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

by Gabi Moore

  “I won’t see Valerie tonight, she’s spending the night with her friend from London.”

  Mama Tembi paused and looked at me. Oops. Had I said something I shouldn’t have? Blown Valerie’s cover somehow?

  “Friend from London?” she asked, coming back towards me.

  “Um, I think she mentioned she just wanted to visit them this evening or something. I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.

  “There’s nobody here from London. She doesn’t have a friend from London,” she said, looking at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.

  “Well, I don’t know, she just told me …maybe you should ask her?”

  “This friend, they arrived last week? With the other missionaries?” she said.

  “No, no this is an old friend she’s been visiting for ages.”

  Mama Tembi’s brows knitted, but then she smiled and threw her hands up.

  “Nevermind, maybe she just didn’t mention it! Maybe in the next village” she said and left the room in a hurry.

  It took a long while to form in my head.

  But the thought eventually did crystallize, slow and hard and with painful edges, in my mind. Once it was there, I felt stupid for not seeing it before. Of course. There was no friend from London and there had never been. Valerie was visiting him. She had always been visiting him.

  The cat sidled up to me and slinked its tail round my leg. I looked down at its inquisitive face.

  Then I threw up all over the floor.

  Chapter 20 - Penelope

  Some chickens were loitering around the front door. I shooed them away and stumbled into the dorm room, slamming the door behind me. Inside was painfully quiet. Eventually, even the protests of the chickens outside died down and I was left alone in there with my thoughts and Valerie’s washing hanging over the sink.

  I shuffled over to my bed and tried to push down the retching sensation. No matter which way I sat, or how I twisted my torso, waves of nausea kept washing over me. I put a hand to my stomach, almost begging it to calm down.

  I shuffled over to the bedside table and pulled out a small hessian pouch bundled with a string. Bent double off the edge of the mattress, I laid out its contents on the floor between my feet: a cheap clay pipe, some matches and a bank bag of dried herbs that could be tea leaves, if you weren’t looking too closely.

  I grimaced through the bilious feeling at the back of my throat and tried to focus on placing a small amount in the pipe, tamping it down, lighting it. It took the most supreme effort, but this was the only thing that could calm my nerves these days. Vik had herbs for everything. Herbs to rest the mind, herbs to calm the stomach and herbs to bring on deep sleep. Of course, I never even had any of these problems before I met him in the first place, but that was another story.

  I put the tip to my lips and inhaled. I held the puff in my lungs for as long as I could manage and then let it go, sinking into the mattress. God, that felt better. My fingers went to all the other things I had in the drawer. Everything in this damn room was shared with Valerie, but this drawer was mine. I took everything out and set it on the floor, like a witch doctor trying to read the future, except instead of chicken bones I had Chappie wrappers and paperclips.

  I looked at the brown envelope from Dylan, empty now except for his message which these days seemed written in a language I couldn’t speak anymore. The first few were light and peppered with exclamations and smiley faces. Stay safe! I love you! There were other letters from him, but they grew shorter and shorter. One month it was Looks like you’ve gone native!! Haha just kidding, but it’s good you’re adjusting. The next month, a little tension appearing. It’s strange how little you mention the wedding. The month after that, Still alive?! Haha just kidding, but really, I’m not hurt, you could just let me know what the hell it is you’re doing over there. And the most recent one, the last and possibly final one, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and you know how I feel about ultimatums in relationships…

  I had started reading that one but never finished. I’m not sure why. Maybe I knew how it ended: you’re a bad girl, Penny, so come home as soon as possible so I can ignore you and show you just how bad.

  I also had a bible, some coins, gum, and several small, unopened parcels. Vik’s parcels. Filled with rare and pungent dried flowers and roots meant to discourage a baby from taking hold. All the women used these herbs. Vik would reach up his long torso and fetch one from a tin on a high shelf, and tell me to take it carefully, with water, on an empty stomach in the morning. What I had really done was smiled, nodded, taken it home and stashed it here in this drawer, where it and several more like it stayed, unopened. There were more than nine parcels.

