‘Oh!’ said Kayley.
He must have noted the slightly conflicted response this provoked in her, because he sighed and cocked his head to one side.
‘Ah, now you’re judging me,’ he said. ‘A local girl, I take it?’
‘Well, you know your family aren’t exactly the most popular round here,’ she said. ‘But don’t mind me. I know it’s not your fault. You were a little kid when it all kicked off.’
‘Indeed I was. And Ma and Pa are a long way away from it all now. They knew better than to stick around.’
‘So they’ve left all this to you?’ She waved a hand, indicating the house as a whole.
‘Yes. Foolish of them. I’m no housekeeper, I’m afraid, and my trust fund doesn’t seem to stretch to domestic help.’
‘It all goes on fun,’ said Ross, with a slight edge of disapproval. ‘Honestly, Loz, you don’t want to let the place fall down. If I got my hands on it, the things I could do …’
‘You’d turn it into a fucking … day centre for underprivileged kids,’ said Lawrence, laughing. ‘Always a bleeding heart, this one,’ he said, turning to Kayley. ‘Always on about how we didn’t deserve our superior education if we don’t use it to give something back to those less fortunate. Such a mealy mouthed phrase, don’t you think? “Those less fortunate”? Sounds like a fat, brandy-swigging vicar on School Speech Day. “Those less fortunate”.’
Kayley realised now just how much champagne Lawrence had got through. He was beginning to slur.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think it’s pretty sound myself. Why do you need a massive house like this when there are kids coughing their lungs up in mouldy one-bed flats on the estate?’
‘Oh, God help us,’ said Lawrence, rolling his eyes at Ross. ‘Why have you brought me Leon Trotsky’s sister? What did I do to you, to deserve this?’
Ross laughed. ‘It’s good for you to be challenged now and again, Loz. I’m only thinking of you.’
‘You’re too … too … kind,’ he said, with a pause to belch out some regurgitated bubbles. ‘At least she’s pretty.’
‘Loz.’ A girl in heavy black eyeliner appeared beside their host, eyeing Kayley with suspicion before laying her head on Lawrence’s arm. ‘Missing you, babe. Come upstairs.’
‘Look, sorry, Tigs, I’m not really in the zone. Later maybe, yah?’
The girl pouted and flounced upstairs, if skinny jeans could be made to flounce. Kayley didn’t own a pair herself – they hadn’t made it to the Bledburn shops yet – but she’d noticed pretty much every girl was wearing a pair of Topshop Baxters.
‘Is that your girlfriend?’ asked Kayley, looking wistfully at her enviably tight bum below the hoodie.
‘No,’ said Lawrence. ‘Just a friend. I’m a friendly guy. I’d like to be your friend, as long as you stop telling me what an evil capitalist swine I am.’
‘I tell it like it is,’ said Kayley. ‘But if you get us a beer I might go easy on you.’
He returned her flirtatious smile with interest.
‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Ross, there’s a barrel in the kitchen. Could you oblige the lady?’
Kayley wasn’t sure at what point Ross disappeared, but by the time darkness fell she was sitting outside on the back kitchen step with Lawrence, having discussed Bledburn politics, state versus private education, popular music of the day, the weirdness of parents and, it seemed, every other subject under the sun until they were hoarse. They disagreed on all of them, and yet Kayley enjoyed their conversation more than any she could remember in ages. She had a sense of being properly listened to that was almost new to her. And Lawrence, even when he was saying something outrageous that would normally make her angry as hell, was so charming and sweet with it that she somehow couldn’t take offence.
‘I’ve never met a person like you,’ he said, coming back outside with a blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
‘What, a normal person?’
He laughed.
‘Quite possibly. Look, I’ve brought us a little something … a treat.’
Kayley saw the pills he proffered and sucked in a breath. She had promised herself she wouldn’t, not any more, not now she was in college and looking at a decent future. But she was drunk and full of the joys of attraction and new, intoxicating company, and she didn’t want Lawrence to think she was some kind of uptight goody-two-shoes. So she took the pill and put it in her smiling mouth.
