Pulling back the waistband of his boxers, I slide my fingers inside, and feel a rush of elation as I make contact. It feels surprisingly warm and hard. With a small gasp, Lochan buckles forward, sucking in his breath, tensing and staring at me with a look of complete astonishment, as if he has forgotten who I am, the colour flooding his cheeks, his breathing fast and shallow. Then, with a small cry, he grabs me by the shoulders and shoves me backwards.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
I recoil, speechless, as he grapples with his flies. He is yelling at the top of his voice, literally shaking with rage. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you? What the hell were you trying to do? You know we can never ever—’
‘I’m sorry,’ I gasp. ‘I – I only – I only wanted to touch—’
‘This whole thing’s completely out of hand!’ he screams at me, the cords standing out in his neck. ‘You’re just sick, you know that? This whole thing’s just sick!’ He pushes past me, his face puce, and slams into the bathroom. Moments later I hear the shower running.
Downstairs in the front room, I pace the floor, breathing hard, anger and guilt coursing through me in equal measures. Anger at the way he just screamed at me. Guilt at not having stopped when he first told me to. Still, I don’t understand, I just don’t understand. I thought we’d decided not to bother with what other people thought. I thought we’d decided we would be together no matter what. I hadn’t been trying to trick him into anything. I’d just suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to touch him everywhere, even there – especially there. But fear now tugs at my throat, my shoulders, my chest. Fear that I’ve ruined what I thought we had.
The sound of his feet pounding on the stairs makes me back into the furthest corner of the room. But from the hall I hear only the jangle of keys, the squeak of trainers, the zip of a jacket. And then the front door bangs.
I stand there, stunned. Appalled. I was expecting a confrontation of some sort, the chance to offer an explanation at the very least. Instead he has just gone off and left me. I won’t accept this, I won’t. It’s not like I’ve done anything so terrible.
I shove my feet into my shoes and grab my school coat. Without even bothering to stop for my keys, I run out of the house. I can just make out his figure disappearing into the wet darkness at the end of our street. I break into a run.
When the sound of my footsteps reaches him, he veers off across the road, lengthening his stride still further. Even as I draw level with him, straining for breath, he raises his arm and knocks away my outstretched hand.
‘Just leave it, will you? Just go back and leave me the hell alone!’
‘Why?’ I shout back, gasping in icy air as the rain lances my hair and face with sharp, wet needles. ‘What on earth have I done that’s so awful? I crept up to surprise you. I wanted to tell you that Mum had come back and I’d cornered her into taking the kids to the cinema. When we started kissing, I just wanted to touch—’
‘D’you realize how fucking stupid that was? How dangerous? You can’t just suddenly do stuff like that!’
‘Lochie, I’m sorry. I thought we could at least touch each other. It doesn’t mean we would have gone any further—’
‘Oh, really? Well, you can forget your fucking fairy tale! Welcome to the real world!’ He turns briefly – long enough for me to make out a face mottled with fury. ‘If I hadn’t stopped it, d’you realize what would have happened? It’s not just disgusting, Maya, it’s fucking illegal!’
‘Lochie, that’s crazy! Just because we can’t have sex doesn’t mean we can’t touch each other and—’ I reach out for him but he shoves my arm away again. Abruptly he turns down the alley towards the cemetery, only to find a padlocked fence at the end. With nowhere to go, he still refuses to turn back towards me. Standing in the middle of the rain-soaked road, my hair whipping against my face, I watch him grab the wire-mesh fence, shake it dementedly, punch it with both hands, kick at it wildly.
‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ I scream at him, my fear suddenly replaced with anger. ‘Why would this have been such a big deal? How would this have been any different to what happened that time on the bed?’
He whirls round, crashing violently back into the fence. ‘Well, maybe that was a fucking mistake too! But at least – at least then one of us wasn’t half undressed! And I’d have never – I’d have never let it go any further—’
‘I wasn’t planning to this time!’ I exclaim in astonishment.
He sags back against the netting suddenly, the fury dissipating into the night like the white breath from our mouths.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ he says, his voice hoarse and broken, and abruptly my anger is joined by a cold rush of fear. ‘It’s too painful, it’s too dangerous. I’m terrified – I’m just terrified of what we might end up doing.’
His despair feels almost tangible, draining the frozen air around us of every last shred of hope. I wrap my arms around myself and begin to shiver.
‘So what are you saying?’ My voice begins to rise. ‘If we can’t have sex, you’d rather we did nothing at all?’
‘I guess so.’ He stares at me, his green eyes suddenly hard in the lamplight. ‘Let’s face it, this is all pretty sick. Maybe the rest of the world’s right. Maybe we’re just a couple of fucked-up, emotionally disturbed teenagers who just—’
He breaks off, pushing himself away from the fence as I slowly back away from him, pain and horror rushing through me like liquid ice.
‘Maya, wait – I didn’t mean that.’ His expression changes abruptly and he approaches me cautiously with his arm outstretched as if I’m a wild animal, ready to flee. ‘I – I didn’t mean that. I – I’m not thinking straight. I got carried away. I need to calm down. Let’s just go somewhere and talk. Please . . .’
I shake my head and move in a wide arc around him, suddenly breaking away and hurling myself through a gap at the edge of the mesh.
Once inside, I turn into the bitter wind, heading up the darkened, cracked path, littered with the usual beer bottles, cigarette stubs and syringes. The glow of the streetlamps reaches me from a great distance, the sound of traffic fading to a distant murmur, the outlines of abandoned, broken gravestones nothing more than amorphous shapes in the dark. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t. I trusted him. I try to make sense of what just happened, to process Lochan’s words without completely falling apart. To somehow accept that the magic of that one night when we first kissed and the afternoon in my room was, to him, simply a dreadful, perverted mistake, to be filed away at the back of our minds until we can eventually kid ourselves it never happened. I need to try to absorb Lochan’s true feelings about the situation – the feelings he has been hiding from me since this first started. And I need to work out how to survive this sudden revelation. But how can anything hurt so much? How can just those few words make me want to curl up and die?
‘Maya, come on.’ I hear his feet thudding on the path behind me and a scream begins to build in my throat. I have to be alone right now or I will lose my mind, I will.
‘You know I didn’t mean any of that stuff! I was just embarrassed that I – that I nearly . . . you know. I was just scared of my own feelings, of what we might have done!’ He looks frantic and wild. ‘Please, just come back to the house. The others will be back in a minute and they’ll be worried.’
The fact that he thinks he can appeal to my sense of duty shows how little he understands the effect of his earlier words, the violence of the emotions coursing through me.
He tries to grab my arm.
‘Get off me!’ I scream, my voice magnified in the silence of the cemetery.