  I can’t tell you why I did this. I’m not even sure myself. I only knew that I did want to do it. After weeks of fighting with tired soil to grow a crop nobody wanted, the idea of growing something inside of me seemed unthinkably alluring. I knew it was crazy. Of course I knew that. I had sat in bed here many nights trying to imagine what I would do. I couldn’t go back home and marry Dylan. Not after everything. And as much as it hurt me to admit it, Viktor was no knight in shining armor either. He used me. But in our many arguments, I guess he had been right about one thing: I had used him too. I needed an excuse to run away, and he had “excuse” written all over him in big, tattooed letters.

  But I certainly didn’t need him anymore.

  I had this beautiful secret growing inside me now, and somehow nothing else seemed to matter quite as much as it did before. I took another drag of the pipe and waited a little for the soothing smoke to gently loosen the nauseas feeling. It was working. I stood quickly and snatched up each of the parcels, taking them to the bathroom.

  If you had told me a year ago that I would be standing here, in the middle of deepest darkest Africa, in a rundown bathroom with a pipe dangling from my lips, steadily flushing tiny parcels of potent witch doctor herbs down the toilet, I would have laughed in your face. I was engaged to be married to an unnervingly “good man”, I was supposed to wear a chic but modest white wedding gown and I was meant for a clean, easy life.

  I watched a parcel whizz round the aged toilet bowl as I yanked the chain from above, and then it disappeared down the hole and the water filled up again. I plopped in another. It was a waste, of course. They were difficult herbs to find, and took time to prepare. I could almost see his careful fingers on the intricate folds on the paper of each parcel. But nevermind. I had what I really wanted from him now.

  A long, long time ago, I had prayed for the perfect man. A good man. I got Dylan Moore, everything a girl like me was supposed to want. But deep down inside, another part of me prayed for something else.

  A bad man.

  And now growing in my belly was living proof that no matter how pretty life is on the surface, your real desires, what you really want, well, those things find a way. They’re underneath, waiting. I yanked the chain and watched another parcel go down, and then another, and another.

  When I was done, I walked back to the bed and sat, glad that the nausea was almost completely gone, and in its place a delicious, warm feeling. Everything was going to be alright. Without Dylan. Without Vik. Just me and my …I couldn’t say the word yet. “Baby”.

  I crouched down and took Dylan’s letters, and in an instant I began to tear them up, into tiny, square pieces, smaller and smaller. Head full of smoke, I imagined the paper was his brittle, two-dimensional body, and I was tearing him apart. The pieces were so small he’d never put himself back together again. When all the letters were torn, I swished the pile to muddle the pieces. These I burnt on the stove.

  I ate one of the candies in the drawer and threw the rest away, along with the paperclips and other sundry trash in the drawer. As I rose to go outside and throw everything in the outside skip, I heard footsteps on the stones outside. Valerie?

  I froze and pricked my ears. The door opened softly and she stood there for a second, looking at me. Her face was differ
ent somehow. Her hair looked like shit, which was certainly a first, and the skin under her eyes seemed both puffy and deflated.

  In other circumstances, I might have said, “Oh you’re home!” or “hey!” and smiled, but on the other side of a few puffs of chamba, all of that seemed pretty pointless right now. I went outside, tossed my bag of trash on the skip and came back in. She was lying on her own bed, knees up and hands crossed behind her head. It was her preferred pose for when she was feeling philosophical, or had something to rant about. Which wasn’t often.

  “Remember what you said that time we were almost hijacked? About how it’s hard to know whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy?” she said at last, contemplating the ceiling.

  “Pretty sure I never said anything like that” I said.

  “No, no, you did. You were saying that maybe even bad guys think they’re the good guys, so how can you ever really know, right?”

  “I think you might have misunderstood me…” I sat down on my own bed. I was suddenly hit with a wild urge to run away from her, and this room. I wanted my own place.