The gathering cold of the night was forgotten in a haze of blissful well-being and sensuality. It seemed such a natural progression, to go from conversation to kissing, from kissing to entwining, and from there to a long, slow coupling on the grass. It must have been damp, but Kayley didn’t notice. She lay looking up at the stars, feeling an enveloping love for Lawrence that was more universal than personal.
How beautiful life was.
How wonderful to be her, with him, tonight.
It was a little less wonderful to wake up with a stiff neck on a dusty, dog-smelling rug in some back kitchen.
Ross was rolling a cigarette at a big wooden table.
He looked down at her and laughed.
‘How’s your head?’
‘Where did you go?’ she yawned. ‘You disappeared.’
‘You didn’t seem to miss me too much,’ he said archly. ‘Seems somebody took a shine to you.’
‘Where is Lawrence?’ She sat up and looked vaguely around. The plastic pearls had wound tight around her neck, leaving rounded impressions in her neck. She pulled them loose and felt her hair with a hand. Rough. Perhaps it was just as well Lawrence wasn’t here to see it.
Ross didn’t answer, but went to the fridge to get her a bottle of mineral water.
‘Here. You must be gasping.’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
The ice cold water was nectar, sliding down her sandpaper throat.
‘Got any painkillers?’ she asked, once her mouth was ungummed.
Ross handed her a blister pack from his jeans pocket.
‘So …’ he said pointedly.
‘So what? It was a party. I was having fun.’
‘I’m not judging you, Kay. I’m just asking … I don’t know … how you feel.’
‘How I feel? Rough as a badger’s backside.’
He laughed.
‘I’m thinking more of the, er, emotional side of things.’
‘What, ’cos I shagged Lawrence? It was nothing. He gave me an E and it made me horny. Don’t look so shocked. Girls get horny too, you know.’
‘I … know. I know that.’ But Ross still looked at her as if she’d just confessed her alien heritage. ‘So you’re OK?’
‘Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Good. Just didn’t want you getting in too deep with him, that’s all.’
Kayley struggled to her feet and looked around her.
‘You seen my handbag?’
‘Sorry …’
‘It’s OK, it’ll be around somewhere. Just wanted to look in a mirror, that’s all.’
She settled for staring into the chrome kettle, tweaking her hair and rubbing stray make-up off with a wetted thumb.
‘God, the state of me,’ she muttered. ‘Do you know where the tea bags are?’
She flicked the kettle switch on and started organising mugs and milk.
‘Loz isn’t a tea drinker,’ said Ross. ‘It’ll be coffee.’
‘Black coffee,’ said Kayley hollowly, sniffing at an ancient looking milk carton located in the fridge. ‘Honestly, for a posh boy, he lives like a pig.’
‘He’s been looked after all his life,’ said Ross. ‘He’s never had to fend for himself till now.’
‘What, he had a nanny until the age of twenty-one? Is that what you’re saying?’
Ross laughed.
‘No, but he was living with a girl at university and she might as well have been his nanny. They split up over the summer. He’s gone a bit … off the rails.’
‘Yeah?’ Kayley fl
icked off the kettle. ‘I don’t want coffee. I think I’m just going to get my handbag and leave. You?’
‘I’ll drive you home.’
‘You safe to drive?’
‘I didn’t have much to drink – couple of glasses of wine and the rest was all spliffs. Perfectly clear-headed now, though.’
Kayley roamed through vast room after vast room, picking her way over lifeless bodies in skinny jeans as she went. She trod on the hair of the girl who had sneered at her dress.
No matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find her handbag though, and there was no sign of Lawrence either.
Perhaps she’d taken it upstairs? Though she didn’t think she’d been upstairs … but it wasn’t impossible.
She made her way up the grand staircase, noting a number of broken banister posts. Nothing drew her in any particular direction – it was all totally unfamiliar – but one of the doors was half-open and low voices issued through the gap, so she decided to start there.
‘Just looking for—’
She stopped, frozen in her tracks, at the sight beyond.
