Telling Tales

CHARLOTTE STEIN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

Originally published in 2011 in the United Kingdom by Xcite Books.

1

Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2011

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008158309

Version: 2015-11-20

To the Terrifying Person of Great Importance, for making me believe I could be a writer.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

More from Mischief

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

In my head, I fucked him the first opportunity I got. I didn’t wait for some perfect time, some perfect place, some perfect convergence of events. I just kissed his sweet mouth right in the middle of him telling me something funny or ridiculous, like – peas are green because they ate too much spinach – and then when he couldn’t quite gather himself after something like that I took his hand and pushed it between my legs.

Or maybe in this dream scenario I could have taken my hand, and pushed it between his legs. I spent so many nights in college, thinking about how his cock would taste and feel. It doesn’t take much to shove my imagination into a slightly different sort of area – one where I unzipped his jeans and licked long and wet over the length of him, while he sat back and simply…let me.

That’s all we were missing, after all. Him letting me. I mean, it wasn’t as though I ever asked or tried to fuck him or any of that stuff, but it was always in my head. That I would make a move on him and he would knock me back, and then I’d lose that bubbling bright friendship between us forever.

Funny how I seem to have lost it anyway. I didn’t even try, and I’ve lost his friendship anyway. It’s been five years, for God’s sake. It’s been longer, according to Professor Warren’s letter, and for a moment I’m just so lost on a sea of trying to remember Wade Robinson’s face.

I’m lost, thinking about things that never happened – his mouth on mine in the back of Kitty’s old Ford Escort, fingers sliding slickly through my ever-ready cunt. How many girls did he do that with? Too many to fucking count, but never to me.

No – I got to sit up front and pretend I couldn’t hear him making out with Tammy or Candy or Veronica, while Joan Jett blasted out from the radio and Kitty shouted at me that we should really actually pick up some boys sometime.

Instead of letting ourselves escort Wade the make-out machine around.

Of course, Kitty soon got into the swing of things. She was my little cloud of blonde loveliness, and she floated through the rest of college on a tide of too-happy. And I was happy too, I was. I really was. We had a great time together – me, Wade, Kitty, and Cameron.

So why am I looking at this letter with dread?

I look at it with dread all through breakfast. And then all the way through lunch too, while simultaneously trying to think of a way to make knitting sound interesting. The magazine wants the article by the seventeenth, but something in me says I’m not quite going to make it.

I’m not even sure what knitting is, really. Something to do with wool, maybe? Possibly a little bit about making jumpers that no one wants to wear with two pointed sticks? I can’t build an article on those things – I know that much. I might as well write what I really want to, which goes something like this:

And then aliens invaded Earth and blew up all the knitting in the world.

But instead I look at the letter again, while pretending I’m not doing anything of the sort. The letter mocks me with its weirdness and its reminders of everything I don’t have anymore, and it makes me think strange things like: I wonder if Wade ever did become a screenwriter. I wonder if he’s still as funny and amazing and handsome, with his gorgeous electric-blue eyes and his mean, mean mouth and his look of something wolfish, as though he might just bite you at any second. God, why did he have to be so attractive? I would have loved him if he’d looked like something that crawled out of a drain.

And I know that much is true, because when the phone rings and it’s suddenly Wade’s voice crawling out of my past at me, saying things in that yawing Canadian accent of his like yeah, no time has passed at all, everything in me goes still. I can’t move for a second, just sitting there staring at the answering machine like it’s suddenly caught on fire.

While he says perfectly normal, ordinary things like How’ve you been, Allie-Cat?

As though no time has passed and I’ll just understand it’s him, immediately. He even has the nerve to demand I pick up pick up pick up, because of course he knows I’ll be here; I have to be here – I’ve just been sitting in one place all this time, waiting for him to grace me with his presence.

I’m almost ready to kill him with the force of my own resentment, when a touch of the old Wade sings out at me from a million miles away. A million years ago:

‘So are you up for the Mystery Machine or what?’

Because, let’s face it, that’s what this is. For reasons unspecified, our old professor has left us his rambling house – the one we used to go to every weekend and rattle around, telling stories by candlelight because Lord, how spooky it was, even back then – on the condition we spend a month within its walls. ‘Renovating,’ the letter says. ‘Restoring,’ the letter says. But Wade knows the score and so do I. The professor wants one last bump-in-the-night story. One last hurrah for the Candy Club, and all those nights we spent telling tales we now can’t remember – or at least, I can’t remember. They’re all at the bottom of my desk drawer and the bottom of the drawer under my wardrobe and the bottom of everything in my apartment ever. They’re spilling out and coming to get me through the dearly departed spirit of Professor Warren, and his house with the corridor of stepping stones and that one room with the little round boathouse window and the doors that sometimes went to nowhere.

I close my eyes and I can almost see Cameron putting the flashlight up to his face – reluctantly, because Cameron was always reluctant about goofy stuff like that – and saying in his gunmetal voice, Mwa ha ha, we’re all going to die in here. Those eyes of his like a storm at the bottom of the ocean, always, and the flashlight making his dark eyelashes seem like shadows, deep shadows.

The machine beeps and I jump as though I’ve been pricked with something, and then it’s just me in my apartment. Just me and the knitting articles and the letter that says, Come and play Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Mansion one last time, Al. Come and see if you can figure out if it was old man Withers all along.

But I don’t think I can. I know what the house is worth – I’ve looked it up, of course I have – but even £750,000 split four ways doesn’t seem like incentive enough. In fact, it feels like a pretty poor pay-off for too many memories and too much pain and this low thrum I always get when I think about his face or his mouth or the way he used to grab me all the time.

He didn’t understand what it did to me. His hands on me, I mean. He didn’t understand that when he fell asleep with his long body curled around mine, I lay awake aching and unfulfilled, wondering what it would take for him to touch me in the way I needed to be touched.

Like now, when just hearing his voice has driven my hand to the top of my thigh – almost at my slowly pulsing sex but not quite. I won’t give in just yet, not yet. Instead I shove the letter in the top drawer of my desk, and stare long and hard at the knitting article that’s blinking away on my laptop.

Then I go one further – a really desperate move, I have to say – and open the bottom drawer. The one crammed with writing, most of it smutty and some of it probably about Wade, and then I grab a wedge of it. Just to, you know, distract myself.

Only it doesn’t distract me. Of course it doesn’t. The story on top – actually handwritten, ink almost disappearing, corners curled – is the one about the girl who comes back from the grave and haunts the man who didn’t love her.

And it’s embarrassing, Lord is it embarrassing. I can hardly stand to look at it, it’s so obvious. I’ve even given the hero a mess of blond hair and those bright sparking glances of his, and there are so many psychosexual Freudian undertones that calling them undertones is like calling a mountain a sinkhole.

It actually turns me on, reading it. I imagine the girl in her dress made out of mist and fog, spreading herself over the hero’s body until her non-flesh sinks all the way into him, and all I can think about is fucking, fucking, fucking. I think not about Wade but about this supposedly faceless and nameless hero, about him over me and under me and inside me like something I always want but never get.

And then I put the heel of my palm over my aching sex and ache harder, stronger, sweeter.

My clit feels huge beneath the press of my hand, but I resist the urges it thrills through me. It says: Replay the answering machine message. But I ignore it and think about the story instead, the story I once read out to my former friends, without shame or worry or any of the things I’m feeling now. He must have known I was writing about him, but back then I didn’t care.

I just care now, as I try to pretend I’m not sliding my hand under the waistband of my panties, to get at my slippery pussy. And it is slippery, because Wade always got me that way and even if he hadn’t, six months of neglecting myself in that regard has definitely put a spike in my libido.

I’m suddenly thinking about what I can do to make it better, make it hotter. There’s a vibrator in one of those many bottomless drawers of mine, but it’s probably still in its wrapper. The batteries inside it have most likely melted. I barely even know what to do with things like that, but just thinking about it buzzing against my clit or filling up that great empty space inside me is almost too much to take.

I can hardly remember what it’s like to get fucked, and my fingers just aren’t enough. They slide around in all this wetness I’ve somehow produced, glancing over my too-sensitive bud until I’m shaking against the hard wood of this chair and on the verge of doing something stupid.

Something like calling Wade up to ask him to talk dirty to me, while I fuck myself on something I don’t know how to use.

Of course, I do know. I’ve written stories about it, so I do know. I’ve written stories about girls masturbating with cucumbers on trains, for God’s sake. I’ve written about girls fucking machines, girls fucking each other, girls fucking guys who can go for hours. It’s just that I’ve never actually done any of that stuff. It’s all fiction and none of it’s fact, not even in the tamest, stupidest, slightest little sense.

Not even a girl getting herself off against a sex toy, because everything in her head turns her on but nothing in reality does the trick.

I think about Wade. I think about the hotter stories I wrote in his honour but never actually read aloud to any of the Candy Club, about the great and terrible land of Hamin-Ra, where the Queen rules over her harem of sweat-glossed men and my imagination gallops and thunders and tells me the most wicked things.

