Asking For Trouble (27 page)

And that was that, more or less. Mr Travis could contact them on his return if he wished to report anything missing.

I didn’t bother asking if they were going to fingerprint the place. I knew what the answer would be: No point. Happens all the time. Mr Travis was simply unlucky.

Better that, I thought, than dead.

Luke has the face of a dazed angel.

His eyes are chestnut brown with lashes so long they ought to belong to a woman or a camel. His summer-bronzed complexion is flawless – he doesn’t even seem to have pores – and his features are perfect, clean lines. If it weren’t for the bleached hair with dark roots, and the ring piercing his brow, mothers might coo over his fresh boyish health.

And however much he wittered on about drugs and clubs, skate-punk and easy sex, he was, to my mind, disappointingly wholesome.

I yearned for Ilya’s craggy masculinity – for that too-big nose, those hooded eyes and that swarthy skin. I ached for his wit, his intellect, his menacing charm and his big bad secrets. I didn’t want to play the older woman to Luke’s eager appetite. I wanted to play the
insignificant slut to Ilya’s sweet-sick demands. I wanted tender kisses from Ilya, too, but I tried not to dwell on that.

He’d promised to phone me. I heard nothing.

Prague, for a fortnight, came and went.

Luke was lying naked on my living-room floor, resting his cheek on folded arms.

This, for him, was an unusually serene posture, and his mood, too, was surprisingly mellow. More often than not, Luke couldn’t stay still for any length of time and he treated all silences as uncomfortable ones. Maybe he was starting to feel more relaxed in my presence. Maybe he was just tired.

Late-morning sunlight, muted by the gauzy muslin curtains, glowed warmly on his back and shot glints into his rumpled blond hair. Against the honey gold of his body, his arse was deliciously creamy. I trailed a finger down the groove of his spine, then continued further into the cleft of his buttocks.

‘Bisexual?’ I said, trying not to smile. ‘You kept that one quiet.’

‘Yeah well,’ he said, with a dismissive little shrug.

I didn’t quite believe him. It was too much.

All I’d been trying to do was develop his fuck-centric sexuality a little. I’d been gently pushing him to open up about his fantasies, the perviest thing he’d ever done or seen, what he thought about when he wanked, that kind of stuff.

His answers had been pretty scanty, to say the least. He’d been more interested in batting the questions back to me.

I didn’t think he was ready to hear the dark side of my desires, so I’d lied and said having anal sex was my wickedest deed to date.

This seemed to intrigue him and he’d started quizzing me – Was it better than vaginal sex? Did it hurt? Why
did I like it? Do lots of couples do it? Straight couples, not just queers?

Then, after a little more probing from me, Luke had said, ‘Well, I suppose I’m a bit bi.’

Now whether he was saying this because he wanted to rescue himself from naivety, or whether he thought it put him in a suitable position to bugger me, I didn’t know. I just knew I didn’t believe him. I thought it was another example of Luke wanting to be in everyone’s gang.

Fighting to contain my amusement, I carried on rubbing my finger in the split of his arse.

‘So what do you mean by “I suppose” and “a bit”?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying you’ve actually been with other blokes? Or you just want to?’

At length, he said, ‘I’ve been with a couple of guys. A while ago. Not at the same time or anything.’

‘Oh? And what did you do together?’ I asked, pressing gently into the crinkled pit of his anus. ‘How come you’re so curious about my anal experiences? Didn’t you fuck?’

‘No,’ he said, propping himself up on one elbow and looking at me with those big doe eyes. ‘It was more, like, messing about. Just touching. You know, wanking. Sucking.’

I pictured his lips, stretched and taut round some other guy’s cock, and the image charged my cunt with a sudden erotic shock.

‘Tell me more,’ I coaxed. ‘Who with? When? Why only twice?’

He shrugged and poked at the carpet as if he were uneasy discussing the subject.

Luke was incapable of feigning emotion and discomfort. Maybe he wasn’t making it up after all. I really hoped he wasn’t.

‘It just happened,’ he replied. ‘And my mates don’t know about it. So . . . I mean, they’d really rip the piss if
they found out. You’d better not tell anyone. I’ll kill you if you do.’

‘Course I won’t,’ I said kindly. ‘Anyway, who would I tell? I don’t really know these mates of yours. But if you ask me, they don’t sound that great.’

‘They’re OK,’ he said defensively. ‘They’re cool. Cool people.’