The eyeliner girl, Tiggy or whatever she was called, was bent over a footstool, fully naked, while some partygoer she didn’t recognise thrust into her from behind.
This might not have been so surprising in itself, and she would have simply flustered an apology and rushed out again, were it not for a third player in the scene.
Lawrence leant against a dresser, his jeans around his ankles, feeding the length of his thick curving cock into Tiggy’s eager mouth.
Kayley watched her jaw work while she was banged to and fro, seeing Lawrence’s heavy balls bounce against her chin. Lawrence had a hand on her neck, keeping her from jerking about too much while she sucked him. He was the one whose voice Kayley had heard.
‘Greedy little bitch,’ he said, apparently oblivious to Kayley’s sudden appearance. ‘Take your medicine.’
Kayley backed out of the room, all thoughts of her bag forgotten. Finding Ross at the bottom of the stairs, she said, ‘Let’s get out of here, now,’ and marched him out of the front door, clinging to his elbow.
She lay in her bed that night seeing over and over again the silhouettes of the threesome against her tired eyelids. Some kind of bright red shawl had been tacked over the window in place of a curtain, and their outlines had been vivid in its foreground. The whole scene had been like some obscene version of an industrial revolution machine – pistons, wheels, the back and forth motion of it.
She saw the generous curve of Tiggy’s bottom, lifted towards the unknown man, and her breasts swaying on the other side of the footstool. She saw the unknown man’s cock, easing out then pushing back in to its sheath. And she saw Lawrence, his careless pose, his taut jaw, his hand on Tiggy’s neck …
‘Manwhore,’ she muttered, turning over in bed.
And that was a good phone she’d lost, too. God knew when she’d be able to afford a replacement.
Oh well. It had been an experience. She’d seen how the other half lived – and shagged – and now she could go back to real life.
Real life obstinately refused to comply, however. She was sitting in the coffee bar between lectures on the following Monday, frowning over her ring binder, when somebody she hadn’t expected to see again plonked himself down opposite her and dumped a handbag on the table between them.
‘Yours, I believe,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ She couldn’t help staring. He was every bit as good-looking as she remembered, and quite a good deal more suave too. But he had been a bit rumpled in that last haunting view she’d had of him, so it was hardly surprising. ‘You. You came here.’
‘Found this in my freezer last night,’ said Lawrence, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m not sure the phone’ll still work …’
‘God! The freezer? Must’ve been looking for ice cubes and …’ She tailed off, biting her lip.
‘Yes, well, we were all a bit past the limits of common sense that night, I think,’ said Lawrence.
Kayley felt the words as a brush-off, an excuse.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking swiftly away from him. ‘You’re not wrong there.’
‘Best place to be,’ he said with a grin. ‘I had a great night. You?’
‘Not bad,’ she said.
‘So maybe we could do it again?’
She was genuinely astonished. Why on earth would this bloke, who seemed to have all those posh girls with the big hair literally at his feet, want to see her again?
‘What, do you mean that?’ she blurted, wishing she could be smooth and hard-to-get. Fat chance.
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I like you, Kayley. You’re … a breath of fresh air. I don’t often meet girls like you.’
‘What, chavs, you mean?’
He looked wounded, cocking his head to one side.
‘No, I do not,’ he said firmly. ‘I mean girls who aren’t full of themselves and their airs and graces. You have an honesty about you that’s really quite … intoxicating.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘And you know how to have a good time.’ He winked, and she felt heat prickle through her. So he just wanted sex. So what? Why not?
She accepted his invitation to go round to the Hall after her last lecture, telling her dad she was going to the cinema with her mates. Roll on the day she could earn money and rent a flat with some friends, she thought, pounding the pavements on the way to Lawrence’s place. Being skint all the time was a pain in the arse.
He got a takeaway and a DVD and they ate and watched in between sessions on the sofa bed in one of the vast, almost empty, downstairs rooms.