In the story, there’s always a line of men. A huge long line of them, one after the other, and none of them can look at the Queen but all of them feel the urge to. All of them are naked and some of them squirm, pricks stiff and backs too straight, trembling with the effort of being so perfectly obedient.

But none of them want her really, she knows. They want the idea of her, they want her crown. They want to stand at her side and rule Hamin-Ra, and so she teases each one with a finger on their cocks or a raised eyebrow, and passes them by.

Until she gets to the One. He doesn’t have to pretend, or feign desire. He stands there so seemingly insensible of her presence, with something smouldering and burning beneath eyes so quiet and still. And when she runs her hand over the heavy length of his slumbering cock, he seems to despise the thrill of desire that charges through his body.

Though I’ve no idea why. I’ve no idea why this one story turns me on so much, either, or what’s so compelling about his resistance. It hurts, that Wade so indifferently rejected me. Why do I give this one man Wade’s face and have him turn away from my Queen, even in so silly a fantasy?

But I do and he does and my clit thrums beneath the busy slide of my finger, all of me eager to hear the rest, the best parts, the scenarios I’ve replayed over and over in my head. Like the ones where the Queen tests him by tying him to a bedpost, then makes him watch as some other man licks and licks at her creaming sex.

Or maybe one of them – some big burly guard with grasping hands and a stone-like face – fucks her and fucks her in ways my resisting hero knows are wrong. He knows she’ll never come on her back like that, with her legs in the air and the guard’s little prick shoving in and out of her cunt.

How he longs to please her, my best hero. How he wants to fight the ropes around his hands and get at her with his stiff, swollen cock. He’s in agony – I know he’s in agony – but worse than that, I truly understand the fantasy for the first time ever. My cheeks burn with shame and I fuck two fingers inside myself, knowing that I’m this ridiculous creature who wants someone to want me that badly, and oh there’s nothing I can do about it. I try to slow everything down, to just feather those strokes over my bursting clit, but it’s like striking a match. It’s like rubbing my face against the coarse grain of someone’s stubble, even though I can barely recall what that feels like. In my head the hero doesn’t care about my shame or what the subtext of this fantasy is. He just tears his way out of the bonds that restrained him suddenly, full of all the fury and lust I’ve never seen on a man’s face in real life.

And then he does all of the disgusting, perverted, insane things I’ve always secretly wanted. He fucks her face with his steely cock, hand too tight in her hair and body rippling with that delicious tension. Or maybe I go worse and weirder than that, and have him force her to fuck his face, cunt pushed so tight against his mouth that he can’t breathe or move or do anything but moan.

Oh yeah, yeah. I like that one. I like it when he gets her on her front and fucks her ass, oil running over her thighs and her hands twisted up behind her back. I like it when he makes her suck the guard’s cock as he takes her, or maybe, God, maybe he sucks the guard’s cock as he takes her.

It doesn’t matter. It all amounts to the same thing – me moaning aloud in an empty apartment, my head full of all the stories I never dared to tell, and then God, God, Wade’s face flashes up behind my eyes and I’m coming, I’m coming, and I’m making so much fucking noise it’s almost enough to drown out the phone.

Almost, but not quite. In fact, I’m still right on the edge of it – little shocks of pleasure still shuddering through me – when I hear another voice on the answering machine, as familiar as Wade’s but for different reasons. Wade I know because of all the things we shared together, because of everything in me that longs for him. Cameron’s voice is recognisable because it’s like liquid metal, pouring out of that accursed masturbation-interrupting box.

‘I don’t know if this is you,’ he says, while my cheeks flame red for reasons better left untouched. I mean, it’s not like he can see me, right? It’s not like he can see me with one foot up on the desk and my knickers half down and my fingers inside, still stroking over my wet and swollen folds.

And even if he could, what would it matter? It’s only Cameron – Cameron with his liquid metal voice that isn’t really liquid metal. It’s just deep because he’s massive, and it’s cultured because he comes from one of those snooty American Harvard-going families even though he didn’t go to Harvard and his family has no money now and, to be honest, I don’t know when he last lived in America.

But he’s on my answering machine anyway, talking and talking.

‘Or if you remember me,’ he says, as though I could forget. Why did Wade assume I’d know it was him, when Cameron thinks I’d forget him so easily? ‘But I just wanted to call and say I’ve missed you, Allie. And if you come to this…whatever it is…it’d be nice. It’d be good to see you again.’

I think it’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in one go. He was never big on talking, Cameron. And if he did talk it was always about something that bored most people to tears – computers or rowing or something that once happened that no one else is interested in. Man he was beautiful, but man could he clear a party.

And his stories…so strange and mechanical. Wade wrote things full of life and pizzazz, people pogo-ing across the universe in spaceships filled with magical robots from the planet Neptune. Whereas Cameron, well…he wrote about spaceships filled with robots too. But then later we’d all find out that he’d intended to write about living, breathing humans, and only ended up with weird, emotionless automatons by default.

That was Cameron. A weird, emotionless automaton by default.

‘Oh, it’s Cameron, by the way,’ he says, and it’s strangely those words that touch me. Wade’s message was all bolsh and Kitty’s was all Oh my Gods, but Cameron doesn’t even think I’ll know it’s him.

Funny, that it’s this very thing that makes me decide to go.

Chapter Two

The house is exactly as I remember it. More so, in fact. The driveway seems longer, the surrounding grounds bigger. Nothing has encroached on it – when I’m standing on the neatly shaped gravel semicircle in front of the entranceway, all I can see is a grassy veld that slopes downward into trees, and then more trees, and then nothing but farmland and quaint little villages and the mist of the morning rising up over everything like a veil.

It’s beautiful. The house itself is beautiful. There’s even more ivy all over the front and it’s the same squat, deceptively large grey building it always was, with the thickly varnished blue front door and the actual bell instead of a buzzer.

I almost don’t want to go in. What if it’s not the same inside? The letter said it needed some work, so naturally my head is full of images of walls that have fallen down and squatters living in fireplaces and God knows what else.

But when I get in – the key the solicitor gave me unneeded, because it’s open, creepily – everything looks so…familiar. The great staircase standing between the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right. The living room still stuffed with those leather wingbacks and the big red sofas and the painting over the fireplace of the stag with the terrifying stare.

They still follow you around the room, those eyes. And the colours are still a mess of vivid and impossible greens and reds, as though any second the whole thing is going to come alive and chase you into another dimension.

That was what this house was like. Another dimension. Everything else about university – the mundane classes, the mundane people, the sense of being alone even when actually in a room full of people – was a great swathe of nothingness, apart from this. Apart from the Candy Club and Professor Warren and the weekends we spent, talking until 2 a.m. under the watchful gaze of the Evil Stag.

Most of the time Warren just left us to it. It was like our house anyway, in those days – but I think of him now, even so. I think of him in one of these great old chairs, falling asleep thinking about the students he must have loved, and then just one day never waking up.

I wish we’d known. I wish I’d known. I miss him, standing in this plush room, with everything about him all around me and the best memories I’ve got swamping my mind. He gave me those memories, after all. He made me come to this place, and he made me write, and he was the one who said to me: Don’t ever give up.

Real sorry about that, Professor.

I swipe at my eyes and shake myself, suddenly bristling with a new kind of discomfort because is that another set of bags, by the bureau? Those are definitely someone else’s bags, and if the unlocked door wasn’t enough of a clue to my ridiculous brain, this sure is.

There’s another person here already. And judging by the assortment of sports bags and rucksacks, it isn’t Kitty. Kitty works as a model now, I know she does, and she was always one for the finer things anyway. She’ll be carrying Louis Vuitton, and if I’ve got my Kitty right, she’ll have bagged a room already. No dumping her stuff in the living room for her.

So that just leaves Wade or Cameron. And odds on it’s Wade. Wade was always the sloppiest one, the one who never packed properly and wound up having to borrow some socks from Cameron that resolutely would not fit him because Cameron’s feet were the size of boats.

Which means that any second I’m going to bump into him. I’m just going to turn a corner and see him, and then the bottom of my stomach is going to drop out of me and find the floor. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it found the basement. I feel sick just thinking about him awkwardly hugging me or even worse – what if he goes for the equally awkward handshake? What if I’m not worth a hug?

What if I throw up on his shoes?

It’s then that I know why it was Cameron’s voice that persuaded me to come. It’s because Cameron is calming, his very being is calming, and I’m never scared of what he’s going to do next because he’s as steady as a rock. He doesn’t do wild, unexpected things. He’s insular and strange and silent, whereas Wade is big and funny and never without a wisecrack. I can’t predict him, and that’s a hard thing to realise when most of me was sure I knew him so well.

Still, I take the hallway past the staircase – the one that still has the stepping stones set into the glossy floor – and make my way to my favourite room. Wade will be in the study if I do actually know anything about him at all, and I’m building up to it.

First, the boathouse room. The one that has nothing in it – not even a carpet – except for the one round window with the glass like melting butter, and the light coming in to fill it up in a way that no other place in the house does. Everything is dark here, everything is heavy and plush and like burying your face in crushed velvet.