  “Well anyway, I think you were right. It’s not so simple, you know? I think sometimes the one everyone thinks is the bad guy is actually the good guy” she said.

  I took a deep breath. I tried to force out of my mind the image of her, with Vik’s rough hands wrapped around her hips. His tight, hard muscles …they had felt like mine. But as I looked at her lying back on the mattress, hair fanned out, I could see the ghost of him on her, and I felt the nausea returning.

  “Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s bothering you?” I said, trying to sound neutral. I realized: it would make me so happy to hear that he had hurt her. That he had fucked her and tossed her aside. It was a nasty, childish thought, but I turned it over in my mind slowly, and decided to keep it. Only I could handle Vik. I had learnt, over the months, to take his immense body, to tame his violent energy and please him in ways that only I could.

  I hated her. But at that moment, I hated Vik as well. And hoped in my heart that they if they were going to hurt me so badly, then they’d get a little of that pain too.

  She let out a big sigh.

  “If I tell you a secret, promise you won’t tell anyone else?” she said eventually. I smiled inside. It wasn’t very Christian of me, I know. But then again, I think I had stopped being a Christian the second Vik slid his giant cock into me and fucked me till I nearly passed out.

  “Oh, sure, you can trust me” I said, and smiled darkly on the inside.

  “Well, I haven’t been at my friend’s this evening,” she said, and then waited.

  “You haven’t? Oh, why not?”

  “Well… nevermind about him. I wanted to say I was somewhere else, though, and –”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, which part of London did you say your friend was from?” I said, cutting her off.

  She paused, still staring at the ceiling.

  “Um …which part? Oh, he’s from, uh, Hammersmith” she said. Little liar. I can’t say why, but it thrilled me to catch her lying.

  “Anyway, go on” I said.

  “If I tell you this, promise you won’t judge me?”

  Oh, I’ve judged you a million times already, you bitch.

  “Of course not. What’s wrong? What’s bothering you?”

  She let out another heavy sigh.

  “Ok, well, I was at Vik’s tonight” she said, then turned to see my reaction.

  I bat my eyelashes and look straight back at her.

  “Oh? Why? I hope everything’s OK?” I said sweetly. I she wanted to play confession with me, then I wanted her to squirm and say it out loud.

  “Yes, no, of course he’s fine. I was there …you know…”

  “I don’t understand,” I said quickly.

  She turned to look back at the ceiling.

  “Vik and I have been having a relationship for the last few months” she said plainly, as though she were on trial and desperate to state the dirty facts in as clinical way as she could manage.

  “A relationship? But, we all have a relationship with Vik, I’m very fond of him too. I don’t understand the problem.”

  Perhaps that was pushing it a bit. I mean, I had worked hard to dispel the Christian good girl image I had when I first arrived here, but even I would have trouble convincing her I was that naïve.

  She looked at me and frowned.

  “Oh god, you are so innocent,” she said, and flopped her legs down on the bed.

  I laughed.

  “I’m just playing. Of course I know what you’re saying. But, I mean, I already knew that…” I said. I wasn’t done messing with her yet.

  “You did?” she seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Of course! Val, everyone knows, duh.” Now it was my turn to laugh.

  I didn’t technically see her blushing, but I was enjoying imagining that she was.

  “Really? So …you’ve …heard?” she said quietly. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

  “Well, don’t feel bad about it!” I said, in mock-sympathy. “It’s not like anybody’s singled you out or anything. If it makes you feel any better, they talk about all the girls he sleeps with. In fact, I think they probably mention you the least, so don’t stress…”

  The silence in the room was sharp, and cold, and delicious. In a few moments, I heard her start crying. For the first time in my life, I felt bad. And I liked it. Valerie had lied to me. Vik had lied to me. And now with an eerie clarity I realized all at once: I didn’t care anymore. It wasn’t revenge exactly. But it felt good.

