Quinn stripped down to his underwear then got into bed with me. “Do you want a massage?” He whispered.
“No, but I want a snog,” I said. I still had some pent up unchannelled heat from the extended arousal earlier this evening and I gave as good as I got as he responded to my demand with alacrity. Being a mechanic is a physical job and I noticed that his chest, shoulders and arms had become really muscular. I ran my hands over his muscles and felt my desire go up a notch. I began to kiss his chest, running downwards towards his stomach. He got my pyjama top off me and buried his head in my breasts. I gripped the sides of his head hard as he got his mouth over nearly the whole of one and started to explore the nipple with his tongue. It was so sensitive I wanted to pull away. He was suddenly grasping me really tight as his lips returned to my mouth and he was urgently pressing his mouth down over mine, crushing my lips, his tongue thrusting aggressively into my mouth, pushing me back down into the pillows with the weight of his body on top of me. I began to struggle away from it. I hate it when they get like this. Some switch seems to flick and suddenly it’s like they go into automatic, all slobbery and don’t seem to be focusing on you as an individual any more, like they’re just playing the scene on a screen in their head. I wrenched my head away and pushed my hands against his shoulders, and in that moment there came the distinctive rhythmic squeaking and thumping from the bed in the room on the other side of the landing.
“Oh my God, they’re at it again!” I groaned. It broke the spell. Quinn let go of me and rolled slightly off me, propped up on his elbow.
He leaned his face over me, his dark mass of wavy hair falling forward and one of his hands cupping my breast and stroking it. “Maybe we should cover up their noise with some of our own,” he suggested with a gleam in his eyes.
But I reached for my pyjama top where it was screwed up at the back of my pillows and covered myself up. “Nope.” I said abruptly. “It’s making me feel squeamish…”
The huffing and puffing and panting was starting. I decided they weren’t making any attempt to keep the noise down as they were assuming that me and Quinn would be at it on our own behalf. SHE started her little moaning sobbing noises.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, grabbed up my pillow and clamped it over my face, clutching it to my ears.
Quinn laughed and used my momentary inattention to get his hand on a tit again. I pulled the pillow off my face and glared at him. He smiled suggestively and then clamped his hand between my legs in about the most unsexy a gesture there could ever be, and said, “Come on now, why don’t we do it as well?”
I just slapped him really hard. Now I was completely turned off and really cross. He let go and looked sulkily at me. “Are you ever going to put out? What’s the point of being in a relationship if you’re not going to do anything? If you don’t want to go the whole way yet, you could at least suck me off!”
“Get out!” I hissed at him. “Just get out!”
He got off the bed and started to get dressed, shooting me evil glances as he did so. You ignore me all evening, you don’t even bother to keep the dirty old men from touching me up, and then you expect me to reward you with sex at the end of it! I turned my back on him and yanked the duvet over me. He left with a slam of the door.
I was so angry for a bit that I couldn’t get to sleep. He didn’t seem to understand that all he had to do was to be a bit more subtle. Seduce me a bit more. Show appreciation for something else about me other than my tits. I didn’t want my first time to be sordid. I wanted to be overwhelmed with desire and passion not just doing it for the sake of it. I wanted it to be a bit special. Finally I dropped asleep.
I grabbed some toast for breakfast which meant I couldn’t completely ignore Dad and HER as they were both in the kitchen.
“Where’s the gorgeous Adam?” She asked with a deep throated giggle. “Having a lie-in?”
Why? I thought, are you thinking of taking him a cup of tea in bed? Actually, against your advice, I kicked him out of my bed. But I sensed she was the sort of person who liked to get something on people to tease them ragged about so I didn’t want them suspecting an argument, particularly not one involving the subject of sex.
“He left early,” I said coolly.
At work, I found that I minded Trev less now he’d seen me dressed up nice at least once. This morning I’d found myself doing my hair in a fancy french plait, and I’d put a bit of powder on to cover the shine and a bit of subtle lippy. I didn’t dare go further than that lest the other men notice.