But not this room. This room is like suddenly being on a boat in the middle of a golden ocean, and when I press my face to the heavy glass it’s just the same. I can see almost nothing and imagine it’s almost anything, out there. A whole world of high seas that I get to explore.

Though more typically it was Hamin-Ra I got to, through this portal to another world. I wrote about it a thousand times – me lifting the latch, and pushing against the glass, and then the golden beauty of my sand-strewn land would spread before me and –

‘Allie?’

My heart hits my mouth. It chokes me – and weirdly it’s not because I know it’s Wade. It isn’t Wade, and my heart wants to kill me anyway. Apparently, all four of my once-were-friends have the same effect on me, which is to say they make me want to run and hide.

Maybe by pushing through a portal to another world.

I brace myself and turn, and sure enough it’s Cameron. Of course I knew anyway – that voice – but it’s still a kind of electric shock to see him so close after all these years. He doesn’t even look any different, either! God, how I must seem to him, with this cardigan on that I shouldn’t have worn and my hair all massive and curly like this and the glasses, oh no the glasses, oh no I totally forgot how much of a dork Cameron makes me feel, with his bigness and his jockish hair and his smooth, perfect face.

And then I remember that he’s a complete nerd – one who fumbles over his words on a daily basis – and it’s OK. It’s OK.

‘Hey,’ I say, only it has about four extra syllables. And I can feel my face cracking, like it’s made of clay and he’s just set a hairdryer on it.

It’s just Cameron, it’s just Cameron, I think, over and over, but my brain can’t remember him being this…immense. Was he this big before? I think I kind of knew he was, but with him filling the doorway like that it’s a different matter. He looks like a giant. He looks like he killed the beast that ate Jack, then devoured the beanstalk too.

And he looks a lot more jockish than I remember too – though maybe that’s just because I’m seeing him fresh. He hasn’t spoken yet, or spent hours not speaking, or bored some girl to death at a party he didn’t want to go to. I vividly recall putting a baseball cap on him before we went to the Christmas blow-out over at Missy Taylor’s, when he’d asked me how he could at least seem cool and approachable.

Smile more, I’d told him, because he’d always appeared to find it a strain. His parents had been very don’t-smile-old-money-be-composed sorts of people, and though I always knew he didn’t want them to, those qualities had rubbed off on him.

They’re all over him now as he stands in the doorway, obviously wanting to hug me or something like it, but completely unable to. I can see the hint of a smile peeking through too, but it’s only because of those neat little incisors of his.

‘Can I give you a hug?’ I ask, and it’s weird how easy it comes. By God, I’d never ask Wade. I’d never ask Wade anything. Pass the peas seems like too much, with him, but with Cameron it’s suddenly and oddly easy.

I try to think back – were we close, Cameron and I? So close that I didn’t mind being the one who suggested, asked, persuaded? I don’t think we were, and yet I can picture a lot of me putting hats on his head or shaking his big body back and forth to loosen him up or asking him if I could read stories he’d hidden somewhere.

Usually he rolled them up and stuffed them down the back of his trousers. I have no clue why. Why bother to bring them to class or to the house if you were just going to pretend they weren’t there?

Until I found them, of course. I always winkled him out.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, yeah – sure.’

And I guess maybe then I know why it’s easier with Cameron. Because although he’s probably better looking than Wade – he’s so good looking that it’s blinding, for a moment – I somehow have this weird little inkling…this little feeling that he won’t say no. Like maybe he understands that I don’t ever expect anything to happen between us, so he can be open with me. Or maybe he just…maybe he’s just like that. He just wants to be hugged, probably.

Even though I’m sure I’ve seen him bend away from a pat on the shoulder, before today.

He doesn’t bend away from a pat this time, however. I put my arms around his middle – just like that, easy as anything – and I feel his huge hands spanning my back, so warm and good after all this time. He even smells the same, like that airy aftershave he always used to wear, and then all I can think is how odd it is that I can remember Cameron’s scent.

‘It’s so good to see you, Allie,’ he says, almost directly into the top of my head. Mainly because he’s six-five and I barely graze the PEMBROKE on his old and very worn university hoodie – but then it’s not his height I’m thinking about.

Instead I’m flooding with heat, remembering when I last heard him say something like that. On my answering machine, as I…did stuff. With my legs all over the place and my hand inside my knickers and ohhhh, there it is. There’s discomfort and embarrassment, my old friends!

I pull away from him too quickly and he looks…startled? I’m not sure. Sometimes it’s hard to read the expressions on his immense face, and it gets even harder when he says things like this: ‘You look really…great. Just very…pleasant.’

Because I remember how often he used to search for words, as though the real, normal, sane ones eluded him. As though his brain constantly wanted to put weird things in there instead, like You look really pumpkin. Just very bicycle.

Odd, that it only makes me want to leap in there with all the casual conversation I don’t usually have, and that he resolutely cannot provide.

‘So do you – I think you’ve gotten even better looking, somehow.’

Which is absolutely true. His mouth looks even plumper, and softer – Jesus, that lower lip like something out of Hot Blowjobs Monthly. And he’s cut his copper-hinted dark hair so that it kind of swirls all over his head and swoops over his forehead and looks much lazier than he is and oh God, why is he staring at me like that? Am I staring too long at him?

It had seemed easier to do, at first, but now it’s getting harder.

‘I think the others might be here,’ he says and then I definitely know I stared too long. He’s going to think I’m hot for him or some other nonsense thing, which is completely not the case. Even if my face feels like it’s burning and there’s this funny, tingly ache between my legs as though really? I’m horny again?

Usually it’s once a month and even then I’m pushing it. So what’s going on here, exactly? Is the thought of Wade really such an aphrodisiac?

It must be, because little weird sparks prickle the length of my spine when Cameron puts a hand on my shoulder. Like he wants to steady me as we make our way back down the hallway, like maybe he knows that my heart is hammering and my legs don’t want to keep walking – even though that’s impossible.

Cameron never knew anything about me, least of all this.

He doesn’t know that I can hardly bear to look Wade in the face, not even when we come to the entranceway and Kitty’s giggling her ass off, camera in hand as usual, snapping away like there’s no tomorrow. And then there’s Wade, my Wade, just standing there with his back half turned as though this is nothing at all, really.

‘Allie!’ Kitty screams, and I see how easy this is for her too. I see her in slow motion, tiny arms out, charging toward me – oh, she was always the one who never let me forget she loved me, with postcards from far-flung places and ridiculous emails about swimsuits made of ham – but it’s Wade I can’t stop watching, Wade who turns in that said same slow motion while my heart tries to eat itself.

He looks older. And then my brain kick-starts and yells at me that of course he looks older, people with masses of handsome stubble generally look older. At which point I have to process that he has masses of handsome stubble and, dear God, I can’t let it slide. I just can’t! It’s all over-styled and too practised and he’s gonna get it, now. He has to.

‘Did something grow on your face?’ I ask, and oh I’m so grateful for the great chunk of incredulity in my words. I’m so grateful that it all floods back into me – the way we used to talk, like nothing could ever be serious. Nothing could ever hurt.

And he grins that shit-eating grin of his through the great mess of hair all over his chin, as though to tell me I’m right.

He’s still him and I’m still me. I haven’t lost him forever, my best friend in all the world.

‘There’s something on my face?’ he says, with a real and perfect slice of panic in his electric eyes, and then he just throws his arms around me. Just like that. Nothing to it. Cameron’s hand slides right off my shoulder and I’m hugging Wade as though no time has passed at all.

Makes me wonder what I was worried about, really.

It takes three boring conversations about jobs we all do now – Kitty models, of course, Wade mysteriously works in real estate and Cameron now does something to do with software I’ve never heard of – and around two bottles of the terrible wine Kitty found in the back of the fridge – Cameron drinks more than I remember, Wade drinks less – before we get around to stories.

Of course, we all know it’s coming. I can feel every tale I ever told right on the tip of my tongue, and when Wade congratulates me on staying true to my dreams I can’t stop myself. I have to start us down this path – the one none of us have actually taken.

‘It’s not real writing, what I do. I just…’ I start, but Wade cuts in. Of course he does. I can see he’s been raring to go ever since that stubble crack in the entranceway. He looks so bristling and spark-eyed, with all his hair slicked back and his new, gorgeous man’s face.

‘So it’s fake, then. You write on air with a magical unicorn hoof.’

‘I don’t –’

‘They print your articles in Non-Existent Monthly.’

Gah, him and his stupid fake magazines. I make them up myself, but it’s only because of him.

‘No, it’s not fake. It’s just…not what I always wanted to write.’

He raises his glass to me.

‘Hey, it’s still more than any of us managed, kid.’

I kind of hate him, for saying that. But then Kitty stretches out on the couch beside me, and curls an arm around my scrunched-up legs, and puts her head in my lap. She’s already half-cut, I know she is, but I also know why she then says: ‘We could all still manage, if we wanted to. People don’t ever run out of stories.’

I expect Wade to interject then – with something about rejection, probably, or losing the will to or any of the things I’ve felt myself a thousand times – but it’s Cameron who gets there first. I’d almost forgotten he was there even though he’s just to my right, in Professor Warren’s old wingback. Sitting at the head of the room like a tombstone, still and quiet and far more comfortable than he’d looked two hours ago.

