by Tilly Delane
It’s nearly midnight, I heard Sheena come home about twenty minutes ago, and I should be long out for the count. Actually, to say I heard her is entirely wrong ‘cause as always I’m plugged into my I-pod. Tonight, Billie Holiday gets the privilege of singing me to sleep. I like the old jazz singers. They make me feel safe. There is a piano in the bar at the Atlantis and when I was little, my mum would often take me down there in my stroller on jazz evenings to let the syrupy atmosphere lull me to sleep. No, what I really mean is that I felt the door open and shut when Sheena came in, the small shudder that the action sends through the house.
In another bid for sleep, I roll from one side onto the other and stick my nose deep into the pillow to take a lungful of Silas’ scent. It’s a bit of a naughty pleasure and I congratulate myself, not for the first time, on convincing him to use the same bedding as me instead of crawling into that horrible sleeping bag every night.
It’s been both heaven and hell snuggling into his scent each evening. It’s funny how something can be both calming and arousing at the same time.
I tentatively stroke my hand down my belly and slip my fingers into my panties. I’m wet, I’ve been perpetually wet since I got here, and I start stroking my clit leisurely.
Normally it doesn’t take me long to get myself off. Practice makes perfect. And due to a lack of proper boyfriends in the last five years, I’ve had a lot of practice. But tonight, I just can’t get there. I can’t settle on a fantasy. My mind keeps wandering. I can’t even say where. I remain restless.
I’m not into psychic mumbo jumbo, but it feels like there is another presence in the house, and it’s not exactly benign.
The thought makes me take my hand out of my panties and sit bolt upright in bed.
Now that I’ve thought it, I can’t help being paranoid. I take my ear buds out and strain my ears. Sure enough, there are noises downstairs that are not normally there at this hour. Sheena tends to come in and go to sleep. She has the other room downstairs, the one that isn’t the living room, closest to the kitchen, and she tends to brush her teeth down there and fall into bed. Fuck knows where and when she goes to pee. But tonight, there are definitely voices downstairs. A female, Sheena, I hope, and a male.
Not Silas. Too rumbly for that. Like rolls of thunder in the distance.
I listen for a while as the exchange gets more heated. I know it is, despite the fact it’s not getting louder. But there is something about the rhythm that changes, that tells me it’s getting more intense, turning into an argument.
Finally, I hear a chair scraping back on the lino and an internal door being opened with a loud creak. I realize it must be the kitchen door and that alone tells me something strange is going on. I’ve not seen the kitchen door in this house shut even once since Sheena rescued me from my fate as a homeless tourist.
“Fucking don’t then!”
The man’s voice travels through the house ─ loud, angry and dark. His timbre makes the walls shake.
It’s followed by a thud and I have no idea how I know, because there has never been any violence in my life, but I’m certain it’s the sound of somebody having their head rammed against a wall.
A second later, the front door is slammed shut.
I’m out of bed and out on the landing in a second. There, I bump into Kalina who’s already out of her room. Her arms are poled on the banister, and she is tentatively looking over the edge to see if she can see anything from there. She looks over her shoulder at me when I join her. She is properly sheet rumpled, her short hair standing in all directions. Her dark eyes are squinting under the light. She must have been fast asleep. Enviable. We stare at each other for a second and she shrugs helplessly, which tells me she hasn’t got a fucking clue what’s going on either.
In a silent exchange, we agree to go down and check on Sheena, but just as we are about to leave the landing, Sheena comes halfway up the stairs and looks up at us. She has a fake smile plastered across her face, but I can see her hands shaking.
“Sorry about that, girls. All good. Go back to bed.”
She turns back downstairs without any further explanation, and that is that.
Kalina and I frown at each other and then go back to our bedrooms.
I lie awake forever after that, listening out for every small sound.
Who the fuck was that?
Silas
I won, but I’m broken.
