Dead to Her(31)
Didn’t she? A worm of doubt wriggled through her veins. All the money she was spending on the house—that was boredom. The social climbing. How much did it actually matter to her? The way he’d been so quick to close down her business rather than help find ways to make it work. None of it made her want to have his baby. To tie herself to him forever.
He’d swept her off her feet at the start, that was for sure, but how did she really feel about him now? His secrets. The way he looked at Keisha. Just needed the bathroom. If it wasn’t Keisha on the phone, who was it? Was a lot of how she felt built on resentment?
Keisha. Her thoughts came back to Keisha, as they had ever since she’d turned up on William’s arm. Now sober, with all the angst of her hangover kicking in, she burned with embarrassment at the kiss. What if Keisha told William? No, she wouldn’t. Or would she? There was something unpredictable about Keisha. How easily she’d opened up about her past. Keisha was a sharer. A dangerous thing. What if she got drunk around Iris or Virginia and told them? The dancing. The kiss. The weed. They all thought Marcie was second rate already, this would make her a joke. Oh God, what had they been thinking?
Marcie rolled onto her side and curled up in a ball. There was no point in worrying about it now. If Keisha brought it up, Marcie’d blame it on the cocktails, laugh about it, and hopefully they’d both forget it ever happened. She closed her heavy eyelids, sleep coming to take her again. She’d kissed a woman. It wasn’t that weird.
No. The thought slipped in as she drifted for once too deep into the darkness to even hear the quiet buzz of Jason’s phone as a text came in. What was weird was how much she’d liked it.
20.
Steam billowed out from the sliding door as Keisha stepped under the shower jet. She’d turned the water up as hot as she could stand, wanting to burn herself free of him, free of everything. She’d feigned sleep while Billy got up to go and use his stupid treadmill, but the truth was that she’d barely dozed for more than half an hour or so all night. Even the call she’d crept downstairs to make hadn’t lifted her mood, and she’d kept her eyes on her feet as she went, sure that if she looked up in the night there’d be ghostly boys coming from every corner to drag her into the darkness. Maybe the Valium wasn’t going to be enough this time. It was hard to stay shining and bright and confident when in so many ways she felt trapped and afraid. After what had happened with Marcie, she should feel good. More than good. Everything was going better than she could have hoped for. But then there was Billy with his Jekyll and Hyde ways.
She let the hot water pummel her shoulders, but where the spray from the jets cut across her buttocks, she winced. He had not been sweet and gentle and pathetic Billy last night. He’d taken two Viagras, eager to enjoy her loose mood and maybe punish her for it too. Perhaps she’d shone too much when he got home. Maybe he wanted that all for himself. Whichever, when they’d gone to bed he’d wanted to experiment. Play out some fantasy, he said. She cringed inside, remembering it. The spanking she could cope with, but this time he’d taken it up a level, using his belt. At first it was just teasing, light and playful, but that didn’t last long. Seemed it had to get harder to make him harder. The less he could fuck easily, the meaner his sex got.
She scrubbed her skin, trying to focus on the good things. The future. The reassuring words on the phone. The sex had probably lasted only an hour or so before he fell asleep, but it had felt like an age. She’d wanted to cry. Especially when he went in there. She could just about cope with a fat old man when he was gentle, but not when he was grunting obscenities while hurting her. She wasn’t made for this. She couldn’t switch off and just do it, no matter how hard she tried.
The fact that she’d been so stoned had made it worse. It made her emotional. That grass had been good but weird, leaving her head heavy and fuzzy, as if it were something stronger. Trippy had been the wrong word. It had been dreamy. But she knew only too well how dreams could turn quickly to nightmares—the ghostly boy, the boy, the boy who wasn’t there—and after the dream of her evening, the hour of sex had become a nightmare.
How could she have seen Billy as such an adoring puppy when they were in London? Harmless. Impotent. Sweet. Maybe sweetness belonged to those in the middle, not the poor or the rich. She knew she wasn’t sweet. She wasn’t a good person, she knew that. Cursed. Why had she presumed he would be? Maybe wicked recognized its own.
What was he going to be like today? Snappy with her? She wasn’t entirely sure that, after it was done, Billy overly liked himself when they’d had that kind of sex, and she figured it was easier for him to blame his urges on her than on himself. To say she brought it out in him. She was going to have to be extra nice to him today and make him feel better about it. Just the thought weighed her down in her bones.
She turned toward the water and tilted her face into it. She’d feel better when her hangover and comedown were over.
“Got room for me in there?” Through the steam Billy’s naked body appeared as he pulled open the door. “I’ll soap your back if you soap mine.”
She laughed and smiled as her heart sank. She didn’t want him near her. Not when she’d just gotten clean. She had to toughen up. Everything was going well. Her mind drifted back to the double dose of Viagra Billy had taken last night and, as she closed her eyes and let the water soothe her, ignoring his hands on her, she thought how much easier everything would be if it had given him a stroke.