Telling Tales by Charlotte Stein Read Free Book Online Page B

it tells me they’re doing it on the sideboard.
    The faint noise I can hear? Plates rattling.
    Even though it sounds much more like papers being shuffled. And then someone gives what sounds like a little muffled cough and I almost jump right back up five steps all at once, because apparently I’ve turned into this nervous nelly and every little thing makes me want to jerk right out of my own skin.
    It’s the house, I think. It’s not just the sex and the weird feelings and the meeting up with old friends. It’s the house, which seems so dark and coated in shadows even with the upstairs hallway light on, and the faint glow coming from the living room.
    There’s no door to it—just an archway—so really that glow should be more than enough to comfort me. But instead I find myself peering around the arc of the stairs to the passageway that reaches down, down toward the boat room and the stepping stones, as though any second a sex-ghost is going to leap out at me and drag me into the walls.
    It did that in my story. Dragged people into walls, I mean. And now I have to think about it while creeping through the house that doom built, too afraid to go forward and too afraid to go back and just desperate for a fucking drink. I’m dying of thirst here, while Kitty and Wade go at it in every available room as though fear is just a wacky concept some nerd invented one time.
    Of course I get to the very edges of the archway and then realize I’m not going to be able to get to the kitchen. If I do anything but press against this wall—if I do something mad like cross the hallway to the kitchen’s arch—whoever’s in there is going to see me. And seeing me once was quite enough, thanks all the same.
    Especially as it’s not actually Wade and Kitty. Though for some mad reason, I’m holding my breath anyway. In fact, I hold it so tightly and so quickly that for a moment I’m sure I’m going to burst. I clench all over like a giant fist, everything in me rushing to some core I didn’t know I had, because he’s not just sitting on the couch, casually coughing and reading Boring Things About Computers while sipping tea.
    Oh, of course he’s not. Why would he be? This is the night of insane shenanigans, like we actually are in some episode of Scooby-Doo , only it’s a version that’s really inappropriate for kids.
    Because he’s…well. He’s gone through my stuff, for a start. I left my bag full of writing down here, and Cameron—strange, closed-off, always polite Cameron—has actually rummaged through the thing and is reading some nonsense load of old bollocks I wrote about a thousand years ago.
    Or at least, he was probably reading it at some point. Now he’s just got it half-crumpled in one white-knuckled fist, and for too long a moment it’s this that I focus on. I can’t take my eyes off it. His hand is just so big, and with everything tensed in such a way it looks as though he could punch through brick. And for some reason that’s all I can think for a good while—about him punching and punching something until his knuckles turn red and a great hole appears.
    But then I’m forced to look at other things, as though I’ve somehow been transformed into a perverted voyeur over the course of one night. Someone’s erected a pane of glass between me and my friends, for reasons unspecified, and now I’ve got to walk around with it between us, watching them do weird things I never thought they’d do, my face pushed up against it like a kid outside a candy store.
    I don’t even know what the candy actually is, in this simile. I don’t even know what’s going on—was there ground-up tiger blood and ten tonnes of oysters in that wine we all drunk? Or am I just in the middle of the most crazy sex-dream of my life? Because God knows I never thought I’d live to see Cameron Lindhurst doing anything like this.
    Kitty and Wade was bad enough. This is just…overkill. He’s twisted sideways on the couch, long body