I guess maybe he’s a little cut too.

‘Apart from me. I think I ran out before I ever even began.’

And then everyone laughs, of course they do. Funny, that I don’t really feel like it.

‘I always loved your spaceship story,’ I tell him, because that’s the truth. I did. It’s not a pity party I’m throwing here.

But he looks at me as though maybe I am.

‘Ohhhh no you didn’t. I stopped writing years ago anyway,’ he says, and then he runs on before I can push at him again. ‘But I did always want to hear the end of “Hamin-Ra”. Did you ever finish that one, Allie?’

I think I go a little cold then. Not because I couldn’t remember ever reading it out to them – after a moment, I vaguely recall reading the tame, vanilla beginnings of it – but because it’s so fresh in my mind. I think about the answering machine and the lurid list of bizarre scenarios, prancing through my head. I think about the window in the boat room, just waiting to open and let me through to another world of joy and pleasure and beauty.

Not like this world of leather and drinking and designer stubble.

‘Yeah,’ Kitty mumbles from my lap. ‘I want to know if the Queen ever found her heart.’

And now I feel slightly less disconcerted. It’s better when it’s not just Cameron remembering this one weird story I wrote, as though it had some special meaning or even worse…as though he somehow heard me through a fucking answering machine.

But it’s still odd. I can’t even recall writing that part of it, about the heart or whatever it is Kitty’s blathering over. The whole and original thing is in one of my bags, but I’d stuffed it in there without looking, while the majority of me pretended I wasn’t doing it at all. After all, it isn’t as though this month is really going to be about ancient writing we did three hundred years ago. We aren’t really going to share stories just like before, and God knows I’m not going to share ‘Hamin-Ra’ even if we decide to do just that.

I only brought it because…I brought it because I brought other stories too. I brought it because I grabbed a bunch and shoved it all in, and there’s nothing more to it, really. Just as there was nothing more to Cameron shoving rolls of stories into the back of his trousers as though yeah, none of us were ever going to find them. None of us were ever going to say come on, come on, where’s your tale, Cam?

‘Probably,’ I say, but Wade laughs, then, and says, ‘Oh, she knows. She knows for sure, she’s got it with her!’

And I hate him for that too. Now they’re after me to read it and no, no, no, I can’t, I can’t, and then I have to tell them why and it’s mortifying somehow. It’s like pulling a tooth. Out of my vagina.

‘The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.’

It’s more than smutty – it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.

Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.

‘Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.’

But Kitty goes one better than that.

‘I always knew you wanted to write porn,’ she says, in-between hilarious, hilarious laughter. ‘All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.’

Oh, Lord.

‘I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?’ I say, but then Wade has a go too.

‘I think you kind of did.’

And then even worse: ‘I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.’ Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wine glass.

Definitely half-cut.

‘See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,’ Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.

‘We went to the same university!’

‘Yeah. Yalevard.’

‘There’s no such place.’

‘Harvale, then.’

‘That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.’

Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.

Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.

It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.

‘But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,’ Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.

Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.

‘I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.’

‘Your stories were always like that, Allie,’ Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. ‘But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.’

OK, maybe not a traitor, exactly. Maybe more like a really evil partner in crime who drags you down with her, into disaster. In all my many dreams of how this reunion would end up going – minor explosions, someone killing someone else, nervous breakdowns – none of this ever featured in even the tiniest, remotest sense. I didn’t even imagine myself ending up in bed with Wade, really, because whenever I let myself want something it almost never happens.

Did I do the opposite of wanting this chat about sex stories?

‘Yeah, also guilty,’ Wade says, and I rack my brain trying to think of where they crammed all this boiling lust into tales about being a pig who could fly (Kitty) and a cyborg from the future (Wade).

Maybe the pigs and the cyborgs had a lot of sex I just don’t know about.

‘It’s OK, Cam, you don’t have to put your hand up for this one,’ Wade adds, and my brain automatically makes an odd little dinging noise. As though it’s decided to tally up all the little digs Wade’s going to get in about Cameron, for no apparent reason. ‘Everyone knows that you’re not a part of our dirty perverts club.’

Seriously. Were they like this before? Because that last part seems even meaner than the first bit, as though Wade would like nothing better than to slice Cameron right out of our group forever, for some end I can’t quite see.

I can’t see it so much that I’m compelled to say something in too big and too funny a voice, as though I can just smooth everything over by being ridiculous.

‘Hey, how do you know he’s not a dirty pervert? You seem really perverted to me, Cam, I swear.’

By being really ridiculous. Because in truth, there isn’t a person on Earth who seems less sexual than Cameron. I’m sure Mother Teresa was more adventurous with her lovers than Cameron is with his. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen him with someone I could loosely term a ‘lover’.

He probably has constant, epic sex with the robot girl he’s built.

Annnnddd…now I feel mean. Especially when he then says: ‘Thank you, Allie. Your faith in my perverted-ness is very…welcomed.’

He actually does seem heartened too. When I look at him he’s getting really close to smiling in this strange, almost-definitely-drunk way, and after a couple of long, weird moments have ticked by I find my mind rolling back and back to that word he used.

Welcomed. And the pause he had before it, as though he had a couple of other contenders before he settled on something so mundane. Though for the life of me, I can’t think what other word he could have slotted in there. What replaces welcomed, easily? Pleased? Sweet?

And then my brain throws up arousing like an insane hiccup, and I move along quickly.

‘OK, so, maybe I liked to occasionally write about sex-ghosts,’ I say, but it comes out less funny and more wounded than I intend. And Wade spots it, which is weird because he never used to. He never used to know when I’d taken a mortal hit and was down for the count.

‘Hey, what’s the big deal?’ he says, and there’s this creamy, smooth note of conciliation in his voice that sounds weird. Weird, but not exactly unwelcome. ‘We’re all grown up now. We can be perverts if we want to be.’

‘I didn’t care about being a pervert before, quite frankly,’ Kitty says.

Of course, my mind flicks to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers in the bed next to mine, in our tiny dorm room. Though I’ll admit, my mind sometimes goes to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers when I’m busy plunging the toilet or waiting for a kettle to boil, so it’s no real commentary on the things we’re talking about now.

‘So where are the stories, Kit? The dirty stories, about something other than magic balloons that get lost?’ Wade asks, and Kitty heys!

Then tries to hurl a cushion at him and fails, miserably.

‘I wrote loads more than kids stories, you doof. I wrote fabulous tales of rip-roaring sexual adventures the likes of which the world has never seen.’

I can well believe her. One of her postcards just had the word ‘five-way’ on it in big letters. Is five-way even a word? I’m not sure and largely felt too afraid to ask.

‘Yeah?’ Wade says.

And then he does something that makes my stomach kind of flip-flop. As though maybe I’d just thought this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.

It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with ‘one-way’ on it in big, fancy glitter letters.

‘Like this story?’ Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.

No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it sub.

Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: ‘Ooooh, he’s a magician!’

Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.

‘You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,’ I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.

‘Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck,’ Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house, he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.

And the L-word’s loose. So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.

‘Why do you think he did?’ Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say…heated – though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.

But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.

Sharing what we never shared before.

Though when I think about this idea, my stomach stops flip-flopping and drops out of me entirely.

‘Because he had no one else,’ Cameron says, finally, and though Wade starts blathering on about Scooby-Doo and Kitty wants to know why he wanted us to stay here for a month first, then, if it was just about him being a lonely old bastard, I think Cameron’s right.

I think we were his family, once. And maybe he just wanted his family to come back together, in some sort of wildly eccentric and completely inadvisable fashion. One that makes Wade say: ‘There’s a curse on the house, and a month is what it takes to possess us all and make us kill each other.’

This time, Kitty manages to hurl a cushion at him. She even kicks one little leg out at him, and misses by a country mile.

‘You dick! I’m already not going to sleep tonight, thinking about people watching us.’

‘People watching us?’ I say, and Kitty turns her head almost 360 degrees to shoot the weirdest look at me. It has nothing to do with the content of my words, though, I know, and everything to do with the fact that me and Cameron say said words at exactly the same time. We even use the same incredulous tone – or we would have, if I had a gunmetal voice like his.

‘Well yeah. There must be people watching us. Checking that we’re staying for the month, you know? Making sure we’re doing the “renovations”.’

‘The place doesn’t even need renovations,’ Wade says, and he would know. But Cameron’s still stuck on this idea of being watched.

‘No one is spying on us. The solicitor even said to me that a clause like that wouldn’t hold up – that we didn’t have to stay if we didn’t want to.’

We all go silent, then. Though I can practically hear what everyone’s thinking, anyway – so why are we here? What are we all doing here, if we don’t have to be? None of us have jobs that we need to rush back to, and there’s a nice healthy provision been made for us, but even so. Even so, what are we doing in this old house again, reliving old memories?

‘So,’ Wade says. ‘Back to my story?’

I can see he’s just raring to plunge right into it – which makes my palms inexplicably sweaty and puts my heart somewhere up around my throat – but Cameron pulls him up short. He points out that none of us have any candy, and I’m almost certain he does so for the same reasons I would, if I’d have thought about it.

