Mindgasm - A Bad Boy Romance With A Twist (Mind Games Book 3)

by Gabi Moore

  “Funny thing is, I think his name actually was Jack,” I giggled, and turned my hips from side to side to admire the stains.

  “Bitch, are you still high?” She took a swig of her beer. “His name was John.”

  “John? Are you sure?”

  “Oh my God, Nyx.”

  “No, I’m serious though. Wasn’t it Jack?” I reached out and took her beer from her, and drained the bottle. Of its own accord, my arm flexed outward and I threw it hard against the concrete floor, smashing the amber glass into tiny pieces and leaving a wet spill on the floor of the same shape as the one on my skirt.

  “Well, fuck, maybe it was a John and a Jack,” she laughed, “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  The beanbag I was curled up inside held me like an embrace, like a big soft leather hand cradling me. I looked down again at the cum stains on my skirt as though I was peering into a crystal ball, trying to decipher which boy had been responsible. I was pretty sure I hadn’t met a John that evening. Or had I?

  “Whatever. Jizz is jizz, right?” I said, and she snickered again, this time, her pretty face going red.

  Leah was, as she loved telling everyone, half Nigerian, half Swedish and 100% bad bitch. She had scary looking red dreadlocks, a pair of tits that started conversations with strangers in clubs, and a baby face I never saw without layers of fearsome makeup. She was also my best friend, and had called me ‘slag’ roughly once a minute over the entire course of our friendship.

  My head spun. The music was still thumping but it was probably close to 3am and I was coming down now, the wobbly edges of my vision settling down and the rubbery feeling in my limbs slowly disappearing.

  “Oh no, no, no, don’t fade on me now, Nyx, go on then, get us another beer?” she said and looked me up and down.

  “Beer? I’m a bit skint just now, Leah, Jesus.”

  I vaguely became aware of a tall figure approaching us on our beanbags.

  “Ladies, what’s this? Making a mess are we?” said a deep male voice.

  Leah giggled, the glitter on her chocolatey cheekbones making her seem for a moment like a very jolly Christmas ornament. I lifted my head and tried to make out whom it was, but the strobe lights behind him turned him into nothing more than a black silhouette, a crown of yellow and pink beams shooting out from behind him.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be called Jack, would you, love?” I asked, hearing myself slur the words. Leah giggled and covered her face.

  The guy said nothing and kept staring down at us.

  “Or John, are you John perhaps, hm?”

  Leah burst out laughing.

  “Neither, I’m afraid,” said the voice. I was having a hard time deciding on his tone of voice. Suddenly, the tall figure dropped down onto his haunches and in the darkness I started to make out the features on his face.

  “Oh shit! Leah, you daft cow, it’s Matt!” I squealed and clapped my hands on my thighs. All at once I remembered. We had come here with him. He had stared at my fishnets all on the Tube ride here and we had laughed and he had bought us all a round. That had seemed to be a whole lifetime ago.

  “Matt, I’m going to smack you if you start talking about going home,” Leah said, and was all of a sudden squinting down at her phone, trying to make sense of the string of text bubbles on the screen.

  “Leah,” he said, still crouching down, “sweetie, I think it’s time to go home.” Leah reached over and slapped his arm, and he pretended to wince in pain.

  “No, seriously,” he said. “It’s winding down here, shall we clear off?” I marveled at how clear and calm he seemed. Good old Matt. Strong, sober, stable Matt.

  “But we were just wondering about getting another round…” I said and played at twirling my hair at him. He looked down at the smashed bottle on the concrete floor and lifted his eyebrows.

  “Well look and what you’ve gone and done with the last one you had,” he said. I suddenly felt indescribably sad. His gaze lingered on my skirt and he frowned quickly.

  “What’s… what’s that?” he asked, and I heard Leah break out into giggles again.

  “It’s like this, yeah? You know that movie Memento? Where the guy can’t, like, remember who he is or nufink? So he leaves himself clues and things, yeah? Well, Nyx and I were trying to figure out who jizzed on her skirt, seeing as she can’t remember what happened two minutes ago…”

  “Shut up, Leah, that doesn’t even make sense,” I said and tried to stand up, staggering like Bambi in heels.

