In short, if there was such a thing as an “average” observer, to them she would seem a shrug-your-shoulders kind of girl, one who didn’t inspire a huge amount of reaction. She wouldn’t turn many heads but she certainly wouldn’t turn any stomachs. Give her a make-over and you might well think: my, my Alicia - I never thought you had it in you! Her character was what made her shine. Anyone who knew her liked her, or more. She did and said some odd things from time to time but that was just Alicia. She was the type you might fall in love with quietly from afar, watching her picnicking in the park during one’s lunch hour, seeing her back-lit by the sun, so perfectly serene.
She was scatty, bewildering and calming in equal measure. She was not someone you might seek to get you out of a crisis, but few would unselfishly comfort you better during it. Alicia was a good girl, a good friend. She was lively and chatty, always one to provoke entertaining conversation, if more of a laugher than a laugh-maker. She could fail to grasp even the simplest of concepts yet was sensible where it mattered. You didn’t see her splashing out on frivolous things or getting so plastered she had to be carried home. On their nights out she was on the soft drinks after a couple of rounds. Boat-pushing for her was a third or an even rarer fourth drink. She would never wish the slightest misadventure on any living thing, even though so few in this day and age felt they had the time or inclination to think the same of others. If she inspired visual images they would be ones of choir-girls or angels; simple beings, with hearts wanting goodness and peace.
And yet she wasn’t at peace. There lay within an inexplicable turmoil for one so kind and enthusiastic and determined to spread happiness. She housed a demon, familiar to many, one that made her hate what she saw in reflection. There was a compulsion for examination whenever she was alone, even though it only led to wrenching stomach-twists of self-loathing. She saw only the bony shoulders, hips and spine; the flat shapelessness of her breasts and the sore-looking rose-pink of the prominent nipples; the long feet and hands; the giraffe neck. Most of all she saw the marked skin of a belly paunch that refused to go or at least change shape, so it wasn’t that drooping flesh-slide like melted candle-wax that always made her look like she was slouching when she never was. Her husband insisted that he couldn’t even see what she was talking about, but he could. He was just being nice, as always.
This body consciousness could plague her even after she had turned with disgust from the mirror. It could lead her to look up odd diets or new-fangled exercise classes on-line. It could lead to bouts of crippling muteness when in the company of strangers. What irked her most was that she knew it was ridiculous, that it wasn’t her thinking these things. She had no history of it, for a start. It came on only in recent years, after childbirth. She took no pleasure in being so self-absorbed. She had neither reason nor desire to flaunt herself to anyone other than her husband, who for his part had never shown any disinclination towards her. It was a false stress, conjured seemingly because she had little else to worry about. However, the grip it had on her was very real; the dejection it caused. At times it seemed set on taking her over and stealing her happiness completely. To others she breezed around apparently without a care in the world, yet secretly she often felt close to imploding. Irrational it might have been, but happiness would only return if the demon was exorcised, and how to do that eluded her.
It might have been coincidence but her instances of self-loathing appeared to have become more frequent and harder to forget since Hunter’s arrival. At the start she hadn’t thought much about him. She was attracted, no doubt like every other heterosexual woman of her age with at least half-decent eyesight. However, her private flights of fancy were quickly put aside. She didn’t seem to be quite so effected as the other girls, either because matters of a sexual nature were never first in her mind, or because she was more of a realist about such things. Then it all got turned upside down that night he arrived at the wine bar during their Girls’ Night.
She’d had one extra drink to normal, which might explain why she was able to laugh and joke and fizz internally at his suggestion along with all the others, and not feel the cold sweat such a thought was prone to cause in her. She knew well enough that he didn’t have her in mind when he said it. Except that he did. Just a couple of days later he caught her when she was alone, and he propositioned her. He apologised for going public when retrospect told him he should have first sought her out in private. It needed to be her above all the other neighbours, or so he said. She turned him down, obviously, immediately breaking the World Record for most refusals given in a ten second period. There was no way she could do as he asked. She laughed as she said all this it but her legs were instantly trembling and inside she was lurching.
‘I need you,’ he had said, doing a Lord Kitchener impression. ‘Please think about it.’ She had. Sometimes she thought of little else. Something about him stopped her from banishing the idea from her mind. There was no reason at all for thinking it was anything other than a bad plan, potentially very damaging, and yet some tiny but insistent part of her mind kept telling her the opposite. It was more the demeanour of him, of what he was, that kept her from screwing up the idea and throwing it in the bin. Somehow he made the scary darkness of it run hand in hand with potential exhilaration.
Still that should not have been enough. The enormity of doing it should have stifled any pretensions of giving him what he wanted. The weight of secrecy, the fear of ever being found out should have stopped her. But there was something about him, an inescapable lure. He took the dread away, simply blew it to fragments and made her feel cosseted. He made it seem so easy and he swore to ease her into it. He was barely more than a stranger to her and yet he made it senseless to say no to him. So, on that cold but bright blue January afternoon, the day after he had arrived back after a month away, she found herself knocking on his door, almost hoping he had forgotten all about it and would send her away. Instead he smiled and said he had been thinking about her that very morning.