To stall Wade from reading out the Story of Probable Depravity.

But then he comes back too quickly with a bag of actual red liquorice, the staple story food of the Candy Club, and then I’m not so sure. Plus he kind of looks at me as he passes by to the kitchen, and there’s something about his expression, something hazy in his bottom-of-the-ocean eyes, as though summer heat has hit the water and everything is melting away.

And then Wade starts talking, and I don’t know whether it’s Cameron’s strange smoky stare or the words of this obviously filthy story that make me feel suddenly warm and liquid between my legs.

Though I think the latter has a running start.

‘He thought about licking her cunt when he brought the pair of panties to his face, even though he didn’t want to. He wanted to think about nice things, cute things, because she was a real lovely girl. Her eyes only ever laughed at him kindly, and her sweet mouth seemed to have no edges. She did nice things, like slipping an arm around him when he felt down – despite the fact that no one else ever seemed to know if he was down or not.

‘But she did. And now he was in her room, going through her things. All of her panties and bras and other stuff besides that he’d never suspected she’d have. She had something that looked like a see-through teddy, and when he rubbed it over his cheek it felt liquid-soft, like maybe it would melt if he kept doing dirty things to it.

‘Even so, he ran it over the stiff ridge of his erection – plainly visible through the material of his jeans – and thought about doing that same thing with her inside it. She’d be all spread out on the bed with the silk clinging to her curvy body, and he could get on her and slide his cock over every inch.

‘The thought alone made him sweat. He could feel his stiff cock pulsing against his zipper, and longed to take it out. But then the door sounded down below, and a new kind of feeling sprang through him.’

I know just what Wade’s perverted character means. A new sort of feeling is springing through me too. Wade pauses to snap off a bit of red liquorice, but other than that he seems completely unfazed by all of the cocks and cunts and, oh my word, I don’t think I can take the heat in here. I think I need to get out of the kitchen, even though I’m not actually in one.

Where has he gotten this stuff from? Is this real? Something about it sounds it, but I can’t imagine Wade sneaking into some chick’s bedroom to sniff her panties – and especially not this new Wade, all smooth and creamy-voiced and too-slick.

In truth I can’t imagine anything at all, because the bottom half of me has been dipped in warm honey and I can’t seem to breathe out. I keep breathing in, but nothing’s going back out again.

And he continues! Kitty is kind of squirming on my lap and I dare not even look at Cameron, but Wade only goes and carries on.

‘Fear. She’d come back early from the poetry recital. Any second, and she was going to climb the stairs and find him here, lurking in her most private space.

‘He did the only thing he could: he opened the door to her adjoining bathroom and slipped inside.

‘However, this action presented a slight problem. Once in there, he had the urge to shut the door tight and lock it – maybe he could tell her he’d desperately needed to go, or something like it – but by the time he’d thought of it, he realised two things. One – an excuse like that wasn’t going to fly. And two – he couldn’t safely shut the door right to without her hearing and knowing he’d gone in there only a moment before she arrived home.

‘It just wasn’t watertight. Which was how he found himself in her bathroom, staring at her through a crack in the door, willing her to leave before anything worse happened.’

I don’t want anything worse to happen. Kitty has a hand inside her blouse – I know she does, without even looking down. But I don’t blame her because my own nipples feel like two great big glaring points, sticking right through my jersey for everyone to see. I wish I’d worn a thicker bra, but really, who could have predicted this?

Does he somehow psychically know I’m this horny? Can anyone else feel it, vibrating off me in waves? I’m sure I can sense some kind of strange heat emanating from Cameron, but maybe that’s just because he’s so massive and I’m so turned on.

God, I’m this turned on before he’s even gotten to the good stuff.

‘It was almost a slap in the face when she stripped out of her clothes before doing anything else. Of course he tried to look away, but it was useless. Here was the object of his lust in just her bra and panties, and both items barely hid a thing.

‘When she turned he could see the groove between the rounded, glorious cheeks of her ass, just visible beneath her plain white of her underwear. His mind went automatically to the most lurid thing he could imagine – stroking a finger over that shadowed crease, or even filthier – sticking his tongue there and licking and licking until she begged him not to stop.

‘And then she turned around, and that warm pulse of arousal he’d felt while stroking her silky things over his body became a sharp kick. A warning – if he didn’t do something soon, he was going to spurt in his jeans just like that.

‘She looked more amazing than he’d ever imagined. He could see it now – the clothes she wore were too shapeless. They hid the full, perfect curve of her hips and the neat way they nipped in at her waist. The slight swell of her belly looked smooth and warm and infinitely caress-able, and though her legs didn’t have a lot of length, there was something about them – something sweet and inviting.

‘She’d barely be able to get those things around his big body, and the thought was exciting. As though she was both solid and real, easily grope-able and always promising a soft sensuality, but also small and quite fragile.

‘The contrast made him want to groan, and he put a fist to his lips. She’d started taking off her bra and any moment he was going to get to see her breasts – the object of many of his fantasies. He’d often imagined covering her in something slick, then easing his swollen cock between those two soft mounds, but the image was so much clearer, here. It was so close he could almost taste it, but he resisted.

‘He didn’t move, or make a sound. Not even when she suddenly slipped a hand beneath the material of her panties, and rubbed slowly over her almost visible pussy.’

He looks up from the story, then, but I can’t look back. Mainly because I’ve covered my face with my hands and am only watching through the cracks between my fingers. Of course, I still know he’s grinning. He’s grinning underneath his stupid designer stubble and, when he continues, he sticks his tongue, lewdly, into the hollow cup of his cheek.

Then Cameron interrupts in a suddenly heated tone, and I don’t know what to think anymore. I’m starting to lose my ability to make sense of things.

‘Maybe you should tell a different story, Wade,’ he says, almost like a warning, but Wade just kind of winks at him and carries right on.

‘She was wet. He could tell she was, because even from all the way over in the bathroom, he could hear the slick sounds her fingers made as they parted things he wanted to part, and did things he wanted to do. The urge to open the door and just go to her went through him, but he held it in check. She’d never forgive him, if he revealed himself now.

‘Not now that she’d spread herself out over her bed, fingers busy beneath the thin material, free hand on one plump, gorgeous breast. From this vantage point, he had a complete view of the place between her spread legs, and when she frigged herself a little more vigorously or slid two fingers inside her tight pussy, the strip of material covering her mound slid to one side to reveal little tantalising glimpses.

‘He couldn’t help sliding a hand over the pulsing ridge of his erection. At first he went with something small and unassuming – the heel of his palm pressing down hard and almost cruelly. But once she started moaning and squirming on the bed, those little glimpses of glistening flesh getting clearer and clearer, he couldn’t stop himself.

‘He’d never particularly thought of himself as a sexual person – he rarely felt anything above a mild arousal and masturbation wasn’t top of his list of fun things to do – but the heat coursing through his body was undeniable, irresistible. It was as though a strange force had gripped him, and was inciting him to slide a hand inside his jeans and stroke over his stiff and swollen cock.’

I swear to God, I jump right out of my skin when Cameron interrupts this time. Even Kitty jolts a little, in the middle of doing whatever it is she’s doing – that’s how loud he suddenly is.

‘I really think you should stop now, Wade,’ he says. But Wade doesn’t.

‘It took only the slightest touch – just his thumb on the slippery tip – to bring him off. He felt it like an avalanche, like something breaking inside him, uncheckable pleasure jerking upward from his straining cock to some place low and deep in his gut. Great spurts of come covered the insubstantial cup of his hand and then flowed messily outward, to stain the inside of his jeans. He could feel his body straining, strung too taut, while all of her cries of pleasure echoed every sound he wanted to make.

‘It was only afterward he realised these sounds had made him bite down hard enough to draw blood, on his still-clenched fist.’

He puts the pages aside, but nobody says anything. It’s as though he hasn’t finished, as though there has to be more, despite the buzz of relief that seems to be going through all of us, to have heard it come to an end.

And yet when Kitty sits up quite suddenly – blouse partially unbuttoned and blonde hair a mussy halo around her head – and says: ‘So did she catch him?’

I’m echoing the sentiment inside. It’s the first thing I want to know, and it feels weird to understand that this is the only time I’ve ever been so desperate to get to the end of something Wade has written. As though all of his other stories somehow pale in comparison to this – whatever this is.

‘Tune in next week to find out,’ he says, though I’m sure he’s lying. There are no more words left on the page. He’s drained them all dry and left us wanting more, even though I’m clenching my nails into my palms with the weird awkwardness of all of this and Cameron is bristling to the right of me, somewhere.

I glance at him and he looks…I don’t even know what he looks like. Pissed on Cameron isn’t the same as pissed on anyone else. He doesn’t frown or grind his teeth, though I can see he’s pulled his lower lip right into his mouth in this mean sort of way. And I think his cheeks are a little flushed, even though that seems impossible.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him blush – so I guess that’s it. He must be embarrassed, in some fashion. I’ve never heard him talk about sex frankly, and he certainly doesn’t seem to want to talk about it now. In fact, before Kitty’s even done pressing Wade for more, Cam has gotten up out of his seat and left the room entirely.

