Читать книгу: «Make Me»

There are lots of things that go through my head when I enter the bar. But my head tries to bypass all of them, for some reason, and just focus on the most inane of the lot: I shouldn’t have brought this potted plant. It’s a stupid, stupid gift to give two old friends when they’ve done something as monumental as create this beautiful, incredible place.

It’s dark, but I can make out all the little touches that are uniquely them – a gaudy jukebox crouched in the corner, amidst leather so thick and luxurious I can smell it, before I’ve even managed to perch my ridiculous gift on the bar. There are framed pictures of obscure movies that scream Brandon; dark mahogany that reminds me of Tyler.

It’s as though someone smushed them together and somehow made a watering hole, and not only because of the décor. There’s a workbench by the door marked STAFF, as sloppy as anything I ever saw Brandon around. And over the back of one the seats by the skating-rink-slick bar there’s a suit jacket.

It smells of Tyler – of Scotch and cigars and that stuff he used to wear that cost more than the gross domestic capital of Brazil. Though of course once I realise this, I have to also accept that I just smelled his clothes.

Five years, and I just smelled his clothes. Lord only knows what I’ll do when I see either or both of them. Blurt out something embarrassing about threesomes, most likely, and then never dare to show my face around them again.

Like I did last time.

‘Maisie!’ someone cries from the front door I definitely shouldn’t have put my back to. I can’t let either of them catch me unawares ever again, and yet somehow I’ve already done just that.

Brandon is on me before I’ve even worked up the wherewithal to turn around. And he doesn’t do anything half-hearted, either, like pat me on the arm or offer me an awkward smile. He actually loops one arm around my shoulders from behind, in a way that’s so reminiscent of The Thing We Did I almost gasp. It’s like having a bucket of cold water dumped over my head – if a dumped bucket of cold water was one of my kinks, and having it done left my vagina in a quivering state of arousal.

‘I can’t believe you came,’ Brandon says, but I understand where he’s coming from. I can’t believe it, either. I spent all day yesterday thinking about what a bad idea this was, and now I’m here I know one thing with a deathly certainty: it’s a hundred times worse than my wildest imaginings. My entire body has clenched so hard I can’t even turn around and greet him properly, and the feeling gets stronger when he finally makes his way to my front.

He looks exactly as I remember, right down to the backwards baseball cap and the hunched shoulders and, oh, that kinking-sideways grin. ‘It’s like you’re a robot from the future who’s trying to simulate a smile,’ I used to tell him.

Back when I dared to do things like that.

Now I just stand here and stare at his stupidly handsome face, head full of ridiculous thoughts like: Were his arms really that big before? And, Oh Lord, you could cut your finger on that jawline of his.

Because you could, you really could. Up this close he’s almost unbearably handsome, and apparently I’m not responding to that very well. The clenched feeling has gone, but it’s been replaced by a prickling under my arms and a heavy sensation low down in my gut, like maybe he punched me when I wasn’t looking.

I want to double over, quick, before this staring contest gets any weirder.

‘It’s totally awesome to see you,’ he says, but as he does so he puts both hands in his pockets. Those shoulders bunch together even more tightly, and even if I didn’t know him I’d understand what that means.

It isn’t totally awesome to see me, at all. I’m a relic of his odd threesome-having past, thrown up on the beach of this bar. This place that now looks more and more like a cocoon they’ve both wrapped themselves in so that they don’t have to face the kind of people they once were.

Brandon – goofy and too sweet. Tyler … oh God, Tyler.

I’m wrong, I’m wrong about Tyler. He can face himself.

When he emerges from behind the staff door he looks so eminently confident in who he is, so flawless and be-suited, that for a moment I can’t look directly at him. I have to gaze somewhere just north of his right shoulder and hope for the best.

‘Here she is,’ he says, and I find myself wondering: Was his voice like this before? And if it was, how on earth did I bear it on a daily basis? It just pours out of his mouth like melting chocolate, and before I know where I am the stuff is up to my inner thighs.

I’m not going to come out of this alive, I know.

‘God, you look good,’ he tells me, as he glides around the end of the bar, arms outstretched. And then I realise – he’s not signalling to some imaginary plane that’s flying in, he’s moving towards me like that because he actually expects me to hug him. Front to front, too, and not just the little half-cocked one-armed thing Brandon attempted.

