Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire Read Free Book Online Page B

room.’
    Shelley giggled. ‘Or we could go back to my place. Mum and Dad won’t be home till after midnight.’
    Jamie hesitated for too long. Her smile faded. She stepped out of his embrace. ‘You don’t want to come to my place?’
    ‘No, I do. Of course I do.’ He tried to pull her closer, but she resisted. ‘I was just thinking that I don’t want to wait that long. If we went inside–’
    ‘You could screw me and then come back out and moon around waiting for Sarah to arrive.’
    ‘That is so fucking unfair.’ He couldn’t believe how unfair it was. For once – yes, he admitted, it was only for once – he had not been thinking about Sarah at all; he genuinely had been thinking that he’d like to have sex with his girlfriend in one of the unfamiliar rooms of this unfamiliar house whose owners he did not know.
    ‘This jealousy thing is getting old, Shell.’
    ‘What’s getting old, Jamie, is you acting like you’re just killing time with me until your precious Sarah comes to her senses and gives up her mega-slut life to settle down with you.’
    ‘I’m not going to listen to this shit again.’ He started to walk away, stopped and turned back. ‘Sarah is my friend. When you disrespect her, you disrespect me.’
    Shelley laughed, shrill and loud. ‘Oh, please, as if it’s offensive to call Sarah Clark a slut. It’s practically her official title.’
    Jamie walked inside. He checked the living room, kitchen, lounge room, hallway. He went back outside and shuffled around the perimeter of the yard. She definitely wasn’t here. And Shelley was right about Sarah. So right that it felt like she had crept inside his head and walked around and taken notes.
    Mike reappeared, looking dishevelled and happy. He told Jamie that he and Jess had seen Shelley crying in the hallway and that Jess was in there now, comforting her. ‘You’re in the shit, heh?’
    ‘Yeah. I guess I better go and make it up to her.’
    ‘Sometimes it’s better to let them cry themselves out.’
    Jamie nodded and took a sip of his beer. He was exceptionally bad at small talk. Before Mike had come along he had been lurking on the edges of a group of people he vaguely knew from uni, pretending to be listening to the conversation. But by holding his shoulder and talking fast, Mike had drawn Jamie away from the group, and here he stood face-to-face with this bloke he barely knew who had very recently had sex with one of Jamie’s oldest friends. A different kind of bloke would say something like
so how does old Jess shape up in the sack
. Jamie didn’t know why he could think these things and not say them, but it explained why his friends were all girls.
    ‘The legendary Sarah hasn’t shown up then?’
    Jamie shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her. She might be around somewhere.’
    ‘Sounds like the kind of girl a bloke would notice though.’
    ‘True.’
    Mike nodded and lit a cigarette. ‘Notice in a look-at-that-ugly-crack-whore-throwing-herself-at-everything-in-pants way?’
    ‘No! Did Jess tell you she looked like that?’
    Mike laughed and held up his palms. ‘Jess didn’t say anything about how she looked. I just assumed from all those stories that she…’ He bit his lip, looking off into the distance. ‘So what
does
she look like?’
    Jamie stalled by tossing his almost-full beer into a nearby cardboard box, then taking another from a slightly further away box, opening it, drinking from it. He had no idea how to describe Sarah’s looks. She was not ugly. She did not look like a crack whore or any kind of whore or any kind of addict. She did not look old enough to be in university or to live alone or to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and have sex. She did not look as though her voice would be as deep as it was.
    She looked like – she was – the daughter of suburban, upper middle-class professionals. She was what a lot of people called short and skinny, but what Jamie called average. Her skin was so pale she could be