I really wasn’t on form and Arlo has been getting steadily better. When he first came, he was supposed to be just fodder. Diego even had a bet on that Arlo would bottle out of the first fight. But the guy is as desperate for cash as the rest of us, and he’s tougher than he looks. Plus, he’s been training night and day since. It pays off.
I need to be more vigilant. I can’t afford to lose top spot. Not yet. I only need five more wins at twenty grand a piece and then we’re in the clear. And then all we have to do is keep it that way. Keep him out of our lives and we’re good. The thought of him automatically makes me pedal harder and it fucking hurts.
I’m so bruised, Diego even offered me a cab home, but I refused. Don’t show weakness. Arlo, that sneaky fucker, managed to land one on my jaw, which has already turned a nice shade of bright red. Give it a couple of days and that’ll be a proper bruise. That never happens. Not on my face. They go for my face and they are toast. That’s how I won in the end. He should have kept away from my head and he might have had me. But you go anywhere above my neck and I go fucking ballistic. They had to take him to A&E. I feel a pang of guilt at that but not for long.
We all know what we let ourselves in for.
It’ll be a headache for Diego, though, ‘cause the coppers will want to know what happened. Here comes the cock-and-bull story about weekenders from London looking for a fight. Average height, average weight, average everything. But Diego has got this, I’m not worried. I’m more worried about the bollocking I’ll get from Mum when she sees my face. She’ll think it happened bouncing and she won’t like it.
I’m careful not to walk around with my shirt off in the house anymore these days. The morning I bumped into Grace was a slip up. I don’t think Mum would buy it any longer if she saw the rest of the marks on my body. She doesn’t like me working for a Benson, even though she loved George when we were younger. She just hates old man Benson and his cronies, the head crony in particular. They’re not movie-style mafia or anything, but they’ve been part of old Brighton for a few generations. And old Brighton is not gentry. It’s the whores that serve the gentry.
I finally get to the lighthouse, so I dump my bike and strip off.
Looking down at myself, I can tell I’ll have a black-and-blue mosaic across my abdomen by tomorrow evening.
Compared to what I’ll look like off the back of tonight, I looked like I’d only been in a mild little scrap that day Grace caught me with my shirt off. I still can’t believe I let her catch a glimpse. What a moron. But I hadn’t expected her to be in the bathroom that first morning. And she never said anything. I need to be more careful. Can’t have her telling Mum what she saw.
I look around. The beach is deserted this morning, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I’ve had enough of people for one night. For a moment, as I push through the pain to run naked into the sea, I wonder if I have internal bleeding. If maybe, today, I won’t come back from the sea.
Half an hour later I know there is no such luck.
Grace
“Grace?”
I’m still mostly asleep when I hear his voice. I can’t quite rouse myself. After that strange incident last night, I lay awake until dawn. It scared me. My mum used to say the more terrified I was the deeper I’d sleep, but not last night.
What I witnessed is so far removed from everything I’ve ever known that it might as well be on TV. I might have a bit of a sailor’s mouth on me but, really, I’m just a well brought up girl from a nice part of Washington, D.C. My peers were the children of civil servants, museum curators and government
officials. Sure, we had metal detectors on the gates of my high school, but they never went off. And, sure, we get the occasional drunk in the Atlantis’ bar causing a bit of a scene, but it’s a five-star hotel, even the drunks are five-star assholes.
At some point in the night, I went to the bathroom and I was crapping myself just having to cross the landing. Luckily, the cats, both of them, managed to sneak in and onto my bed, and it was only then that I finally found enough peace to fall asleep.
Sol is the negative image of his sister, more black than white, and they cuddled up like yin and yang at the foot end of the bed, warming my feet. They are there now, slowly getting up, stretching, purring and meowing a greeting at Silas.
Silas.
He’s in the room.
I wake up fully.
He’s standing in the doorway, looking at me.
Silas
Fuck me, she is beautiful.
