Taming the Beast

by Emily Maguire

  Jamie grabbed her leg and pulled her down. She put her arm over his shoulder and he rested his head against her. Sarah stated what she dearly hoped was the obvious. ‘She’ll get rid of it.’

  ‘No.’ It was more a sigh than a word.

  ‘Fuck. What then?’

  ‘We’re getting married. Her dad’s giving us the deposit on a unit.’ Jamie pressed his face into Sarah’s arm. She felt his tears through the flannelette of her pyjamas. Damn Shelley. Sarah wanted to go around and sort the bitch out. Give her a good kick to the stomach or push her down some stairs. She kept waiting for Jamie to leap up and say he was kidding, but he just cried until the top of her pants was soaked.

  ‘I’ve always wanted kids,’ Jamie whispered. ‘You know that, Sarah, I’ve always said it, haven’t I? It’s what I wanted, just sooner. It’ll be good, I reckon. Just need to get used to the idea.’

  Sarah stroked the back of his head and swore to herself that she would rip out Shelley’s heart with her bare hands. She would rip it out and throw it to the ground and jump up and down on it until it was a pile of bloody mush.

  6

  In the first week of August, Shelley and Jamie held a small dinner party in their unit to celebrate the apparently wonderful trifecta of mortgage, engagement and pregnancy. The party consisted of two blondes, their freshly caught men and Sarah.

  Jamie showed Sarah around the flat, which was almost as small as her own but much newer. She tried to make appreciative noises and pretend to be happy for him, but she was seething inside. Jamie had dropped out of uni for this. He was selling financial services over the phone for this. He had dark circles under his eyes for this.

  ‘You hate it don’t you?’ he asked after she had failed to muster the required enthusiasm for the way the bedroom windows looked out over the council reserve.

  ‘No. I like it. I’m jealous. It’s much nicer than mine. But then you get what you pay for don’t you? This place is beyond the reach of a poverty stricken student.’

  ‘You think I should have stayed at uni?’

  ‘It just seems a waste.’

  Jamie pulled the blinds closed and sat down on the edge of the bed. Sarah could hear Shelley giggling from somewhere down the hallway.

  ‘I’ve got responsibilities. I can’t be a student while I have all these responsibilities. Later, when things settle down, I can go back.’ Jamie sounded as though he had rehearsed the words.

  Sarah shook her head. ‘Jamie, don’t pretend that you want this. You’ve been tricked and–’

  ‘I want it. Be supportive.’

  Sarah sat beside him and put her hand on his knee. ‘Fine. If you’re happy, I’m happy.’

  ‘That was convincing.’

  ‘I’m trying.’

  Jamie patted her hand and smiled, and Sarah wanted to kiss him. It was a purely platonic urge, or mostly platonic. Kissing Jamie was natural and comforting. It was a way of saying You’re okay, I’m okay whenever their differences came between them. But maybe now the differences were too large. If she kissed him on the bed he shared with Shelley, would that be crossing some line? A line that had always been soft and ever shifting but now seemed hard and restrictive.

  Sarah hated hard lines. She hated Shelley. She hated Venetian blinds and council parks and the smell of fried onions. She kissed him. For a little too long. With open lips. With just a touch of tongue.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A kiss. So you know that I am genuinely happy for you.’ Sarah watched his face carefully. Had he felt anything? He must have felt something. Personally, she felt quite warm.

  ‘Shelley made punch. Come and have some.’ Jamie walked out of the room, and Sarah felt the unfamiliar cold wind of rejection.

  Sarah drank a glass of Shelley’s punch. It was too sweet and the pineapple pieces were too big and kept getting stuck to the bottom of her glass. She said something polite about it and then went for the bottle of Jim Beam.

  ‘Ah. A girl after my own heart.’ Mike winked at her, and Sarah poured him a glass.

  ‘Ooh, on to the strong stuff this early?’ Shelley said, with raised eyebrows and a darting glance at Jess.

  ‘Oh, it’s never too early for bourbon.’ Sarah downed the entire glass in one go. She had not planned on drinking at such a pace, but then she had not planned on kissing Jamie or on wanting him to kiss her back or being winked at and condescended too. She poured another glass and smiled at Mike, ‘Ready for another?’ she asked, gesturing to his still full glass.