‘I can’t promise anything but I will try,’ she said. ‘Although if we don’t do it right now I’m not sure I will ever summon the courage again.’
He opened the door wider to welcome her in.
‘I am ready when you are,’ he said.
Almost
Secrets: ones to send the excitement hurtling around your body with the guilt chasing close behind, to weaken the limbs and make your head spin. Ones to change sleep into restless hours of either burning impatience or the pins and needles coldness of unshakeable trepidation. It had happened just before he went away, and no one could ever know about it. No one must ever know about it. Just when Shelley thought the original incident must have been imagined, he was there to confirm that it hadn’t.
There had been minimal contact since that time he had silently mouthed what he wanted to do to her. Any time he had been in her presence since he had not followed up on it, nor even singled her out for special attention. Perhaps he guessed not to, because she became so fragile-minded and flighty when he was near that she might have blurted something she shouldn’t. He couldn’t know what he did to her with those five secret words. Perhaps he merely took her for a floozy accustomed to being on the end of such blatant flirtation. Was he wrong? Perhaps he thought he could take her whenever it suited him, without so much as a by-your-leave, like some medieval Lord exerting his rights over the local wenches. That was probably what relieved her most about the fact that he hadn’t acted, more so even than the withering guilt of wishing it: that he wanted her only for what he assumed she was, not for what she now habitually kept hidden, her true self.
The preoccupation he had caused her was almost laughable - indeed it would have been if it didn’t wrench so. There were times when she wished him elsewhere for possessing her the way he did, but just a glimpse of him and it all went away. The truth was her life was better for his impact, despite the endless hours she fretted about what he might do
, and why he hadn’t. He had already made a better person of her. Those few times she had seen him since - like the time he’d walked into the wine bar on their Girls’ Night Out - he had rendered her rabbit-in-the-headlights frozen; bashful and almost mute. This was so much like she used to be, before her husband started putting her on display at social gatherings. It was so unlike how she was that time she threw the welcoming party for their new neighbour, and she blathered and giggled and flirted at him so ridiculously she had felt the horrible pang of shame for days. She wasn’t born to that; it had been thrust upon her. Since mouthing those five secret words he had all but silenced her, and she was glad of it.
Now she gazed at herself in the large mirror, trying to find any semblance in her reflection of the person she thought she was. The memory of that secret episode might now give the courage to say the words to make that person reappear. It happened just before Christmas. Such life-altering incidents don’t normally occur whilst you are wearing washing-up gloves, but this one did. She had been thinking about him, again, at the sink looking out across her garden, across the road to his drive, and then he was there. She felt the fizz and the weakening of the legs, felt the flutter of her eye-lids caused by the panic of potentially being caught staring at him. But he wouldn’t be able to see her, what with the glare on her window. He was at the rear of his car, loading some kit into it. It struck her that this was nearly the only way she ever saw him. Apart from the few social gatherings he had attended and a few meetings in the street, most of the time she only saw him when he was out on his driveway. Was that all he was? Someone who loaded and unloaded things from his car? How could he have such an effect on her through doing so little?
He obviously had an existence away from this but it was all done elsewhere or behind closed doors. What he was really like went on somewhere she was not. The thought induced wistfulness, a sudden realisation that she had barely scratched his surface. Yet her head told her she knew him so well, indeed well enough to have seriously considered committing the darkest sins if he ever came for her. From whence did she gather her knowledge of him? How many words did someone have to speak to you before you could claim to know even a little part of them - a thousand? Five hundred? Had she heard him speak even that many in total?
Of course, however many it may have been, it was those five silently mouthed words that carried the most weight. But did they say more about her than they did about him: a summation of the image he had gained from all those ill-judged, half-drunk exclamations she couldn’t seem to contain whenever he was around? Of all the things she had said to him, how many did she now wish she could take back? How many had been nervously blurted, already spoken before prudence could check their content, out there to give him exactly the opposite impression of her than the one she wished to convey? Had anything she had said given him cause to see past her low-cut tops to the true character buried within? What could she possibly now say to him to skew the view set so hard by those first impressions?
It seemed very likely that the person she thought she was had gone forever, and while it was the tarty flirt that brought those five words from him, it was the considered, reasoned, romantic, hidden side of her that spent so many hours mulling over them, accepting them. She felt like going over there and telling Hunter she was to release him from his pledge to fuck her, like it was some kind of promise of engagement, because he had said it under false pretences and he didn’t really know her at all. However, she knew on her approach the strength would drain from her legs until she was stumbling and then crawling towards him, finishing in a hyperventilating heap at his feet. She knew she wouldn’t be able to plead her case. He had too much of a hold over her. The threat of losing his attentions towards her outweighed the withering thought that he only wanted her as some throw-away hussy, that there was no substance to his desire towards her other than her deep cleavage and her long peroxide hair. She couldn’t bear pushing him away, even if, to her utter shame, it meant promoting the very image she was desperate to shed.
