Saving from Monkeys

by Star, Jessie L.

  Saving from Monkeys

  Jessie L. Star

  Copyright © 2012 Jessie L. Star

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover art photo: Couple hiding behind red heart for a kiss © Robert Kneschke. Licensed from Dreamstime.

  Cover art design by the incredibly talented Master Ning.

  Please note this novel is written in Australian English and was originally published under the penname star123.

  Dedicated with ridiculous amounts of love and appreciation to Mum and Dad for being nothing like the parents I seem to end up writing! And for my sister, who first introduced me to the wonderful world of monkey-themed curse words.

  Contents

  Prologue – The Hungry Boy and the Shoe

  Chapter 1 - The Floorboards and the Magically Lifting Toilet Seat

  Chapter 2 – The Posh Conquests and the Ship Already Sailed

  Chapter 3 – The Ducklings and the Whale with a new Name

  Chapter 4 – The Statistical Inevitability and the Personal Space Invasion

  Chapter 5 – The Years she Doesn’t Have and the Help

  Chapter 6 – The Invitation and the TV on Fire

  Chapter 7 – The Principles of Life and the Impressive Side-Boob

  Chapter 8 – The Penis not Forgotten and the Smell of Green

  Chapter 9 – The Bouncing and the Closed Doors

  Chapter 10 – The Shadow and the Morbid wet T-Shirt Competition

  Chapter 11 – The Dinner and the Robbery that Didn’t Happen

  Chapter 12 – The Nice Contours and the Grey Dawn

  Chapter 13 – The Weeping Eyeliner and the Silent Scream

  Chapter 14 – The Best Letter Ever Written and the Final Goodbye

  Chapter 15 – The Sinclair Charity Case and the World Record Attempt

  Chapter 16 – The Weird and the end of the World

  Chapter 17 – The Truth and Nothing but the Truth

  Chapter 18 – The Bandaid and the Mixed Message

  Chapter 19 – The Complicated Woman and the Unhelpful Afterlife

  Epilogue – The Birthday Present and the Happy Forever After

  Prologue – The Hungry Boy and the Shoe

  "I'm hungry."

  The sudden announcement from behind me made me drop my school bag in surprise, and it plummeted, with gleeful accuracy, onto one of my big toes. A whole host of words that suitably captured the moment flew through my mind, but I clenched my fists and forced a comparatively innocent one to the fore.

  "Monkeys!"

  There. I was proud of myself.

  Yesterday had been my first day working in the Sinclair house and I'd stubbed my toe, the same one that had just been crushed by my school books, on one of Mrs Sinclair's utilitarian bookcases. Thinking myself alone, I'd hissed out a curse, only to turn and see Mr Sinclair walking along the corridor towards me.

  Less than an hour later, the Sinclair’s housekeeper (AKA my mum) had sat me down and delivered an extremely thorough lecture on the behaviour expected of staff. Swearing like a sailor in front of the family, it transpired, was blacklisted.

  Censoring myself had never been my strongest suit, but I needed the job or, more accurately, we needed the money, so I had taken it on board and consciously chosen a replacement curse. It hadn’t been difficult; the Sinclair boy had a poster with a leering monkey riding a skateboard on it that I hated.

  And speaking of the Sinclair boy...

  I kicked the bag off my smarting foot and turned to see Elliot, only child of my employees and bane of my existence, leaning against the kitchen table, floppy hair artfully flopped, braces glinting in his smarmy mouth.

  "What did you say?" He asked, immediately voiding his question by adding, "Monkeys? What does that mean?"

  "All that money going to your fancy school and you don't even know what a monkey is?" I grabbed up a sponge and leant down to see if I could buff out the mark my bag had left on my school shoes. Although, actually, due to a lean time in the Mapley household, they were currently my only shoes.

  "Ha ha, you're so funny," he said sarcastically, before repeating his opening gambit, "I'm hungry."

  I looked round, taking in the full pantry, the well-stocked fridge and the oven from which the smell of mum's famous lasagne drifted.

  Was this guy for real?

