Under My Skin

by A. E. Dooland

  I didn't actually get the hang of the game, and Rob had to keep pausing it to explain the rules to me when I screwed up.

  Before we gave up and switched to shooters, though, I took a photo of the living room with footy on the TV and Sarah asleep in one of the armchairs and sent it to Bree. “Highlights of the wild adventures you're missing out on up here.”

  As we were changing the discs, I got a reply. “haha.... if ur bored....well that chair looks like there might be enough room for both of us in it.........??? maybe i could keep u busy??? ;) ;) ;)”

  I was a bit stunned she'd send me something so suggestive, but on the other hand, this was Bree. Bree who freely posted those 'bust on me' photos of her cleavage on Facebook. Suggesting sitting on my lap in an armchair was comparatively pretty tame. And yet, it had far more of an effect on me than her raunchy photos ever did.

  I looked over at the armchair she was talking about and imagined playing the whole game with Bree sitting on my lap. That would have been infinitely more fun, I thought, flushing a bit as Rob put Halo in the Xbox.

  I spent all of Halo imagining Bree straddling me and kissing my neck, kissing around my ears, pushing the controller aside and just making out with me in earnest... I died far too often for Rob to not notice I was distracted. It was almost a shame when we had to quit so he could drive me to the first of the 'grouse' places he thought I might like to paint as the sun set.

  The shallow canyon was nowhere near as entertaining as imagining Bree, but I did have work to do, so I tried to focus on it.

  Keeping me company while I painted, Sarah had been trying to read up on mining law on her phone when my own phone rang.

  “It might be Schoolgirl,” Sarah commented, looking pointedly at my ringing pocket. We both knew it wasn't.

  I shook my head, focusing on my tablet. “She'd message first. I'll call him back later when I'm not in the middle of something.”

  Even though I told Sarah I'd call Henry back twice today and had planned on doing it after dinner, Sarah, Rob and I took fish and chips down to the beach after the sun had set and we didn't get home until late. I probably still could have called him at ten or eleven because he would have answered, but I didn't. I just lay awake in bed and imagined what it would have been like if Bree had come up with me here, and kept thinking back to pashing her on the floor outside my bathroom. The way her lips had felt, the way the blade of her tongue ran along mine, and those desperate little sounds she'd been making...

  It was such a great feeling, just lying there and indulging those memories in all their glorious detail. And when I thought back to the sweet things she'd said last night and how affectionate and open she was and how good it had felt to imagine her on my lap in the chair... wow, yeah. This was all working for me, in a way that Henry never had. I wanted her, and the urgency of it was actually painful. I lay there torn between how good it felt to think about her, and how much it physically hurt she was four thousand kilometres away. I wanted her here in this bed with me.

  Shortly before midnight I couldn't take it anymore and texted her, “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  I wasn't sure if she'd reply because it was so late, but she did. “dont stop then....im not going to......”

  That gave me one of those stupid smiles again, and I had to put the phone down for a minute or two and grin like an idiot. I picked it up again when it buzzed on my stomach. She'd sent another message. “what are u thinking about exactly.......???”

  It wasn't cheating just talking about it, was it? I hoped not, because before I could talk myself out of it, I replied, “Kissing you.”

  I held the phone over my face and waited for her to reply. It felt like eternity before another text came through. “ur making me blush so bad.........”

  That mental image got me. It was hot, imagining her flustered. “If you think you're blushing now, just wait til I get back...”

  “......oh my god min ur giving me butterflies....................”

  My stomach was full of them as well, and I wanted to reply, 'I want to give you more than that', but that was way too bold for me to convince myself to say to anyone while I was sober. Instead, I decided we'd probably gone as far as I was comfortable going given that I wasn't actually single, so I replied, “And there's a lot more where they came from ;) Goodnight, Bree.”

  As I was trying to get comfortable in bed, she sent me one last message. “great how am i supposed to sleep now???????”

