The instinct was to tell, no matter how fond she was of the man doing this dirty deed. However, imagine being the one to bring that pain indirectly to one so undeserving of it. She couldn’t bear to witness that sadness. Consider the fall-out, the probable tearing apart of the family, the real possibility that a split would mean they were both forced from this home, the loss of two friends. No, as terrible as it was to be complicit, Nesta had to keep the secret for now, until she had worked out how best to deal with it.
Perhaps half an hour went by, with a fidgety Nesta seemingly holding her breath for the whole of it. Finally Eva emerged and slipped away without looking back. With the street light behind her it was hard to see the expression on her face but no doubt it would be one of smugness. Nesta hunched lower, although it shouldn’t have been her afraid to be seen. She tracked the nonchalant departure of the bare-bummed tart, her eyes stuck on the quivering behind as it went past her and disappeared from view.
How Eva thought she could get away with such brazen behaviour was anyone’s guess, but clearly she assumed it was safe enough. Only she knew how many times she had done this without being seen. However, her exposure had exposed her. Only a few seconds to be seen but indeed she had been. Gone was the lesbian masquerade. She drank with the men to get close to them. She avoided the nights out with the girls so she could do this. They were elsewhere having fun, all oblivious to this, no reason to suspect a thing. The street was quiet again as if nothing had happened. It had always seemed the perfect place to live, a haven of pleasantness, calm, and true friendship. Now the bubble had burst. Everything had changed, and she didn’t even know the half of it. She couldn’t know that the intended witness had indeed been drawn to his window by the clacking of Eva’s high heels, and that having watched her latest efforts at mocking provocation had decided that it was high time something was done about it. However, the feeling in Nesta’s gut told her that from now on things would never be the same again and, goodness, how right she was.
Part Two
The Close
Number Five
Another year had hurtled past Christmas and its end. The last days went in a blur of anticipation, shopping madness, unpredictable weather, and excess. But Roni was an optimist so she refused to think it was all anything other than worth it, that another year removed from one’s ticking finite existence had not been in vain. Time had a knack of blurring one day into the next if one was not careful, so it was good to pluck out the positives rather than view life as one relentless predictable cycle. The year just gone, however, would be one to stand out in the memory.
It would go down as the Year of His Arrival, even though he had been there for less than half of it. From now on things would be measured in relation to his coming. Whether they admitted it or not, time for the residents of Temptation Close would now be divided into two phases: that of before Hunter and that of after. The dynamic of the street had changed. Where once there was an air of impenetrable stability, safety, and taken for granted happiness, now cracks were showing in the defences. Roni could see them opening, week on week. She was a people-watcher and body language is not always that subtle. Plus she had the evidence of her own body. She, of all people, the girl for whom innuendo and lewdness and flirty talk was an indecipherable foreign language, even she had felt the tingle. She too had lain in bed and pondered the scenarios.
Quite how he had caused such a change might not be obvious to the external observer. It wasn’t like he had gone blaring into their midst, drowning them all out with weight of gregarious character, thrusting life and colour and risk onto the security of their family units. He did exactly the opposite. They, in fact, had needed to pursue him, to draw him out. They had needed to force the little hints from him. Things might have stayed quiet if they hadn’t prodded the slumbering giant. Now that they had, the consequences were going to be felt, since the power to stop him didn’t exist. She knew this because she, of all people, could feel that lack of resistance.
What he brought wasn’t precisely quantifiable. It was a threat, a promise, a scintillating dream. Without doing much he had eroded the safe foundations of their lives. He had planted the notion of possibility. Stranger still, his effect was not uniform. Roni could tell by the way they spoke of him that the impression he instilled differed from neighbour to neighbour - the female ones, that is. Each shaped him according to their particular taste, bending and fitting the snatched snippets about him to fit their ideal. Each had him as a template to pin their favourite characteristics to, creating their own hero.
To Maria he was a film-star action man, the first one into the fire. In her thoughts he would kill and beat with total expertise, his heart ice-cold to everything and everyone except for his one lover. Most of his perilous adventures would be taken to save her. Maria became careless and erratic around him, like her heart was beating too fast to keep her tongue and muscles in check. Bethan was the polar opposite. She was stunned into even greater silence than usual when he was amongst them. She seemed frozen and bewildered, her cheeks aflame, always casting him furtive glances and then looking away, as if like a Gorgon he could turn you to stone if he caught you with his gaze. Bethan had never said it, but Roni guessed their youngest neighbour was kept awake with thoughts of him as some kind of rampaging monster - a pillaging, raping Viking, perhaps.
To Nesta he was far gentler. He was a philosopher or poet, a Byron; intelligent and profound but wild and untameable. For her the beauty was also in his words, in his warm humour. She loved the way his tight-lipped reticence could suddenly drop to reveal animation and even fervour. She had said it once, quietly, and perhaps no one else had listened. ‘I love the light he gets in his eyes sometimes, when he comes alive,’ she had said. Roni knew that Nesta couldn’t wait to laugh with him. She would blush and tremble in his presence, and he would call her things like his Fondant Fancy if he thought no one else could hear him. Such pet names betrayed their mutual fondness. Nesta was the most sensible and composed female Roni had ever known, yet even she went to jelly when he was around.
