by Tilly Delane
My hand flies to my mouth.
“Fuck.”
“Fuck, indeed. But it gets better. Enter Cecil O’Brien, a guy who had the hots for Mum since fucking pre-school. She was his childhood crush all grown up into this internationally successful model, he was an MMA champion. Match made in fucking heaven. He takes care of the cunt for Mum and eventually Cecil and her get married. That’s why we are still O’Briens even though Cecil isn’t my father.”
“What?” I ask, my head swimming.
What a back story. I feel positively boring in comparison.
“Yeah. Cecil was a nicer type of arsehole but an arsehole, nonetheless. Was. Past tense. Now…never mind. Either way, he wasn’t the most faithful of people. Kept shagging other women left, right and centre. So eventually Mum got her own back with the next cunt. My father. He didn’t stick around, and I don’t think she wanted him to either. He was supposed to be just a revenge fuck. Only it went hideously wrong and she got knocked up again. With me. Cecil was even gonna take her back if she had an abortion. But full circle back to Catholic upbringing and I was born. Needless to say, Cecil hated my guts. Still does.”
A bunch of puzzle pieces are falling into place for me right now. There was a Cecil mentioned in connection with Diego setting up next week’s fight, and I’m certain it’s the same one. It’s not exactly a common name. But that’s not what we came here to talk about, so I prompt him a little.
“Rowan?”
Silas takes another big breath.
“Yeah. He came with cunt number...I’ve lost count. A guy called James. Came after we had already been priced out of Brighton and relocated to Shoreham. Actually, he wasn’t really a cunt. Just an opportunist. He was just some random builder bloke who did some work on the house for us, made eyes at Mum and then moved in, complete with his whole fucking brood. He was basically looking for a new mother for his kids. His wife had died a year or so previously in a freak accident. He had a daughter called Sammy, she was quite sweet, and a little boy called Adam. They were fine. And then he had Rowan. Twelve, same age as me. Though he always made a big fucking deal out of being six months older than me. He wasn’t James’ son. James had kind of inherited him from his dead wife. Fuck knows who his father was. But anyway, Rowan moved into my room with me and when Mum kicked James out after a couple of years, that’s where Rowan stayed. Well, not in my room, he moved out into the one Kalina is in now, but the point is, he stayed with us. James didn’t want him, so Mum decided to keep him. Like a fucking pet.”
“Well, I get why you didn’t like him. Must be tough having somebody dumped in your space like that.”
He looks up at me for the first time since he’s started talking about Rowan and his eyes bore into me with an intensity that makes me shiver. I can tell he’s making a decision there and then about how far I’m allowed in. Then he shakes his head.
“No, Grace, I fucking loved him.”
Silas
It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud.
I did.
I loved that fucker like an actual brother. I would have died for him. No question. I know how I just sounded to Grace but, actually, Rowan moving in and then staying when Mum kicked James to the kerb was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Before Rowan, I’d been fucking lonely most of the time. Mum was always at work. No matter which cunt was sharing her bed, she always, always maintained her independence. It’s what killed it with James. He wanted her to stop working and take more care of his kids. She told him to fuck off. She liked Sammy and Adam well enough but she ain’t the mummy type.
Never has been. I was at nursery all day from the moment I hit six months. She’s good with teens, though. Once you can let yourself in and out of the house with your own key, she’s a top mum. Before? Not so much.
So before Rowan, I’d been pretty lonely, and it was like having a ready-made brother. We got on like a house on fire. Even in the two years we actually shared my room. Both loved the same kind of stuff, both got into MMA at the same time. Best sparring partner in the world. Thick as thieves we were.
Till Niamh.
I realise that I’ve disappeared into my own head when Grace takes the stick away from me that I’ve been twirling in my hand and pokes me with it to regain my attention.
“We were like actual brothers,” I carry on. “I remember the day Mum officially adopted him, which took forever because of all the legal shit, but I was so chuffed. Fucking made. We were already into competition fighting then, both of us. But strictly legit MMA fights, nothing like the shite that goes down at TripleX. Or so I thought. Turns out, Rowan was already knee-deep involved with the Bensons back when we were still at school.”
