Chapter Eight Satoshi #3
A stray piece of hair was falling in her face. I stroked it back. My fingers brushed the sensitive spot behind her ear, the one I’d studiously avoided in our month of slow, and I felt a shiver go through her. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That was an accident.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ she whispered.
We looked into each other’s eyes for one moment, two, the length of a promise made as two glasses clinked together.
And then Fiona Fisher kissed me.
It was an impossible mix of tentative and urgent, one of her hands fisting hard in my hair and the other in my shirt, even as her lips asked a question.
I answered it, kissing her back harder, opening my mouth to her, sucking her bottom lip between mine and nipping it with my teeth.
She made a desperate noise of pleasure and—
—the fraying thread of my control snapped.
I pinned her against the wall of the school hall, hiking my hands under her thighs and hauling her up against me.
Her legs wrapped around my waist, and she moaned as I ground against her.
‘I love how strong you are, Satoshi. It’s—’ our lips met again, hot, wet, messy ‘—so fucking sexy. When you were manhandling that keg around—’ and again ‘I thought I was going to lose my mind.’
One of her hands snuck under the open collar of my shirt, and she pressed her lips to my pulse point. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ she breathed. ‘This whole last month – I have so many things I have to think about, but I can’t stop thinking about you.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about you either.’ I ground myself against her again and the hungry sound it drew from her made my blood fizz. ‘All the things you let me to do to you. All the things you might let me do to you. I spend my week living for Thursdays, wondering what you might let me do next.’
‘I bought a vibrator,’ she gasped.
The sudden admission made me laugh. ‘God, I adore you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?!’ I bit her earlobe. ‘Why do you think? You’re—’
‘Oh my goodness, Fiona, is that you?’
Fiona slid swiftly back down my body, her feet hitting the ground with a thud. It felt like my heart fell out of my body and landed there with her.
The woman laughed. ‘Well, this is the last thing I expected to find back here!’ She waggled a finger playfully, but disapprovingly. ‘Isn’t making out beside the bins a bit high school?’
‘Michelle—’ Even in the semi-dark, I could see that Fiona’s face was crimson, the colour of a full-bodied shiraz. ‘I can explain.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to explain!’ The woman’s laugh was a supercilious trill. ‘If anyone’s entitled to be messy, it’s you, Fiona.’
‘Excuse me?’ I interjected.
But Fiona was already speaking. ‘I’d appreciate if you’d keep this quiet.’ She positioned herself in front of me, trying to hide me behind her, even though she was nearly a head shorter. ‘I’ve had enough of my personal business being public gossip.’
‘Oh, babe, of course.’ Michelle put her hand over her heart. ‘I’ll take it to the grave.’
I had known this woman for approximately thirty seconds, but I was confident that she would not, in fact, be taking this to her grave.
‘And between you and me – get it, girlfriend.’ She winked conspiratorially. ‘A hot little toyboy is exactly what you deserve. But you might want to make sure you don’t get carried away.’ Her tone shifted to something more patronising. ‘Poor Lex is standing there on the oval, all alone!’
‘They’re twelve,’ Fiona said. ‘They can—’
‘Don’t worry, I made sure Steve waited with them.’ Michelle laughed again, and I could practically feel the hairs on the back of Fiona’s neck stand on end. ‘I’d never leave them unsupervised – that’d be very bad P&F chair behaviour! But you might want to get back to them, yes?’
‘I’ll be right there. Thanks for looking out for them.’
‘Any time, babe.’ Michelle turned to go, but then turned back, pointing at me and gesturing up and down. ‘Love this for you.’
She left. ‘Oh god,’ Fiona moaned.
‘What an awful woman.’
‘She’s not, she’s just… oh god.’
Fiona took a step away from me, hurriedly tucking the front of her blouse back into her jeans. ‘I’m so sorry, Satoshi – about all of this – but – Lex – I have to—’
‘Go,’ I said, even though there was a dark, yawning chasm in the pit of my stomach. ‘It’s all right.’
She went. Unlike Michelle, she did not look back, and I stood there beside the bins, in the still of the night, for a long time.
I was – or, at least, should be – smart enough not to take phrases like hot little toyboy seriously. Who would take one single thing this condescending woman had said seriously?
But I couldn’t stop seeing Fiona’s face: at first scarlet, and then milk-pale with mortification.
I didn’t give a shit that she was older than me. But for her, age was clearly not just a number. Was I can explain something she would have said if she’d been caught with someone her own age?
I took off my glasses – my stupid, childish, lime-green glasses – and put my palm over my eyes, as if it could block out the awful, inexorable truth of what had just happened.
Of what had already happened when Sadie caught us at the restaurant, even though I’d shoved it deep down and refused to acknowledge it.
Is it okay if we don’t tell anyone? she’d asked me that day we’d decided to go slow, and I’d blithely agreed, because I would have agreed to anything if it meant I got to have her.
Fiona might like me. She might value me. She might enjoy our Thursday nights together, and she might even trust me.
But the idea that people might think we were actually together was something she found deeply, profoundly embarrassing.