Telling Tales

CHARLOTTE STEIN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

Originally published in 2011 in the United Kingdom by Xcite Books.

1

Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2011

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008158309

Version: 2015-11-20

To the Terrifying Person of Great Importance, for making me believe I could be a writer.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

More from Mischief

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

In my head, I fucked him the first opportunity I got. I didn’t wait for some perfect time, some perfect place, some perfect convergence of events. I just kissed his sweet mouth right in the middle of him telling me something funny or ridiculous, like – peas are green because they ate too much spinach – and then when he couldn’t quite gather himself after something like that I took his hand and pushed it between my legs.

Or maybe in this dream scenario I could have taken my hand, and pushed it between his legs. I spent so many nights in college, thinking about how his cock would taste and feel. It doesn’t take much to shove my imagination into a slightly different sort of area – one where I unzipped his jeans and licked long and wet over the length of him, while he sat back and simply…let me.

That’s all we were missing, after all. Him letting me. I mean, it wasn’t as though I ever asked or tried to fuck him or any of that stuff, but it was always in my head. That I would make a move on him and he would knock me back, and then I’d lose that bubbling bright friendship between us forever.

Funny how I seem to have lost it anyway. I didn’t even try, and I’ve lost his friendship anyway. It’s been five years, for God’s sake. It’s been longer, according to Professor Warren’s letter, and for a moment I’m just so lost on a sea of trying to remember Wade Robinson’s face.

I’m lost, thinking about things that never happened – his mouth on mine in the back of Kitty’s old Ford Escort, fingers sliding slickly through my ever-ready cunt. How many girls did he do that with? Too many to fucking count, but never to me.

No – I got to sit up front and pretend I couldn’t hear him making out with Tammy or Candy or Veronica, while Joan Jett blasted out from the radio and Kitty shouted at me that we should really actually pick up some boys sometime.

Instead of letting ourselves escort Wade the make-out machine around.

Of course, Kitty soon got into the swing of things. She was my little cloud of blonde loveliness, and she floated through the rest of college on a tide of too-happy. And I was happy too, I was. I really was. We had a great time together – me, Wade, Kitty, and Cameron.

So why am I looking at this letter with dread?

I look at it with dread all through breakfast. And then all the way through lunch too, while simultaneously trying to think of a way to make knitting sound interesting. The magazine wants the article by the seventeenth, but something in me says I’m not quite going to make it.

I’m not even sure what knitting is, really. Something to do with wool, maybe? Possibly a little bit about making jumpers that no one wants to wear with two pointed sticks? I can’t build an article on those things – I know that much. I might as well write what I really want to, which goes something like this:

And then aliens invaded Earth and blew up all the knitting in the world.

But instead I look at the letter again, while pretending I’m not doing anything of the sort. The letter mocks me with its weirdness and its reminders of everything I don’t have anymore, and it makes me think strange things like: I wonder if Wade ever did become a screenwriter. I wonder if he’s still as funny and amazing and handsome, with his gorgeous electric-blue eyes and his mean, mean mouth and his look of something wolfish, as though he might just bite you at any second. God, why did he have to be so attractive? I would have loved him if he’d looked like something that crawled out of a drain.

And I know that much is true, because when the phone rings and it’s suddenly Wade’s voice crawling out of my past at me, saying things in that yawing Canadian accent of his like yeah, no time has passed at all, everything in me goes still. I can’t move for a second, just sitting there staring at the answering machine like it’s suddenly caught on fire.

While he says perfectly normal, ordinary things like How’ve you been, Allie-Cat?

As though no time has passed and I’ll just understand it’s him, immediately. He even has the nerve to demand I pick up pick up pick up, because of course he knows I’ll be here; I have to be here – I’ve just been sitting in one place all this time, waiting for him to grace me with his presence.

I’m almost ready to kill him with the force of my own resentment, when a touch of the old Wade sings out at me from a million miles away. A million years ago:

‘So are you up for the Mystery Machine or what?’

Because, let’s face it, that’s what this is. For reasons unspecified, our old professor has left us his rambling house – the one we used to go to every weekend and rattle around, telling stories by candlelight because Lord, how spooky it was, even back then – on the condition we spend a month within its walls. ‘Renovating,’ the letter says. ‘Restoring,’ the letter says. But Wade knows the score and so do I. The professor wants one last bump-in-the-night story. One last hurrah for the Candy Club, and all those nights we spent telling tales we now can’t remember – or at least, I can’t remember. They’re all at the bottom of my desk drawer and the bottom of the drawer under my wardrobe and the bottom of everything in my apartment ever. They’re spilling out and coming to get me through the dearly departed spirit of Professor Warren, and his house with the corridor of stepping stones and that one room with the little round boathouse window and the doors that sometimes went to nowhere.