At first nothing seemed to have changed. We just said hi and got on with our work. Later on in the morning when the initial rush of assessing new jobs and parcelling out the tasks had passed, Trev said conversationally to me, “Good night last night?”
The men were on it in a flash. “You two been out together?”
I shook my head quickly. “We just bumped into each other at a gig last night. Pure co-incidence.”
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much!” Dewhurst teased.
I rolled my eyes. This was just what I feared.
“She did leave with her original escort,” Trev said, but with a bit of a smile at me that the men knew all too well how to interpret.
I walked away.
During the rest of the day nothing was said, but when I made a long reach over a bench for a tool, I’d find Trev just behind me, leaning over the top of me, “Sorry, just need that wrench there.” His position meaning he was leaning against my bum and his arm reaching further than mine so part of his chest would be touching my back too. And then when I was hopping up and down to reach something off a high shelf, he’d come up behind me and say, “Shall I get that down for you?” And he’d reach up past me again, leaning into me as he did so. And then when I was bending over an engine, instead of coming up alongside me and peering into the depths like the other men would, he’d come up behind me and lean over me with a hand on my shoulder to ask what the job was.
By afternoon tea-break I was a nervous wreck. I sat on the ground outside the shed in the weak sunshine on my own with legs drawn up tightly in front of me and my back firmly against the wall. Bolton came over and looked down at me. “Looks like you’re in bunker mentality,” he joked. “What’s up?” He sat down beside me with his mug of coffee, leant back against the wall and stretched his legs out in front of him.
Now Steve and I had always got on ok, but he was still one of them and I really didn’t know if I could trust him. I glanced sideways at him. “I’m only going to tell you if you promise you won’t run straight back blabbing it to the others.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Intriguing.” He lifted his mug to me, “Go ahead then.”
I sighed. “You may have all been a complete bunch of bastards to me when I first arrived here-”
“Ta very much,” he exclaimed.
I ignored him and carried on, “–but at least I couldn’t ever complain that any of you were handling me…”
“Aaah,” he said, “I have a feeling I know where you’re going with this…” He took an avoiding slurp of coffee then looked sideways at me.
“Yeah well, the reason I’m sitting with my back to a wall is because it’s the only way I can be sure he’s not going to come up behind me if you get my gist.”
“Perhaps you should rephrase that just slightly,” Steve suggested with a grin.
I slapped his arm. “Stop it! I might’ve known you’d be like this!”
He drew one leg up and rested an elbow on it and rubbed his chin, looking across the yard. “I don’t know what to suggest if you don’t fancy him.” He said.
I groaned. “I could do without this sort of thing,” I told him. “I just want to come to the garage and get on with my work!”
“Probably best to just ignore him till he gets bored of it,” Steve advised.
Just at that moment, the object of my complaints emerged from the shed and walked really close to us. I looked away in the opposite direction, and
Steve lifted his cup to his lips and didn’t make eye contact with him, so he was forced to walk on by without being able to find an excuse to join in the crack.
“I’m not asking you to intervene,” I continued once he was safely out of earshot. “You won’t want to be getting involved – but maybe you could just keep your eye out, and if – and I hope it won’t ever come to this – I ever had to go to Entwistle about it, maybe you’d have witnessed enough of it to be able to back me up if he wanted some further proof?”
Just at that moment, Bowker came out and gave us a bit of a glare, so we got up. Steve didn’t promise anything verbally but he gave me a slap on the shoulder as I walked away which I took as a gesture of support.
The one thing I wasn’t telling him though, was that whenever Trevelyn managed to get that close to me, I was scared of the strength of my own reaction. I was quivering with such a strong sexual response that I just had to get away from him so that he wouldn’t be able to guess at it. But humiliatingly he either knew all too well how I was reacting, or else he was just so fucking overweeningly self confident about the fact that no woman could possibly resist him, that whenever he met my eye he smiled in a knowing way that all too clearly meant, ‘don’t worry luv, we’ll be making it soon enough…’ And when I looked quickly away I could see out of the corner of my eye the swift amused smile that would follow.