Grace frowns at that.
“How did you not notice?”
“Niamh,” I answer. “We’d all been friends for a long time, but then Niamh and I got together and you know how it is, first love and all that. I kind of lost track of where Rowan was most nights.”
Despite everything that fucker has done to me, I still feel a twinge of guilt at that. Maybe if I hadn’t been so fucking wrapped up in Niamh and trying to make her happy, he wouldn’t have fallen off the tracks. And maybe if he hadn’t fallen off the tracks, he wouldn’t have felt the need to annihilate me, us.
I’ve thought about that night a hundred million times backwards, forwards and sideways. Till it became an obsession I had to break, and at the end of the day I still think he did what he did because he was hurt. Because I’d taken my eye off him and he’d got into trouble, and he wanted to punish us for not noticing how far he’d slipped. But no matter what, there are things there are no excuse for.
It’s a Friday night, the house is empty apart from the two of us and things have just got serious. We’re both naked, lying on our sides, kissing. I’m stroking Niamh’s breasts the way she says she likes, and I tweak her left nipple. She moans but I’m not sure if it’s a real moan. I feel the pressure building again and not in a good way. We’ve been together nearly three years, have been having full on sex for the last two, but still I have never been able to make her come. Not with my hands, or tongue, or dick. And I’ve tried. Boy, have I tried. It’s a dark cloud that continuously hangs over our relationship. For a long time, she pretended, and I was naive enough to buy her climaxes. Then one day, she confessed. Since then, I’ve done everything she’s asked me to do, exactly how she’s asked me to do it, did it every which way she wanted to do it, played every role she wanted me to play and some of it was downright filthy. But nothing. She senses me getting tense and reaches down to wrap her hand around my dick. I’m hard for her whatever. I’m nineteen and I get hard if a chick licks her lips, so no matter what the difficulty between us, having Niamh naked in my arms will make me hard like a rock. She takes her lips off mine.
“Relax,” she says.
She pushes me onto my back and starts sliding down, kissing a path down my body and then latches onto my dick. She loves giving head, loves being in control. She gets off on the power trip, she says. And it’s true, nothing gets her wetter than knowing she has me at the flick of her tongue. And she is so fucking good at this. I’ve never been with another woman, so I have no comparison, but I don’t need to. I can’t imagine another woman’s mouth on me like this. She is the one. She sucks me just right, going long and hard, soft and slow, licking around the head, teasing me with the edge of her teeth and even gently suckling on my balls in a way that drives me nuts. Soon I’m at the point of no return, that moment when the house could be on fire but you can’t stop, you have to climax first no matter what, though you’re not quite there. I’ve been watching her but now my head falls back and my eyes close. I vaguely register the door opening and a movement in the room. My eyes flutter open and I see Rowan standing behind her. His jeans are undone, and he is holding her by the hips. He grins at me as he enters her from behind, shoving his full length into her in one swift stroke. It pushes her mouth further onto my cock and she moans
around it. A real moan. Rowan pumps into her rough and fast, while Niamh’s sucking on me gets erratic and desperate. But I’m too far gone already. I spill into her and while she lets my come drip from her lips, I watch in a mixture of post-orgasmic bliss and total horror how Rowan grabs around her waist, his hand disappearing to what I’m sure is her clit as he pounds her like a rag doll. And within seconds, she starts trembling all over, coming with a choked whimper, my softening dick still in her mouth. A real orgasm.
It’s funny how in actual fact it doesn’t take more than a few sentences to tell the story, here under a tree in the middle of the cemetery. I had to shut my eyes, though, to go through with it and now I open them and look at Grace. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, but it sure as hell wasn’t a deep frown line between her brows, telling me she doesn’t think I’ve finished. Shock, maybe. Horror. Disgust even. But not an ‘and then what?’ frown.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “Not what I was expecting, and I get now why this─”
She points at my crotch.
