by Rosie Price
Lewis stayed at the barbecue until all the meat was cooked. It was getting dark now, and people were starting to get drunk. He noticed Kate was standing on her own. The strap of her brown leather bag cut across her body like a seat belt, and she looked as though she was ready to leave at any moment. He walked up to her, looked deliberately at the strap.
“Are you out of here already?” said Lewis.
“We’re out of ice,” said Kate.
The large plastic bucket in which the beers had been cooling was now filled with water, loose corks, and labels of wine bottles. Lewis threw his empty beer bottle into the swamp.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
They walked out of the house into the street, where the trees were lit yellow by streetlamps. The air was a fraction cooler than in the garden, and it was quiet. The sound of music and of conversation from the back of the house was contained within the garden’s four walls; Kate looked at Lewis and smiled, and he knew that he was no longer at the margins of a group. The shop was on the corner, two minutes from the house.
“I’ll get this,” said Lewis, as they got to the counter, passing a five-pound note to the shopkeeper. “Actually, and some of that rum.”
Kate fumbled in her brown bag for her purse, but Lewis had already got out his credit card.
“This is on me,” said Lewis.
10
When they returned to the house, Lewis took the bag of ice from Kate and put it in the kitchen sink.
“First rum, ice later,” he said. He took two glasses from the kitchen cupboard.
“Max told me what’s going on with Rupert,” said Kate. “I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for all of you.”
It was strange to hear his uncle’s name from the mouth of this girl he hardly knew.
“Have you met him?” Lewis said.
“No, but I know he’s close to Max. We were just talking about him earlier.”
Lewis unscrewed the lid of the bottle of rum.
“Was I rude to you when we first met?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Kate said. She seemed to Lewis to be eager to placate him, and he quite liked it.
“I can be quite shy sometimes,” he said. “Maybe it comes across as arrogance, but really I’m just self-conscious.” Lewis poured a large measure of rum into Kate’s glass.
“Yeah, maybe,” Kate said. She glanced at one of Zara’s magazine covers. “Most people would find it hard not to feel overshadowed being in your family.”
“Is that so?” said Lewis flatly. It should have been no surprise that Kate was impressed by his aunt.
“Actually, I’m applying to film school,” Kate said, flushing slightly. She had been about to say that she was planning on trying out Max’s camera tomorrow, but something in Lewis’s expression stopped her.
Lewis sipped his drink, slowly. Between the fruit bowl and water jug on the table in front of him was what looked like an invitation to an award ceremony, embossed and gold-edged. He flipped it over.
“I want to show you something,” he said, picking up the bottle of rum and their two glasses and going through the doorway toward the stairwell. Kate was at the kitchen table, and she looked reluctantly back out to the garden. She was trying to work out how best to say no. “Come on,” said Lewis. “They won’t even notice we’re gone.”
She followed him up the back stairs, kicking off her trainers on the bottom step, out of habit. Alison didn’t like shoes on the beige carpet of their little terraced house. Later, she would look back at this moment, when Lewis was so far ahead of her up the stairs; he would not have stopped her had she turned back now.
The thing he wanted to show her she had already seen. He took her through Zara and William’s bedroom to their en suite bathroom. The room was filled with candles, with powders and creams in clean white cartons and blue glass bottles. Behind her, a large copper bathtub with bronze taps stood in the middle of the room, and to her right, the shower, which was marble-walled with a wide, sunken plug set in the middle of the floor. There was a cartoon of Zara hanging above the toilet, a caricature from a New York magazine, which William had hung there and which Max had shown to Kate on her first visit to the house. Because she didn’t want to deflate Lewis, who looked so pleased with himself, Kate pretended that it was new to her.
“Wow, yeah,” said Kate. “That’s pretty funny.”
Lewis was looking at the cartoon, at Zara’s plump lips, her breasts, which were pushed together and spilling comically out of her low, tight top, with an expression of grim satisfaction.
“I always think of it when she’s fucking with me. This is out there, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She might be famous and successful and beautiful but she doesn’t have control over how people see her anymore. People can fuck with her, and she can’t do anything about it.”
“Did you need to piss?” said Kate. “I need to piss.”
Lewis left her and waited outside the bathroom. Now she’d got him out of there, she would catch her breath and then go back downstairs. She was feeling drunker than ideally she would have liked, and she knew they were missing the party. From here she could hear voices and music but didn’t know how much time had passed already.
He was waiting for her in the bedroom, the door closed and the bottle of rum cradled in his lap. He took a swig and passed it to Kate as she emerged.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“Tell me something personal. Something about yourself that you’ve never told anybody.”
“Um,” Kate said, “how about no? I’m going back downstairs.”
Lewis got up from the bed and stepped toward her. He was tall, her eyes were level with his chest, and his shoulders were broad. The way he was looking at her made her feel as though he knew something she didn’t.
“But I want to get to know you better,” he said. “OK, I’ll go first. I’ve got a tattoo. Right next to my dick.”