I massaged his buttocks, kneading into the muscle under the layer of softness. ‘Fancy any of them?’ I teased.

Luke gave me a filthy look.

‘Sorry,’ I said sheepishly.

Then the phone started to ring. Luke sighed heavily.

A few days before, my heart would have leapt excitedly because, in the run-up to Ilya’s expected return, it had done so for every phone call. Then his fortnight in Prague had become fifteen days, sixteen, seventeen. We were now into the twenties and my heart was tired of leaping. I let the phone ring.

‘You should unplug it more,’ said Luke. ‘It’s always interrupting.’

‘Could be important,’ I mumbled. I nibbled gently on his shoulder, trying to crush a rising hope as my answerphone message played then beeped.

‘Beth. Ilya.’

There was a silence as if he were waiting for me to pick up the phone. I scrambled for the receiver and the answerphone whined with feedback, recording my echoey greeting as I fumbled to turn it off.

With another sigh, Luke got up, walked into my bedroom and quietly closed the door. He could still hear me from there, but it was a nice gesture.

‘Where are you?’ I demanded breathily.

‘Back in Brighton,’ replied Ilya in a chirpy tone. ‘Have you missed me? Hope you’ve been keeping your cunt warm and supple for my homecoming?’

‘Where in Brighton?’ I spluttered. ‘At home? Have you seen your landlord? How did –’

‘No, I’m in a bed and breakfast,’ he said.

‘You’ve been burgled,’ I went on. ‘Someone broke in. Do you know? Christ, you didn’t need to go to a B and B. You should have just come here if you couldn’t get in. Is everything OK? Did you get stuff sorted out? Business or whatever? Are your ribs better? And your face? Someone’s nicked your telly and your video. The police –’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know all that,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’

‘Well, when did you get back?’

‘Couple of days ago,’ he said breezily.

There was an ugly little silence.

‘Been seeing the sights?’ I asked in a tight, brittle voice.

Ilya gave a short harsh laugh.

I couldn’t understand it. Why was he being so offhand and remote? Was this his way of erasing the intimacy we’d shared?

‘So what are you doing tonight?’ he enquired. ‘Any plans?’

I allowed silence to spin out as I willed a carapace to form around my heart. ‘Not sure yet,’ I said crisply. ‘Might be going into town.’

‘How do you fancy being my whore again?’ he asked, barging past my aloof tone. ‘Get your slut gear on and pay me a visit? You’ll like it down here. It’s squalid and seedy. Just your thing.’

‘Is that it?’ I asked, struggling to curb my anger. ‘We just step back into playing our game? Pretend nothing’s happened?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Why not? I could do with a good dose of madness and sex. Couldn’t you?’

I drew a deep shivering breath. My bottled-up emotions pulsed like a migraine that filled the whole of my body. In any other relationship, with any other person, I would’ve torn into him. I would have lambasted him for trying to duck reality, for refusing to confront the truth of our situation.

But this wasn’t any other relationship with any other
person. It was a game I’d embarked upon with Ilya – a game that had veered wildly off the rails at some point.

Perhaps he was trying to get us back on track again.

Or perhaps we hadn’t even been close in the first place. I’d simply played nursemaid and slut when he was bruised and battered. I’d misread things. He hadn’t been warm and compassionate, or emotionally open, or heart-meltingly fragile and needy. He’d just been a bit off colour.

Whatever. If he could be hard and cool, then so could I.

‘What’s the address, then?’ I asked tersely.

I jotted down details, fixed a time, hung up, then I just sat for a while, thinking.

Luke didn’t emerge from the bedroom. Music came from behind the closed door – some faceless thump, thump stuff that meant he’d tuned my radio to a different station.

I was annoyed with myself for succumbing to Ilya. I wished I’d had the strength to say: ‘Fuck you, you can’t treat me like this. I won’t stand for it.’

But I was slave to my corrosive lust. It gnawed too deeply for pride to get a look in.

I wondered if I should go to him without playing the whore. Going to grotty B-and-B land, dressed as a slut, to take shit from a man with a heart of ice was tantamount to having my nose rubbed in my abasement. I’d sunk low enough. I ought to haul myself up. I ought to show him that I wouldn’t kowtow to his every demand.

Would wearing jeans and trainers be a big enough gesture? Hardly.

My mind ticked over, searching for a way to achieve a minor victory. My emotions became increasingly vengeful, but my ideas failed to satisfy them.