I can’t, I think, I can’t, but by the time I’ve finished resisting in my head I’ve been engulfed. The scent from the suit jacket surrounds me, deeply familiar and almost too much to bear, but it’s the feel of his body that really pushes me over the edge. The shirt he’s wearing is strangely flimsy, and I swear I feel the burr of his chest hair against my cheek. I feel his heavy flesh pushing against various pressure points on my body: the tips of my tits, suddenly sensitive; my lips, which I didn’t actually mean to part when he pulled me in.

Now I’m practically kissing his left pec, and, oh, that muscle is so damned heavy. It’s so solid. I think I might be wet between my legs, over nothing more than some brief hugs and a generous compliment.

‘Doesn’t she look good, Bran?’ he asks, but he’s talking out of his ass. I’m wearing jeans and my hair’s all loosely pulled back in a way that suggests I’m about to wash my face, and both things look singularly incongruous in a place like this. I need a cocktail dress, I need high heels, I need Prada.

I need some goddamn steel plating.

‘Yeah,’ Brandon replies, but he seems about as convinced as I am. There’s this expression on his face that I don’t recognise – a sort of uncomfortable, half-pained look – and it gets tighter and more intense as this goes on.

By the time we’ve gotten around to talking about tonight, he’s almost beside himself – though I’ve no idea why. Is he really this bothered by how I look, five years later? I feel like telling him: people age, you know. And also, sometimes they just want to wear their comfortable trainers and an old jersey. Not everyone can be as awesome and Calvin Klein as you, jockstrap.

All of which is a little unkind, I know, but sue me. I’m caught in a mahogany cage, and I’m vulnerable.

‘So, are you staying in town?’ Tyler asks, and of course he does so at exactly the wrong time. It’s just after I’ve noticed that Brandon seems overpoweringly eager to get away, and right before he makes this sound: hurk.

So I don’t think I can be blamed for my response, exactly. ‘Oh … no. No, I just thought I’d … you know, stop in and say congratulations. I mean, I have this hair appointment, and I’ve got to call at the dry cleaner’s before it closes, so …’

There’s no hair appointment. And I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t even own any clothes that need dry cleaning.

‘I should probably just get going.’

Of course I think of the note I left for them both the moment I’ve said it. The similarities are uncanny, they really are – the same awkward excuses about having to do something that doesn’t exist, the same vague end to it. I mean, could I have crammed more non-specific hedging in there? All I need are some littles and maybes to go with those reallys and justs, and we’re right back to where we left off.

It’s like it hasn’t been five years, at all. It’s been five seconds.

‘Seriously? You’re going to skip the party?’

Such an elegant choice of words from him, truly. Skip instead of anything less loaded, like not able to make or maybe even miss. Skip suggests I’m running out on them; that I’m a flake who can’t hold my shit together – and I’m pretty sure he knows that.

The years have only made him stronger, smoother, better. I bet he could talk Mother Teresa into a gangbang with very little effort at all. Despite the fact that she’s been dead for God knows how long.

‘Well, I’m really not dressed for a –’ I start, but he anticipates that, too. He anticipates it before I’ve even finished talking, and he does it in a way that makes me simultaneously angry and ready to faint on a chaise longue.

‘Here, take my credit card. Get yourself something,’ he says, just like that. As though he’s James Bond or Aristotle Onassis or some other smooth sort of character that I can’t even think of, because seriously no one is like this. And it’s not just me that thinks so because once the offer is made Brandon gives him such a look.

I think he actually starts to tell him don’t, too, but after another shared and silent exchange that I’m not a part of, Brandon glances away, defeated. And all of Tyler’s three-hundred-watt attention is back on me again.

‘Of course, I think you look fine as you are,’ he says, and I wonder if it’s in response to that expression of Brandon’s. Like maybe he was teasing me and Brandon knew it, and now that the look has been exchanged he’s changing tack.

Or at least, I imagine something like that until his gaze slides over me, inch by inch, and that chocolate-box voice drops an octave lower.

‘That jersey is very …’ he starts, but I’m just left to imagine the rest.

Tight, I think, he wants to say tight. If that’s true it only leaves me with one option: he really is staring at my tits. Oh Lord, I think he’s actually staring at my tits, and it’s making my face red and my body go all hot and cold, to the point where I’m actually relieved when Brandon blurts out: ‘OK, well, if she can’t stay for the party she can’t stay for the party. Nothing to do about that! Oh, by the way, Ty, I really need to talk to you in the back about some … thing.’

