Trust Exercise(38)
“Everybody’s outside,” Liam said. “All our lot, and David.” After a moment he added, “He used to be your boyfriend—or was he just having us on?”
Her mouth was too dry to speak comfortably. “He wasn’t ever my boyfriend.”
“But he fancied you?”
“I don’t know.”
“’Course he did.”
Stupidly she blurted, before thinking, “Why.” Now he would think she wanted compliments from him, when what she’d literally meant was why did David love me—which was the cowardly way to ask David, Why do you no longer love me? Of course Liam, in speaking to her, assumed she was speaking to him.
“Because you’re lovely, that’s why.” He delivered the line beautifully, and a thrill rippled over her surface, in the depths of which David continued to lurk, the unanswered question.
“Stop,” she said, wincing.
“You are. So. Lovely. D’you know who you remind me of?” he exclaimed, as if finally solving a conundrum. “Sade. D’you know who that is?”
“I don’t look like her.”
“You do,” Liam said, feasting his eyes on her face until he seemed to embarrass himself. He broke off, and reaching outside the open window, brought in a saucer of cigarette butts. After patting himself all over, he produced a packet of Drum and papers, and sat down on the bed. “Fancy a ciggie?”
“Don’t you want to go down in the yard?”
“With the rest of them? No. No.” He dropped the packet of Drum and pulled her by the wrist to sit beside him. “No,” he whispered hotly. “I want to stay here with you.” When he jammed his tongue into her ear she gasped with repulsion as much as surprise, and twisted her head to take his tongue in her mouth, a less embarrassing arrangement that was even less pleasurable. She tasted the bitterness of her own earwax and bore down harder against him, in the hopes of erasing the flavor. It was a baffling struggle to accommodate his wildly poking, flicking tongue; no matter what they did, her tongue and his seemed to be at violent cross-purposes, each trying to poke the other out of the way. With an agonized groan Liam twisted their intertwined torsos until he’d crushed her to the mattress’s uneven surface, and then her air went out of her all at once as Liam, wildly struggling to take off his jacket, let his full weight drop onto her chest. He finally wrenched the jacket off with the vehemence of a madman escaping his straitjacket, and at the same time she gasped in such a desperate effort to refill her lungs she made a noise like a squeak or a shriek—hearing her, Liam raised himself above her on the balls of his hands and grinned frankly into her face, for he’d taken her gasp as a sign of excitement.
And she was, in a strange way, excited. All the physical signs of Liam’s ardor abashed and shocked her. He flailed; his dead white hairy limbs appeared impaled on the stem of his unaccountably wrinkly erection which he took in his fist and seemed to squirt redly at her, for he’d yanked back the covering skin. Sarah had never seen or even imagined an uncircumcised penis; she must have gaped at it, delighting him further. But along with these dismaying physical extrusions came verbal ones which made her shudder with astonishment. He talked constantly, mostly incomprehensibly, but what of his babble she grasped was unstintingly filthy. His voice rose and fell as he jabbered at her, like the voice of a gleefully mischievous boy who’s found a pornographic novel and is reading it aloud. And the words he used! So much filthier for being nursery words a mincing mother might use as she wiped a fat baby. He called it his willy—“Oh my willy’s going in!—it’s going in!—so squashy wet my willy’s in your squashy wet tight squashy hot—” Nothing could have been less suave—he didn’t touch her so much as he yanked, poked, jabbed, squeezed as if her body were some sort of toy—and yet she heard herself, a rising note of protest or a siren of warning, “Noooo, noooo, noooo.” And the horrible pleasure, pushing outward from her like a flower of flesh with great muscular petals like tongues, in its enormous agonizing opening so overpowered her she could not even feel his “willy” or any other part of him anywhere in or near her, as if he’d shrunk to a speck and been swept out to sea on the flood of her unwanted pleasure.
Returning from this she found herself suffocated beneath a weight of damp flesh. Her bra, T-shirt, and jean jacket were shoved to her armpits, exposing her breasts; her jeans and panties were shoved to her ankles; her knees were splayed open; she was still wearing her black pointy boots. Her bottom, coldly soaking wet, felt glued to a puddle of slime. Over Liam’s shoulder she saw the door of the room which was not even closed, and shoved him away with such force he fell off the end of the bed into foothills of trash.
“Didn’t you like it?” he exclaimed.
“The door’s open!”
Ah, she wasn’t displeased, only charmingly shy! Agreeably he sprang across the room to close the door despite it hardly mattering now—and so was the window still open, through which, only minutes before, she had heard David’s voice. What had the night heard of her, she wondered as she frantically tugged her clothes back into place, dodging his spidery efforts to re-entwine her, his slobbering kisses and praise. “God you’re so lovely,” he marveled again and again, like an actual idiot. She wished he would put on his clothes, cover his pale washboard chest and its brightly pink nipples. But he seemed perfectly at ease, sitting cross-legged on the heap of fouled sheets, his spent penis flopped between his legs like a stricken worm.