Telling Tales. Charlotte SteinЧитать онлайн книгу.
this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.
It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with ‘one-way’ on it in big, fancy glitter letters.
‘Like this story?’ Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.
No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it sub.
Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: ‘Ooooh, he’s a magician!’
Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.
‘You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,’ I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.
‘Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck,’ Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house, he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.
And the L-word’s loose. So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.
‘Why do you think he did?’ Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say…heated – though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.
But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.
Sharing what we never shared before.
Though when I think about this idea, my stomach stops flip-flopping and drops out of me entirely.
‘Because he had no one else,’ Cameron says, finally, and though Wade starts blathering on about Scooby-Doo and Kitty wants to know why he wanted us to stay here for a month first, then, if it was just about him being a lonely old bastard, I think Cameron’s right.
I think we were his family, once. And maybe he just wanted his family to come back together, in some sort of wildly eccentric and completely inadvisable fashion. One that makes Wade say: ‘There’s a curse on the house, and a month is what it takes to possess us all and make us kill each other.’
This time, Kitty manages to hurl a cushion at him. She even kicks one little leg out at him, and misses by a country mile.
‘You dick! I’m already not going to sleep tonight, thinking about people watching us.’
‘People watching us?’ I say, and Kitty turns her head almost 360 degrees to shoot the weirdest look at me. It has nothing to do with the content of my words, though, I know, and everything to do with the fact that me and Cameron say said words at exactly the same time. We even use the same incredulous tone – or we would have, if I had a gunmetal voice like his.
‘Well yeah. There must be people watching us. Checking that we’re staying for the month, you know? Making sure we’re doing the “renovations”.’
‘The place doesn’t even need renovations,’ Wade says, and he would know. But Cameron’s still stuck on this idea of being watched.
‘No one is spying on us. The solicitor even said to me that a clause like that wouldn’t hold up – that we didn’t have to stay if we didn’t want to.’
We all go silent, then. Though I can practically hear what everyone’s thinking, anyway – so why are we here? What are we all doing here, if we don’t have to be? None of us have jobs that we need to rush back to, and there’s a nice healthy provision been made for us, but even so. Even so, what are we doing in this old house again, reliving old memories?
‘So,’ Wade says. ‘Back to my story?’
I can see he’s just raring to plunge right into it – which makes my palms inexplicably sweaty and puts my heart somewhere up around my throat – but Cameron pulls him up short. He points out that none of us have any candy, and I’m almost certain he does so for the same reasons I would, if I’d have thought about it.
To stall Wade from reading out the Story of Probable Depravity.
But then he comes back too quickly with a bag of actual red liquorice, the staple story food of the Candy Club, and then I’m not so sure. Plus he kind of looks at me as he passes by to the kitchen, and there’s something about his expression, something hazy in his bottom-of-the-ocean eyes, as though summer heat has hit the water and everything is melting away.
And then Wade starts talking, and I don’t know whether it’s Cameron’s strange smoky stare or the words of this obviously filthy story that make me feel suddenly warm and liquid between my legs.
Though I think the latter has a running start.
‘He thought about licking her cunt when he brought the pair of panties to his face, even though he didn’t want to. He wanted to think about nice things, cute things, because she was a real lovely girl. Her eyes only ever laughed at him kindly, and her sweet mouth seemed to have no edges. She did nice things, like slipping an arm around him when he felt down – despite the fact that no one else ever seemed to know if he was down or not.
‘But she did. And now he was in her room, going through her things. All of her panties and bras and other stuff besides that he’d never suspected she’d have. She had something that looked like a see-through teddy, and when he rubbed it over his cheek it felt liquid-soft, like maybe it would melt if he kept doing dirty things to it.
‘Even so, he ran it over the stiff ridge of his erection – plainly visible through the material of his jeans – and thought about doing that same thing with her inside it. She’d be all spread out on the bed with the silk clinging to her curvy body, and he could get on her and slide his cock over every inch.
‘The thought alone made him sweat. He could feel his stiff cock pulsing against his zipper, and longed to take it out. But then the door sounded down below, and a new kind of feeling sprang through him.’
I know just what Wade’s perverted character means. A new sort of feeling is springing through me too. Wade pauses to snap off a bit of red liquorice, but other than that he seems completely unfazed by all of the cocks and cunts and, oh my word, I don’t think I can take the heat in here. I think I need to get out of the kitchen, even though I’m not actually in one.
Where has he gotten this stuff from? Is this real? Something about it sounds it, but I can’t imagine Wade sneaking into some chick’s bedroom to sniff her panties – and especially not this new Wade, all smooth and creamy-voiced and too-slick.
In truth I can’t imagine anything at all, because the bottom half of me has been dipped in warm honey and I can’t seem to breathe out. I keep breathing in, but nothing’s going back out again.
And he continues! Kitty is kind of squirming on my lap and I dare not even look at Cameron, but Wade only goes and carries on.
‘Fear. She’d come back early from