I close my eyes and I can almost see Cameron putting the flashlight up to his face – reluctantly, because Cameron was always reluctant about goofy stuff like that – and saying in his gunmetal voice, Mwa ha ha, we’re all going to die in here. Those eyes of his like a storm at the bottom of the ocean, always, and the flashlight making his dark eyelashes seem like shadows, deep shadows.

The machine beeps and I jump as though I’ve been pricked with something, and then it’s just me in my apartment. Just me and the knitting articles and the letter that says, Come and play Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Mansion one last time, Al. Come and see if you can figure out if it was old man Withers all along.

But I don’t think I can. I know what the house is worth – I’ve looked it up, of course I have – but even £750,000 split four ways doesn’t seem like incentive enough. In fact, it feels like a pretty poor pay-off for too many memories and too much pain and this low thrum I always get when I think about his face or his mouth or the way he used to grab me all the time.

He didn’t understand what it did to me. His hands on me, I mean. He didn’t understand that when he fell asleep with his long body curled around mine, I lay awake aching and unfulfilled, wondering what it would take for him to touch me in the way I needed to be touched.

Like now, when just hearing his voice has driven my hand to the top of my thigh – almost at my slowly pulsing sex but not quite. I won’t give in just yet, not yet. Instead I shove the letter in the top drawer of my desk, and stare long and hard at the knitting article that’s blinking away on my laptop.

Then I go one further – a really desperate move, I have to say – and open the bottom drawer. The one crammed with writing, most of it smutty and some of it probably about Wade, and then I grab a wedge of it. Just to, you know, distract myself.

Only it doesn’t distract me. Of course it doesn’t. The story on top – actually handwritten, ink almost disappearing, corners curled – is the one about the girl who comes back from the grave and haunts the man who didn’t love her.

And it’s embarrassing, Lord is it embarrassing. I can hardly stand to look at it, it’s so obvious. I’ve even given the hero a mess of blond hair and those bright sparking glances of his, and there are so many psychosexual Freudian undertones that calling them undertones is like calling a mountain a sinkhole.

It actually turns me on, reading it. I imagine the girl in her dress made out of mist and fog, spreading herself over the hero’s body until her non-flesh sinks all the way into him, and all I can think about is fucking, fucking, fucking. I think not about Wade but about this supposedly faceless and nameless hero, about him over me and under me and inside me like something I always want but never get.

And then I put the heel of my palm over my aching sex and ache harder, stronger, sweeter.

My clit feels huge beneath the press of my hand, but I resist the urges it thrills through me. It says: Replay the answering machine message. But I ignore it and think about the story instead, the story I once read out to my former friends, without shame or worry or any of the things I’m feeling now. He must have known I was writing about him, but back then I didn’t care.

I just care now, as I try to pretend I’m not sliding my hand under the waistband of my panties, to get at my slippery pussy. And it is slippery, because Wade always got me that way and even if he hadn’t, six months of neglecting myself in that regard has definitely put a spike in my libido.

I’m suddenly thinking about what I can do to make it better, make it hotter. There’s a vibrator in one of those many bottomless drawers of mine, but it’s probably still in its wrapper. The batteries inside it have most likely melted. I barely even know what to do with things like that, but just thinking about it buzzing against my clit or filling up that great empty space inside me is almost too much to take.

I can hardly remember what it’s like to get fucked, and my fingers just aren’t enough. They slide around in all this wetness I’ve somehow produced, glancing over my too-sensitive bud until I’m shaking against the hard wood of this chair and on the verge of doing something stupid.

Something like calling Wade up to ask him to talk dirty to me, while I fuck myself on something I don’t know how to use.

Of course, I do know. I’ve written stories about it, so I do know. I’ve written stories about girls masturbating with cucumbers on trains, for God’s sake. I’ve written about girls fucking machines, girls fucking each other, girls fucking guys who can go for hours. It’s just that I’ve never actually done any of that stuff. It’s all fiction and none of it’s fact, not even in the tamest, stupidest, slightest little sense.

Not even a girl getting herself off against a sex toy, because everything in her head turns her on but nothing in reality does the trick.