  She didn't actually sleep for a while I don't think. I did, though, and when I woke up to my alarm at 5:30 am the following morning so I could go somewhere and paint the sunrise, there was a message on my phone. I rubbed my eyes, yawning, and opened it.

  It was a picture message, and it was of Bree sitting on the couch in the doona—in only the doona—holding it to her chest with one hand while she pointed the remote towards my magic TV with the other. Compared to some of the photos she'd put on Facebook, you couldn't really see much. It was more her bare shoulders with her curls falling over them and the knowledge that there was apparently nothing between her and the doona that made it sexy. And it was sexy. She was hardly showing anything, and she didn't have an over-the-top O-face, or a duck-face, or any of the other weird expressions she'd been making in her other photos. In fact, all she had was this shy little smile and those bare shoulders and fuck I was going to need a very, very cold shower. I wanted to rip that doona right off her.

  The text underneath read, “wish u were here.............(this one is tasteful right???)”

  I had to laugh at that. She was gorgeous.

  I did have a quick shower while I tried not to think about why Bree might have been naked in the doona and what she might have been doing, and when I dressed and rushed out into the living room, Sarah was slumped in a kitchen chair looking half-dead. “God, what time is it?” she asked in a croaky voice. “Why couldn't you use stock photos for our materials like everyone else does?”

  “Everyone else's careers aren't riding on this one pitch,” I reminded her, and tried to figure out where I'd ditched my sneakers.

  Rob came out of the master bedroom in his boxers and a dressing gown. “You ready?” he said, apparently having decided he was. At Sarah's expression, he looked down his body. There was nothing self-conscious about him at all, despite the fact he was half-naked and had a sizable beer-belly to go with his muscles. “I'm going to come back here for some more shut-eye while you two are working. What's the point of getting dressed?”

  He seemed a lot chirpier than Sarah did, so on the way to wherever Rob was driving us, I asked her, “Couldn't sleep?”

  She shrugged. “I could have if I'd tried. I was just reading common law court cases between mining companies to see if I could find anything.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “You see, that would put me to sleep, not keep me up. Did you end up finding anything?”

  She shook her head. “I probably would have come and told you if I had.”

  This time Rob dropped us along a rocky creek. The landscape itself wasn't that impressive, but the still water perfectly reflected the sunrise, and it turned out to be a great choice.

  Unfortunately, I was distracted. Not by what I should have been distracted by, which was the prospect of fucking up and losing my job or all the infighting going on at Frost, but by the text conversation Bree and I had had last night and that photo she'd sent me.

  “Min,” Sarah said neutrally at one point, finishing the muesli bar she’d been eating. “You can't will the painting onto your tablet. I think you have to actually use the stylus.” I'd just been sitting there staring at it.

  “I knew I should have read the instructions,” I told her in the same flat tone, and then got back to copying the scene in front of me. I was actually a bit embarrassed.

  Sarah laughed. “I think someone else was up late,” she observed.

  “Not that late.”

  “Late enough to have stuff to think about,” she fired back.<
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  I grinned a bit, and she whooped and pointed at me. “I knew it!” she announced. “Probably best I didn't find anything in those court cases, right? Who knows what I would have interrupted if I'd come rushing into your room?”

  It was a rhetorical question which was good because the answer was 'nothing'. I didn't want her to know that, though, because I was kind of aware that anyone else who'd been thinking the things I had been would have had their hand down their pants. Everyone else was happy with the contents of theirs, though. I wanted as little as possible to do with mine—I didn’t even want to think about it—and I didn’t want Sarah to guess that. I didn’t want anyone to guess that.

  So, instead, I said, “Pity you didn't. You could have joined in,” and winked at her. She groaned and threw her scrunched-up muesli bar wrapper at my head. It missed, and I chuckled and kept painting until I had what I needed.