And I can’t help glancing after him, as he goes.

Chapter Three

Of course I can’t sleep. I try, but it’s impossible with Wade’s story on my brain, and then in the kitchen, later on, him hugging me from behind. Him whispering in my ear: Did you like the story?

I felt like saying Nooooo, I hated it. I wish it would die a horrible, untimely death, and then I could just stop thinking about it forever and ever, amen.

But instead I had just gone all hot and cold like an idiot, feeling his much-bigger-than-they-used-to-be arms around me, and smelling his rainy days smell as though no time had gone by at all. Only the thing is, back then he wouldn’t have whispered something like that in my ear. No – I don’t think he would have.

Because…and here’s the kicker…it was definitely suggestive. There was something suggestive about it – I can’t deny that fact. His breath had been all hot and moist against the side of my face and my throat, and his voice had held a little burr of something delicious right down low, right from the deepest darkest place inside him.

My clit had jerked to that sound before I’d even had chance to process it. His hand had spread over my chest – so achingly close to my right breast – and he’d pulled me so tight against him, so tight I could have rubbed my ass into the curve of his body and maybe felt something else that possibly maybe could have been there.

It was there on Cameron, I think. I don’t want to face it too head-on because there’s this weird barrier in my mind, this weird urge not to embarrass him any further even though he’s never going to know I saw something just as he passed me by. But he’s a big guy, and, well, it’s not as though sweatpants hide a lot. And neither does kind of bending over and moving fast.

Christ. Why the fuck am I thinking about Cameron’s possible erection in the first place? I’ve got sex on the brain. I’ve got sex on top of me and all over me and in the tiny grooves between my higher thought processes. Wade has poisoned me with his stupid, ridiculous story and now all I can think about are cocks and sweatpants and maybe getting up and going to Wade’s room.

A blush storms my entire body whenever I let myself entertain the notion, but the notion is there nonetheless. I mean – that’s what he was saying, right? He was being suggestive. He was suggesting I get up and go to his room in the middle of the night – or maybe slightly earlier than that, because I’m sure he didn’t imagine it would take me three hours to stew over all of this – and maybe talk for a little while. You know, about old times.

And then after all the talking: fuck his brains out. Just fuck and fuck and fuck his brains out. Hell, if he wants me to masturbate on a bed while he spies on me from the bathroom, we can do that too. I’m feeling loose-limbed and lax and up for anything, even as the neurotic side of me tries desperately to cling to my teetering mind.

He doesn’t want you that way, the teetering side says. He was just being friendly.

Only I know there’s something new here, now, and it isn’t exactly holding hands and sharing tales of happy pigs. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s almost as though I can feel it charging through the walls of this house – between his room and my room and probably Kitty and Cam’s rooms too – when I put my hand on the smooth, cool surface above my bed. Like we’re all connected down this great red hallway we’ve picked as our living space, every buzzing molecule in our bodies breathing life into the Professor’s weird old place.

It’s even something weird – like the thought of the lush crimson carpet out there, gathering between my bare toes – that urges me up, and out of bed, and down toward Wade’s room. His is the fourth door on the right – mine is first, then there’s a bathroom, then comes Cam’s room, and Kitty’s picked one of the rooms opposite – and I know before I even get to it that it’s open. I can see a slither of blue through the crack, because Wade’s room is all navy curtains and swirling sky-coloured rugs, though it’s not those things I’m paying attention to.

No, God, no.

I’m paying attention to the sounds of people fucking. Obviously, vigorously fucking. And for a long, long, frankly pain-stricken moment, I’m not sure what to do. I could keep going toward the door, clearly, and uncover exactly who’s doing the fucking in question. But that just seems like asking for heartache, because really there are only two options.

Either that weird tension between him and Cam was actually intense sexual attraction and they’re both in there doing each other in the ass, or else it’s the far more likely option. Kitty snuck across the hallway well before I ever even considered it, and now she’s in the middle of a marathon sex session with the object of all my hopes and dreams.

God, I hate that he’s the object of my hopes and dreams. I hate Kitty for one bright, burning, selfish second, because she’s brave and I’m not, and she’s lovely and I’m not, and she doesn’t have to be a eunuch for the rest of her life, and I somehow do.

And then I get to the door with my mind this boiling cauldron of stupid ideas – like how I’m going to barge in and accuse Wade of cheating on a girlfriend he doesn’t actually have, or accuse Kitty of betraying a friend over something she doesn’t even know about, or have some kind of ridiculous meltdown where I say words that aren’t even really English, just the blind tumbling result of my stupid heartache – and I just can’t do any of it. I can see them through the crack in the door, and I have to simply stand there and watch my hero twisting into some pretty incredible shapes with a person who is not me.

I have to watch him lift both of her legs over his shoulders until she’s almost bent double on the bed, and then pound into her as though sex is going to disappear tomorrow. Whoever invented fucking is going to revoke everybody’s licence, and from then on we have to spend our days shaking hands or violently waving.

I wish I’d done more than that in the short window of sex we all had. For one far too long and not-quite-agonising second, I find myself gazing at them with my mouth actually open. Heartache falls by the wayside in the face of this, because by God I’ve never seen a man flip a woman like that. He just gets hold of her hips and somehow she’s on her front, even though I’m sure such a move should have dislocated her hip.

Of course, I’ve seen things like this in porn. I’m aware that most people have more athletic sex than I’ve ever had. But even so, it’s different when it’s close up. It’s different when it’s only inches away from me, and I can see the look on Kitty’s face when she turns it to one side and bites at her own arm.

She looks like someone who realises there’s going to be no more sex tomorrow. She looks desperate and blissed out and she’s making this noise – this ah ah ah noise – that I can hardly stand to hear. It forces unwanted feelings through my body, and I know they’re there because I just have to squeeze my legs together against them.

God, what must it be like to feel that way? To have someone pounding into you over and over again, so hard I can see her little cupcake breasts bouncing beneath the curve of her body, and when I dare to flick my attention to Wade I can make out every muscle in his tensing stomach, all ab-tacular and hard as anything and fuck, fuck.

This is too much. Did he look this way, before? He had a good, strong swimmer’s body, I know that much. But I can’t recall him being so hairy or having those ropey, muscular arms or those actual high, firm pecs. He looks so rippling, so hard-bodied – though I suppose the overall effect is added to by the sheen of sweat all over him. It’s as though he slid out of the pages of Men’s Health only five seconds earlier, and I’m not ashamed to admit I can’t take my eyes off it.

Though maybe it’s partly because I don’t want to look at the two most obvious eye-magnets: his cock, and his face. If I look at his cock or his face, I swear I’ll die. He’s saying some pretty dirty things – Take it, take it, you little slut, among others – and that’s enough all on its own. It’s enough to make me press my legs together tighter, tighter, and I can feel I’m sweating through my pyjamas, I know I am, I know any second I’m going to touch myself like the guy in Wade’s story.

And then I look up at his face – just as Kitty says something disgusting like Ohhhh yeah, fuck my slick cunt – and of course he’s staring right at me. Of course he is. He’s staring right at me as he fucks her, this look on his face like something the Devil would do on realising he’s corrupted another innocent soul, and I back right up in a hurry until I crack my shoulder blades against the wall.

I realise I’m breathing hard. Probably hard enough for Kitty to hear, if she takes a second in-between ordering him to Fuck her pussy harder, goddammit. I almost laugh hearing my little pixie girl being such a bossy-boots in bed, but then my mind flashes on Wade’s grinning, mischief-lit face again and I’m too shocked to get the sound out. I think I’ll be too shocked to make a sound tomorrow, actually. In fact, I think I’m too shocked to ever make another sound from now until the end of time, because God I don’t know how I feel about any of this.

I can’t even find bitterness, anymore, which seems very odd indeed. Instead I just seem all juiced up with too much sex, and when I try to walk back toward my room all I can manage is a kind of vague slide along the wall.

Of course it’s only once I’m tucked back in my bed, staring at the ceiling like a ghost of myself, that I actually dare to admit what I wasn’t sure I’d seen before.

He beckoned me in. He jerked his head in the universally accepted gesture for ‘come on in, the water’s fine.’ And then he winked, and I broke my back against the hallway wall, before slithering back to my room like the proper little eunuch I am.

Of course, the sleeping situation is even worse now. I catch myself staring at the alarm clock I brought with me – the one I’ve perched, incongruously, on the ornate dresser in the corner of the room – watching the neon numbers flick by, one at a time. 4.36 a.m. 4.37 a.m.

Jesus, what a nightmare. So typical, too – of course he’s fucking Kitty! Of course he is. I come here hoping for one thing, and get a face full of that instead. With possible weird threesomes thrown into the bargain. And then in the insane aftermath I get my body humming like an overheated tractor, everything between my legs all swollen and heavy and obviously soaked.

In fact, I think I’ve soaked through my pyjama bottoms. Whenever I move everything feels wet down there, though I don’t want to move because when I do my clit sparks and my pulse beats slow and heavy all the way through my sex and the urge to masturbate is just incredible.