“I don’t think I’d ever get a tattoo,” Kate said. “It’s too permanent. Or, if I did, it would have to be really spontaneous, so I didn’t have time to change my mind about it.”
She didn’t want to hear any more about his tattoo: she was trying to steer him away.
“So, tell me something you’ve done that’s spontaneous. It doesn’t have to be a secret, but I want to know something personal.”
“Can’t I just be boring?” Kate said. She wanted to get closer to the door, to keep him talking as she did so.
“But I know you’re not,” he said, “that’s what I like about you. You don’t let people tell you what to do. You do whatever the fuck you want.”
She didn’t know what to say; everything she said he seemed to twist, and now he was slipping his hands around the base of her neck, so he was covering her ears. He kissed her; instinctively she pushed him. He stepped back, and for a moment she thought he was going to open the bedroom door, but instead he backed up against it, blocking the exit.
“You don’t even want to see it?” he said.
“You know what, Lewis, no. I don’t want to see your dick. Let’s go and find Max.”
He had both hands on the door handle now, behind him. There was a key in the lock; he turned it. Kate knew she wasn’t going to be able to leave.
“Come on,” he said. “You have to see what it says at least. You’ll like it.”
He walked her back into the room, took her arms and held them behind her. Kate wanted to tell him not to, but she couldn’t find the words—her mind was blank and her limbs numb, so that when he pushed her onto the bed she fell easily, and when he pulled her hair back from her face so he could kiss her again, his tongue in her mouth this time, she couldn’t move her arms to push back against him.
There was a point at which she ceased hopi
ng that he would let her leave, only that nobody would come in and see them there. But nobody could come in, because the door was locked. He straddled her, a six-foot man, unbuckling his belt like he was being paid, as if any of this was supposed to be sexy. She could hear the music playing downstairs, but she couldn’t remember the song or the name of the singer.
“Read it,” he said, pulling down the waistband of his boxers. In turquoise ink just below the waistband were the words: To live is to suffer. He was hard, and he was close enough for her to smell him, hot and salty.
“Nietzsche,” he said, with a hint of pride, when she said nothing. She wanted to laugh, but her voice choked in her throat, betraying her.
She was betrayed, too, by the hole in her jeans, which tore, a slow, large tear, as he put his fingers through the gap and tugged, sharply. She was betrayed by her waist, her small breasts, which allowed her thin cotton top to slip up to her neck. As he released her momentarily to pull down her jeans she tried to sit up, but he pushed her back down.
“Close your eyes.” He’d pulled his boxers down too, now, and was holding his dick in his hand. “I’m not going to do anything.”
“I don’t want to fuck you,” Kate said.
“I respect that,” he said. “Let me just see you.”
He tugged at her knickers, pulled them down around the tops of her thighs.
“You’re wet,” he said. He put his hand over her face, his fingers in her mouth. They smelt of sweat. “Taste yourself.”
She could have bit down, then, on his fingers. Bite down. Move away. Scream. But instead she closed her lips and not her teeth.
“You’ve got a tight cunt,” he breathed.
That was when she closed her eyes. That was the moment at which she shut off her mind, leaving her body to him. Locked out, shut down.
* * *
—
What would later become the icy sensation that spread through her body in moments of retrospective terror she first experienced as pain. Briefly, yes, it was brief, not torturous pain, but a sudden sharpness, like a reprimand, that stunned her to stillness, starting in her cunt, and spreading up through her stomach, settling in and across her chest.
But the pain and the brutality of his dick jammed inside her, transformed after a few moments into a warmth that was almost relief, much like a cold foot stepping into a hot bath that burns then settles.
Lewis moved his hand to her collarbone, his fingers pressing toward her windpipe. His eyes were closed, frowning, as if he were trying to wipe some terrible image that had been imprinted on his mind, and he pressed down harder on her, pressing her into the ancient mattress as he fucked her, his jeans pulled down around his knees.
All the while, she looked not at his face but at his collar, which was at her eye level, and traced the thin red ribbon stitched along the inside of it to where it disappeared with the curve of his thick neck, whose tendons and veins were bulging with the strain of fucking her. She was wet, accommodating, the ridges that ran inside her softening, acquiescing to the rhythm he dictated. But then he stopped, pulled out, opened his eyes, and came on her stomach, the white flesh of which had been exposed, and was now covered in a clear white slime that was warm but turned quickly cold.
“Fuck,” said Lewis. “Fuck.”
He stood up and zipped up his jeans, buckled his belt. He did not look at her.
“Clean yourself up,” he said, sitting back on Max’s parents’ bed. As she closed the bathroom door, he put one hand down his jeans and lay back on the cushions, and with the other hand he started scrolling through his phone.
Kate stood in front of the marble basin, looking at herself in the mirror. It seemed impossible to her that the image reflected there was her face, that what she could see still belonged to her.