  "So eat," I advised, giving up on my shoes and slipping them off. I tried not to wear them any more than necessary to save the tread. Tucked down in the kitchen where Mr and Mrs Sinclair rarely ventured I felt I could get away with the breach in workplace etiquette. Elliot, or ‘Smelliot’ as I’d very maturely taken to calling him, avoided his parents just as much, if not more, than me so I wasn't bothered about him tattling on me.

  "Can't you make something for us? You actually work here now, right?"

  At the mention of 'us', I automatically stiffened. Elliot's friends were round, then. Great. It didn't surprise me, they were over most of the time as Elliot had all the latest and greatest in mindless toys for boys, but I always hoped I'd score a reprieve from that lot.

  "My mum does the cooking," I said through gritted teeth, watching him absently lean his grotty hands back onto the table that I'd only just wiped down and disinfected. "I'm hired to do the cleaning."

  He shrugged. "Same diff."

  I looked at him incredulously, wondering what that was supposed to mean. What, did he think that all words beginning with 'c' meant the same thing? Luckily, I didn't have to come up with a response to his stupidity. Unluckily, it was because, at that moment, a whole bunch of Elliot's mates trundled into the room.

  "Hey, Elliot, did you get us some food, yet? I'm starving!" One of them bellowed and I flinched.

  Seriously, what was with teenage boys? They were just so loud.

  "Oh, look, it's Cinderella!" The big ginger one I had, somewhat cruelly, nicknamed Jonah the Whale grinned widely over at me. "Hi, Cinders."

  I waved feebly.

  "And here're her glass slippers!"

  My blood ran cold as one of the boys darted forward to snatch up my shoes.

  Trying to sound nonchalant so they wouldn't know how freaked out I was, I said, "Yep, well, it's not midnight so Cinderella will have those back, thanks." I reached out for them, but knew straight away I'd made a tactical error.

  A glint of evil joy entered their eyes and the one holding my shoes chucked them towards another of the boys. My hands snapped back to my sides and I forced myself to stand there, unprotesting. If I didn't object I knew they'd get bored sooner. Still, it took every last bit of my self-control to just stand there as my shoes flew from hand to hand, arching over my head and around me as they sought for a reaction.

  It took a lot longer than I would've liked for them to grow bored, but eventually, they did. Still, the last one who held my shoes had one more nasty little trick up his sleeve and, at the last minute, instead of throwing one of my shoes to a mate, he turned and chucked it straight into the sink full of dirty washing up water.

  I couldn't help letting out a short squeak of dismay and he, I think it was the one they called Henderson, smirked, clearly pleased with himself.

  "Mate, what did you do that for?" Jonah the Whale handed me my dry shoe and then gave Henderson a shove towards the door. "You're a real dick sometimes." But he was smiling indulgently and the rest of them seemed equally unconcerned by the havoc they’d wreaked as they lumbered out of the kitchen, leaving just Elliot and me.

  Making a disgusted sort of face, he reached over and fished my shoe out of the water, giving it a bit of a shake and then dropping it onto the draining board.

  "Shit," he laughed, wiping his hand o
n his t-shirt, "that shoe is rooted." He looked round at me then and, obviously seeing my stricken expression, he rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Rox, no need to look so tragic," he informed me as he, too, headed towards the door, "just buy another pair."

  Chapter 1 - The Floorboards and the Magically Lifting Toilet Seat

  Six years later...

  Even before I'd opened my eyes, or felt that first thump of the worst headache in the world, I knew something was seriously wrong.

  The way I was laying was weird for one thing. My legs were kind of hooked strangely and the sheets against my skin, soft and pleasant as they were, didn't feel quite right. Thinking revealed itself to be ridiculously difficult so it took me a fair while to figure out that one of the reasons the sheets felt weird was because they were pressing against parts of me that were usually covered by my pyjamas. It was another goodly while before I carried this to the conclusion that I was naked.