  Since Rob had far more places he wanted to show us than the number of paintings I had scheduled, Sarah and I let him drive us around for the better part of the day. We finished on the beach again with a six-pack of beer, and only came home well after the sun had gone down. After we got there, Sarah and Rob went mysteriously missing together, so I had a quick shower and then switched on my laptop with the intention of finishing off a painting while they were busy with each other. However, I was still a bit drunk and thinking about what Sarah and Rob were doing meant I ended up wanting to message Bree.

  Before I did, though, I opened up that picture message she’d sent me to have another look.

  It had the same effect the second time around; maybe a bit more so because I was tipsy. Those bare shoulders coupled with that coy little smile... She looked so sweet and innocent—and she was, about some things—but when it came to her body and the effect it had on people, I suspected she knew exactly what she was doing. Her pose was too deliberate, and the angle was too staged. She'd done it on purpose. That made it hotter, though; there was something so deliciously illicit about her spending ages trying to take the perfect photo so I'd be turned on when I looked at it.

  She wants to turn me on, I thought as I stared at that smile, and she wants me to touch her. She wants me to imagine pulling down that doona so I can get to what’s underneath. And boy, was I ever doing exactly as she intended.

  It made me think other things, too; snapshots, not even whole thoughts. Moving on top of her, skin-to-skin as we kissed deeply… or her rocking back and forth in my lap as she straddled me on the armchair… or even me bearing her down against that hard bench when she’d tried to kiss me at the train station. And, as hot as each of those thoughts was and as much as I wanted to indulge them and linger on them and imagine whole scenes and whole stories around them until I was desperate for her to be enacting them with me… when I started to think about them, when I started to imagine how they’d begin or how we’d get there…. I got stuck.

  I wanted her to be straddling my lap, but what was that really going to achieve, with my body? I wanted to be on top of her with her legs wrapped around me, but, again, how would that actually work? And in the scenarios I'd been imagining, the movements I wanted to make on her just seemed so easy and so natural. I had such a clear, almost primal expectation of what I was supposed to do, but I didn't have the right body to do it with. It was so disorienting.

  And while I was perfectly aware of the fact there were other things we could do—and I quite liked the idea of them, actually, at least the idea of doing them to her—they weren't the main course for me, not even close. Trying to pretend they were felt forced. I caught myself thinking, 'Well, I suppose I could pretend I'm happy with just head so that I don't upset Bree...' and I stopped myself dead in my tracks. I wasn't going to do to Bree what I'd done to Henry. I wasn't going to pretend I was completely happy with something when I wasn't.

  I was doing it already, though, wasn't I? When I'd started dating Henry, I'd really, really worried about needing to have sex with him. I'd ended up doing it anyway because I didn't want to upset him, and before I knew it I was stuck doing something I wasn't into. And now here I was worrying about sex again, this time with Bree.

  I had an awful thought that maybe I just wasn't supposed to have sex at all, that no matter how much I desperately wanted to, it was never going to work and I was always going to be unhappy.

  That was a really confronting, really fucking terrifying thought. I didn't want to think any more about it, because I was going to stress myself out again.

  I put my phone away without messaging Bree after all, and tried to focus on completing the paintings.

  After a little while Sarah and Rob came back from wherever they'd been, pink-cheeked and glowing. I hated them both a little bit, but I didn't say anything. It wasn't their fault everything just worked for them. I think Sarah noticed something was wrong because she asked about me, but I muttered something about work and she left me alone to finish.

  When I was done with one of the paintings, I checked my phone out of habit, and Bree had sent me a message. “....soooooo......u want me to show you the cool things your tv can do for video calls.............?? ;) ;) ;)”

  I slumped. I did, but at the same time, I didn't. I didn't want to be reminded about the crap I'd been worrying about earlier. And if Bree thought were going to give each other private stripteases... I was so at odds with my body right then that if someone had offered me the technology to bond my clothes to my flesh, I would have paid just about anything to do it.

  I didn't want to leave her hanging, though, so I messaged back, “Sorry, Bree, I'm in the middle of working right now.”

  I felt guilty about that, but I did call the hotel phone before I went to sleep.

