovered my secret, how could it get worse? Perhaps, if I could explain, I would save some damage.
I nodded. “All right.”
“Are all those bracelets that you’ve started putting on his gifts?”
I stroked one of them, making me feel closer to him. “Yup. But he hasn’t bought me with bracelets if that's what you think.”
“You know that’s not what I think, Gia. At least I think I know you a bit.”
Tim entered a side road I didn’t know.
“Where are we going?” I asked, guardedly, grabbing his seat.
He slowed down and drove into an isolated car park, surrounded by tall poplars. “It seems to me that we’ve only just started talking: it’s best if we throw ourselves in some corner.”
It was then that Zoe asked the worst question she could’ve asked me. “Are the bruises I’ve seen on you his?”
Simon turned again, all ears.
“He would never hit me,” I replied deadpan, looking at her cautiously. “It's offensive you think that.”
“I don’t know him, I don’t know what he’s capable of. And you haven’t answered my question anyway.”
The car stopped, the engine switched off and I sprang out of the car into the semi-deserted car park. The others did the same. Simon slammed the door more forcefully, plunging at me. “Are you going to reply or not?”
Zoe was to his right. Tim, to his left, hurried to light a cigarette, although Zoe had told me he was quitting because for his career in football. I was surrounded.
“You don’t want an answer, you want to find the dirt where there isn’t any, and you don’t realize that you’re hurting people in the process at all. What do you care about how we like to do it?” I was cornered there and I leaned back against the car. “Are you telling me that none of you’ve ever tied anyone up or been tied up?”
“No, actually,” Simon was ready with his answer.
Tim gave a thumbs-up shifting his embarrassed expression. Zoe pressed her lips together and bit one. Without admitting it, it was clear that’s how they’d had fun in the BMW. Even Simon realized it.
Zoe’s wrists weren’t marked like mine, but somehow Tim had to have tied her up.
“And you want to tell me you've never left bruises on anyone?”
“No, never,” Tim piped up, supported by Zoe emphatically shaking her head.
This time, however, Simon was disconcerted.
“Not obvious ones,” she murmured.
So not like mine, but no matter, a bruise was a bruise.
I crossed my arms boldly, taking my revenge. “Each one to his sins.”
“I can control myself, Giada. I know when to stop. Can your mastiff?” There it was, Simon’s self assurance that attracted me to him in the first place, still immature compared to Vincent.
“We’re not here to talk about our sexual preferences.” Zoe sat on the boot, happy to be able to include herself in a conversation about people who had sex. “Your parents don’t know, do they?”
“You swore, Zoe. You can’t tell them.”
“I'm your friend: I won’t tell them if you don’t want, but you need to understand how absurd your relationship is. You’ve got nothing in common.”
“Do you think a mature man wouldn’t be interested in me?”
“Only mature? Get real.” Simon looked at me with his blue eyes. “He’s ruined you. You wanted to be with me and then suddenly he got in the middle to break my balls. And now we understand why: he likes girls. He had the chance to get rid of your parents, brain wash you and have you at his disposal, so he kicked my ass.”
It was like fighting with windmills, they didn’t want hear what I had to say, they thought they already knew everything. “That's not how it is, you don’t know him, he really loves me.”
“OK, Giada, convince me, and I'll be on your side.” Zoe swung her legs, knocking her Nike’s together.
“It's not someone I happened to meet in a queue at the supermarket, Zoe. He’s been in my life since I was born, my parents have always trusted him. He really does love me.”
“Ah, well, if he loves you, it's perfectly fine for him to do all the revolting things he wants to do to you.” Simon took the phone and pointed his finger at it. “You think this son of a bitch loves you, eh? Eh?”
I didn’t want to stay a minute longer to be insulted by him. I didn’t want to get angry again either, he could say anything he felt like, he couldn’t ruin what Vincent and I had between us. “He told me he loves me, I didn’t invent it myself.”
“That too... ‘what an arsehole!’ Ah well, then, if he told you...” He moved over next to me, leant against the door, and picked up his mobile. “You know, maybe you're right, here it shows perfectly well how much he loves you.” He flicked through the gallery of the photos and showed me another.
I was ready to suffer the humiliation of seeing me and Vincent in a worse than the initial one, but I didn’t expect what I saw.
I looked at the first photo without understanding what I was looking at, Simon flicked through showing me a series.
I instinctively asked myself what I’d done to make him hurt me so much, then I realized, Simon had only taken the photos. It wasn’t him who had the power to hurt me so deeply; that belonged to the only one I loved, to Vincent.
In the photograph he’d been talking about, Vincent was going into the same restaurant he’d taken me with another girl.
“You shouldn’t have shown it to her like that,” Zoe compla
ined, leaping down from the boot. “I told you I wanted to talk to her first.”
Deafened to my friend's words, I snatched the phone out of Simon’s hand and turned my back on them to look at it alone.
Enlarging the girl, she looked no older than me, if anything even younger. “When were these taken?” I asked urgently.
“Last night. Tim and I followed him because we wanted to be sure before talking to Zoe. Tim also went into the restaurant.”
In fact, there was a film of a few seconds, a bit wobbly, in which Vincent completely changed his expression, from authoritarian to amusement. He smiled, stretched out his hand to cover hers on the table and gave her two little taps. Then the video stopped. In the next photo they were outside, in front of the car and he was hugging her tightly completely wrapping her up.
“Giada...” Simon put a hand on my shoulder.
I shrugged him off. “Shut up for a minute!”
I scrolled back struggling to use the touch screen with my suddenly sweaty hands. I watched the film again; I couldn’t see the girls face, but as it zoomed in, Vincent pulled his hand away and I could clearly see her slim hand with pale painted nails and a big oblong electric blue ring.
I remembered.
It was her hand I’d seen at the door before he took me to buy the carpet. He had delivered one of those yellow envelopes he used for his work.
Had he photographed her? Naked? Was it so important that he had to deliver those photos in person, when just the night before he had taken my virginity like a possessed hog? So important to run to her while he was with me?
There was also the worst question of all: had they had sex?
They couldn’t have, she was far too young for him.
Young... like me.
“He went to pick her up from a bar in the Latin Quarter, took her to dinner, and after took her back to the area. He went up with her, I assume to her home, Tim can confirm everything.” Simon was an annoying buzz in my ear. Words that I didn’t want to hear that did nothing but worsen the situation.