“Doesn’t want to go in here.”
She points at her mouth.
“Though I’d still like to try to convince him otherwise. But here’s the real question, how come you hate Rowan, but you still meet up with Niamh for tea?”
Grace
He looks at me in that completely blank way people have when they’re not comprehending a single syllable of what you’ve said.
“Why would I be mad at Niamh?” he asks, and I get the feeling we need to back up a bit. I clearly heard a different story from the one he’s been telling me.
“Right, okay. Tell me what happened next. I mean immediately after. Did you guys talk about it?”
“What?? No. What happened immediately after is that Rowan took his dick out of my girlfriend, and then he disappeared out of the house before I could get mine out of her mouth. Literally. That was the last I saw of him until we went to the dogs. He came back the next day, while I was out, to pack a bag. And then he was gone. That’s when we found out he’d been running up debts left, right and centre with bookmakers. And that he had been fighting for the Bensons as payback. Still left us with the lion’s share, though.”
“Okay. Forget Rowan for a minute. What about Niamh? Did you talk to her?”
He looks at me with regret then shakes his head.
“I couldn’t be with her after that. It was just too much. I knew it wasn’t her fault, but still...We just kind of split there and then. Didn’t even need saying. We looked at each other and we knew we were done. Never mentioned it.”
“Are you sure?”
“About?”
“That it wasn’t her fault?”
He gets pissy at that and in a way it’s a relief because up to now he’s been too fucking stoic about the whole thing. Robotic.
“What do you mean? Did you listen to a single word I said?”
I know I’m on thin ice when I respond, but I also figure I’ll be gone tomorrow and maybe, just maybe, I can serve that purpose for him. The one who brings the truth. Who mentions the fucking obvious.
“Every single one. And what I hear is the story of a woman who’s got fucked-up sexual stuff going on, so she goes and sets up some fucked-up two brother fantasy to service her fucked-up sexual kinks. And burns two people in the process.”
He looks at me wide-eyed, and I realize that he really thought that she was an innocent in all of this. God, men can be such idiots.
“Trust me,” I add wryly. “A woman doesn’t orgasm when she is raped. Especially not one that has problems climaxing. I would bet my bottom dollar that she set this up.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time after that, just stares at me, almost angrily. Eventually, I get to my feet and dust myself off.
“Enough of this. I don’t want to spend the rest of my time with you talking about your fucked-up ex and your fucked-up stepbrother.”
I lean down to bring my face to his and give him a good view of my cleavage.
“I want to spend it as us.”
He smiles at that and I know we’re good.
Silas
I know it’s a fucking cliché, but I feel lighter after I tell Grace about what happened with Rowan, Niamh and me. I find her evaluation of it hard to stomach but nevertheless I feel better. She threw me a bit with her nonchalance but, actually, I liked the way she reacted to me telling her my deepest, darkest secret. Neutral. Logical. Astute. Grace.
I also get that she doesn’t want to carry on talking about it, so after our little heart-to-heart under the tree in the cemetery, I push the past out of my mind. Practice has made perfect and I actually manage to give her my full presence in the present after we leave to make our way home to supervise Mum’s cooking. By the time we get to the house, it’s clear we are bloody well needed.
Mum’s decided she is making lasagne, one of the few things she thinks she can cook and has already managed to burn the mince in the frying pan. It really is a gift. I take over as soon as we get in, ordering her to make some cocktails for Kalina, Grace and herself while I do the food. Sheena O’Brien is great at cocktails. Or so I’ve been told. I don’t drink. Grace doesn’t really either, the only time I’ve seen her drink was at the track when Diego plied the women with champagne, but tonight she gratefully accepts the Gimlet Mum puts in front of her.
Kalina, who comes down as soon as she hears Grace and me return, is game, too. So while I stay at the hob, making the bolognese and then the béchamel sauce for the lasagne, I listen to the women talk and laugh and get tipsy. It’s nice. Especially when Grace comes over and helps me cut the onion, garlic, red pepper and carrot that Mum forgot to fry with the meat.