  He raised his glass and drank the lot, not taking his eyes off her.

  ‘Come see the new car, Mike. Shell’s brother got it for us wholesale,’ said Jamie.

  Sarah said that she would like to see the new car too, but Jamie ignored her and led Mike away. That hurt. Jamie never ignored her. He couldn’t be pissed off by the kiss. It was a damn good kiss.

  As soon as the men were gone, Jess and Shelley started gushing. Look at the diamond ring, and wasn’t it fun to have your own place, and the flat was sooo beautiful. And the furnishings! Oh, there was so much to talk about with furnishings. Sarah was not interested in hearing about the various trials and tribulations of sofa shopping; she’d picked hers up at a garage sale for twenty-five dollars.

  Sarah wished that Jamie and Mike would come back before she died of boredom. She tried hard not to be a sexist since she would hate to discriminate against herself, but the truth was that ninety percent of women her age were boring as shit. As compared to men her age, of whom only about seventy percent were coma inducing. Add ten years and remove clothing and there was barely a man alive that Sarah couldn’t find something interesting about.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing I didn’t expect,’ Shelley was saying, ‘the constant pressure to do it. Like, he was satisfied with once or twice a week when he was at home and now he’s nudging me every bloody night!’

  ‘Don’t you like doing it with him?’ asked Sarah.

  Shelley and Jess looked at each other and rolled their eyes. ‘That’s not the point, Sarah. It’s exhausting doing it every night. Sometimes I would just like to cuddle up and go to sleep.’

  The one time Sarah had done it with Jamie, he had been careful but fast. That was a long time ago, but even allowing for less caution and longer duration, she couldn’t see how screwing Jamie could be exhausting. Anyway, the stupid bitch had ruined his life; the least she could do was have it off with him without complaining.

  ‘So what do you do then?’ Sarah asked Shelley. ‘Just leave him to look after himself?’

  Shelley’s face was white as she picked at her cuticles. ‘Jamie doesn’t do that.’

  ‘I’m quite sure he does.’

  ‘I think Shelley would know better than you,’ Jess said. ‘She lives with him after all.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sarah. ‘She does.’

  *

  Jamie was pissed off. Correction. Jamie had been pissed off at seven o’clock when Sarah had kissed him, now at seven forty-five he was nothing more than a concentrated mass of rage in the form of a human being. Sarah was so infuriating, such an unashamed bitch, that it was all he could manage not to grab her by the ponytail and toss her out on the street.

  First, there had been that kiss. He thought he had handled that quite well. He had kissed her back, which probably wasn’t the right thing to do as far as Shelley was concerned, but he would challenge any straight man with a pulse to not respond to Sarah for at least that first thoughtless second. Then he had walked away. That had definitely been the right thing to do. God knows what would have happened if he hadn’t.

  But Sarah being the vain, selfish little cow she was, could not leave well enough alone. She started flirting with Mike so blatantly that Jamie was embarrassed for Jess. He managed to get Mike outside, away from her brushing fingertips and suggestive smiles, but they had to go back in eventually and when they did she started in straight away.

  ‘Hey, boys, settle something for us will you?’ she said, and Ja
mie knew it was trouble because Jess and Shelley both said Shut Up! She ignored them of course, stood up and leant forward with her palms on the table so that her T-shirt stretched and a patch of pale skin on her lower back was revealed. Jamie knew that if she leant forward a little more, he would see the thin, pink scar that trickled across her spine.

  ‘How often would you say that a normal, healthy, Aussie bloke flogs his log?’

  Jamie looked at Shelley and saw that her face was red. He would be getting it later tonight. She had not wanted to invite Sarah. She said that it would be nicer to just have Mike and Jess over. Calmer. She felt threatened by single women now that she was not one. Actually, that wasn’t true; she had heaps of single friends. She felt threatened by Sarah and why shouldn’t she?

  ‘Do you keep statistics on that? For the magazine?’ Jamie asked Mike. It was important not to let Sarah see she had got him flustered. She could smell fear.

  Mike laughed and looked at Sarah in a way that turned Jamie’s stomach. ‘Not official statistics, no.’ He took the cigarette Sarah was offering, his fingertips brushing her wrist.