  Matt scowled at me and wiped his face, then grabbed me round my middle and hoisted me up in one swift movement, throwing me over his shoulder. My hair hung long down his back and my legs dangled down the front of his chest, each of my shoes hanging limply off my feet.

  “Oh my God, Matt, that is like, so hot,” Leah said and gawped. “You’re like a fireman or sumfink.”

  “Get your coat, Leah, we’re leaving.”

  I don’t remember everything that happened to get us out of that warehouse party and out into the street. I don’t remember how we made our way back to the street and caught a taxi, or figured out how to get home again, although I know we must have done it somehow.

  What I can remember is being bunched up in the back seat, draped over Matt’s lap as I bawled about how sorry I was for smashing the beer bottle, and how I swore I’d never do it again. Leah sat opposite us tapping away on her phone and some other guy sat in the front seat, a guy I didn’t recognize. John? Jack? I was beyond caring.

  Matt stroked my hair and told me to calm down, and soon I remember telling him how beautiful the light was. That the streetlights were trapped in the water droplets on the taxi window, and why wouldn’t he just look and see how beautiful they were?

  When they dropped me off at my flat, Matt seemed irritated and told me to message everyone in the morning. The taxi sped off and I stood alone in the street for a while, looking at the lights reflected in the puddles.

  I wobbled inside, clutching my sequined bag under my arm and wondering if there was something sticky in my hair. The house was deathly quiet. I walked slowly down the hallway and tried to get my eyes adjusted to the light. Mom and dad may still be out, but My aunt Lila had been staying with us for a while in the spare bedroom. Her marriage had gone tits up and she had come to live with us for a while. It certainly made these late nights a little harder to pull off quietly.

  I removed my heels and one by one, I took the stairs, stockinged feet on the carpet. I reached the top of the landing, threw down my coat and bag and turned on the bathroom light.

  Fuck, did I look a fright.

  My makeup had smeared. My skin looked pasty and flushed. My hair was flat in the middle and fuzzing at the tips. And there it was, plain as day on my skirt: Jackson Pollock. The mystery cum. A gift of liquid DNA from a shadowy suitor in the night. Had I sucked him off? My lipstick still looked pretty good. God, I really was a slag.

  The thought of peeling off all my clothes, having a shower, removing my makeup and detangling my hair seemed Herculean. I sighed and turned around. I’d sort it all out tomorrow. I just wanted to sleep. As I turned and made for my bedroom I saw aunt Lila standing in the doorway of the guest room, in yoga pants and a Snoopy sleep shirt, her blank face staring hard at me.

  I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes travelled down and up my body, and got caught on the red skirt with the white. I was little red riding hood after the wolf had gotten hold of her. A sticky lace shape, in Valentine colors. It was a cum nebula in a deep red, velvety sky. Kind of, almost, very nearly pretty.

  Aunt Lila just looked at me with horror. I watched her chest rise and fall as she took a breath and tried to gather herself.

  “It’s late, Nyx,” she said, as though it took all the patience in the world to muster those words. “This is the last time. The last time. For God’s sake clean yourself up.”

  I looked down at myself. She was right of course. It wasn’t a nebula. It wasn’t lace, and I wasn’t red ridin
g hood. It was cum and I was a disobedient 18-year-old who made too much noise when she crawled in on a Friday night, reeking of booze. Of course.

  Shame washed over me. A new feeling.

  She turned and closed the door. I wished she had at least slammed it. I stood there, in the harsh bathroom light, trying to think. Mum and dad had never cared that I was a little …exuberant. Hell, they were frequently out themselves until all hours. I thought of peeking into their room and seeing if they were still awake, but thought better of it. I could just see them tomorrow. We’d have a late morning and dad would make us coffee and Nutella toast with sliced bananas.

  I clicked off the light and skulked back to my room. I couldn’t know it at the time, but it was, in fact, ‘the last time’.

