Pretending: The brilliant new adult novel from Holly Bourne. Why be yourself when you can be perfect?

by Holly Bourne

  I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying it. I’m not even having to fake it I’m enjoying it so much. So, of course, of course, Joshua pulls out.

  He smiles down, like he hasn’t just done the most annoying thing in the universe. Gretel smiles back. We wrangle about, mix it up. He half-heartedly tries to touch me when I’m on top but then gets lost in how good it feels for him so stops after twenty seconds – but probably still considers himself a good lay because he bothered to try. Gretel loves it. She can’t believe her luck at how good this not-as-good-as-a-moment-ago sex is. Joshua’s face below me looks like he’s won the lottery though I’m not used to being this naked and confident and exposed.

  ‘You’re so hot,’ Joshua leans up and whispers in my ear.

  And, without warning, always without warning, the past regurgitates on me.

  ‘You’re a fat slut,’ Ryan whispers in my ear. Pain and shame and being too confused to do anything other than freeze up.

  Josh is below me, and he’s looking ever so into it, but … but …

  I’m not here any more.

  I’m there. Staring at the white wall.

  The white wall.

  The

  white

  wall.

  I can see every pattern of the embossed wallpaper. I’m too shocked to move. It’s hurting. It’s hurting so much. My body is screaming in pain though I stay silent and perfectly still, a primal part of me telling me this is the safest way – the quickest way – to end the hurting. Oww, it hurts so much, but I just look at the wall. Focus all the pain on the wall. A vague part of me, the tiny part of me that hasn’t numbed out completely to keep me safe, is aware, so aware that this is damage. That what he’s doing to me is damage.

  Damage damage damage.

  Damage.

  I’m damaged.

  I’m no good and I’m damaged and it hurts so much, but it’s all I deserve. God it hurts. Why isn’t he stopping? I can’t find the words to make him stop. My throat is stitched up. Vocal chords ripped out, screaming silently into the empty hole of my throat. He keeps hurting me. It won’t stop. I just need it to be over. Please be over.

  Please

  Be

  Over.

  But it’s not. It seems to go on and on, time as slow as the pain is burning, hurting more and more. My whole body is on fire. Hands on my waist. Pulling me back and forth roughly while I’m as limp as I can go, whimpering. Why can’t I open my mouth? Why can’t I scream? Why can’t I push him out and away and run run run? Why am I frozen?

  Just staring.

  At the white wall, the white wall, the white wall.

  No no no no. Come back, come back, come back. It’s over, it’s over, it’s in the past, the past, it can’t hurt you. My lungs are small, so small. There are tears pricking. Breathing is hard. But come back. Come back. I can’t, I can’t … I’m back there. So scared. So hurt. So helpless. Staring at the wall. No no no. April! Come back! Come. Back.

  I take the fingernail of my second finger and bury it into the side of my thumb as hard as I can. Pressing, pressing until I almost draw blood …

  Here. In Joshua’s room. The art print of Paris. Joshua is squeezing my hand, slowing it down. ‘Hey?’ he’s saying. ‘Is everything OK?’

  His face is concerned. Shit. I lost Gretel. I lost Gretel and I lost me, I’m fucking it up. ‘I’m fine. Why have you stopped?’

  ‘I just thought. You seemed to zone out there. Is everything all right?’

  No no no. He can’t see this bit. The plan won’t work and he won’t fall for me if he sees this bit. Cover it up, make it good for him, power through. Power. Through.

  Gretel pulls it together. Gretel reaches out and drags him closer. Gretel makes it clear he’s misread this entirely. ‘Don’t stop,’ she says. ‘Please don’t stop.’

  And, it’s not like he needs further convincing. He smiles, relieved, that I am not one of those damaged ones he has heard so much about. No no no, don’t want one of them, do you? They’re not sexy, those damaged ones. Can’t spunk in their faces without feeling mildly guilty about it, and who wants to ruin an orgasm with guilt? Luckily, he doesn’t try anything too risqué but I’m still fighting the trigger and losing. I need to hold it together. I’m not holding it together. I need to distract him to his finish. Gretel ramps it up. She cannot believe how amazing his thrusting his. She asks for him to go deeper, she says how big he is, how big and hard. Predictably, this sends him over the edge very quickly. He lets out a guttural squawk and judders into me. I just need to hold it together, hold it together. Wait wait wait. You can unravel soon, I promise. Just not yet, not yet.

  Joshua stays still inside me, his head buried into my neck for some time. I twist my head to one side to let gravity roll the tear off my cheek. I can physically feel his penis deflating inside me, like a helium balloon days after the party. My trauma’s surfacing; it’s boiling in my skin.

  Joshua finally lifts his head and looks down and Gretel’s face is tear free and smiling as their eyes meet in a post-coital lock. His face bursts into a grin, and he has the good grace and manners to lean down and plant a kiss on my lips before holding the end of his penis to ensure the condom stays on while he tugs himself out of my body.