He was sweet to her, complimentary and gentle, in between bouts of rough, very ungentle sex. He made her laugh. He could be thoughtful. And he was very, very generous with his pills.
So generous, in fact, that her boundaries began to blur. As the weeks passed, she was meeting him two or three nights a week for sex and drugs. It never occurred to her that the time to pay for all the free treats might be coming.
One night, she turned up at the Hall to find a group of his friends there. Tiggy was one of them, though most of the others were men.
They all got off their faces and ended up all over each other. Kayley’s memories of it all were pretty vague now, but she knew that at least three or four different men had done things to her. At one point she and Tiggy had put on a show for them, laughing and slurring and kissing all over the floor.
The next morning, she’d been horrified with herself and sworn never to touch another pill, but Lawrence always managed to talk her round and get her back in his clutches. In the end she was shagging random strangers most nights of the week, out of her mind on pills, doing whatever they wanted while the lines of her inhibitions were blurred into nothingness.
She couldn’t remember most of it.
But Lawrence had the pictures.
She wished she could say it ended when she found a shred of self-respect and walked away. But in fact, it ended in a blaze of ugly jealousy, when she took her friend Mia to one of the parties and her pretty, extrovert friend proved to be more popular with Lawrence’s crowd than she was.
What the hell had she been thinking? In what way was it a compliment that some arrogant dicks liked to gang-bang you? She could see now, with the benefit of long hindsight, that her self-esteem had been appalling, and so had Mia’s, but nobody could have told her that at the time. She’d have said, ‘It’s just a laugh,’ and explained that Lawrence and his posse were her friends. Some friends.
Oh well. They – and Mia – had done her a favour in the end. She’d flounced off, nursing her hurt feelings, and vowed to avenge herself by getting her qualifications and living her own life her own way.
And she’d done it.
Until suddenly the whole nasty business had reared its head again.
She let her tears soak into the slippery nylon of the old-fashioned sleeping bag, feeling an enormous weariness weighing down her whole bo
dy, but especially her heart.
What did Lawrence Harville mean to do to her?
And would she even make it out of there alive?
Chapter Twelve
‘SHE’S STILL GOT her phone switched off.’
Jason looked up from his easel and nodded tersely before getting back to work with his charcoals.
‘Well, maybe we should go up to her dad’s after. Make sure she’s OK,’ he suggested, his focus intent on the paper clipped to the board.
‘OK.’ Jenna twitched, feeling the onset of pins and needles in her left hand.
‘Keep still,’ growled Jason.
‘I can’t. My arm’s starting to go to sleep.’ She shook her hand vigorously and propped herself up on an elbow, giving Jason an accusing stare. ‘I wasn’t born to be a life model. And I’m getting cold in this ridiculous rig-out.’
She was wearing Jason’s favourite black underwear set with all the cut-outs, reclining on her reconditioned eighteenth-century chaise longue amidst a pile of marabou-trimmed cushions.
‘Five more minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m almost done with this sketch, I promise. Now, lie back down and think of England, babe.’
Jenna, clenching and unclenching her hand to restore life to her fingers, grinned at him.
‘I didn’t think that was the look you were aiming for,’ she said. ‘Staunch and patriotic.’
‘No, that’s true,’ said Jason. ‘Don’t think of England. Think of what my hands are going to be doing once they drop these charcoals and get hold of you.’
Jenna slid back into her reclining position with a happy sigh. Yes, that was worth thinking about. Never mind that her nipples were starting to throb in the draughty air of the morning room, or that the marabou cushions were slippery and about to fall off the chaise.
Never mind anything except that she was dressed and arranged for Jason’s lustful gaze and he would soon be transferring all the fantasies she represented into reality.
‘Yeah, that look on your face, that’s what I want,’ he said approvingly. ‘Keep it just that way. Show me you want it.’
Immediately Jenna was overcome by self-consciousness. Was her expression so blatant? Did she look slutty? A silly question, perhaps, given what she was wearing, but she couldn’t help thinking that these sketches might be viewed one day, many years in the future, by art students and people in galleries. What on earth would they think of her?
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