  She yawned. “Hey...! I thought maybe you'd gone to sleep already, so I did, too...” From the way she spoke, I could tell she'd been asleep. I could also hear the clock ticking, which meant she was in the living room.

  “Wait, are you sleeping on the couch?”

  She finished her yawn. “Uh huh.”

  “Uh, why?”

  “Well... it's where the TV is,” she told me in a little voice. “Just in case you changed your mind and decided you did want to video chat with me, I didn't want to miss the call.”

  Ouch. I lay there in my own bed, staring up at the ceiling. I wanted to tell her about that stuff I'd worried about earlier, but I couldn't imagine ever talking about things that were so private with someone. I didn't even want to think about it, but it was stuff that wouldn't go away, wasn't it? Bree was going to notice if we weren't having sex.

  “Min, are you okay? You want to talk again?”

  I exhaled. “Yeah. But I don't know how to.”

  She giggled. “So that's why you're so quiet all the time...”

  “Oh, shut up,” I told her, but I was smiling. It didn't last long.

  She was yawning again. “Well, I'll give you a big hug when you come home again, okay? I've been eating so many Easter eggs I'll be ball-shaped by then, and you can squish me like a stress ball. It will be very therapeutic.”

  I smiled briefly at that image, but since she was obviously half-asleep I let her go. I had to have another couple of painkillers before I could get to sleep myself, though.

  It would have been nice to spend Easter Day actually relaxing, but I had six half-finished paintings that needed to be formatted, laid out and sent to the rest of the team before I flew back to Sydney on Monday. So, instead of sleeping in and relaxing and celebrating the spirit of Easter or whatever, I had my nose to the grindstone, sitting on the porch and trying one-by-one to complete the detail in all of the paintings. It was a mammoth task.

  My phone had also been ringing since about nine in the morning, so I left it in my bedroom in order to concentrate on work. A bit after lunch, Sarah, who had been sitting inside reading up on mining law again, came marching onto the porch with my phone. It was vibrating in her hand.

  “Min,” she said sternly as she stood in front of me and held it out, using my actual na
me for emphasis. “This thing has been going non-stop for the past two hours. It's stressing me out and he's not even my boyfriend. Can you just answer the damn thing and have a conversation with him?”

  I accepted the phone from her, feeling guilty. She nodded resolutely and then walked back inside, but as soon as she was gone I just rejected the call, turned vibrate off, and put it in my pocket. I couldn't focus on painting if I had to think about what Henry and my mother were saying to each other while he was visiting her. I'd call him later when I had the energy to pretend everything was fine.

  I did actually get all the graphics finished, cleaned up and laid out on some pretty flash looking templates before I went to bed that night. I texted Bree goodnight, and when I woke up in the morning she'd replied, “im so excited ur coming back tomorrow!!!!!! :D :D :D”

  I smiled at that, rolling onto my back and stretching.

  I wasn't excited to go back. I just wanted to stay here, fly Bree up, and leave no forwarding address for ninety per cent of the people I knew. I couldn't, though. I couldn't even lie in bed and feel sorry for myself because I was leaving on the morning flight. Sarah hadn't been able to get me on the afternoon one with her, and that meant I needed to rush around at the crack of dawn to make sure I'd packed everything that belonged to me.

  Rob was hardly awake as I left, but he did wander stiffly over and gave me a big bear hug. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “You're great. Bring the Playstation next time, yeah? We can try some of your games as well.” I agreed to, clapped him on the back and said goodbye.

  Sarah and I drove to the airport in silence, partly because the sun wasn't even up and we were both semi-conscious, and partly because neither of us was looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.

  When we got to the airport, we both just sat in the car and looked at it before I climbed out.

  I broke the silence. “So, Bree suggested running away to Canada.”

  She laughed shortly. “No way, I'm not letting the bastards win,” she said. “They're not driving me out of their chauvinistic hell-hole, I'll go on my own terms. Maybe after I've paid off my house.”