Queenie(33)

“Turn around, face me,” he commanded. His tone had changed. I turned slowly and sat, cross-legged.

“I hope that glitter doesn’t go all over me,” he said, and I went to respond that it would only improve his look, but he grabbed me gently by the jaw and shoved his tongue in my mouth. He climbed onto the bed and pushed me onto my back. He spread my legs and pulled my knickers to the side, penetrating me with jabbing fingers and sharp nails.

I made no sound as he leaned down and bit my neck, then my shoulder, leaving what I knew would be deep, red impressions on my skin. I was in pain, but still I didn’t cry out, didn’t ask him to stop. I didn’t want him to. This is what you get when you push love away. This is what you’re left with, I thought.

“Get onto your knees,” Welshman said. “And take your hair down.” I did as I was told. He knelt behind me and smacked me hard on my thighs. I gritted my teeth in shock. He did it again. I had to bite into the pillow. I let out a cry of pain, turning to face him. “Stop your noise, girl,” he growled, digging his nails into each of my buttocks and parting the cheeks roughly, burying his face between them. I could add rimming to another of my sexual firsts, along with sex in cars, circumcised boys, and questionable e-mails with colleagues. Temporarily, the pain was numbed by the shock. I squirmed with discomfort, but instead of taking a second to step out of his own pleasure and see that I didn’t like what was going on, he reared up and pushed himself into me from behind.

“Do you like that, Queenie?” Welshman asked, inserting a finger into a place that he was dead set on fully exploring before he was finished with me. Another first. I didn’t say anything.

“I said, do you like that?” He pulled my hair so that my head was whipped back next to his mouth. I should either wrap it up or take my twists out because my hair was getting used as a control for my head, which wasn’t what I had in mind when I bought bundles from the hair shop.

“Yeah, yeah, I like it, I like it, fine,” I lied, convincing him, and myself. Maybe I did like it? Maybe this was what I’d been missing with Tom.

“Yes!” Welshman shouted as he came and immediately withdrew, putting his full weight on my shoulder blades to push himself away from me. He lay next to me on his back, panting. I turned to look at him and went to put a hand on his chest.

“I don’t really like people touching me,” he said, moving away and rolling onto his side to face the wall. I apologized and went to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet and inspected the raised marks on the outsides of my thighs.

When I went back into the bedroom, he was asleep. I got under the covers, fighting for my fair share of the duvet and failing as Welshman’s weight trapped the majority of it. I fell asleep, somehow.



* * *



“Hey.” Someone was shaking me awake.

“Huh? What?” I croaked. “What’s going on?”

“You were just kicking me!” I turned my lamp on and looked over at who the voice belonged to. “That really hurt, that did,” Welshman said, blinking the light out of his eyes with his thick lashes.

“Sorry, I was asleep,” I apologized.

“Yeah, I figured. You were shouting ‘Don’t touch me!’ over and over, I thought you were possessed,” Welshman said angrily.

“I should have warned you, that happens sometimes,” I explained, sitting up. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Sorry.”

I reached over to my bedside table and turned my phone over. It was 6:12 a.m. I had a text from Darcy doing her best Mrs. Bennet impression.

Darcy

Who did you leave with? Someone said you left with Welsh Guy, Fran’s friend from Oxford? He’s very handsome, isn’t he? Good prospects too!



Does any person who didn’t go to Oxford care about anyone going there?

“It’s all right, you can make it up to me,” Welshman said, taking my phone out of my hand. I lay back and let him part my legs, even though I was so disoriented that I couldn’t yet register how much pain I was in from our earlier activities.

If I could have fallen asleep as he rutted into me, I would have, but he kept lifting one leg up and throwing it over his shoulder, then putting that leg down and the other would go over. At one point it was both; I didn’t know where’d he’d put which one next, but before I could worry about it, as if by magic he came, rolled over, and said, “Try not to attack me again, eh.”

I lay there, still, until he started breathing deeply. “Hello?” I whispered.

No reply. He was asleep.

I shuffled over to him and tucked myself into his back, my heart soaring at the close human contact that I’d been yearning for so long.

“Can you get off me?” he said, his accent more pronounced by the annoyance in his voice.





chapter


SEVEN


“SO THEN WE woke up properly and we had sex again. Four times in total, three times more than Tom could ever manage. But the third time, anal. Can you believe it? It was so hot,” I said to Darcy as she added sugar to her mug. “And he used to play rugby, so has these amazing strong shoulders.” If I pretended the night had been amazing, maybe I could rewrite the memory of Guy in my head so that I felt like slightly less of a sex aide to him.

“Do you think the anal thing is because he plays rugby?” she asked.