Glow by Ned Beauman Read Free Book Online

veins that wind their pale green up between her knuckles and then drain it into skin a few shades more melanous than his own. He has never before had in his flat, he reminds himself, a girl whose life he might just have saved. He leans forward to kiss her.
    Her tongue is warm from the tea, and then so are her fingers on the back of his neck. In this position they have to lean awkwardly into each other, as if the kiss is something heavy they’re hoisting through a broken window, so he pulls his chair closer to hers in two little hops. She pivots her left leg up to rest across his knees, and when he touches the bare ankle of her dangling foot her whole body shrugs. Normally the radio by the sink is tinny, but now the bass has crawled after them into this vault they’ve built with their lips and eyelids, and in the limitless darkness there it seems to find room to swell until Raf feels as if he could be back at the laundrette right next to a subwoofer. Their hands squirrel up under each other’s T-shirts, his fingers counting the bumps of her spine, and without thinking he starts to unhook her bra. She pulls away. ‘Hey . . .’ she says, not angrily.
    Raf clears his throat. ‘Sorry.’
    Cherish is breathing fast and there’s a flame in her eyes as if she’s just metabolised about a double shot of rocket fuel. A single hair from her head has found its way down into the corner of her mouth. She bites her lip and looks away, weighing something up – and then at last she looks back at him, smiles, and reaches down to peel off her T-shirt. For the second time his fingers find the catch of her plain black bra, and as she shrugs off the straps he kisses her from her neck down to her nipples. ‘Do you have a bed?’ she murmurs.
    ‘Yeah.’ He gets up and takes her by the hand, seeing that across her upper back she has a tattoo of three songbirds: red, orange, and yellow, with black heads. Their mugs of tea are only about a quarter drunk, and he realises they can’t have exchanged more than a few hundred words in total; but in a club that would never trouble him, it’s only the damp daylight that’s making it strange. Isaac once went home with a girl he met on a bus on a Sunday afternoon, although admittedly they were both still out from the night before.
    When they get to his bedroom Cherish stops dead, and at first he’s worried that it’s too messy or something. ‘Whoa, listen,’ she says. ‘I’m not that into . . .’
    Raf doesn’t understand. ‘What?’
    She is looking down at his eyemask and earmuffs. ‘Isn’t that, like, S&M stuff?’
    He laughs. ‘No. That’s to help me sleep. I have a disorder.’
    ‘And what’s that thing on the pillow?’
    ‘That’s for white noise.’
    ‘Oh! I thought maybe it was for electric shocks.’
     
    3.50 p.m.
     
    When Cherish climbed off Raf for the second time, he just knotted the condom and left it on the floor by the bed, which was a serious error. They’re still lying there side by side when Rose scurries into the bedroom, and before Raf can stop her she has found the condom, gulped it down with an actual audible gulp, and escaped triumphantly into the hall.
    ‘Oh my god, that is so fucking gross!’ says Cherish.
    ‘She loves used condoms. A lot of dogs do. I don’t know why.’
    ‘And you let her eat them? Like, as a treat?’
    ‘No!’ Normally he remembers to put them out of her reach.
    ‘Is she going to be OK?’
    ‘It’ll go through her in about a day.’
    ‘That is really fucking gross.’
    ‘Yeah.’ His penis feels, pleasantly, like a railway bridge that’s been struck by a vehicle. He shifts his head on the pillow so that his eyes are only an inch from her bare shoulder, almost too close to focus, and in that position he could swear there’s a phosphorescence in her skin, as if he could shut the blackout curtains and still see the shape of her. And he knows that this is probably a combination of at least three things: first of all, the light