Then that day had been turned upside down when she realised that he was looking at her. The blinds were down but the slats were fully open. The sun that mid-morning was only just over the top of the houses opposite but must have been spreading at least some weak winter light onto the window pain. Surely he could not see inside? And yet he was looking directly at her and then coming across the road, heading for her drive. His face gave nothing away. His finger was pointing in her direction as if to indicate an absent-minded recollection of a need to talk with her about something - that something presumably being his overlooked need to bury himself inside her.
The frozen rabbit feeling had gripped her at once. She could feel the numbness spreading and the tremble in her bottom lip. She should have run to lock the door that separated the driveway from the kitchen. What could she call out to deflect his arrival and send him away? Nothing came to mind, her head emptying of thoughts quicker than a ruptured bag of water - one of those bulging clear plastic ones you see at fairgrounds, with single, rather puzzled-looking goldfish inside them. And then she was floundering, rooted to the spot, devoid of any resistance strategy. The knock came and the only solution seemed to be to ignore it, but he must have known this and was already opening the door to let himself in.
This instant breaching of her defences had shocked her. The other neighbours would have thought nothing of such an entry but it seemed so unlike him, usually such a polite and reserved specimen, to barge in uninvited. She could summon no words of admonishment for this invasion of privacy. She couldn’t even turn around, stuck as she was to the spot, her hands still immersed in the sink bowl, encased in very unsexy yellow rubber gloves that the suds could only partially hide. She was only doing a couple of crystal glasses that she hadn’t wanted to put through a dishwasher cycle. How on earth had she got herself trapped in this ridiculous position? She could feel his approach behind her, guessed his eyes were running up her three-quarters bare legs to the round of her tightly enclosed behind.
‘Do you always wear such short skirts when doing the washing up?’ he said as his opening gambit, apparently reading her mind. So, there was to be no beating about the bush. Her head had stayed down, her eyes fixed upon the soap-frothed water as the heat rushed to her cheeks. She knew he would be wearing that half-smile, the one that made him always seem so amenable despite the darkness of his hair and the deep lines upon his face, despite the fact he was so damned handsome. Her addled brain had searched for reasons behind her attire but none came.
‘I was going out. I was going to...’ She tailed off. It was all rubbish. It was cold outside and she had been in what at best could be described as a skirt for warmer spring days. There was no rational reason for her to be in it other than the fact that her husband had suggested it, had even taken it out of the wardrobe and laid it upon the bed to enforce his suggestion, once he learnt she might be meeting her friend in town for lunch. Hunter had then closed in on her, going to stand right alongside her with his hands lightly resting upon the draining board, his shoulder almost touching hers.
‘And I bet there are only some skimpy knickers under there too?’
He had said this quietly, looking towards her. The tingle spread rapidly from her belly. His seduction had started, just like that, cutting straight to the chase. The directness of his words proved he was driven purely by carnal urges - but then she was only a strumpet after all, stood there in her short skirt with nothing but a lacy G-string beneath, so why would he ever bother with romantic pleasantries?
‘I really don’t know what knickers I’ve got on...’ Again her tongue was numbed by the situation and the lack of cogency in her brain. He was going to do as he promised, probably right there in the kitchen. She had dreamt of him being gentle and expert but his curtness suggested a ravishing, perhaps doing her over the kitchen table having dragged up her skirt, ripping her top and bra, spilling out her tits to be pinched and roughly grope
d as he slammed in and out of her like a beast. Still the thought had her all desperate and wet, proving she wasn’t much less of the slut that he clearly took her for.
She hadn’t wanted it to be like this: with her simply fucked and used and then left to rue the empty dissatisfaction with years of guilt lying in wait. She wanted it to encapsulate something, to be meaningful - she just hadn’t known how to stop herself caving in the very next time he spoke. And she had sensed his next line would be the killer, the one where he repeated the five words he had used to slowly break her resolve over the weeks. It would be her last and only chance to thwart him. If she couldn’t summon something to combat those five words then she would be lost. She would commit the ultimate betrayal against a husband who would never dream of doing the same to her. There could be no justification. The resentment and shame at what she had been modelled into by her years of marriage wouldn’t just disappear through letting her gorgeous neighbour get inside her. Yet she readied herself for his next line, already knowing she was beaten.
‘Do you think it will snow?’ he had then said, leaning forward to peer through the window at the clear sky. ‘They keep saying it will but it never gets here.’
That had made her look his way. She remembered even shaking her head slightly in disbelief at his sudden backtrack. Weather predictions couldn’t be considered in answer to him, such was the state of her spinning mind. She had thought she was almost there, right on the brink of doing something enormous, an act she would never have dreamed she would consent to. Just a few words would have seen her capitulate without a struggle. As easily as that: all the promises and the moral objections swept aside by a phrase that made her heart race and her pussy burn with need, because it was said by a man more tempting than she could resist. Suddenly it wasn’t going to happen. The moment had disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived. With her breath still coming hard and her pulse still racing, he had just casually eyed the sky with no apparent intent to tug down the knickers he’d so recently referred to.
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