Taming the Beast (11 page)

‘You don’t want to fuck me?’ She was unbuttoning his jeans.

‘No, I do, but–’

‘Jamie, listen to me. I have never been so wet in my entire life. I had no idea it was even possible to be this wet. You understand me? I need you to fuck me right fucking now.’

And he could not believe how much he wanted to do that. They started for the bedroom but it was so far away. The hall carpet
was soft. She was softer. They were both fully clothed. Jeans pulled down just far enough and underwear pushed to the side. He wanted to keep touching her because she was so soft and open and wet but she was pushing his hand away and guiding him into her.
We don’t have much time
. It didn’t matter because he was already coming. There was no condom, and Jamie was pleased because it meant he could feel her properly. Feel himself pumping into her, filling her up. His precious, precious Sarah.

Shelley returned as they were sitting back down at the table. While Shelley hung the keys on the hook near the door, Sarah emptied the bourbon bottle down her throat. She lit a cigarette, and Jamie noticed her hands were shaking.

‘Booze is all gone,’ she said. ‘Guess I’ll be off.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ he said, meaning
I love you
.

‘You’re too drunk. I’ll walk.’

Shelley sighed. ‘I’ll take you. Come on.’

Sarah stood. ‘No, really. I’ll walk.’ She kissed Jamie on the forehead, cradling the back of his head in her hand for just a moment. Then she thanked Shelley for dinner and was gone.

Mike stood in the doorway, jiggling his car keys, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Jamie, mate, come to the pub?’

Jamie emphatically did not want to go to the pub with Mike. He had to wait at home until Sarah called; he couldn’t call her, because Shelley would want to know why he was calling Sarah only twelve hours after he’d last seen her.

‘Please, Mike, get him out of here.’ Shelley handed Jamie his wallet. ‘He’s got ants in his pants this morning. Driving me insane.’

‘I need to–’

‘Have a nice time.’ Shelley kissed his forehead, gave him a shove and the door was closed behind him.

They sat in the beer garden, which was empty at this time of the morning, and Mike spent ten or so minutes tearing his coaster into tiny pieces while Jamie cursed himself for not grabbing his mobile phone on the way out. He tried to remember where the nearest public phone was.

‘So, ah…’ Mike stared off into the distance behind Jamie’s left ear. ‘About Sarah. Did you and her used to go out or what?’

Jamie’s gut twisted. ‘No, we never… We’ve always been mates.’

‘Yeah, but… You’ve had a go at her?’

‘Whatever that means.’

Mike gave him a contemptuous look. ‘You’ve screwed her?’

Jamie took a gulp of beer, which seemed to solidify in his throat. With effort, he swallowed it. ‘Just the…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just the once. We were sixteen. Pissed.’

‘Yeah, and? She’s a firecracker, right?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘Ah, mate, I am hanging out for some of that.’

Jamie sat silently for another minute. He was no good at talking to men about intimate things; he was missing the instinct that seemed to tell other blokes how sincere they could be without crossing the line into effeminacy. But the thought of slick, shallow Mike grunting all over Sarah made his already upset stomach churn.

‘You’re not thinking of going after Sarah, are you?’

Mike looked surprised. ‘Going after her? Mate, I thought you and her were tight. Doesn’t she tell you anything?’

Jamie had thought she did, right up until about three seconds ago. He shrugged, waited.

‘She has been working on me for months. I can’t believe she hasn’t said anything to you.’

‘Working on you?’ Jamie battled to keep the rising panic from his voice.

‘Yeah, you know. A kiss here, a grope there. Teasing. Working me up.’

Jamie sipped his beer. He would not let Mike see how shaken up he was. Probably Mike was full of shit anyway.

‘I’m helpless to tell you the truth. She’s just…’ Mike mimed casting a fishing rod and reeling it back in, ‘…got me hooked, my friend. I’m at her mercy. Whenever she wants she’ll reel me in and then I’ll do whatever the hell she tells me. And she knows it too, the sly bitch.’

Jamie felt like vomiting. It really was inconvenient the way that Sarah made him want to throw up. ‘Do you feel bad about Jess?’