But I won’t, I won’t, because I’m heartbroken. And because it’s weird. And because I’m going to keep telling myself those two things until I utterly believe them.

God I wish I wasn’t so horny. And so thirsty too. A night of pacing in my head has left me dry-mouthed, and while horny’s worse, thirsty means I’ll have to get up and pass the dreaded room of sex again. No doubt they’re still going at it, only this time the door will be wi-i-ide open and I’ll have to see him perpetrating other insane things too, like doing her in the butt with a dildo while he fucks her pussy with his cock.

Oh, there’s no end to the depravity my mind can conjure up. It conjures it as I’m passing Wade’s closed door, by telling me that it’s only closed so he can nail her up against it. And then when I get to the bottom of the stairs and hear sounds from the living room, it tells me they’re doing it on the sideboard.

The faint noise I can hear? Plates rattling.

Even though it sounds much more like papers being shuffled. And then someone gives what sounds like a little muffled cough and I almost jump right back up five steps all at once, because apparently I’ve turned into this nervous nelly and every little thing makes me want to jerk right out of my own skin.

It’s the house, I think. It’s not just the sex and the weird feelings and the meeting up with old friends. It’s the house, which seems so dark and coated in shadows even with the upstairs hallway light on, and the faint glow coming from the living room.

There’s no door to it – just an archway – so really that glow should be more than enough to comfort me. But instead I find myself peering around the arc of the stairs to the passageway that reaches down, down toward the boat room and the stepping stones, as though any second a sex-ghost is going to leap out at me and drag me into the walls.

It did that in my story. Dragged people into walls, I mean. And now I have to think about it while creeping through the house that doom built, too afraid to go forward and too afraid to go back and just desperate for a fucking drink. I’m dying of thirst here, while Kitty and Wade go at it in every available room as though fear is just a wacky concept some nerd invented one time.

Of course I get to the very edges of the archway and then realise I’m not going to be able to get to the kitchen. If I do anything but press against this wall – if I do something mad like cross the hallway to the kitchen’s arch – whoever’s in there is going to see me. And seeing me once was quite enough, thanks all the same.

Especially as it’s not actually Wade and Kitty. Though for some mad reason, I’m holding my breath anyway. In fact, I hold it so tightly and so quickly that for a moment I’m sure I’m going to burst. I clench all over like a giant fist, everything in me rushing to some core I didn’t know I had, because he’s not just sitting on the couch, casually coughing and reading Boring Things About Computers while sipping tea.

Oh, of course he’s not. Why would he be? This is the night of insane shenanigans, like we actually are in some episode of Scooby-Doo, only it’s a version that’s really inappropriate for kids.

Because he’s…well. He’s gone through my stuff, for a start. I left my bag full of writing down here, and Cameron – strange, closed off, always polite Cameron – has actually rummaged through the thing and is reading some nonsense load of old bollocks I wrote about a thousand years ago.

Or at least, he was probably reading it at some point. Now he’s just got it half-crumpled in one white-knuckled fist, and for too long a moment it’s this that I focus on. I can’t take my eyes off it. His hand is just so big, and with everything tensed in such a way it looks as though he could punch through brick. And for some reason that’s all I can think for a good while – about him punching and punching something until his knuckles turn red and a great hole appears.

But then I’m forced to look at other things, as though I’ve somehow been transformed into a perverted voyeur over the course of one night. Someone’s erected a pane of glass between me and my friends, for reasons unspecified, and now I’ve got to walk around with it between us, watching them do weird things I never thought they’d do, my face pushed up against it like a kid outside a candy store.

I don’t even know what the candy actually is, in this simile. I don’t even know what’s going on – was there ground-up tiger blood and ten tons of oysters in that wine we all drunk? Or am I just in the middle of the most crazy sex-dream of my life? Because God knows I never thought I’d live to see Cameron Lindhurst doing anything like this.

Kitty and Wade was bad enough. This is just…overkill. He’s twisted sideways on the couch, long body spread out like a great diagonal slash, still in the clothes he left the room in earlier on. Which I suppose should make the scene before me seem less lewd, somehow, because it’s not as though I can see a great deal of skin. He’s got his jersey ruffled up and I can see the hairy and solid expanse of his stomach, and the sweatpants are tugged down enough to give me a glimpse of the almost coppery fur down there, but other than that he’s completely covered.

Though I confess it’s not the idea of naked that’s exciting me. It’s the hand he has, between his legs. I can see it, even through the barely-there light. He’s got a hand underneath the material of his sweatpants and he’s tugging and rubbing at the second shape I can just make out, and whenever he gets just a touch too frantic with it he presses his mouth into the leather of the couch and, oh God, he moans.

I can hear Cameron moaning. Cameron. Moaning in sexual ecstasy. It seems impossible but he’s doing it, and then even more shocking he suddenly takes that hand out of his sweatpants and licks over his palm. Before returning to the furtive dirty stroking he’s doing, faster this time, fiercer.

I think he might actually be close to coming. He’s rocking his hips into his own touch and he’s practically biting at the couch, and now when that hand slides downward beneath the material, his whole body shudders.

‘Ohhhhh God,’ he moans, and that’s it. I don’t know who this person is. This person apparently reads a story of mine and then masturbates in a place he could easily be caught in. None of it even remotely seems like Cameron, and the more he moans and gasps and seems almost tortured by desire, the more my paradigm shifts.

Has he done this before? Masturbated where someone might catch him? I think of the story Wade read out, of course I do, but then I realise with a little jerk that I’m the pervert in this particular scenario. I’m the spy, watching him fuck his own hand and moan and strive frantically for his orgasm, which is going to be utterly glorious when it comes.

I’m practically on tenterhooks waiting for it, like the true dirty little fucker I am. Is he going to tug his sweatpants all the way down before he does it, come into the cup of his hand, maybe? The thought is enough to send arrows of pleasure directly to my groin – as though I’m going to meet my orgasm just by standing here, watching him be this amazing and lustful and disgusting.

Because it seems like all of these things, when he does it. Wade didn’t even seem that disgusting when he winked at me and beckoned me over. But Cameron doing this is beyond the pale; it’s deliciously decadent, it’s too much to take. I can feel my clit swelling and begging for my touch, but the tense feeling it provokes isn’t just localised to that one area this time. It spreads upward through my body, burning as it goes, and the urge to masturbate, to join him, to just go there and suck his cock into my mouth is so overwhelming suddenly I’m stunned by it.

He hasn’t even beckoned me over, but I realise with a start that he doesn’t need to beckon me over. I just want to go to him like some sort of lust-starved maniac. I want to slide down on that cock he’s so desperately stroking, but more than that I want to see it, taste it, touch it.

I can’t stop wondering if it’s as big as the rest of him. It looks it, even though I can barely see more than a ridge beneath the material. When he starts working his hand over the head, licking his hand again before he does so in such a lewd and wanton way I can’t stand it, I can see the heavy line of the rest of it pressing heavy against his sweatpants.

It’s unbearable. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a precipice with him, just waiting for him to swell and push into his hand and let go of all that pleasure. And then he does and I almost feel myself go too – a great wash of sensation runs through me, as though someone licked between my legs. As though I’m finally getting what I’ve been needing all night long, just from hearing him groan that he’s coming, he’s coming.

Just before the grip he’s got on himself gets audibly slicker.

It takes me a moment to realise it, but then it comes to me.

He’s working his own hot liquid down over his shaft. Like he just wants to draw it out and can’t quite bear to have it finish yet. Like he needs more and more and if he just keeps writhing and rocking into it, he’ll get it.

I almost moan with him. It’s the strangest, hottest thing I’ve ever seen, in a night when I also watched my best friend fuck my other best friend. That fact alone seems remarkable, but it’s worse when I get back to my room on shaky legs and realise something insane:

I don’t want to masturbate right now, and think about Wade. I want to masturbate right now and think about Cameron.

Chapter Four

When Kitty comes and joins me at the breakfast table in the kitchen the next day, my face doesn’t go red. I think she knows – she gives me a very pointed, ‘Did you sleep well?’ – but it’s not as though it’s unusual between me and her. I’ve seen her fuck before. It’s no big deal.

It’s not even a big deal when Wade comes in and he’s sort of, you know…pretending he and Kitty are like business partners now. How are you today, weather is fine, have you seen last night’s stock reports, etcetera. It’s all very clinical and normal and I don’t even find myself blushing when he gives me this mischievous look. Eyes narrowed just ever so slightly, almost-smile touching his lips, all of him just quivering for a reaction from me, I can tell.

But somehow, bizarrely, I do blush when Cameron comes in. I more than blush, in fact. I feel it right to the roots of my hair, this King Kong mega blush from the planet beyond. I don’t even know why, either, because what he was doing was far less than what they were doing, but somehow it’s worse even so and then he says, ‘Hey, Allie,’ and I mumble something back, into my cornflakes.

For the barest of seconds, I’m sure he looks hurt. Not hugely, or anything, but something definitely passes across his face. As though he’s used to me being silly, sweet Allie and now that I’m suddenly not being, he’s sorely sensible of the change.