I think about Wade. I think about the hotter stories I wrote in his honour but never actually read aloud to any of the Candy Club, about the great and terrible land of Hamin-Ra, where the Queen rules over her harem of sweat-glossed men and my imagination gallops and thunders and tells me the most wicked things.

In the story, there’s always a line of men. A huge long line of them, one after the other, and none of them can look at the Queen but all of them feel the urge to. All of them are naked and some of them squirm, pricks stiff and backs too straight, trembling with the effort of being so perfectly obedient.

But none of them want her really, she knows. They want the idea of her, they want her crown. They want to stand at her side and rule Hamin-Ra, and so she teases each one with a finger on their cocks or a raised eyebrow, and passes them by.

Until she gets to the One. He doesn’t have to pretend, or feign desire. He stands there so seemingly insensible of her presence, with something smouldering and burning beneath eyes so quiet and still. And when she runs her hand over the heavy length of his slumbering cock, he seems to despise the thrill of desire that charges through his body.

Though I’ve no idea why. I’ve no idea why this one story turns me on so much, either, or what’s so compelling about his resistance. It hurts, that Wade so indifferently rejected me. Why do I give this one man Wade’s face and have him turn away from my Queen, even in so silly a fantasy?

But I do and he does and my clit thrums beneath the busy slide of my finger, all of me eager to hear the rest, the best parts, the scenarios I’ve replayed over and over in my head. Like the ones where the Queen tests him by tying him to a bedpost, then makes him watch as some other man licks and licks at her creaming sex.

Or maybe one of them – some big burly guard with grasping hands and a stone-like face – fucks her and fucks her in ways my resisting hero knows are wrong. He knows she’ll never come on her back like that, with her legs in the air and the guard’s little prick shoving in and out of her cunt.

How he longs to please her, my best hero. How he wants to fight the ropes around his hands and get at her with his stiff, swollen cock. He’s in agony – I know he’s in agony – but worse than that, I truly understand the fantasy for the first time ever. My cheeks burn with shame and I fuck two fingers inside myself, knowing that I’m this ridiculous creature who wants someone to want me that badly, and oh there’s nothing I can do about it. I try to slow everything down, to just feather those strokes over my bursting clit, but it’s like striking a match. It’s like rubbing my face against the coarse grain of someone’s stubble, even though I can barely recall what that feels like. In my head the hero doesn’t care about my shame or what the subtext of this fantasy is. He just tears his way out of the bonds that restrained him suddenly, full of all the fury and lust I’ve never seen on a man’s face in real life.

And then he does all of the disgusting, perverted, insane things I’ve always secretly wanted. He fucks her face with his steely cock, hand too tight in her hair and body rippling with that delicious tension. Or maybe I go worse and weirder than that, and have him force her to fuck his face, cunt pushed so tight against his mouth that he can’t breathe or move or do anything but moan.

Oh yeah, yeah. I like that one. I like it when he gets her on her front and fucks her ass, oil running over her thighs and her hands twisted up behind her back. I like it when he makes her suck the guard’s cock as he takes her, or maybe, God, maybe he sucks the guard’s cock as he takes her.

It doesn’t matter. It all amounts to the same thing – me moaning aloud in an empty apartment, my head full of all the stories I never dared to tell, and then God, God, Wade’s face flashes up behind my eyes and I’m coming, I’m coming, and I’m making so much fucking noise it’s almost enough to drown out the phone.

Almost, but not quite. In fact, I’m still right on the edge of it – little shocks of pleasure still shuddering through me – when I hear another voice on the answering machine, as familiar as Wade’s but for different reasons. Wade I know because of all the things we shared together, because of everything in me that longs for him. Cameron’s voice is recognisable because it’s like liquid metal, pouring out of that accursed masturbation-interrupting box.

‘I don’t know if this is you,’ he says, while my cheeks flame red for reasons better left untouched. I mean, it’s not like he can see me, right? It’s not like he can see me with one foot up on the desk and my knickers half down and my fingers inside, still stroking over my wet and swollen folds.

And even if he could, what would it matter? It’s only Cameron – Cameron with his liquid metal voice that isn’t really liquid metal. It’s just deep because he’s massive, and it’s cultured because he comes from one of those snooty American Harvard-going families even though he didn’t go to Harvard and his family has no money now and, to be honest, I don’t know when he last lived in America.

But he’s on my answering machine anyway, talking and talking.

‘Or if you remember me,’ he says, as though I could forget. Why did Wade assume I’d know it was him, when Cameron thinks I’d forget him so easily? ‘But I just wanted to call and say I’ve missed you, Allie. And if you come to this…whatever it is…it’d be nice. It’d be good to see you again.’