  “Oh, hey, don’t cry Val…” I said, but what I really meant was, go on and cry, bitch.

  She sobbed a little and then started frantically wiping away tears.

  “I just don’t understand why I keep doing this to myself, you know? Why I keep choosing men who hurt me. Why do I keep doing this to myself?” she cried.

  I got up and went to her bed, placed a hand on her shoulder and stroked absentmindedly.

  “Did her…? Have you broken up or?” I said.

  She was tracing her fingers over the flowers patterns on the bed, over and over again on the same loops.

  “Well, it was all fine, we were doing so well. Obviously I never expected him to drop everything and have a big serious relationship or whatever, obviously with me leaving soon we both understood it would be a temporary thing, I’m not an idiot, I knew that…”

  “But he dumped you and now you’re sad?” I said. That was maybe a bit blunt.

  She sniffed and looked at me.

  “Well, not dumped exactly. But he’s just pulled away completely. He’s just ignoring me. He’s an utter arsehole, truly” she said and sobbed again.

  I lowered my head and rested it against her shoulder. It might sound strange, but hating her was a comfortable feeling. Now that I saw how hurt she was, it felt natural to try and cheer her up. You’re fucked up, Penny.

  “You know, maybe you’re attracted to guys like that because you know that they’re unavailable. Maybe you want them to leave you” I said.

  “What?”

  “Think about it. I don’t know. Why are girls drawn to him so much?”

  “Good question.”

  “Well, maybe there’s something comforting about the whole idea. Vik will never commit to any one girl. He’ll never leave Mchinji. And maybe it’s a relief not to have to care about that for a while.”

  “I don’t know… maybe.”

  “Imagine if Vik settled down with one girl. I can’t even imagine what that would look like, can you? He wouldn’t be Vik anymore” I said.

  “Well, that’s true,” she said. At least she had stopped crying.

  “You know what you should do? Forget him. Do your own thing. Do you see him fretting about women? He just does what he likes. We should do the same” I said.

  “We?”

  I got up and went to my own bed again and laid down there. It was getting late.
<
br />   “I’m just saying, Vik’s not the only one who gets to do cool things.”

  We chatted late into the night, but my mind was elsewhere.

  Chapter 21 - Viktor

  Without Penny, the world was flatter. Lacking a dimension.

  But they all leave, eventually.

  I thought she was different. I thought I saw and felt something different in her. But clearly I had been wrong. Women …only complicate things.

  I get everything I need from the earth herself, who is a woman too, only not so complicated. With my bare hands I turned her soil and buried seeds in her and pulled out plants and herbs and roots to sustain me. My home was hewn from wood grown in the very same forests that swayed and swished around me at night, like her great rustling skirts. And if I did things just right, she would smile and gift me a rabbit or two from her endless banquet. I wanted for nothing. Except for one thing.

  I was seated at the back porch outside of the cabin, a narrow lip jutting off the edge where I could perch and smell the air and think. With my legs crossed, I balanced my small pipe on the flesh at my knee and tamped down my own special blend into the stem, pressing little scraggles in with my finger. I dangled a match over the surface and watched the flame lick and catch the dried plant tendrils, then set the whole wad alight. As it glowed noiselessly I opened my chest and inhaled, pulling the plumes of wandering smoke down the tube and into my body.

  I sealed my lips, put the pipe down and narrowed my eyes as I looked out over my view of the forest. Distant birds trilled and chattered in the treetops. When I couldn’t hold it any longer, I collapsed my chest and exhaled, and sent the smoke back out into the world, thanking it for taking the time to visit all the little corners of my lungs. I blew a smoke ring and watched it bobble off into the forest and disappear.

  All the leaves were her face. Every bend in every tree was the shape of her cheekbone. All the foliage was her hair. There was nowhere to look: she was everywhere.

  I took a fresh lungful of air and looked harder, trying to do without her, to forget. She had left, what more was there to say? Did anybody care if I missed her?