Sneaking up behind him, I slide my arms around his waist and feel him tense.
‘She’s taken them out,’ I whisper in his ear.
He turns in my arms and suddenly we are kissing hard, frantically – no one to stop us, no limit on our time. But instead of making us languorous, it adds a new element of excitement and urgency to the situation. Lochan’s hands shake as he cups my face in them. Between kisses, he pants gently against my cheek and the pain of longing pulses through my whole body. He kisses every part of my face, my ears, my neck. I run my hands up and down the warmth of his bare chest, his arms, his shoulders. I want to feel every part of his body. I want to inhale him. I want him so much, it hurts. He is kissing me so fiercely now he hardly gives me time to draw breath. His hands are in my hair, against my neck, beneath my collar. His bare skin tingles beneath my touch. But there are still too many clothes, too many obstacles between our two bodies. I slip my hand under the top of his jeans. ‘Wait . . .’ I whisper.
His breath shudders against my ear and he tries to kiss my neck but I push him gently away. ‘Wait,’ I tell him. ‘Stop for a second. I have to concentrate.’
As I lower my head, I feel his body tauten in frustration and surprise. I force myself to focus on what I’m doing, careful not to rush. I don’t want to get this wrong, make a mistake, make a fool of myself, hurt him . . .
Undoing the button is easy. Sliding down the zip is less so – on the first try it sticks and I have to draw it back up before sliding it down all the way. But suddenly Lochan is grabbing me by the wrists, wrenching back my hands.
‘What are you doing?’ He sounds incredulous, almost angry.
‘Shh . . .’ I return to his open trousers.
‘Maya, no!’ He is panting hard, a frantic edge to his voice. His hands are between mine now, trying to zip himself up again, but his fingers are fumbling, shaking in shock.
Pulling back the waistband of his boxers, I slide my fingers inside, and feel a rush of elation as I make contact. It feels surprisingly warm and hard. With a small gasp, Lochan buckles forward, sucking in his breath, tensing and staring at me with a look of complete astonishment, as if he has forgotten who I am, the colour flooding his cheeks, his breathing fast and shallow. Then, with a small cry, he grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me backwards.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I recoil, speechless, as he grapples with his flies. He is yelling at the top of his voice, literally shaking with rage. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? What the hell were you trying to do? You know we can never ever—’
‘I’m sorry,’ I gasp. ‘I – I only – I only wanted to touch—’
‘This whole thing’s completely out of hand!’ he screams at me, the cords standing out in his neck. ‘You’re just sick, you know that? This whole thing’s just sick!’ He pushes past me, his face puce, and slams into the bathroom. Moments later I hear the shower running.
Downstairs in the front room, I pace the floor, breathing hard, anger and guilt coursing through me in equal measures. Anger at the way he just screamed at me. Guilt at not having stopped when he first told me to. Still, I don’t understand, I just don’t understand. I thought we’d decided not to bother with what other people thought. I thought we’d decided we would be together no matter what. I hadn’t been trying to trick him into anything. I’d just suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to touch him everywhere, even there – especially there. But fear now tugs at my throat, my shoulders, my chest. Fear that I’ve ruined what I thought we had.
The sound of his feet pounding on the stairs makes me back into the furthest corner of the room. But from the hall I hear only the jangle of keys, the squeak of trainers, the zip of a jacket. And then the front door bangs.
I stand there, stunned. Appalled. I was expecting a confrontation of some sort, the chance to offer an explanation at the very least. Instead he has just gone off and left me. I won’t accept this, I won’t. It’s not like I’ve done anything so terrible.
I shove my feet into my shoes and grab my school coat. Without even bothering to stop for my keys, I run out of the house. I can just make out his figure disappearing into the wet darkness at the end of our street. I break into a run.
When the sound of my footsteps reaches him, he veers off across the road, lengthening his stride still further. Even as I draw level with him, straining for breath, he raises his arm and knocks away my outstretched hand.