‘Yeah.’ Mike rubbed his forehead. ‘Kind of. I mean, Jess is a sweetheart, but Sarah, man. Fucking Sarah Clark! You don’t turn your back on an opportunity like that for anything.’

‘Got any smokes?’ Jamie said, and Mike handed him a pack. Jamie lit one, ignoring the immediate tightness in his chest.

Mike lit himself a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘So here’s what I wanted to tell you. Last night, at your place, we got so dirty, right in front of everyone. No one had a clue!’

‘At my place?’ Jamie’s face flushed. ‘What are you on about?’

‘Me and Sarah were going for it, right there at dinner.’

Dinner. Jamie ran the tape over in his mind. Nothing had happened at dinner. Before dinner Sarah had kissed Jamie and flirted with Mike. After dinner, Shelley had driven Mike and Jess home and Sarah had…
God!
What was Mike talking about?

‘There I am, eating the delicious meal your lovely lady cooked up, and suddenly my pants are open and there’s a hand on my knob.’ Mike shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘There’s Sarah, chatting away about variable loans or some shit, and all the time she’s pulling me off under the table. I returned the favour though. When I licked my fingers after the meal, it wasn’t just the chicken I was lickin’ if you get what I mean.’

‘Sorry, I have to–’ Jamie bolted for the toilets and made it inside just in time to vomit up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and drunk in his entire life. After a couple of minutes, he stopped and rocked back on his heels to catch his breath. Then he remembered her saying
I’ve never been so wet in my life
, and his stomach heaved again.

When Jamie was sixteen, he wanted nothing more than to wake up one morning and discover that he had magically become his brother. Brett was everything Jamie wasn’t. Strong and muscular, while Jamie was weak and prone to broken bones. Tanned and rugged, while Jamie was pale and freckled with mousy hair that stuck straight up no matter how much gunk he used in it. Brett was a star athlete, while Jamie had been excused from PE all his life because of his asthma. And Brett had girls falling over themselves
to get to him. He knew how to talk to them without stuttering and staring at his feet, and what clever things to say to make them laugh and look up at him with starry eyes. The only way girls looked at Jamie was with pity. Sometimes they called him cute and such a nice guy, words that were the kiss of death for an Aussie bloke who was meant to be rough, tough, rugged.

It was Brett who told Jamie about the secret life of Sarah Clark. He said it was time Jamie knew that his little friend was the best fuck in Sydney. He said it was pathetic the way Jamie mooned around like a lovesick puppy dog while Sarah was giving it to every bloke who looked at her twice. Brett confessed, with a wide grin, that he had personally got his end wet three times in one night with her. Sarah Clark was, he said, a wild thing. A totally uninhibited, sexy as hell, wild-thing. Didn’t go on with that talking, commitment, take me out to dinner crap that other girls ask for. She just wanted dick.

Jamie refused to believe it at first. He knew Sarah better than anyone – she’d said so herself. So many nights she had sat on his bed and talked until her voice was croaky and his neck was stiff from looking up at her from his position on the floor. She told him about Nietzsche and William Blake. She told him about her affair with Mr Carr, about how her parents ignored her, about the way she never slept more than two hours without waking. All night she’d talk, wild eyed and wired and brilliant, making him feel like nothing he’d ever thought about before was important. It was never until the sunlight came streaming through the window that she would stop. Then she’d look around as though just noticing where she was, laugh in an embarrassed way and slink off into the breaking day to be home before her parents woke up.

Surely she would’ve told him if she’d slept with his brother. And surely he was close enough to know if she really was sleeping
around. Surely. But Brett had no reason to lie. Brett was, in fact, the only person who ever talked to Jamie on the level. He treated him like a man, unlike their parents who treated Jamie as though he was five-years-old and made of glass.

Jamie asked around and found that he had spent the last couple of years with his head up his arse. Every bloke he broached the subject with knew about Sarah, and many of them knew about her from personal experience. Jamie got to thinking that it really wasn’t fair that he was missing out. Why were his balls permanently blue while she was off doing every bloke and his dog?

His opportunity to correct the injustice came the following week when his parents went to Melbourne for the weekend. Brett, always the party animal, invited half the university over to get smashed. Jamie invited Sarah, and she laughed and told him he was the tenth person who’d asked her.