  ‘An educated guess though,’ Sarah said, lighting Mike’s smoke, ‘Based on personal experience and a livelihood based on writing about men and their penises.’

  Jamie tried to glare at her, but she only had eyes for Mike. Which really pissed him off, because what was with that kiss if she was angling for Mike? Was this an attempt to make him jealous, or was that wishful thinking? Was it more that the kiss had been nothing to her and the effects or consequences, or lack of both, were already gone from her frivolous and fickle little mind?

  ‘Bare minimum would be three times a week.’

  ‘Dinner ready yet, Shell?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Yeah, should be. I’ll check.’ She smiled at him and he was relieved. She didn’t blame him for Sarah’s crudity; she thought they were in this together. He realised that they were, or that they should be, and felt horribly guilty.

  ‘What about married men? Men in steady, committed relationships? Do they still do it?’

  ‘Shit, yeah. Any man who reckons he doesn’t is lying through his teeth.’

  ‘I rest my case.’ Sarah nodded at Jess who smiled tightly.

  ‘And you, Sarah?’ Mike said.

  Jamie almost whimpered as the picture of Sarah touching herself appeared in his mind. It wasn’t a new picture; it was an old favourite. It was just that he normally had control over it, making it appear only when he was locked in the bathroom with the water running.

  ‘Well, you tell me,’ she said. ‘If you could have intense, bone shaking orgasms over and over and over with no time out to recover, how often would you be doing it?’

  Jamie walked out of the room. He stood in the hallway, his forehead against the wall, until his pulse slowed, his body relaxed. Then he went into the kitchen and asked Shelley if she needed any help.

  ‘Nope. All good here. I think you should stick close to Sarah. Stop her from embarrassing herself.’

  ‘She’s alright.’

  ‘According to you.’

  Jamie checked out in the hallway to make sure no one was around. He could hear Mike’s raucous laugh over the top of Sarah’s low one. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jamie. You tell me how smart she is, how interesting or whatever, but I just… I don’t get her. She’s like a bloke.’

  Jamie smiled, thinking of Sarah’s hair, her laugh, the delicate feet which could fit in his hand. ‘How is she like a bloke?’

  ‘She’s… distant. She doesn’t reveal herself, you know? She just gets drunk and talks about sex. She doesn’t let anyone know her.’

  ‘When she gets drunk and talks about sex, she is revealing herself. That is her.’

  Shelley sighed. ‘That’s so sad.’

  Jamie wanted to argue, but he wasn’t sure he disagreed. He shrugged, grabbed another beer from the fridge and returned to the dining room, where Sarah was pouring another glass of bourbon and talking about sex.

  Sarah’s behaviour throughout dinner was above reproach. When Jess went on about the difficulties of keeping deli meats fresh in the storefront window, Sarah appeared to be listening to every word. She even asked questions, without a trace of sarcasm. Then Shelley talked about the savings plan they had started and how by the end of the year they would have a deposit on a proper house. Jamie cringed, expecting Sarah to be scathing, but she nodded seriously and discussed the benefits of fixed-term verus variable and whether it was better to buy new or to get a fixer-upper as long as it was in a nice suburb.

  After dinner they sat around the table drinking until all the punch was gone. Shelley offered to drive them all home since she was the only one who hadn’t been drinking. Mike and Jess agreed, but Sarah refused to take the hint, saying she would stay and finish off the bourbon. Shelley rolled her eyes for only Jamie to see but did not argue.

  ‘Are you still mad at me, Jamie-boy?’ Sarah said as soon as they were alone.

  ‘No.’ He resisted the urge to brush away the hair that was hanging over her left eye. ‘You are very hard to stay mad at. I think I lasted all of half an hour.’

  ‘Ah… he loves me!’ She squeezed his arm. Her hand was hot and moist. Her breathing was heavy. An involuntary glance at her chest revealed stiff nipples poking through white cotton. An image of Sarah – damp, naked, writhing underneath him – flitted across his mind. He pushed it away, but it was too late. Sarah could sense lust the way she could smell fear, and both excited her to the same degree.

  ‘That kiss was pretty hot, huh?’