‘Just leave it, will you? Just go back and leave me the hell alone!’
‘Why?’ I shout back, gasping in icy air as the rain lances my hair and face with sharp, wet needles. ‘What on earth have I done that’s so awful? I crept up to surprise you. I wanted to tell you that Mum had come back and I’d cornered her into taking the kids to the cinema. When we started kissing, I just wanted to touch—’
‘D’you realize how fucking stupid that was? How dangerous? You can’t just suddenly do stuff like that!’
‘Lochie, I’m sorry. I thought we could at least touch each other. It doesn’t mean we would have gone any further—’
‘Oh, really? Well, you can forget your fucking fairy tale! Welcome to the real world!’ He turns briefly – long enough for me to make out a face mottled with fury. ‘If I hadn’t stopped it, d’you realize what would have happened? It’s not just disgusting, Maya, it’s fucking illegal!’
‘Lochie, that’s crazy! Just because we can’t have sex doesn’t mean we can’t touch each other and—’ I reach out for him but he shoves my arm away again. Abruptly he turns down the alley towards the cemetery, only to find a padlocked fence at the end. With nowhere to go, he still refuses to turn back towards me. Standing in the middle of the rain-soaked road, my hair whipping against my face, I watch him grab the wire-mesh fence, shake it dementedly, punch it with both hands, kick at it wildly.
‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ I scream at him, my fear suddenly replaced with anger. ‘Why would this have been such a big deal? How would this have been any different to what happened that time on the bed?’
He whirls round, crashing violently back into the fence. ‘Well, maybe that was a fucking mistake too! But at least – at least then one of us wasn’t half undressed! And I’d have never – I’d have never let it go any further—’
‘I wasn’t planning to this time!’ I exclaim in astonishment.
He sags back against the netting suddenly, the fury dissipating into the night like the white breath from our mouths.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ he says, his voice hoarse and broken, and abruptly my anger is joined by a cold rush of fear. ‘It’s too painful, it’s too dangerous. I’m terrified – I’m just terrified of what we might end up doing.’
His despair feels almost tangible, draining the frozen air around us of every last shred of hope. I wrap my arms around myself and begin to shiver.
‘So what are you saying?’ My voice begins to rise. ‘If we can’t have sex, you’d rather we did nothing at all?’
‘I guess so.’ He stares at me, his green eyes suddenly hard in the lamplight. ‘Let’s face it, this is all pretty sick. Maybe the rest of the world’s right. Maybe we’re just a couple of fucked-up, emotionally disturbed teenagers who just—’
He breaks off, pushing himself away from the fence as I slowly back away from him, pain and horror rushing through me like liquid ice.
‘Maya, wait – I didn’t mean that.’ His expression changes abruptly and he approaches me cautiously with his arm outstretched as if I’m a wild animal, ready to flee. ‘I – I didn’t mean that. I – I’m not thinking straight. I got carried away. I need to calm down. Let’s just go somewhere and talk. Please . . .’
I shake my head and move in a wide arc around him, suddenly breaking away and hurling myself through a gap at the edge of the mesh.
Once inside, I turn into the bitter wind, heading up the darkened, cracked path, littered with the usual beer bottles, cigarette stubs and syringes. The glow of the streetlamps reac
hes me from a great distance, the sound of traffic fading to a distant murmur, the outlines of abandoned, broken gravestones nothing more than amorphous shapes in the dark. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t. I trusted him. I try to make sense of what just happened, to process Lochan’s words without completely falling apart. To somehow accept that the magic of that one night when we first kissed and the afternoon in my room was, to him, simply a dreadful, perverted mistake, to be filed away at the back of our minds until we can eventually kid ourselves it never happened. I need to try to absorb Lochan’s true feelings about the situation – the feelings he has been hiding from me since this first started. And I need to work out how to survive this sudden revelation. But how can anything hurt so much? How can just those few words make me want to curl up and die?
‘Maya, come on.’ I hear his feet thudding on the path behind me and a scream begins to build in my throat. I have to be alone right now or I will lose my mind, I will.