There is a weird sense of family in the air that I’m not used to, like an American fucking sitcom or something. One that is utterly unfamiliar but that I really, really like. There is even a cake. On the windowsill, there is a cake with a hole in the middle cooling down, which I assume Kalina has made since there is no way on earth you’d find my mother ever doing any cakey-bakey. Those cake bakes at school? I was the kid who brought in the multi-pack from Tesco. I smile at Kalina across the kitchen and jerk my chin in direction of the cake.
“Did you make that?”
She nods.
“Is Kolasz.”
“Okay.”
She grins.
“Is wedding cake, really, but who wants to eat cake only once a lifetime?”
It takes me a second to get my head around her syntax but then I laugh. The girl is fucking genius if you pay attention. Grace looks over at her with the kind of affection that says she figured that one out a long time ago. She leaves her carrot chopping station and goes over to hug Kalina.
“I’ll miss you,” she says.
Grace can’t see it, but I can. Kalina shuts her eyes tight for a moment and she looks like she’s about to cry, but then she laughs instead as she withdraws from the embrace.
“No need. Wait until you taste Kolasz. You will take me with you in hand luggage.”
Grace steps back a bit and scrutinizes her playfully.
“Yep, you’ll fit in the overhead locker just fine. You can come.”
Then she turns to me with a big, cheeky smile.
“Sorry, Silas, it’s a dog crate in the hold for you.”
Our eyes meet across the kitchen and there is so much longing between us it’s a miracle the kitchen doesn’t spontaneously combust.
How am I ever going to live without her?
Grace
If the occasion wasn’t so sad, it’d be a grand kitchen party. We have the radio on some bizarre music station, called SAM FM, that plays hits from the last fifty years with no apparent rhyme or reason peppered with the occasional cryptic pre-recorded one liner and while Silas prepares the food, Sheena slowly but surely gets us rat-assed on Gimlets.
I’ve heard of them. I’ve been tending bar at the Atlantis since I was old enough to tend bar, and they sit firmly on our classic cocktail menu
, somewhere between the Manhattan and the Cosmopolitan, but I can’t remember anyone ever ordering one.
They’re delicious. Finally, I have the answer to the question what purpose lime cordial serves.
The tipsier we get the more amused Silas seems and the more Kalina starts nagging Sheena to let her give her a makeover while the lasagna is in the oven. Three Gimlets later, Sheena finally gives in and lets Kalina get her makeup case. Though ‘case’ is an understatement. It’s more of a trunk. On wheels. I want to help, but Kalina shoos me off, so I offer my services to Silas instead.
We’re told not to look as soon as Kalina finishes examining Sheena’s profile by cradling her jaw and turning her this way and that under the kitchen light. It’s quite impressive how this slip of a girl at only eighteen can hold her liquor. She’s definitely still more sober than I am. She opens her box of tricks and begins working her magic on Sheena, and we turn our backs to them and start preparing the salad, hip to hip. Silas does pretty much the lot while I hack at the bell peppers. He looks over, tuts in my ear, places himself behind me and shows me how to wield the knife professionally, hand over hand, in a reenactment of every cheesy pool playing movie scene. But with knives. And vegetables. I can feel his hard-on against my butt and grind into him a little. I hear him subdue a groan and giggle a little. Which means I’m on my way to pretty sloshed. I never giggle.
“You know, children, I may have my eyes shut but I can hear perfectly well,” Sheena says, amusement tinting her voice.
“Shshsh, no moving, Sheena,” Kalina reprimands her. “Let children play.”
It’s funny, but it is exactly how I feel. Like a naughty child. I make us put the knife down, toss the pepper pieces into the salad and sling an arm backwards around Silas’ neck. Then I turn my head, so I can kiss him. He responds hungrily. With a lot of tongue. Relief washes over me, and it is only now that I realize our earlier heart to heart had me all tensed up, wondering if it would taint the sexual ease between us somehow. It really, really hasn’t. When he withdraws, we look into each other’s eyes and the heat between us is as palpable as ever.