  Before I could attribute too much significance to this sudden naturist bent of mine, something else occurred to me and it went a little something like, 'Oh my God, I'm in pain! So, so much pain!' Seriously, even my hair hurt and I was sure if I managed to peel my eyes open I'd be able to see a pulsing red aura around me. Yes, I was definitely radiating pain.

  I groaned and shifted slightly and that was when I twigged to what really was the most horrifyingly wrong thing about my situation. There was someone beside me in the bed. Someone who, at that moment, had his hand resting dangerously low across my bare hip and who was pressed up against me close enough for me to feel his early morning glory pushing against my back.

  Momentarily forgetting the massive pain lancing through my head, I screamed. Then, in a rush to get away from the stranger behind me and, to be honest, through being slightly startled by the volume of my own shriek, I tumbled ungracefully off the edge of the bed.

  "Christ," I heard a croak from above me. "What was that about?"

  Feeling the breeze across my breasts, and terrified that some guy was about to pop his head over the edge of the mattress and cop an eyeful, I scrabbled at the sheet that was twisted around my thighs, finally managing to yank it up to a more acceptable level. The effort it had taken to provide myself with some modesty had exhausted me, however, and I dropped my head down to the floor with a clunk.

  Wait a minute, a clunk? I had carpet, why the hell was my head making a clunking noise?

  I loosened one hand from where it was clutching the sheet up at my neck and sent it on a cautious foray out onto the floor around me. All my nerve endings felt fried, but some of them made a big effort and sent one word sluggishly back up to my brain.

  Floorboards.

  Well. That wasn't good. That wasn't good at all.

  See what the word 'floorboards' meant was that, not only had I just fallen out of bed to escape some guy, I'd fallen out of somebody else's bed to escape some guy.

  What the hell was going on here?

  I tried to take some deep breaths to calm myself, but only succeeded in making myself lightheaded so I stopped and instead tried to gather together the facts. I had a hangover, that was abundantly clear. An epic hangover the likes of which I'd never come across before in my life, to be more specific. I was naked and I wasn't in my room. And, oh yeah, there was some strange guy up on the bed who moments before had been all pressed up against me.

  Holy monkeys! I'd had a one night stand!

  I felt a blasting heat ripple up my face as the full, debauched truth sunk in. But seriously, that so wasn't me, I was not a one night stand kind of girl. And yet here I was. Great. How did I get out of this?

  With a huge effort, I forced myself up into a sitting position and, blinking a few times to try and clear some of the fog out of my eyes, properly took in my surroundings.

  The walls were a painfully crisp white and reflected sharply off the shiny floorboards. The room seemed crazily flooded with light considering there was only a relatively small window over on one wall. Then I recoiled as I followed the source of the light up to see a massive skylight over the bed.

  The space was clearly one of those fancy studio flat things; the bed and a few metres either side were up on a slightly raised platform, while the rest of the space was filled with rails of clothes, a massive leather couch, a chrome liquor cabinet, and...a ridiculously big TV.

  I couldn't help it, I rolled my eyes, feeling, as I did so, how gritty and sore they were. But seriously, no-one needed a TV that big; if you wanted 'life-size' go outside and see the world. Life is in life-size. Yes, I had a thing against big TVs and I hadn't seen one so deserving of a bad attitude since...

  Oh no.

  The croak from the guy on the bed suddenly took on a hideous edge of familiarity, sounding awfully recognisable now I was cross-referencing it with a specific brand and size of TV. Hadn't I let the delivery and installation guys in to hang one just like that at the Sinclair house a few years ago?

  "No, no, no, no..." I started to chant, the pain in my head intensifying in a way I wouldn't have thought possible a minute ago. It couldn't be. I would never...

  "Rox," there was that voice again, "I appreciate you're having a mental breakdown down there and I sympathise, I really do, but my head hurts a lot and I really need you to shh."

  Well, there was no escaping it now.

  "I'm going to be sick," I mumbled, feeling the bile rise up my throat.

  "Bathroom's behind you," came the response.

  Still holding the sheet so tightly to me that my knuckles were fair white with the strain, I stumbled off the bed platform and aimed for the first door I saw.