She took a sponge from the shower, soaked it in water, rubbed it across her stomach, ran hot water through the sponge until it was clean again, soaped it again, and scrubbed her stomach until it was pink. She washed the sponge through until it smelt clean and of the lavender soap that sat on Zara’s glass shelf. Zara would use it later, when she showered. She wouldn’t know that it had been used to clean Lewis’s cum from Kate’s stomach. She pissed, quietly, hoping that Lewis wouldn’t hear her, and when she stood up, before she pulled up her knickers, using the same sponge, she wiped between her legs.
She couldn’t put the ripped jeans back on, but she couldn’t go downstairs again without jeans. She didn’t want to go downstairs at all, but she could hear the music still, the laughter, and she longed to be with everybody else, to shatter the sudden isolation. So she pulled the jeans over her thighs, still damp from the sponge, buttoned them up, and straightened her top, then went back out to Lewis.
“You look so fucking hot,” he said, looking up at her. “Come here.” She didn’t come to him, so he stood up and went to her, held her to his chest. “You smell like sex.”
He led her out of the bedroom, looking both ways before they slipped out into the hall and turned off the light. He left the door open this time. “Don’t tell Zara you were in her bathroom,” he said. “She’ll go mental. But then”—he took a swig of the rum—“you don’t care, do you? You don’t give a fuck. You’re bad.”
She shook her head. He leaned back, that lazy look on his face, but his hand was still reaching out to touch her, not wanting to let go of her just yet.
“You say no, because you like saying no. But I see through you. I can see through it all.”
He waited for her to react. She did not. He passed the rum. She took a swig to get rid of the taste in her mouth. When she did not speak, he lost interest.
“I’m going back downstairs. Are you coming?”
* * *
—
Kate stayed there in the hall as he went, taking the stairs two at a time, and when he had disappeared from sight she sat on the top step. Above her, fixed to the walls of the middle landing, were photographs of the Rippon family, iterations of Nicole and Max grinning in varying stages of toothlessness; photographs of Zara and William printed in eighties matt, Zara wearing shoulder pads that must just have been going out of fashion and William in thick-framed spectacles and with an inordinate amount of hair. There was a photograph of Rupert, too, with long hair, standing with his arm around Zara and grinning. He looked well—tanned, lean—probably, he had been happy.
And there was Lewis, she recognized him in among one of the family photographs, flanked by Max and Nicole, their arms linked protectively through his. The three children were wearing green Wellington boots and oversized waterproofs, standing at the top of the hill that rose above the house in Bisley. Lewis was grinning, his eyes screwed shut and his little chin and chest thrust forward. Nicole was looking at Lewis and laughing. Max was frowning at the camera, his eyes framed by long, thick eyelashes.
She sat there for a long time, staring up at the photographs.
“I was tempted to do the same.”
A girl wearing a thick beige cardigan had appeared a few steps below Kate. She was looking up at her, amused.
“Hello,” Kate said.
“I think perhaps the best of the party is over, don’t you?” said the girl. “Though, if I were you, I think I would have gone to bed, rather than stopping here.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” said Kate, shifting closer to the banister so she could get past. Kate could see up her nostrils, the edges of which were dusted with coke.
“And how are you?” asked the girl.
“I’m fine. I’m just having a break.” Kate forced a smile. “Are you going to bed?”
“No, no,” she said airily. “I will continue partying for the time being. I’ve rather found a second wind. I just came upstairs to shit in peace.”
“Good idea. I can recommend Zara’s bathroom.”
She pointed. The girl stepped around her an
d bowed.
“Thank you,” she said and disappeared.
Kate stayed there on the step until she heard the flush and then pulled herself to her feet. She went upstairs and let herself into Max’s room. There she undressed, stuffed her knickers in a shopping bag in Max’s bin, and then took them out again and put them in her bag with the jeans and with her top. She zipped up the bag.
She ran her hands over her body. Her extremities—her fingers, the widest part of her hips, her ass—were cold, as though they no longer belonged to her. She put on clean underwear and leggings, stiff cotton on dry skin, then slipped under the weighty sheets. She had left the light on, but she did not get out of bed to turn it off. Instead she lay there, duvet tucked under her chin, her back to the wall, waiting for Max to come up, or to fall asleep: whichever came first.
11
Kate woke early. Max was in bed beside her, curled up, breathing heavily. His skin smelt of alcohol, sweat, antiperspirant. She lay still, her head pounding. Max had turned off the light when he’d come to bed, and the heavy curtains were drawn against the morning sun. Daylight was difficult to contemplate. More difficult was the thought of Max waking and having to face him. She slipped out of bed and pulled on a sweatshirt that had been left on the floor. She took her bag and went down the stairs, barefooted and silent.
Sunlight was streaming into the kitchen through the conservatory roof and front window. She caught sight of her reflection in the oven door and saw that her face was streaked with black mascara and that her eyes were puffy.