Roni herself saw him as a kind of modern-day Darcy. Look at the clothes he wore - not frills and breeches and tail coats, but the constant chic smartness of them, as if to say you guys might like to slum it in your free-time but a gentleman never lets his standards drop. It was as if any untidiness might be offensive to others and thus couldn’t be tolerated in one so refined. Oh, to catch him half-undressed and off-guard, fresh from the lake and still dripping. He was aloof until you broke him down, perhaps instinctively feeling those around him were not on his level. He didn’t mind offending the other husbands by seldom showing for their nights out. He had to be coaxed to any gathering and hadn’t repaid the generosity by returning the favour. He didn’t mix unless he had to.
Yet draw him out and the barriers came down. His physical magnificence became amplified. Suddenly you saw the humility, the kindness, the warmth. Yes, warmth was the word. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke that made you believe you were the only thing of importance in the world. It was a smouldering look - one that made you smoulder. Roni had actually felt heat spreading within her belly from these looks, like some energy or joy or passion was growing internally. It was a little like rapture and a little frightening. It wasn’t just like simply being attracted to someone. It was as if you were up against something supreme. They hadn’t confessed as much, but Roni knew all the girls had felt this same inner heat. He was already inside them.
To understand his effect you had to appreciate the biology behind it. The simple reason he didn’t have to do much to have them all under a spell was because he was a true alpha male. No one else in the small world she and her neighbours inhabited came close. He out alpha-ed all and reset the bar. Any others you thought might have been at that level were instantly relegated. One would have to visit Hollywood, or legend, or classic romance literature to find his peer.
He was living pro
of that all females carried the base instinct to identify the very best mate, should they ever be lucky enough to happen upon him. The heat in the belly was that instinct, spilling out to ensure he could not go unnoticed. It didn’t matter that you didn’t know him one bit; your instinct did. And nature would brook no refusal. It didn’t care for circumstance or morals. It simply said: this one you must not let get away. It eroded all your notions of contentment and stability, and put him as your only focus. You sometimes get a similar effect from certain rare individuals you see on the cinema screen or performing for massive cheering audiences. If you have never felt it in real life then you haven’t met his like. Roni had been unprepared for the shock.
Love is something that writers and singers and philosophers endlessly try to encapsulate. However, in simple biological terms, it is merely a mechanism for overriding the instinct to find a mate. That, at least, was Roni’s theory. Love kicks in to end one’s search. Nature knows when you have done the best you can to optimise your chances. Love negates all instincts to continue looking so that the family unit finds a bond and true stability, which is the optimum environment in which to successfully rear offspring. Some get it wrong, mistaking mere fondness or lust for love, and so their impulse to keep searching cannot be masked. Roni hadn’t got it wrong. Everything in her contented soul told her that in her husband she had got it just right. Then Hunter came along and awoke that dormant instinct, so unexpectedly. There was no love strong enough to override nature’s urge for him. Before Hunter and After Hunter: the time when you thought you had everything and the time when you realised you were wrong.
It helped to concoct such theories to deflect one’s guilt at being preoccupied by someone other than the person you loved, since there didn’t seem to be any other legitimate excuse. If Mother Nature forced the instinct upon you then your body had no choice but to respond. Roni hadn’t meant to fantasise about him; he just kept coming to mind. She had barely even spoken to him before she had fleshed out his character to best fit her vision. Her fantasies were still fairly staid, held back from getting too rude, more long drawn out build-ups rather than actual action. She never dreamt the kind of scenes that the likes of Maria confessed to, although this could be a fight she was beginning to lose. Hunter’s arrival, you see, had coincided with her conviction that she was in dire need of a sexual awakening.
Some are born bawdy, others just don’t get it. She was one of the latter. Her upbringing no doubt contributed, as did her group of friends at school. She was a late developer physically, blooming only much later when already at university. She therefore missed the blue-balled attentions of the randy teenage boys, who might have given an insight on the muckier side of life. Sexual slang meant nothing to her, so the whole notion of kinkiness was just a cloud of mystery. Even now, double entendres went whizzing over her head. Her naivety in life formed her sexual character: one of old-fashioned innocence, where shyness and even some trepidation ruled.
She had never known anything different. She had married a wonderful man who respected her naivety and never try to enforce his will in the bedroom. Back when they were first together she was glad of this. She only properly discovered the intense joy that her own fingers could bring a year after her second child was born; shuddering finishes she had never been able to put herself through before. To help ease her conscience she put it down to hormones, but she wasn’t prudish enough to not realise that physical bliss was right there, waiting to be explored, just as everyone else did. Mixing with her female neighbours helped wake the curiosity. It only needed one hearing of a drunken vulgar chat between Maria and Shelley to realise that sex did not stop at the three positions she had tried. That was the sum total of her sexual adventure. Three sexual partners, three positions, all done in her bed, with no additives unless condoms counted. It might have still been fairly regular in frequency, but there weren’t going to be any books written about it.
