Pants on Fire by Maggie Alderson Read Free Book Online Page A

those three bright stars in a row? That’s Orion’s belt. That little cluster is his head and—if you follow the line down here—his left foot is called Betelgeuse. It’s a red star. Great name, isn’t it?”
    I looked and looked and, while I was looking, he kissed me. Not a yucky kiss like the one he’d given me on the dance floor when I first met him, but a really nice kiss. Lots of really nice kisses. Slow ones. Confident ones. Confident kisses and confident hands, moving and exploring and unbuttoning. I was lost. No one had kissed me like this since Rick. But the point came, lying as we were in the middle of a public park, when I thought, we could get arrested if we carry on like this. Billy had his shirt off and in the light of the moon he looked like he was carved out of soap. It was a very fine thing, I must say, but suddenly his trousers were unbuttoned too and the top of my catsuit was all over the place. When he rolled on top of me I decided I’d better do something quick. So I rolled him straight over the top.
    â€œEugh! Oh no. Yuk!” he cried out as he hit the ground on the other side and an all-too-familiar smell filled the air. “I’ve rolled in dog shit.”
    â€œYuk! You poor thing.”
    Talk about destroying the moment. We both sat up and there it was all over his back. I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up.
    â€œWhy is dog poo so vile?” he said. “Kangaroo or sheep poo won’t do you any harm if you roll in it, but dog poo is evil. I feel sick. Pass me my shirt, will you, Georgie? Would you rub it off me? I can’t stand it being on there.”
    â€œWith your shirt?”
    â€œIt’s all we’ve got. I’m not rolling in the grass, I’ll just get more on me.”
    I wiped it off with his shirt as best as I could.
    â€œIt’s really sticky. Oh yuk.” The smell was making me retch. “It really is disgusting. I think you’d better come back to my place and have a shower.” I said it without thinking. Honestly.
    We got up and walked back through the park, Billy holding his shirt out from him as if it was radioactive.
    â€œWhat a waste of a good shirt,” he said, dropping it in the first garbage bin we came to. “And I loved that one. It was my special Easter Show shirt. I always had a good time in it. But it doesn’t matter how many times I wash it, it would always be the dog shit shirt now. People who don’t pick up their dog’s droppings should be shot. Why would you have a dog in the city, anyway? God, I feel stupid walking around with no shirt on.”
    He didn’t look stupid—even though he still had my hat on. He looked magnificent. His back was muscly, he had marvelous shoulders and, I noticed, a tattoo of a tiger on his left bicep.
    â€œNice tat, Billy.”
    â€œOh yeah, had it done when I was sixteen. Rory and I got drunk and went together. It was his idea.”
    That surprised me—Rory had seemed so straitlaced. “What has he got?”
    â€œA Maori symbol he found in a book. It’s pretty cool. It means strength.”
    â€œWhat does yours mean?”
    â€œGrrr!” he said, making tigery faces and pretending to claw me.
    When we got to the door of my building I suddenly realised I hardly knew this guy, and here I was letting him come up to my apartment. This was foolish behaviour. But he was Debbie Brent’s cousin, I told myself, and I did work with her, so he wasn’t a total stranger. I turned the key. I just hoped he understood that I was only inviting him in because his back was covered in excreta. It didn’t mean I was asking him to stay the night.
    â€œI wouldn’t normally expect to come up to your place, Georgie,” he said as I opened the door to my flat. Mind-reader. “But they are slightly unusual circumstances—and I also need to apologise for kissing you on the dance floor ten seconds