  ‘God, it’s hard to be your friend sometimes.’

  ‘Because you want to fuck me, right?’ She put her hand on the bulge in his jeans. Ashamed, he stood up and moved away, but she followed. She stood in front of him and took his hands. ‘It’s okay. I want it too. I want it so much.’

  ‘What? Sarah, I–’ Her kiss cut him off. He knew this was impossible, a dream, a joke. But her kiss felt genuine. ‘Sarah, wait a second, I–’

  ‘You don’t want to fuck me?’ She was unbuttoning his jeans.

  ‘No, I do, but–’

  ‘Jamie, listen to me. I have never been so wet in my entire life. I had no idea it was even possible to be this wet. You understand me? I need you to fuck me right fucking now.’

  And he could not believe how much he wanted to do that. They started for the bedroom but it was so far away. The hall carpet was soft. She was softer. They were both fully clothed. Jeans pulled down just far enough and underwear pushed to the side. He wanted to keep touching her because she was so soft and open and wet but she was pushing his hand away and guiding him into her. We don’t have much time. It didn’t matter because he was already coming. There was no condom, and Jamie was pleased because it meant he could feel her properly. Feel himself pumping into her, filling her up. His precious, precious Sarah.

  Shelley returned as they were sitting back down at the table. While Shelley hung the keys on the hook near the door, Sarah emptied the bourbon bottle down her throat. She lit a cigarette, and Jamie noticed her hands were shaking.

  ‘Booze is all gone,’ she said. ‘Guess I’ll be off.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said, meaning I love you.

  ‘You’re too drunk. I’ll walk.’

  Shelley sighed. ‘I’ll take you. Come on.’

  Sarah stood. ‘No, really. I’ll walk.’ She kissed Jamie on the forehead, cradling the back of his head in her hand for just a moment. Then she thanked Shelley for dinner and was gone.

  7

  Mike stood in the doorway, jiggling his car keys, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Jamie, mate, come to the pub?’

  Jamie emphatically did not want to go to the pub with Mike. He had to wait at home until Sarah called; he couldn’t call her, because Shelley would want to know why he was calling Sarah only twelve hours after he’d last seen her.

  ‘Please, Mike, get him out of here.’ Shelley handed Jamie his wallet. �
��He’s got ants in his pants this morning. Driving me insane.’

  ‘I need to–’

  ‘Have a nice time.’ Shelley kissed his forehead, gave him a shove and the door was closed behind him.

  They sat in the beer garden, which was empty at this time of the morning, and Mike spent ten or so minutes tearing his coaster into tiny pieces while Jamie cursed himself for not grabbing his mobile phone on the way out. He tried to remember where the nearest public phone was.

  ‘So, ah…’ Mike stared off into the distance behind Jamie’s left ear. ‘About Sarah. Did you and her used to go out or what?’

  Jamie’s gut twisted. ‘No, we never… We’ve always been mates.’

  ‘Yeah, but… You’ve had a go at her?’

  ‘Whatever that means.’

  Mike gave him a contemptuous look. ‘You’ve screwed her?’

  Jamie took a gulp of beer, which seemed to solidify in his throat. With effort, he swallowed it. ‘Just the…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just the once. We were sixteen. Pissed.’

  ‘Yeah, and? She’s a firecracker, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Ah, mate, I am hanging out for some of that.’

  Jamie sat silently for another minute. He was no good at talking to men about intimate things; he was missing the instinct that seemed to tell other blokes how sincere they could be without crossing the line into effeminacy. But the thought of slick, shallow Mike grunting all over Sarah made his already upset stomach churn.

  ‘You’re not thinking of going after Sarah, are you?’

  Mike looked surprised. ‘Going after her? Mate, I thought you and her were tight. Doesn’t she tell you anything?’

  Jamie had thought she did, right up until about three seconds ago. He shrugged, waited.

  ‘She has been working on me for months. I can’t believe she hasn’t said anything to you.’

  ‘Working on you?’ Jamie battled to keep the rising panic from his voice.

  ‘Yeah, you know. A kiss here, a grope there. Teasing. Working me up.’

  Jamie sipped his beer. He would not let Mike see how shaken up he was. Probably Mike was full of shit anyway.