  I lay in bed that night till dawn, my head buzzing even though I felt raw and nauseas and tired beyond belief. Though my head was still spinning and my limbs ached, I was seeing something with painful clarity. I didn’t know it at the time, but the spell broke for me that day, in the stairwell.

  Chapter 2

  September 1, 2015

  Two Years Later

  Fast forward two years and I had cleaned myself up, so to speak.

  Really.

  The green tips of my hair grew further and further from my scalp until one day I chopped them off cleanly and went with a short, natural brown bob that felt like it didn’t belong on me for a whole week afterwards. I started wearing my nails short and buffed them in the shower till they went pink and hurt. I cleaned out my closet, threw away three quarters of everything I owned and sat patiently in session after session of group therapy, talking about my transgressions as though only a younger, stupider version of myself had done them, and not me.

  “My mom and dad died instantly in a serious car crash two years ago,” was enough to shut people up. People assumed that this is why I was ‘acting up’, and for a while I was happy to let them. Wasn’t it true? How the fuck should I know. They were just there, and then they weren’t. I didn’t feel sad. In fact, I spent many blank hours in the bathtub, sucking water into my belly button, pushing it out again, wishing I could feel sad. Or anything. But I just took a step away from life. Life simply went two-dimensional and lost its color. The way you zoom out of a flashback in a movie, like everything you’ve just watched was just a memory, just a dream in the past.

  Now it was just me and aunt Lila. Guilty survivors, as it were.

  “Now don’t go all ridiculous on me,” she said, “this is a very intensive course, Nyx. You’ll actually be working, it’s not a big picnic.”

  My aunt Lila was a woman who looked as though she might have been a real knockout once, but long ago in the past, and maybe when men had different tastes in women. She wore expensive but boring looking organic cotton print slacks and tasteful shirts. I had seen those shirts on the washing line, and wondered at the point of printing an extravagant band of yellow or blue, but on the inside of the hem, where nobody would ever see it.

  Aunt Lila smelt like antibacterial soap and menopause, and though I was supposed to be thanking her for being my savior these last few months, I felt anything but.

  Her husband had passed and left her with a convenient fortune, and she was dutifully and painfully lording it over everyone. I could imagine her at church, making the fat Sunday school ladies beg and plead for a donation, and wringing her hands at how much of a burden it was to suddenly be the one in charge of who was and wasn’t allowed to pursue their dreams that day.

  Death had formed a sort of psychic bond between me and aunt Lila. Her brother, my father, had died and then soon afterwards her husband had followed. There were no other nieces or nephews. Nobody but me. And so she wrung her hands and decided that I was her cross in life to bear, and that she ought to fork out for a proper education for me.

  “It’ll be real lectures and real tutorials, not just fannying about every day,” she carried on. I knew for aunt Lila ‘Fannying about’ could mean anything from turning up ten minutes late to doing coke in back alleys on a school night. To be fair, I had been guilty of both at some point. I knew what she was saying. She knew I knew what she was saying. There was money available. A lot of money. I could go to the school of my dreams. But there were …conditions.

  “I know, auntie Lila. I’m ready. It’s going to be great.”

  “It’s not going to be great, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “It’s going to be hard work. Are you even listening to me?”

  She sat opposite me, and we both looked down at the pamphlets and brochures on the table in front of us. Shiny, happy drama students printed on high glass cardboard. One of the most prestigious programs in the country. A veritable field from which the big names would come and pluck out the talent they saw.

  “Melissa Craig, you know Melissa?” she said. “She graduated Blackworth’s two years ago and she’s already had offers to work on a Broadway musical over the summer.”

  My aunt Lila knew all the theatre people, all the actors and actresses and playwrights in England and where they had gone to school and whether their parents were decent or not. My whole family was a theatre family. Or at least, it had been, once. Now it was just my thrice-rehabbed self and aunt Lila, a manager slash professional busy body to the stars.

  “Now I’ve set up a direct debit for you, and you’ll have a hundred pounds a week. I think that’s pretty generous, given the rent is sorted and that I’ll take care of the tuition. If you have other expenses, you just say so, obviously.”