I think it’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in one go. He was never big on talking, Cameron. And if he did talk it was always about something that bored most people to tears – computers or rowing or something that once happened that no one else is interested in. Man he was beautiful, but man could he clear a party.

And his stories…so strange and mechanical. Wade wrote things full of life and pizzazz, people pogo-ing across the universe in spaceships filled with magical robots from the planet Neptune. Whereas Cameron, well…he wrote about spaceships filled with robots too. But then later we’d all find out that he’d intended to write about living, breathing humans, and only ended up with weird, emotionless automatons by default.

That was Cameron. A weird, emotionless automaton by default.

‘Oh, it’s Cameron, by the way,’ he says, and it’s strangely those words that touch me. Wade’s message was all bolsh and Kitty’s was all Oh my Gods, but Cameron doesn’t even think I’ll know it’s him.

Funny, that it’s this very thing that makes me decide to go.

Chapter Two

The house is exactly as I remember it. More so, in fact. The driveway seems longer, the surrounding grounds bigger. Nothing has encroached on it – when I’m standing on the neatly shaped gravel semicircle in front of the entranceway, all I can see is a grassy veld that slopes downward into trees, and then more trees, and then nothing but farmland and quaint little villages and the mist of the morning rising up over everything like a veil.

It’s beautiful. The house itself is beautiful. There’s even more ivy all over the front and it’s the same squat, deceptively large grey building it always was, with the thickly varnished blue front door and the actual bell instead of a buzzer.

I almost don’t want to go in. What if it’s not the same inside? The letter said it needed some work, so naturally my head is full of images of walls that have fallen down and squatters living in fireplaces and God knows what else.

But when I get in – the key the solicitor gave me unneeded, because it’s open, creepily – everything looks so…familiar. The great staircase standing between the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right. The living room still stuffed with those leather wingbacks and the big red sofas and the painting over the fireplace of the stag with the terrifying stare.

They still follow you around the room, those eyes. And the colours are still a mess of vivid and impossible greens and reds, as though any second the whole thing is going to come alive and chase you into another dimension.

That was what this house was like. Another dimension. Everything else about university – the mundane classes, the mundane people, the sense of being alone even when actually in a room full of people – was a great swathe of nothingness, apart from this. Apart from the Candy Club and Professor Warren and the weekends we spent, talking until 2 a.m. under the watchful gaze of the Evil Stag.

Most of the time Warren just left us to it. It was like our house anyway, in those days – but I think of him now, even so. I think of him in one of these great old chairs, falling asleep thinking about the students he must have loved, and then just one day never waking up.

I wish we’d known. I wish I’d known. I miss him, standing in this plush room, with everything about him all around me and the best memories I’ve got swamping my mind. He gave me those memories, after all. He made me come to this place, and he made me write, and he was the one who said to me: Don’t ever give up.

Real sorry about that, Professor.

I swipe at my eyes and shake myself, suddenly bristling with a new kind of discomfort because is that another set of bags, by the bureau? Those are definitely someone else’s bags, and if the unlocked door wasn’t enough of a clue to my ridiculous brain, this sure is.

There’s another person here already. And judging by the assortment of sports bags and rucksacks, it isn’t Kitty. Kitty works as a model now, I know she does, and she was always one for the finer things anyway. She’ll be carrying Louis Vuitton, and if I’ve got my Kitty right, she’ll have bagged a room already. No dumping her stuff in the living room for her.

So that just leaves Wade or Cameron. And odds on it’s Wade. Wade was always the sloppiest one, the one who never packed properly and wound up having to borrow some socks from Cameron that resolutely would not fit him because Cameron’s feet were the size of boats.

Which means that any second I’m going to bump into him. I’m just going to turn a corner and see him, and then the bottom of my stomach is going to drop out of me and find the floor. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if it found the basement. I feel sick just thinking about him awkwardly hugging me or even worse – what if he goes for the equally awkward handshake? What if I’m not worth a hug?

What if I throw up on his shoes?

It’s then that I know why it was Cameron’s voice that persuaded me to come. It’s because Cameron is calming, his very being is calming, and I’m never scared of what he’s going to do next because he’s as steady as a rock. He doesn’t do wild, unexpected things. He’s insular and strange and silent, whereas Wade is big and funny and never without a wisecrack. I can’t predict him, and that’s a hard thing to realise when most of me was sure I knew him so well.