It makes me wonder if he’s thinking about last night, and suspects something. It’s the first thing I’d think of if someone’s demeanour changed toward me – that I did something wrong and now I have to pay for it. And although what he did wasn’t wrong, exactly, I’m pretty sure someone like Cameron feels it is.

I mean, he masturbated after going through my things. That’s almost as bad as Wade’s story, and it gives me a little shiver thinking about how close we both were to mirroring those fictional events. He went through the stuff, and I played the voyeur. He masturbated, and I thought long and deep and hard about masturbating.

I didn’t do it, however. I felt the way I do now: electrically embarrassed. Kitty watches me slosh my cornflakes and eventually asks me if I’m OK, but I can’t deal with that right now, either. It’s obviously starting to dawn on her that maybe I’m not quite OK with her fucking Wade, but it’s the least of my concerns right now, it really is.

Instead I look up at Cameron, now he’s sitting down with his eyes on his own breakfast. What’s going on in that head of his, exactly? Why was it my stories he was going through? I feel almost as though I’ve caught a thief, but I can’t confront him about it because the thief is way too nice and kind of weird.

Plus, what if his answer is something bizarre, like: I have a fetish about people being sucked into walls? Maybe my sex-ghost story affected him more than I’ve ever suspected, and he’s just been waiting all these years for another chance to read it. I mean, there’s not much else it can be, realistically.

It’s not like he’s going to be secretly in love with me, or anything.

I glance across the table at him and see the way his eyelashes curve so darkly against his cheeks when he blinks, as though everything is in slow motion suddenly, everything is so brilliantly clear. Did I notice before now how beautiful he is?

I don’t think so and yet I can’t escape it, right in this moment. His lips are so perfect – the lower one barely there and the upper like a soft bow, like a woman’s mouth in a face that’s otherwise so masculine. His face is heavy, I think, as though he held a lot of puppy fat when he was a kid and suddenly shot right out of it, and now that he’s older and taller and handsome, he doesn’t quite know what to do with any of it.

And then he looks right at me with those eyes of his – such a different shade of blue than Wade’s – and I forget everything I was just thinking. I forget about Wade and the night before; I forget all my fears of coming here. I just stare at Cameron like I’m seeing someone for the first time, and all the sound in the world boils down and down into nothing, as though I’ve found myself in a long tunnel beneath the ocean, all the waves crashing above but none of them reaching me –

‘Allie! Jesus Christ. Are you alive?’

I jerk to Wade immediately, and out the corner of my eye I see Cameron do it too. Somehow it’s like we were both caught with our hands in the cookie jar, but I can’t think what, exactly, the cookie jar is in this scenario. It’s not as though we were fondling each other or kissing or any of that stuff, after all – and not as though I actually want to, either, because you know, I don’t. I’ve never even thought about Cameron that way, and have no idea why I’m thinking of it now.

‘I was just saying,’ Wade continues, and there’s something steely in his voice. Something he’s grown since college – an insistence about himself. Like the night before when everyone had to look at him and hear his story. Like the night before when he seemed so sure I would come into the bedroom and do fuck knows what. ‘Maybe we should all go down to the lake, today. Have a swim.’

It makes me want to say to him, weirdly: You don’t look like you swim anymore. You look like you run. You look like you power run.

Though I’m not sure why he does, exactly. Something about the way he slicks his hair back, maybe? Something about the way it looks almost dirty blond now, as though he dyes it, though I’m not certain he does. I just remember him saying to me that he hated being so cute in a family of big dark-haired men, and it seems awfully convenient that now, he’s almost a big dark-haired man. He’s slick and efficient and bristly, and he’s just waiting for an answer.

‘Sure,’ I say, though I wish I hadn’t.

The trouble is, we always used to come down here in our clothes. In the night. Never in broad daylight with everybody suddenly half-naked and me looking like a prized idiot because I’ve got three jumpers and a pair of dungarees on.

And OK. Maybe not that bad. I’ve got a swimsuit on underneath these shorts, I swear to God.

But the swimsuit is absolutely gargantuan compared to Kitty’s swimsuit. Hers isn’t even a swimsuit, really. It’s two specks of cloth over her nipples and one speck of cloth over her vadge and I must really be an old lady inside because all I can think is Dear God it’s March. She’s going to die in this freezing disc of grey-blue water.

I’m dying already, just looking at it. I mean, it’s as beautiful as I remember it being – surrounded by misty open fields and clumps of trees here and there, the sun just skating its surface – but I can almost see ice forming, in places. The grass around its banks has frost on it.

‘I think we’re going to die,’ Cam says, but then I have to look at him, so really dying is the least of my issues.

God, he’s big. Just really, really big. I even see Wade casting a weird look at him before he takes his own shirt off, because I’m pretty sure Wade was expecting to have the body, you know? He obviously goes to the gym now and everything is just as bumpy and firm as it was last night, when he put on his little fuck-show for me.

But somehow he’s not quite as…immense as Cam. Cam is…huge. And not just in a freakishly tall, six-foot-five sort of way. His shoulders look heavy and substantial, as though he spends his days with a yoke over them, climbing up some never-ending hill. His chest is broad and weighty, muscular but not in a gym-bunny way, like Wade’s is.

This is more like…I don’t know. I want to ask him what he’s been doing to get his body like this, but just the idea of posing the question makes my face heat. Asking would only suggest that I’m looking and that I like what I’m looking at and both things seem impossible, suddenly.

I might have said it before – Whoa, hey there stud, something like that – but I can’t now. Not after…he did that thing. I can’t, I can’t.

Unfortunately, however, Kitty can.

‘Jesus Christ, Cam – get in me. Wow.’

I do not like the fact that, when she says this, I have the sudden urge to shove her in the lake. No, I do not like this feeling at all. Where is it even coming from? I didn’t feel like pushing her in the lake when I saw her fucking my one true love. Thinking it now is just weird and insane and then I glance at Cam and his face has gone bright, bright red and he’s fingering his T-shirt like…I don’t know. Like he wants to put it back on maybe?

Yeah, he looks like he wants to put it back on. As though she’s being sarcastic, or something, and he should cover up quick before anybody else sees the rest of his grotesquery.

Makes me want to put a hand on his arm and say something good and reassuring like I’ve never seen a better body on any actual person, only I can’t. I can’t because it would be the absolute truth. He looks better than I’ve ever seen any other person look, and thinking about it makes my face flush and my body go all weird and, Jesus Christ, I’m turned on again.

‘Come on, you doof,’ Kitty says, and grabs his arm, and even though I can see she’s trying to make up for whatever weird discomfort she caused him, I feel that little flash of something again. That urge to shove the girl I love best in the whole world right into the lake.

‘Why can’t we just use boats, I need a boat,’ he says as he trails after her to the water’s edge, and I find myself thinking: Is that how you do it? Is it the rowing that makes you all big, do you still row after all these years, do you still stand around in a boathouse somewhere in those tiny Lycra shorts that show just about everything you’ve –

‘Hey. Earth to Allie. Seriously, what’s going on with you? I talk, you’re off in some other world.’

I manage to tune back into Wade again and I don’t know. I guess I’m expecting him to be half-laughing or not that bothered. But when I actually look he’s kind of pissed. Yeah, there’s definitely something angry in his expression, like before when I thought about him being insistent somehow.

Was he this way before? All I seem to recall is me begging for his attention, me feasting on the tiny scraps of his laidback love, though that’s not what I’m thinking about right now. Instead I find myself wondering just what his expectations were for this little get-together.

Everyone pledging undying sexual allegiance to him, maybe?

‘No, I was just…’ I start, but then I stop. Mainly because the words coming to my lips were definitely going to be about Cameron, and they were going to be something along the lines of Did Cameron ever talk to you about my stories? About maybe liking them a whole huge lot? And I realise I don’t want that. I don’t want Wade to know what I saw, or how I felt about it, or anything of the kind.

Which is weird, when you really think about it.

‘Nothing. I guess your story last night really threw me for a loop,’ I finish, though it’s no better than what I was going to say, in all honesty. It sounds as though I’m talking about something else altogether, and when he grins I know he’s thinking that.

‘Yeah?’ he says and I brace myself. I know what’s coming. Or at least I kind of do until he does it, until he gets right up close to me suddenly and breathes all of his hot breath on me and murmurs in that husky way of his. ‘Well I thought you were going to come to my room last night. And maybe if you had, I could have told you a story instead.’

Ugh. Ugh. When did he become this Master of Seduction type of guy? Was he always like this? Did I always like it? Because I’m liking it now even though I don’t want to, and my body feels all hot and my face feels all hot and this close up he’s so good looking and so wolfish. Predatory, I think, even though I always used to consider him gentle. Kind, and gentle.

‘Oh yeah? Is that the one about the amateur gymnasts in the middle of the night?’ I say, only I mean it to be confrontational and bolshy and it comes out like I’m flirting instead. Like I want him to lean even closer toward me and whisper in my ear about all the stories he just can’t wait to tell me.