‘You know I didn’t mean any of that stuff! I was just embarrassed that I – that I nearly . . . you know. I was just scared of my own feelings, of what we might have done!’ He looks frantic and wild. ‘Please, just come back to the house. The others will be back in a minute and they’ll be worried.’
The fact that he thinks he can appeal to my sense of duty shows how little he understands the effect of his earlier words, the violence of the emotions coursing through me.
He tries to grab my arm.
‘Get off me!’ I scream, my voice magnified in the silence of the cemetery.
He recoils as if he’s been shot, shielding his face from the hysteria in my voice. ‘Maya, just try to calm down,’ he begs me, his voice shaking. ‘If anyone hears us, they’ll—’
‘They’ll what?’ I interrupt aggressively, whipping round to face him.
‘They’ll think—’
‘Think what?’
‘They might think I’m attacking—’
‘Oh, it’s all about you!’ I scream at him, sobs threatening to explode in my throat. ‘This whole thing – it’s always been about you! What will people think? How will I look? How might I be judged? Whatever feelings once existed between us clearly mean nothing to you compared to your pathetic fear of other people’s narrow-minded, bigoted, parochial prejudices that you once despised but now adopt as your own!’
‘No!’ he yells desperately, launching himself after me as I start striding off again. ‘It’s not like that – it’s got nothing to do with that! Maya, please listen to me. You don’t understand! I just said those things because I feel like I’m going crazy: seeing you every day but never being able to – to hold you, to touch you when anyone else is around. I just want to take your hand, kiss you, hug you, without having to hide it all the time. All those little things every other couple just takes for granted! I want to be free to do them without being terrified that someone will catch us and force us apart, call the police, take the kids away, destroy everything. I can’t bear it, don’t you understand? I want you to be my girlfriend, I want us to be free—’
‘Fine!’ I scream, tears springing from my eyes. ‘If it’s all so sick and twisted, if it’s causing you so much grief, then you’re right, we should just end it, right here, right now! That way at least you won’t have to walk around with some awful guilty conscience, thinking how disgusting we are for having these feelings for each other!’ Frantic now to get away, I break into a stumbling run.
‘For chrissakes!’ he yells after me. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? That’s the last thing I want!’
He tries to grab me again, tries to force me to slow down, but I can’t – I’m going to fall apart, break down in tears, and I refuse to have him or anyone else as my witness.
Spinning round, I slam my hands against his chest and push him as hard as I can. ‘Just get away from me!’ I scream. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone for five minutes? Please go home! You’re right, we should never have started this! So get away from me! Just give me some space and time to think!’
His eyes are frantic, his expression stricken. ‘But I was wrong! Why won’t you listen to me? What I said was bullshit – I just lashed out in frustration, this is not what I want!’
‘Well, it’s what I want!’ I shriek. ‘God forbid you should stay with me out of pity! Everything you said is true: we’re sick, we’re twisted, we’re deranged, and we have to end this now! So what the hell are you still doing here? Go home to your normal, socially acceptable life and we’ll pretend nothing ever happened!’
I’ve completely lost it. Hammers pound against my skull and red lights zigzag in the darkness. But I’m afraid that if I don’t keep screaming at him in blind fury, I’m going to collapse in tears. And I don’t want him to see that: the last thing I want is for him to feel sorry for me, to feel he has to pretend to be in love with me, to realize I can’t live without him.
With a desperate cry, he moves towards me, reaching out for me again. I take a step back. ‘I mean it, Lochan! Go home! Don’t touch me or I’ll shout for help!’
He withdraws his outstretched arm and steps back in defeat. Tears fill his eyes. ‘Maya, what the hell d’you want me to do?’
I take an uneven breath. ‘Just go,’ I say softly.
‘But don’t you understand?’ he says in quiet despair. ‘I want to be with you, no matter what. I love you—’
‘But not enough.’