  "Cupboard."

  Right.

  I lunged for the other door and, when I heard no further advice from the bed, barrelled through it to discover one of the most pristine, posh bathrooms I'd ever had the pleasure of vomiting in.

  As I dropped to my knees, already retching, the toilet seat automatically rose for me, a fact I would have found amusing if I hadn't then lowered my head and convulsed into the bowl. Oh it was awful! My eyes smarted, my nose ran and my throat burned. Throwing up really is the most disgusting thing.

  When I finally seemed to have lost everything from my stomach, I collapsed against the cool porcelain feeling utterly wretched.

  I had known the guy on the bed, AKA Elliot Sinclair, since I was 10 and, in the subsequent decade or so, I'd felt absolutely no compulsion to get naked with him. Although I’d basically grown up as his maid, with all of the trashy romance connotations that entailed, we'd never even considered a class-defying romp. So what could possibly have happened last night to change that? I prodded my sozzled mind for an answer, but none was forthcoming.

  At that point, the only thing I knew for sure was that I'd been drunk, so very, very drunk. My tongue was virtually pickled and my brain was slurring something about not wanting to be held responsible for whatever had happened last night, that’s how drunk I’d been. And weird things happened when you were drunk; I'd seen enough odd things turn up in the corridors of my residential hall after a Friday night to know that. Yes, being drunk enabled randomness so, in order to gain the equilibrium to peel myself off the toilet bowl, I just had to chalk the whole 'naked in Elliot Sinclair's bed' thing down to that randomness. OK then...

  Submitting to this, admittedly feeble logic, I managed to drag myself up to the sink and start to swill my mouth out and splash my neck with cold water. There was a mirror over the basin and I hesitantly raised my head to it, blanching as I saw the true horror of my reflection. My normally blonde hair looked brown it was so greasy and my make up from the previous day was smeared down my face in the traditional war paint of the one night stander. Not particularly keen to be recognised as a member of this tribe, I scrubbed at my face and managed to remove most of the black streaks, leaving my skin pink and shiny. I still looked horrible, but at least I was a little cleaner.

  Right, shoulders back, chin up, it was time to go back out there and...find my clothes.

  "First thin
gs first, Sinclair," I said in a credible attempt at a dignified tone as I made my way unsteadily out of the bathroom, "we did not have sex."

  Apparently, however, while I'd been having an existential meltdown in the bathroom, Elliot had gone straight back to sleep. He gave a little jerk as I spoke and then slowly opened his eyes to slits.

  "What?" He asked, burrowing his head back into the pillow so only his messy, dark hair was showing.

  "We didn't have sex," I repeated, but he just snorted unattractively and then said, his voice muffled by the pillow,

  "The condom wrapper stuck to your foot begs to differ."

  Now, here was a dilemma. It would be so like Elliot to make up something like that just to make me look so he could have a good laugh at my expense. Then again, if there was a condom wrapper stuck to my foot...

  I swallowed my pride and took a peek. Yep, there it was. For once I wished he had been teasing me.

  "That doesn't prove anything," I said, my haughty response somewhat undermined by the way I was having to hop and hold the sheet at the same time in order to grab the wrapper off my heel. "Judging by that hideous TV, this must be your place so I wouldn't be surprised if it was positively littered with condom wrappers."

  "There's a compliment in there somewhere," I heard him mutter as I finally succeeded in snatching up the foil packet.

  I twisted the wrapper over in my fingers, my heart sinking as I saw that it was the same brand that they handed out at my residential hall. Coincidence, I told myself firmly, but just to check...

  "Where do you keep your condoms?" I asked and Elliot groaned, presumably at the pitch of my voice, and pointed at his bedside table without lifting his head. As I stalked over and yanked open the top drawer, however, I heard a rustle on the bed and knew he had rolled over and was watching me.

  "Hoping for another round?"

  Oh that insufferable voice!

  "There's no another about it," I said firmly, although my voice faltered as I pulled out the box of condoms I found in his drawer and saw that they were a completely different type.