Even if those ramblings kind of sound like he hates me.

‘Yeah, really, guys, you go ahead and talk about your … thing. I’m just going to head back,’ I say, and I swear, I come this close to escape. This close, before Tyler runs a hand around my shoulders and leans in far too close, to murmur in my ear.

‘Oh no, we wouldn’t hear of it,’ he tells me, while my spine turns to jelly and slides right out of my body. I know what’s going to happen here, before it actually does. ‘You just take my credit card and see Marie at Ebe, she’ll take care of you. And then when you come back we can all have a real talk, about old times. What do you say?’

I say a million different things, in my head – mostly about how smoothly arrogant he now seems, and how awkward this all is, and how bizarrely aroused I feel. But, of course, I don’t voice any of them. It’s impossible to voice any of them when Tyler’s practically kissing the side of my face and Brandon’s looking at me with these big, kind of shocked eyes.

So instead I just go with the safest option: ‘OK.’

* * *

I think, in all honesty, that I intend to get in my car and drive back to Hollingdale without a second thought. And yet somehow I find myself going to this annoyingly pretentious boutique Tyler mentioned, and, sure enough a woman called Marie does help me out – as though he’s done this a thousand times before for a million different women, and all of them fit into these tiny, drafty clothes far better than I do.

I have to come away with a dress that’s more akin to a jumper, in truth, because everything makes me look like some obscene whore of Babylon. And as I drive back to the bar I can’t help wondering if he knew that. He knew everything would cling to my enormous breasts and skim somewhere just shy of my vagina. He knew, and sent me there anyway like some more terrible version of Pretty Woman.

I can hardly bring myself to walk back into the bar, and not just because of the sluttish glimpse I catch of myself in the slick black exterior. The place is packed, and pushing through the crowd in a dress that’s continually threatening to show my gauche panties is not a fun time for me.

Someone fondles my ass, I think – though it could just as easily be a wayward bar stool, brushing against me in the dark. I’m so oversensitised and on the edge of God knows what that I can’t tell the difference, and by the time I get over to the table of honour I think it’s showing.

My face is flushed, my hair is in disarray and, worst of all, my nipples are stiff and poking through the material. I know they are, without looking, because every single move I make flags it up and, even if it didn’t, Tyler’s eyes immediately shift downwards to the offending articles.

I want to die. Oh God, please just let me die. I’m sorry for what I said earlier, about wanting to get through this alive. I don’t at all.

‘Maisie!’ Tyler says, and I can tell he’s had a couple. Not enough to make him drunk, of course, but he’s relaxed back against the booth he’s in, and he’s spread both his arms around the girls on either side of him.

Plus he’s just shouted my name. There’s a clue, right there.

‘Have a seat,’ he tells me, but here’s the thing: there’s not a seat to have. The whole horseshoe shape of the booth has been filled with people I don’t know at all, right down to my once-were-best-friends, Brandon and Tyler. They’re just as unfamiliar as anything else in this place, now that the former’s got a beer and the latter’s got a Scotch, and they’re both just staring at me in equally uncomfortable ways.

Tyler looks as though he’d like to hunt me down, on the Serengeti. Brandon looks as though I just sprouted a third arm, and am about to batter him with it.

‘Oh no, really – there’s not room,’ I manage, but it’s hard to, with those dark eyes trained resolutely on the side of my face. I can tell without glancing at him that he wants to check out what Tyler’s obviously checking out, but Brandon was never like that. He’d never just go for anything.

Tyler had to do it for him, always.

‘Sure there is,’ Tyler says, before adding the very worst thing he possibly could. Worse than Suck my cock, worse than Get those clothes off – because of course, I could get out of orders like those. I’d be completely justified in slapping his handsome face, the moment he said them to me.

But I can’t get out of: ‘Just sit in Brandon’s lap.’

It’s just too innocent, out there on its own, devoid of consequences. All of these staring, giggling girls would think I was an absolute maniac if I acted offended over so slight a thing. One of them is practically in Brandon’s lap, as it is, and she has to vacate when I fumble my way over to him.

And, oh, she gives me such a look as I sit down. Clearly, she was happy where she was, with one leg hooked over Brandon’s and one boob almost in his face. I want to tell her that we can trade back if she wants. I’ll sit where she is, next to a guy whose name turns out to be Patrick, and she can make Brandon incredibly uncomfortable to her heart’s content.