The trouble was that her sexual character was now defined. Her husband loved her too much to want to introduce anything. Such attempts in their earliest times together had been met with shocked squeals and hasty retreats. This was a bed she had made for herself. It would be up to her to take the initiative but there was no way she could. She could curse but she didn’t have the ability to use those same rude words to ask for what she now wanted. Dirty talk was a cringe-inducing horror too great to contemplate. Even if she managed to utter some her husband would probably expire from shock on the spot, or assume she had learnt it in somebody else’s bed. She neither possessed the courage nor the vocabulary. She couldn’t ask, nor could she take the initiative without feeling like she was under suspicion. She needed it to just happen, and it wasn’t going to.
Worse, she didn’t even know what “it” was. Her head fluttered with images but she could never grasp one in particular to focus on what might turn her on. With no experience, how can you know what you will like? She just knew she wanted to do something a bit more, well, dirty. Somehow this would have to happen without her asking or instigating it. It would have to happen by magic. It nearly had. One time over drinks for the girls, shortly after Eva’s arrival to the close, the incoming lesbian had made what Roni much later deduced was a pass at her.
Though they barely knew Eva at all back then, she had been shockingly vocal about her sexual proclivities and practices, telling them all about her girlfriends past and present. Most of it passed Roni by, but she could tell by the giggles and gasps from the others, and from the range of flirty expressions Eva sported, that it was all very rude. She had just smiled back politely when Eva made a point of looking at her when saying that she and her current girlfriend were always looking for other girls to join in their fun. Only later did she get the insinuation. As Roni had been leaving, Eva had grabbed her arm and secretly whispered: ‘Next time I’m tribbing my dirty girlfriend, guess who I’ll be thinking about?’
Roni couldn’t remember her reply, but it was something vague because she didn’t know what or who Eva was going on about. She only worked out the who bit much later. What confounded Roni most was not any objection to Eva’s sexual leanings. She herself had often thought she might have similar tendencies. She even long harboured what might have been regarded as a crush on best friend Nesta. The thought of being with another girl was actually rather exciting. It was just the way Eva described it that wasn’t. The words were so clinical and lewd. Could “tribbing”, whatever it was, possibly be sexy? It sounded like some kind of medical procedure carried out on livestock, or some other kind of animal husbandry: ‘I’ve been out in’t top field all’t morning tribbing t’sheep.’
Such incomprehensible words and phrases made her feel like she was the only person not to be a member of the Sexual Experts Club. They also felt cold and impersonal too, like they were something you had to do as part of a repertoire, not because the individual partner inspired you to do it. Lovemaking was meant to be close and flowing. She could see the advantage of adding new dimensions to it, but not if it caused awkward interruptions, and definitely not if it involved having to use some terrible slang terminology to ask for it.
It struck her one day that she would now be willing to do most things in bed, even some of the rudest she could bring to mind, as long as they just happened - no requests, no horrible back and forth conversation to ascertain consent. She wanted to expand her sexual horizons, in fact she was eager to do so, but she couldn’t see how this could possibly take place now that she and her husband had set out the parameters of their lovemaking. In her guilty fantasy scenarios Hunter did what he wanted because he had expertise branded into his genes. He seduced her at great length, so that she slipped almost unknowingly towards infidelity.
Most of it was not about what he did, but from those as yet unidentified things he would do, when the time came, because he would do as he pleased, knowing it would please her. She would somehow suddenly be in his bed, without even registering the cards he played to
get her there. He would use his strength to hold her and manoeuvre her seamlessly just as he wished, it never even crossing his mind that he should seek permission to do so. There would be no words and everything would feel wonderful and natural and just for her. With him it would be so easy you couldn’t possibly imagine why it had all seemed so difficult before. He would give her what she had been missing. That’s why Mother Nature was nagging at her, refusing to let him slip from her mind. Before Hunter and After Hunter: how could any of them live the same lives now that he had arrived?
Number Eight
If a delegation of hippies from the 1970’s were transported through time to the present day, and the first person they bumped into was Alicia, they wouldn’t necessarily think an awful lot had changed. She had that same mantra of friendliness and tolerance to all, a laissez-faire attitude to the behaviour of her children. She had those same fairly scatty but generally peace-loving attitudes. A fly would be safe in her presence, even one of those horrible shit-brown ones you see buzzing around the backsides of cattle. She didn’t eat meat. She often wore beads and floral smock-like tops with long boot-cut jeans over sandals or clogs. She had the long, straight hair. Most of all she had the body.
“Willowy” was an apt description. “Devoid of tits ’n’ ass” was a crueller one, but one she would happily accept if the scrutiny stopped there, rather than going on to analyse all her faults as she herself did whenever in front of the mirror. What was unarguable was that she stood six feet tall in bare feet and was slim of frame, with small handfuls up front and not much to sit on behind. No one could argue with that. Facial attractiveness is always down to aesthetics but it would be hard for a detractor to prove any feature there was worthy of particularly averse criticism, but nor was anything overly striking - although she seldom wore any make-up to accentuate the good.
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