  Obviously. She waited for me to protest, but I knew better. It was a generous offer. One I should be thrilled to have. One even might say I should grovel a little.

  “I’m sure a hundred pounds a week is more than enough. It’s not like I’ll be doing anything other than studying, right?” I flashed her a playful smile.

  She sighed and gave me a weary look.

  “You always had a free spirit,” she said and smiled gently.

  These last few months, I had taken to imagining that when she looked at me, she was seeing my father somehow. It made things better, imagining that she was kind to me because I reminded her of dad.

  “Free? No such thing as a free lunch!” I said, doing my best imitate her and her favorite saying.

  “No, and don’t you forget it,” she laughed.

  I idly thumbed through the pamphlets. Blackworth’s Art College. I would complete an exclusive set design course, after which my aunt would be able to send me off to any of her well-connected friends and secure me a respectable position that would make my father proud. That was the plan, at least. It didn’t hurt that people usually recognized my name. Nyx Westling, daughter of Sir Norman Westling, knighted by the queen for his contributions to Britain’s cultural landscape and for that one time he won all those awards for his performance as Cesar.

  Little Nyx Westling. My parents had graciously put up with my deviance for a little while – they were ‘creatives’ themselves, weren’t they? – but now aunt Lila entered stage left and was ushering in a new act; one in which my character redeems her sorry self and grows up already.

  It was all laid out. All agreed on. All signed and ordered and direct debited. My future lay ahead of me like some colorful pamphlets on a coffee table. It didn’t feel like the most exciting thing in the world, but I guess that’s cold hard reality for you.

  “Dear, I know it’s been hard,” she said, her voice changing all of a sudden.

  No. Not now. I didn’t want another talk like this.

  “I’m fine, aunt Lila, really.”

  “I know you are. You’re strong. I know that. But you’re a very lucky girl. I know you can’t see that right now, but you’re actually in a very fortunate position.”

  Sure, but fortune that came with strings attached.

  “You’re mourning now. We all are. But this new course is going to be a good thing for you. I can just feel it.” She leaned over to squeeze my knee.

  I tried to smile. Tried to play the part o
f a Very Fortunate Girl.

  “I won’t let you down,” I said quietly, looking down at her hand on my leg. She gave me a friendly pat.

  “There’s a good girl.” she said, and stood up to leave.

  I had come a long way. Less than two years ago, I was partying around London like there was no tomorrow, and if there was a substance out there, Leah and I had tried it. But with mom and dad gone, all of that lost its shine. Lost its glitter. I hated what aunt Lila was saying. But in my heart I couldn’t find a way to disagree with her. It was time to sober up, be a mature adult and face reality head on.

  Chapter 3

  What better way to face reality than in a tasteful grey skater dress with little silver earrings and ballet flats?

  It was the third day of my new course and I was meeting with the people I’d liaise with over the course of the semester, and we’d bring to life our very first production. I had responsibly drawn fifty pounds at the start of the week for incidental expenses, and had come to the meeting with a civilized looking folder, a click pen and a can-do attitude.

  “Where the hell is Adam?” said a wiry looking blond girl. “He swore up and down he’d be here today.”

  Tamara Keane was the head producer and had summoned us all here for our first meeting. We were a small company, and the college theatre group typically only managed around thirty people or so. But each and every last one of us was invited, at this first meeting of the new season.

  “Let’s just go on without him?” said the guy beside her.

  I tried to remember if he’d been introduced to me as the choreographer, but to be honest, I had been introduced to dozens of people over the last few days.

  Nevermind.

  Tamara squeezed her eyes shut and drew a deep breath, then threw open a folder and started talking us through a detailed series of notes she’d given us for this semester’s production, a reworking of a classic folk tale. Bluebeard.

  “The story is a reimagined fairytale,” she said, “and so takes place in a time and space parallel to our own. This is not your standard hokey Sherwood forest vibe, and we’re not doing Game of Thrones either; this is something like a formalized collective unconscious, like a dream, but only more precise.”