She wasn’t there sitting on the landing, waiting like normal, when I came out of the shower. So I assumed she’d got up early and gone out already. Didn’t occur to me that she hadn’t got up at all yet and that she’d still be in my bed. She looks so peaceful, my dark mood lifts instantly. I almost regret having called her name to wake her, but I really, really need my mattress to sleep on today. I can’t take these bruises onto the floor, they’ll go necrotic.
I watch her struggle to consciousness and my dick springs to attention. I didn’t take care of him just now because I wasn’t in the mood. Pain, real pain, isn’t sexy. It fucking hurts. But all it takes is for her to open those emerald eyes and for that pussycat mouth to curl up at the corner and he’s all game down there. It helps that the duvet has ridden down to her waist, she’s wearing only a ribbed white man’s vest, kryptonite, and I can see a lot of her cleavage. As her eyes flutter open, she can’t help but notice what’s happening to me, I’m wearing jogging bottoms for Christ’s sake, and her tongue darts out to lick her lips as she tries hard to look everywhere but there. It’s not a conscious action and that makes it five times as sexy.
“Hey,” she mutters, finally settling on my eyes in her search for an anchor in the room. “Are you back early?”
Before I can answer, she frowns and starts rooting around in the bed for something that turns out to be her I-pod. She looks at it and starts swearing.
“Shit, Silas, I’m so sorry.” The moment she utters my name, it’s like a bolt through the heart, and, yeah, down to my dick. “I totally overslept.”
As she sits up, the cats that were curled up by her feet when I came in and have started rousing jump off the bed. They pad over to me and rub up against my legs. I bend down to stroke their heads, hiding my hard-on, willing him to go down. Sol takes a swipe at me and draws blood from the back of my hand. That helps. I straighten up.
“Whoa,” Grace mutters, putting a flat palm on the mattress to steady herself. “Gimme a minute. I feel a bit woozy.”
“Heavy night?”
She gently shakes her head.
“No. I rarely drink. Just couldn’t sleep. Didn’t fall asleep until, I don’t know, about an hour ago?”
My turn to swear.
“Shit, Grace, I’m sorry. I’ll go and sleep in Mum’s bed when she goes, or something. You get some more rest.”
“Your mum’s going to work?” she asks, and there is a strange quality to the question.
“Yeah, ‘course,” I answer.
“I guess Kalina is already out?”
“Probably.”
There is a weird moment when she looks at me very, very intensely, and I can tell something big is about to shift in my universe.
“There was a man in the house last night,” she says slowly, and I freeze.
A chill creeps down my spine.
“I think,” she carries on, then pauses as if she is searching her brain for the truth in her words, “I don’t know exactly, but I think he shoved your mum into the wall.”
“Fuck,” I say and look at her as my brain goes into overdrive.
I was right, he’s back. And Mum let him into the fucking house. She never fucking learns. I knew it. All those texts she was suddenly getting. All those ‘I’ve got to take this’ calls then disappearing into her bedroom. Still, what Grace says shocks me. He’s never been violent at home. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be now. It’s been a long time. I wouldn’t put it past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him if he’s desperate enough.
Grace is watching me closely. It’s clear to her that I know who he is but that’s not the question she asks.
“Is he dangerous?”
“Not in the way you might think.”
I see the fear in her eyes and also the exhaustion of a sleepless night. I wonder what she sees in mine, because again something happens to the quality of the air in the room. Another shift. Between her and me this time.
She draws up her legs and curls into a ball, lays her cheek sideways onto her knees and just looks at me questioningly. She is making herself small and suddenly I know where she is going with this. I might have only had two girlfriends but I ain’t stupid. And we’ve been dancing around each other for days now. Like a fight in which neither opponent throws the first punch. Now it’s there, in her eyes. The first punch. And I’m acutely aware that if I duck from it, it’s gonna cut her like fuck. So I don’t duck. I just lay down the rules.
“Move over,” I say. “No touching.”
She smiles.
