Vince and Joy by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online Page B

head and laughed wryly.
    Vince caught the vibration of a look being thrown across the table from Kirsty to Chris. Chris closed his mouth against his next comment and dropped his gaze. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Friends. That’s grand, that is.’
    A moment passed in silence, save for the hysterical babble of the Radio 1 Roadshow and the crackle of Kirsty’s tabloid as she peeled apart the pages.
    ‘So,’ began Chris, ‘your new “friend”. D’you think she’d like to come to the beach with us today?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ snapped Vince, beginning to lose patience. All he wanted to do was sit here and ruminate on the exquisite perfection of last night. He didn’t want to have to reconcile it with the reality of his circumstances. He didn’t want to consider the practicalities of his parents and her parents and the banality of making plans and arrangements. He just wanted to drift around in this state of rapture until he somehow floated his way back into her company again. Was that too much to ask?
    ‘I’ll ask her, if you want,’ said Chris.
    ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake – just drop it, will you?’
    ‘Oh, come on, Vince. Don’t be like that. Don’t you want to see her in a bikini?’ He threw him a raised eyebrow and Vince cracked a smile. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll sort it.’
    *
     
    Great, thought Vince a couple of hours later, as he peered into the rear view mirror of his mum’s Mini.
    A poker-straight Alan sat behind the steering wheel of his shiny Jaguar, negotiating the treacherous speed humps of the dirt track to the beach with strange, diagonal swooping motions. Next to him, barely visible above the dashboard, sat the overly radiant Barbara, mopping at her brow with a handkerchief and wearing some kind of hat. And there, in the back, pinioned against the door by the sheer volume of an oversized picnic hamper, sat Joy.
    She had one elbow on the hamper and the other on the window frame, and stared pensively at the windswept landscape as the breeze swept her hair away from her face. Every time Alan performed one of his peculiar swervy negotiations of a speed bump, she gripped the window frame and grimaced slightly.
    Chris’s plan had backfired somewhat. In the process of inviting Joy to join them at the beach, he’d inadvertently asked her parents, too.
    Stupid bastard.
    Holmes Beach was part of a nature reserve encompassing acres of fragrant, shady pine forests, endless tide-stippled beaches and undulating sand dunes. A ruddy man in a balsawood hut charged them 50p per car to take the ginger-dust road down to the beach. Every half a mile or so, Chris got out of the car, swung open a gate and gestured Alan’s car through after theirs with an exaggerated flourish and a bow.
    The sky stretched endlessly overhead, sapphire blue and studded with tiny thumbprint clouds. Salty sweatgathered in sticky pools between Vince’s thighs on the green vinyl seats of the Mini. He took a swig from a warm can of Coke and watched Chris’s thumb massaging the back of his mum’s slender, suntanned neck.
    And then an image came to mind, an image of he and Joy on the seafront last night, of Joy’s lean fingers threaded through his hair, her breasts pressed up against his chest, her leg wrapped round his thigh. He remembered the alien, thrilling feeling of his tongue as it made its way around hers and how quickly it had felt normal. But most of all he remembered how passionate Joy had been, the little pants and whimpers that escaped from between her lips, the hardness of her mouth against his, the clash of teeth that neither of them acknowledged. She’d set the pace, guided his hand on to her bare breasts under her shirt, pressed her hand against his groin through the gabardine of his trousers, pushed herself closer and closer to him.
    They’d kissed like that for nearly three hours.
    People had passed them, thrown comments at them – ‘Oy-oy,’ ‘Go on, my son.’ But they’d remained oblivious, tied up together in