I wasn’t doing my community hours that night as I’d been asked by Todd if I could help him take some students to a footie match on Saturday afternoon instead. He seemed to imagine that just because I was into cars, I’d be into other typically male interests as well. In fact I’d always remained supremely uninterested in football and only watched the Match of the Day highlights and match break-downs just to keep up appearances at work when the vehement discussions started. I rang Quinn to see what he was up to as I’d heard from Jamie that there wasn’t a gig on tonight. Quinn told me abruptly that he was off to Rob’s place to get the car in fighting condition for next Saturday’s meet. He clearly hadn’t forgiven me for last night. The fact that the whole thing had been his own fault had not pierced his thick skull.
I lay on the settee staring at the ceiling. This whole thing with Trevelyn was worrying me in more ways than just a bit of sexual harrassment at work. When I’d suddenly come over all shivery quivery sexy when Quinn had got his hands on me for the first time, I’d assumed that this must be what love was. Everyone, including my own Dad, seemed to have been expecting us to get together for years and couldn’t understand why I hesitated, and in the beginning Quinn had repeatedly declared his undying love for me and even sworn to my Dad that he was going to marry me! I’d gone out with a lot of boys in my time, but only briefly with each and it was mostly for show, to keep my reputation up at school, or because I fancied their vehicles more than their arses. I’d managed to negotiate around a fair number of wandering hands and had never been much turned on by any of them, and had mostly chucked them once they turned up the heat. The way I’d felt about Quinn had taken me by surprise, and his romantic assault had been very seductive. But within a few weeks of succumbing, it had all started to go wrong. He’d expected me to sleep with him almost straight away and all his charming gestures of compliments and flowers and singing me songs and such like had stopped as soon as he’d secured me. Marriage had never come up as a subject again though something else had come up frequently.
And now here I was getting all quivery and sexy whenever Trev got too close – a man who I loathed and thought was a completely self-satisfied jerk! So maybe what I’d been feeling for Quinn hadn’t been love at all, just indiscriminate sexual desire? Ok, I had to stop obsessing on this and do something positive. I was determined to get involved with this Stock car racing business, but it was becoming clear that it couldn’t be via Quinn and RAC racing contacts. I’d have to find my own way in.
I got up sharply and went to the bag that I’d taken to Belle Vue and fished around in the bottom. There was that card I’d got off that girl’s brother, caught up in the lining. I put the computer on and typed the postcode of their address into Googlemaps, as I didn’t recognise the placename from it. I stared with a slightly raised heartbeat at the result. Of all the places they could have come from, their garage workshop appeared to be only about a twenty minute bike ride from here! Right out in the moors beyond the other side of town, which is why I hadn’t recognised the address.
I spent the rest of the evening on my own in the dark, finding every possible link I could find to Stock car racing. I found it oddly hard to find out very much though. It seemed a closed, almost secretive world. I found the official BriSCA sites and read through everything I could find on the rules of each different discipline, the specs of the cars allowed, the allowable modifications and the banned. I read up on driver disciplinary hearings and through the licence application PDFs. But it was really difficult to get any hard information on anything much at all. In addition, different stadiums were run by different promotors with separate specialisms and it was hard to get the hang of what was going on. I joined a forum and gave myself the online name of ‘Newby’ and posted some questions asking about the difference between racing on shale and tarmac, what modifications were needed, and whether you could get away with modifying the same car for different surfaces between venues, or whether you needed two cars? I noticed that as a new person on the forum, you were given the symbol of a white rectangle with a black cross on it, the same sign you had to wear as a novice driver in your first three Stock car races to warn the other drivers to give you an easy time of it. Then I went back to a BriSCA site to send off for the last three editions of Stock car racing’s official magazine, ‘Unloaded 7.3’, clicked a few more links and proceeded to sit mesmerised by the hundreds of postings on YouTube of various races, where I tried to take in everything at once, the features of the particular venues and tracks, and the precise ways the drivers were challenging and spinning each other. I itched to have a go.