Then it clicked: delicious and wicked.

As I walked into my bedroom, I barely gave a second thought to how cruelly exploitative it was, nor what
Ilya’s reaction might be. Would he cuttlefish me? Did that word still count?

Well, if it did and he said it, then it would just go to prove how little I meant to him. And if that was the score, then it was high time we went our separate ways.

I met Luke in the Great Eastern, a narrow, book-lined pub midway between our houses. I wore my black shift dress and geisha-girl sandals; no tart’s clothes for me – apart from a pair of flimsy scarlet knickers. We downed a couple of Dutch-courage whiskies, then headed out into the September night.

I was nervous and eager and so was Luke – but for very different reasons.

Luke thought I was helping him to explore his bisexuality; he thought we were going to meet a friend who might be interested in doing some stuff with him. We’ll play it by ear, I’d told him, because I’m not sure how my friend, Ilya, will react. He said it was OK, but sometimes, when it comes to the crunch, he can get a little edgy, uptight. So maybe I’ll join in, I said. We could have a sexy threesome to make it all go smoothly. Trust me, Luke. It’ll be great.

Oh, I was a prize bitch.

But I wanted the upper hand for a change, and Luke, poor Luke, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The two of us walked down Grand Parade, which is no longer grand and you wouldn’t want to parade there. The faded beauty of yesteryear’s houses overlooks a confusion of traffic lanes leading down to the sea: buses go this way, cars go that, cyclists go the other, and pedestrians negotiate.

Under the darkening sky, the place was full of lights: headlights, brake lights, traffic lights and street lights. Buses with hardly any passengers purred and puffed
down to the shelters at Old Steine, their brightly lit interiors stark and clinical.

I hoped Ilya wouldn’t fly off the handle. I hoped he would agree.

I imagined the three of us entangled on some strange guesthouse bed: my soft curves between those beautiful hard bodies – one nut brown, one gold brown. I pictured the two of them touching – perhaps tentatively for a while – then Luke taking Ilya’s cock in his mouth, or maybe in his arse, depending on how far I could push things.

I couldn’t imagine Ilya returning the compliment. He wouldn’t take Luke’s prick into any part of his body: it would compromise his big butch masculinity. But he might be prepared to use Luke’s orifices the way he would use a woman’s.

And if he said no, I’d say, ‘Well, how do you spell that? Does it begin with a C followed by a U?’ and so on.

That, at least, had been the original plan. But I was starting to have doubts.

In silence, Luke and I mooched along, past tall crumbling terraces with chessboard-chequered steps rising from pavement to door. They were all narrow and bow-fronted, as if someone had concertinaed the street together and the facades had buckled under pressure. Fops in breeches used to party in those houses; now they’re all flats, bedsits, offices and guesthouses – where the guests are homeless people who stay for months on end, watching satellite TV.

Street lamps cast silver shards on lumpy black binbags.

My mood got bleaker and bleaker.

I hoped Ilya’s B and B wouldn’t be too scummy.

‘You swear this is nothing weird?’ piped up Luke as we skirted past some scaffolding. ‘I mean, this guy, you know him pretty well? And it’s not a setup? It’s not, like, one of your jokes, is it?’

‘No,’ I said guiltily. ‘It’s not a joke.’

We paused at the corner of Edward Street, waiting for the traffic lights to change.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I went on, still not sure if I wanted him to back out or stick with it. ‘If you’re worried, or just not into it any more, we can easily forget about it. It’s not a problem. I’ll understand. Me and you could go for a drink. We’ll be in gay central. I could be a fag hag. And I’ll chose a nice man for you.’

‘I’m not gay,’ said Luke snappishly.

‘Hey,’ I said, giving his hand a quick squeeze. ‘I know. And even if you were –’

‘But I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m into girls mainly. Blokes are just . . . different. Harder. I don’t mean . . . I mean, like, grittier. Anyway, I might not like it the third time. Might have changed my mind.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said, and I let the conversation drop.

I didn’t understand Luke. I’d always regarded bisexuality as just another playground for sexually adventurous people. I didn’t think you could swing both ways and be slightly embarrassed about it as Luke was. Still, it was interesting.

Wordlessly, we crossed the road. On the opposite side was the floodlit Royal Pavilion – Brighton’s very own Taj Mahal – its pale-gold turrets and onion domes stamped against the night sky.