“No touching,” she agrees and scoots towards the wall to give me more space.
By my feet, Luna has started gnawing on my big toe in a desperate bid to make me go feed her, while Sol is already halfway down the stairs, meowing loudly.
“I’ll be back in a second,” I say to Grace. “Just feeding these guys.”
I turn away and go down to the kitchen, gathering my thoughts.
This is a stupid, stupid idea.
But I can’t back out now.
More to the point, I don’t want to.
Fuck knows, I need this as much as she does.
Shelter. Companionship. Peace.
By the time I get back to my room, she is fast asleep again, face turned to the wall.
Or so I think.
I wonder for a moment if I should just leave her to it and go crawl into Mum’s bed after all, but then she lifts the duvet behind her.
“Get in,” she demands.
I swallow hard at the sight of her arse. She’s wearing just normal white cotton knickers, nothing special but, man, they may as well be the finest lace lingerie the way they show off those perfect ripe cheeks. Her vest top has ridden up a bit and reveals a strip of skin along the small of her back. She has dimples there, left and right of her spine, and I feel the overwhelming urge to kiss them. Then maybe a little lower.
Now I really, really wish I’d jerked off in the shower.
Grace
I know he’s looking at my ass, and I know he likes what he sees. I know because he just made this really low sound in his throat. Something between a growl and a moan and it goes straight to my core. I bet he doesn’t even know he made that sound.
I wonder if I’ve made him hard again. I hope so. I want him to suffer as much as I do if he insists on this stupid no touching rule. Who is he kidding? We’re on a roller coaster and he knows it.
I feel empowered by the effect I have on this man in a way I never thought possible. I used to sneer at women who would get off on how they could drive a man crazy. My friend Cindy used to brag about how she could orgasm by giving her boyfriend a blowjob. Used to think it was just hyperbole. Now I’m not so sure.
He’s still hesitating, and I flap the duvet I’m holding up behind me a little.
“Come on, I’m getting cold,” I say, and my voice sounds unintentionally husky.
I sense him move across the room, and then the mattress dips behind me. He hasn’t shed either his sweatpants or his tee and I’m disappointed. Even if we’re not touching, I was hoping for the warmth of
his skin next to mine.
He lies on his back and crosses his arms behind his head.
It’s amazing how much you can tell is going on around you without even looking. I never noticed that before. He’s making me notice a lot of things I’ve never noticed before.
Like the fact that if you are aroused enough, the ribbed cotton of your tank top really rubs over your nipples each time you take a breath. I desperately, desperately want him to spoon me, put a hand on my tit and stroke that nipple just a little. I think that’s all it would take. It would be enough. I’d go off like a rocket. The thought makes me huff out a suppressed sigh.
“Grace!” he hisses warningly, and I clench at the sound of his voice. “Go to sleep.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not doing this.”
“Why not?”
I never thought I’d ever be this forward, but in a strange way, his restraint makes it easy. I feel him gingerly turn onto his side. He groans, but this time the sound doesn’t spell lust. It spells pain. I think of those bruises he had the day I met him and the red mark I saw on his cheek earlier.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” he answers. “Go to sleep.”
I nearly die from electric shock as he gently pulls my hair away from my neck and plants a kiss just below my ear. A shudder runs through my whole body, from that one brief touch.
“I thought you said no touching,” I murmur.
“Make no mistake,” he says softly. “I want you.”
And then he goes and does one better.
He licks up behind my ear in one long, slick stroke of the tongue. My pussy contracts sharply and I jerk.
“More,” I moan, loudly.
“No,” he whispers in my ear. “Not today. Go to sleep, Grace.”
I want to protest, but I can hear in his tone that the verdict is final.
I try to control my breathing and, eventually, it works.
I sound like I’m asleep.
Silas
I can’t believe I just fucking did that.
Me, Silas O’Brien, the guy who dated his first girlfriend for weeks before the first chaste kiss. What the fuck is happening here?