  ‘Hi,’ he whispers, collapsing to my side, giving me another kiss.

  ‘Hi,’ I reply.

  I want to scream so loudly that it would scatter every pigeon living in London.

  I watch him attempt to fight sleep for, oh, twenty whole seconds. He reaches out and heavily pats my naked back, all like ‘there there son’. I reach out and rub his back, comforting him into unconsciousness so I can be alone. Quickly, his arm collapses as his body finds sleep, pinning me to the bed.

  I focus on my breath, the rise and fall of my ribcage. I have to wait; I have to make sure he’s fully gone before I get up. I do not want him to wake. I need to be alone so much right now that I’d kill him if I could, just for the peace, just to ensure he stays sleeping.

  In and out, in and out.

  Breathing really is quite painful sometimes, isn’t it?

  Gretel isn’t here.

  It’s just me. April.

  In this strange flat, with this strange man who doesn’t know who I am. I check his sleeping face one more time. He is out. The slimy dead slug of the used condom dangling from his other hand. I delicately remove myself from under him, rolling until I’m standing, naked, looking down at him.

  Still sleeping.

  It’s just me in this flat. My throat throbbing with screams that want to be screamed till my voice runs dry, but that would wake him up. I find my dress discarded on his wooden floor and hold it to my cheek with shaking hands. Then I pad out barefoot, gently closing the door behind me.

  The living room is still how we left it. The scene of the wooing. The ice in our margaritas hasn’t fully melted yet. Our meals lie half-eaten – the bowls of handmade dips still full and waiting to be scooped. A clock ticks on the wall. It’s not even eight thirty. I clutch my dress to me tighter and I enter the tiling of Joshua’s bathroom. The tang of Mr Muscle punctuates the air. I picture him scrubbing it moments before I arrived. The heat seeps through the small, open window above the sink. I can hear the laughs of Friday night bouncing through. I close it. I pull the string of the extractor fan, the hum giving me the white noise needed to cover the gasps escaping my mouth.

  I lock the door.

  I fall, naked, onto the bathmat.

  Reasons why I’ve cried in bathrooms

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  - Occasionally, work stress

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  - Occasionally, PMS

  - Because I don’t want a man to know I’m crying

  When I’m finishe
d, you would never know how hard I fell apart. My breathing is back to normal. My face is blotch-free. My shoulders unhunched. I’ve managed to get the nine-yard stare out of my eyes.

  The white wall, the white wall, the white wall.

  No.

  Joshua’s still dozing as I climb back into bed, fully naked, because that’s what Gretel would do. I dream up the scenario of what she’s been doing for the last forty-five minutes. She would’ve slept too, dozing happily in her post-orgasmic bliss that was real instead of faked. Then she would’ve done something fun! Oh, I know, she’ll want more cocktails. I climb back out and retrieve the melted margaritas, placing them carefully on Joshua’s side table before getting under the covers again.

  My movements stir him. He half opens one eye.

  ‘Oh hello.’ He reaches out and pulls my head into his chest.

  ‘I’ve brought in the margaritas.’

  ‘You’re a legend.’ He kisses the top of my head. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to doze off.’ He kisses my head again. ‘You tired me out.’

  I twist in his arms to look up at him. He has quite a lot of nostril hair for a man not yet 35. ‘You tired me out too.’ I lean over to get the drinks. He sighs exhaustedly and props himself up, saying ‘thank you’. We sit, sipping, conversation temporarily not flowing. I know I should be bright and sparky, like Gretel would be, but I used up a lot of energy climbing my way out of hell on Joshua’s bathmat.

  ‘We didn’t finish dinner,’ Joshua opens.

  ‘We bloody better. I’m starving.’

  He pats my thigh. ‘I’m glad my cooking didn’t put you off.’

  ‘What can I say? The man can cook …’ I take a syrupy salty gulp. ‘Among other things …’

  My words visibly relax him, his body softens into his pillow. ‘Oh,’ he says, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards. ‘So you …?’

  I nod hard. ‘Oh yeah! Couldn’t you tell?’

  ‘Yeah, I mean, no. I wondered. So you did? Of course. Sorry. That’s great. Great.’

  I lean over and make myself kiss him. I wonder why men worry about women not coming when, during sex, they regularly do things that it’s common scientific knowledge do not lead women to come. The kiss leads into a snog and I can feel the duvet cover twitching with the stirring signs of Joshua’s second erection. I know I won’t be able to avoid having sex with him again tonight but I don’t think I can face it yet. Especially as it always takes much longer the second time around. I break off the kiss. ‘Mmm, I’m starving,’ Gretel breezes. ‘And I’ve not tried your guacamole yet.’ I’m up, stark naked, padding back to the dining table. ‘You coming?’ I call, sitting down. He practically runs after me.

  ‘I think the food is cold,’ he says.

  ‘That’s fine. I’m too hungry to care.’ I pick up my fork and stab it into the remnants of my fajita. I get this urge to eat and eat and eat until I throw up. ‘Mmm,’ Gretel says. ‘Top marks for the guacamole.’