Next day, I checked on the forum to see if I had any answers. Thirty-three views, but not a single answer. I’d carefully hidden the fact I was female but I felt oddly humiliated that no-one had deigned to answer me when some of the other posts got a whole string in reply.
I sat turning over my options in my mind as I sat in the front of the van with the annoying Aiden of verbal diarrohea fame on the way to Preston North End’s Deepdale ground. It wasn’t our local, but Todd originally came from there so knew his way around and liked the excuse I guess, to get paid to attend his own team’s games.
In the back of the minibus as we turned off the motorway into Preston, the other eight students started singing, “Wigan fans are stupid, Wigan fans are morons!”
As insults go they weren’t sophisticated, but I didn’t think the Wigan supporters would be stopping to rate how erudite the opposition was. I glanced at Todd. “You should have brought a couple of Downs Syndrome with us.”
He glanced in the mirror at the faces of the students behind us and didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “I know, I started kicking myself about half an hour ago.”
All the students with us looked completely normal on first glance. It was only on sustained contact with them that you realised that their behaviour, personality or intellect wasn’t quite what you expected. A couple of Downs Syndrome would have marked our group out for sympathy as ‘special needs’. Whereas a group of broadly normal looking eighteen to twenty-one year olds slinging childish insults at the Wigan fans was asking for trouble.
Todd pulled the minibus over into a lay-by about five minutes before we reached the grounds. He turned round and looked severely at them. “Absolutely no remarks about Wigan supporters,” he told them in dire tones. “Not a single one. I want you to understand that if you get punched by one of them, Eve and I won’t be able to defend you.”
They looked shocked.
“That’s right,” I rubbed it in. “If you get attacked by a big group of Wigganites me and Todd won’t be able to d
o a thing. All we’ll be able to do is help the others who haven’t been so stupid as to insult someone, to get away to safety…”
“Leaving you getting beaten up,” Todd agreed.
A rather more subdued group got out of the minibus in the carpark and was herded across the road to the turnstiles. At either end a great deal of aggressive sounding roaring and chanting was taking place. There were police swarming everywhere. I glanced again at Todd. “We’ve got tickets in the family area,” he reassured me. But he looked a bit tense. At the gate, Benjy leaned conspiratorially towards a policeman said something a bit odd that ended in a spray of spittal, and then grinned and dribbled. The policeman eyed him, but had the grace to keep his expression neutral. I found myself talking loudly to the students in an embarrassingly condescending and innapropriately childish way just to signal to anyone around that they were ‘special needs’.
Out on the stands we found our seats near the front. “Shit,” I murmured. I’d never seen so many police in one place in my life. At either supporters’ ends there was a wall of police in high-vis gear standing shoulder to shoulder guarding the pitch from the occupants of the stands. Along the long sides of the pitch under the enclosed celeb viewing area were six mounted police on huge horses. And crouched down the central steps from top to bottom of both end stands were about forty riot police each side, complete with visored helmets and see-through shields.
“Ok,” Todd said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. I should have realised this sort of Derby would be a bit tense.”
“What did you put on the risk assessment?” I teased. “Did you mention getting torn limb from limb as one of them?”
It turned out ok, just about. At one point the ball cannonned into a goal off the toe of a Preston striker and everyone groaned except our students who cheered loudly and leapt up and down. A whole row of men in front turned round and glared at us and muttered. Since I hadn’t actually been paying attention and can only follow a match on TV because the commentator tells you the significance of every move, I had no idea what had happened. I decided to do a bit of a dizzy blonde. I smiled winsomely at them. “Ooo, could you explain to them what has happened as they don’t seem to understand,” I lisped out.
Paradise Postponed (Not Quite Eden Book 2) Page 13