She arrived late, alone and drunk. She was wearing perfume and lipstick and a skin tone skirt that kept riding up her thighs. Jamie steered her away from the salivating hordes and told her she looked beautiful. She said
oh my
, wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed her whole body up against his and began to sway to the music. Jamie stroked her hair and pressed the small of her back, then after a minute he dared to brush his sweaty palm over her backside. She said
oh my
again, and he said
Sarah, I really
… and then she kissed him hard on the lips and said
Wanna go upstairs?

Jamie’s only sexual experience to that point had been with a girl he’d met the previous summer when his family rented a holiday house at Pearl Beach. She was seventeen with spiky blonde hair, calves the size of his thighs and a tendency to snort when she laughed, which was often. Jamie didn’t like anything about her at all, but she wanted to practice having sex for when someone she liked came along, and Jamie thought that was a damn good idea. At
the end of three weeks she shook his hand, told him he wasn’t too awful and wished him luck.

What Jamie and Sarah did in his bedroom bore no resemblance to what he did with the girl at the holiday house. What he did with Sarah was so far removed from that dry, determined rutting that he was amazed it could be considered the same act at all. What he felt could only be described as bliss, and incredibly, Sarah seemed to feel the same way. She pressed her face into his chest and said
who would have thought?
And sixteen-year-old Jamie had thought that was that, but sixteen-year-old Jamie had been an idiot.

And, as it turned out, so was twenty-two-year-old Jamie.

While he was washing his face, it occurred to him that he should actually speak to Sarah rather than unquestioningly accept everything Mike had said. A phone call wouldn’t cut it; he needed to see her face.

Her door was unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped inside, turning cold at the thought that
anyone
could push this door open and step inside. ‘Sarah?’

‘Bedroom.’

She was sitting on the windowsill, smoking, a paperback opened across her knees. She looked small and forlorn, so much like the abused and abandoned child he knew her to be. He wanted so much to touch her, to be touched by her, to feel again the tiny weight of her hand on his cock. He wanted to be close enough to smell the smoke in her hair, to taste the sweat trickling down the back of her neck. But how could he touch her when she had not even turned to look at him, had not acknowledged his presence in the room at all? He leant against the wall, as close to her as he dared. Still she did not move except to lift her cigarette to her lips, inhale, lower her hand, exhale.

‘You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked.’

‘No, I probably shouldn’t.’ She blew smoke out the window.

‘It’s dangerous.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Anyone could walk in. You’d be trapped.’

She shrugged.

‘Jesus, Sarah! Do you want to have your throat cut?’

‘Stop being such a fucking nana. Why are you here?’

He had never wanted to hit a person so much in his life. He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. ‘What happened last night, Sarah?’

‘You don’t remember? You must have been drunker than I thought.’ She threw the cigarette butt out the window, and they both watched it sail down and land in the alley, still trailing smoke.

‘You’ll start a fire doing that. You should put it out first.’

‘Yeah, guess I should.’

‘You don’t think much about the consequences of your actions do you?’

‘I don’t think about the consequences of where I throw my ciggie butts, no.’

‘Must be nice to not care about anything or anyone else.’

Sarah was quiet for a very long time. No matter how long it took, how sweaty and shaky and sick it made him, Jamie would not leave this room until she faced him. He watched her hands as she lit another cigarette. Her stubby little girl’s fingers topped with a serious young woman’s neat, rounded nails.

He couldn’t help touching her, just resting his palm on the top of her arm. ‘Sarah? Please?’

She looked up at him and her face was unutterably sad. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching a fingertip to his chin. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

Jamie steeled himself. ‘Was it no good?’

‘Oh,
God
.’

‘Was it that bad? Was
I
that bad?’

She stood up, still holding his chin. For a second he thought she was going to kiss him. His stomach lurched. But no.

‘It was
wonderful
. But it shouldn’t have happened. You’re having a baby, for God’s sake.’

‘I know, it’s just–’

‘Shit, Jamie.’ Sarah stroked his face. ‘I’m such a selfish cow. I felt as though… it’s hard seeing what’s happening to your life. I needed to be with you, to be close to you. I didn’t think about what would happen afterwards, I just… Can you forgive me?’