We stare at each other. His hair is ruffled by the wind, his green eyes luminous in the darkness, the zip of his black jacket broken, revealing his grey T-shirt beneath. He shakes his head, his eyes scanning the dark cemetery around us as if searching for help. He looks back at me and a harsh sob escapes him. ‘Maya, that’s not true!’
‘You just called our love sick and disgusting, Lochan,’ I remind him quietly.
He claws at the sides of his face. ‘But I didn’t mean it!’ His chin starts to tremble.
A sharp pain rises through me, filling my lungs, my throat, my head – so sharp I think I might collapse. ‘Then why would you say it? You meant it, and now so do I. You’re right, Lochan. You’ve made me see this whole sordid mess for what it is. Just a terrible mistake. We were both just bored, disturbed, lonely, frustrated – whatever. We were never in love—’
‘But we were!’ His voice cracks. He screws up his eyes and presses his fist against his mouth to muffle a sob. ‘We are!’
I look at him, numb. ‘Then how come it’s gone?’
He stares at me, aghast, tears wet on his cheeks. ‘W-what are you talking about?’
I take a steadying breath, bracing myself against an onslaught of tears. ‘I mean, Lochan, how come I don’t love you any more?’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lochan
Something inside me has broken. There are moments during the day when I just grind to a halt and simply cannot find the energy to draw another breath. I stand there, immobile, in front of the cooker, or in class, or listening to Willa read, and all the air exits my lungs and I cannot muster the strength to fill them again. If I keep breathing, then I have to keep living, and if I keep living, then I have to keep hurting, and I can’t – not like this. I try to divide the day up into sections, take it one hour at a time: get through first period, then second, then break, then third, then lunch . . . At home the hours are broken down into housework, homework supervision, dinner, bedtime, revision, bed. It’s the only time I’ve ever been grateful for the relentless routine. It keeps me going from one section to the next, and when I start to think too far ahead and feel myself crumble, I manage to reel myself in by telling myself, Just one more section, and then just one more after that. Get through today – you can fall apart tomorrow. Get through tomorrow, you can fall apart the day after . . .
When Maya told me she no longer loved me, I had no choice but to retreat, to retract. At first I told myself it was said in anger, a reaction to my own stupid words – my inane declaration that it had all been a sick mistake – but now I know differen
tly. I play and replay that phrase in my head, wondering where on earth it came from when I never believed it for a single moment. It must have been the anger of the moment, my embarrassment and shame – shame at wanting more than I could ever have – that made me blurt out the most hurtful, hateful thing that came to mind. Instead of coping with my own misery and frustration, I’d turned on Maya, as if by blaming her I could absolve myself . . .
But now, through my own stupidity and selfish cruelty, I have lost everything, degraded everything, even our friendship. Despite the sadness in her eyes, Maya has been very good at going back to normal, pretending everything is fine, being friendly while keeping her distance. No awkwardness that might alarm the others – in fact she is almost cheerful. So cheerful that at times I even wonder whether she is not secretly relieved it’s all over, whether she actually does believe it was all a sick mistake, an aberration, born out of physical need. She has stopped loving me, Maya has stopped loving me . . . And this one thought is slowly eating away at my mind.
Concentrating at school has long become a thing of the past; now, to my horror, teachers notice me, and for all the wrong reasons. I barely manage half a page of trigonometry before realizing I have been sitting immobile, staring into space, for the best part of an hour. They ask me if I’m all right, if I need to see the nurse, what it is I don’t understand. I shake my head and avoid meeting their eyes, but without the counterbalance of top grades my reticence is no longer acceptable, and so they summon me to the front, demanding answers to questions on the board, afraid that I am falling behind, that I am going to let them down by failing to gain an A in their subject this summer. Summoned to the whiteboard in front of the whole class, I fumble my way through easy questions, make stupid mistakes, and watch the bewildered horror spread across the teachers’ faces as I return to my desk amidst jeers and laughter, all too conscious of the sniggers of satisfaction that Weirdo Whitely has finally lost the plot.