  ‘You know, I’ve never eaten fajitas naked before.’

  ‘How have you coped your whole life without me?’

  And he actually, momentarily, looks like he’s considering the question. ‘I honestly don’t know, Gretel.’

  We eat. We flirt. We wash up together. We chat about all the things we have yet to learn about one another. We’re past the basics now – where he grew up (Norwich), where he went to uni (Leeds), and are getting into the slightly more detailed. We finally get to favourite colours. His is blue. Gretel’s is orange. Mine’s green.

  It gets dark, but the promised rain doesn’t fall. The storm never arrives. The sky outside gives off the vibe of someone who grossly overate, but not quite to the point of being sick. The sky is a long, uncomfortable, indigestion. I want it to rain so much.

  We settle on his sofa, entwined, acting like the couple we are not yet. I can tell he’s been single a while by how much he craves physical touch. He keeps putting a hand on my back and his hugs last a bit too long.

  ‘So, apart from Morgan Freeman, can you do any other impressions?’

  Apart from of a carefree woman who doesn’t exist and can orgasm the first time she has sex with someone with hardly any clitoral stimulation? I think to myself.

  ‘Give me an accent and I’ll be able to do it.’

  ‘OK, say something in American.’

  ‘Something in American,’ I parrot, but in a perfect US accent.

  ‘All right, harder now. Scottish.’

  ‘Oi, Joshua, you’re a wee bit sexy, aren’t ya?’

  He laughs while also beaming at the compliment. ‘I like this game,’ he declares. ‘Can you do anyone else famous apart from Morgan?’

  ‘I do a great Ronan Keating actually.’

  ‘Niche, but let’s hear it.’

  I sing a line and Joshua cracks up again.

  We open the windows to let in the non-existent breeze. I ask him about the print of Paris in his bedroom. ‘Oh, that? I bought it when I was travelling around Europe the summer I graduated.’ The topic drifts to backpacking, an activity I’ve always considered exists solely for boring middle-class people to feel better about themselves and give them something to talk about at boring middle-class parties. No personality? No worries – just talk about IndYA! But Gretel’s riveted – she just loves travelling – and so I have to sit through some of the same stories he’s already told me about Mount Kilimanjaro.

  We start kissing again. The kissing escalates and we end up having sex on his sofa. It’s better than last time. When Joshua has finished removing the second used condom of the evening and collapses in a sweaty mess into me, I try to make sure I get my Madonna:Whore blend just right. ‘That was amazing,’ I say, even though it wasn’t. It was only OK.

  He grins and kisses my fingers. I can smell myself on his breath.

  ‘I never usually sleep with someone this fast,’ Gretel admits.

  Joshua props himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously?’

  She nods, shyly.

  ‘I thought … I mean, you’re so confident. I assumed …’

  ‘What?’

  He’s clever enough to back away from the loaded question. ‘Never mind.’

  Gretel lets it go, like any normal girl would ever be able to let an ‘I assumed’ go ever in the history of life. ‘Well I don’t normally do this.’

  Joshua’s still for a moment, clearly thinking. Then he suddenly hugs me, really tightly, making me so suffocated it’s a miracle I don’t hit him.

  After a moment, I tap his back. ‘Can we sleep now?’

  He tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear and looks like he’s falling in love with me. ‘Let’s sleep.’

  I lie awake and stare at his ceiling, only catching an hour or so when dawn sneaks around the curtains and birds who wish they lived somewhere nicer than London chirp their morning announcements and wake me up. I want to scratch my skin off. I want to cry for a thousand years. I want to take a man, any man, and make him feel true, pure, fear. I want violence. I want to watch him bleed. I want the whites of his eyes to grow bigger with terror. I want him to freeze as a survival mechanism and then torture himself for the rest of his life for not fighting back. I want him to blame himself for it. I want him to scream and …

  Joshua rolls over in the bed. His eyes are open. He’s smiling.

  ‘Good morning!’ I chirp.

  ‘It’s a good morning indeed if I’m waking up next to you.’

  ‘Oh, that is cheesy Joshua.’

  He pulls me into him (all the better to let me poke my morning erection into your thigh, my dear) and we roll into the inevitability of morning sex with morning breath and both of us pretending I’m not a bit too dry for it, what with it being the morning and all, and Joshua doing absolutely no foreplay beforehand. Even Gretel can’t fake wetness. But Joshua doesn’t seem to mind, or notice. When he is done, he falls off me headfirst into the pillow, patting my back and muttering compliments.

  ‘I need the bathroom.’ I get up, pee, sh
ower, and start tugging my clothes on. My skin’s itchier. That last bout of sex was too much. I’m running out of time. The trauma’s closing in. My ribs are tightening on my lungs.

  The white wall.

  The

  white

  wall.

  He appears in the kitchen just as the kettle boils, shrugging into a casual white T-shirt.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’ I ask, in an air hostess voice.