Silas Read online

  “How long until the lasagna is done?” I mouth.

  “Half an hour,” he whispers back.

  We turn towards the door.

  “We’ll be back in a bit,” Silas informs Kalina and his mum in an admiringly neutral tone. “Salad is done. We’ll be back before the lasagne is done but if not, it needs to come out in thirty.”

  Then he pulls me out of the kitchen by my hand, and I grin at Kalina as we pass.

  She tsks back at me with mock disapproval, but the gleam in her eyes tells another story.

  Pretty sure she won’t let the lasagna burn, no matter how long we take.

  As soon as we leave the kitchen, Kalina turns the radio up to full volume and starts singing along.

  Silas

  I pull her up the stairs to our room. Our room. I swallow. This time tomorrow it will be just my room again.

  My life.

  My fights.

  The thought nearly kills my mood but then we’re at the top of the landing and Grace twirls around to face me and pulls me in for another kiss. She is slightly tipsy and sloppy with her tongue and I love it. She backs into the room, pulling me with her by fisting my t-shirt and we land sideways on the bed. I catch my fall, so I don’t crush her and search her eyes.

  She isn’t so drunk that they are glassy and sparkle at me with all the desire I’ve come to know from her. It’s the biggest high, this hunger in her eyes. For me.

  “God, you turn me on so much,” I whisper before I lean down to suckle the patch just above her clavicle.

  She loves this. She loves having her skin sucked and my mouth wandering along her neck to behind her ear, never letting up, like a sucker fish. The harder the better. I always have to be careful not to leave hickeys behind but today I don’t care. I want to mark her as mine.

  I want the guy sitting next to her on the plane tomorrow to see at first glimpse that she is fucking taken. Even if technically she is not.

  I know it’s juvenile. I know leaving hickeys is fucking base as shit and makes me a chav, but I don’t give a shit. I suck hard, and she yelps then moans in pleasure, bucking under me.

  There are sounds coming out of this woman I haven’t heard before and she is fucking loud. But, again, I don’t care. My name is in there somewhere and I’ve never heard her scream my name before.

  We’ve always been quietish, mindful of Kalina and Mum. But the music is turned up so high downstairs, there is little chance they can hear us. And even if. It’s too good to stop. Grace’s guttural sounds as she moans and groans and calls my name and ‘yes’ and ‘more’ and ‘harder’ gets me so riled up I think I’m going to come in my jeans just from the friction she causes by rutting against me. And, fuck me, is she rutting. I need something to hold on to and my hand goes to the hem of her shirt, rucks it up and finds her bare tit. I let up from suckling just below her ear to comment.

  “No bra again.”

  Her hand goes onto the back of mine and pushes it down harder around her fullness, while she arches her neck up against my lips.

  “Don’t stop.”

  Like I was going to.

  I latch back on, and she slings her legs around my hips, gyrating against me.

  I know I’m gonna come if she doesn’t stop.

  “Grace,” I hiss.

  “Shut up and suck,” she demands.

  I do as I’m told, and her hips get more and more demanding. She is shamelessly dry humping me now, and I can feel her climbing higher and higher, her breathing coming in short, desperate pants until she starts shuddering in my arms as her orgasm rolls over her.

  I take my mouth off her and watch her face as she comes, eyes shut, cheeks rosy, biting her lip.

  She opens her eyes and looks into mine, her face serious for a second before her mouth curls up at the corner.

  She flips me over onto the bed and laughs.

  “You so let me do that. No way could I actually shift your butt like that,” she says.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, milady,” I tell her, and she wriggles around on my hard-on a little. I groan.

  “So I do,” she grins, sliding her hand under my t-shirt.

  It travels over my abs, up to my chest, and then slowly down again to get to the button at the top of my jeans zip. She touches the head of my cock as she undoes it and a shudder ripples through me. Her eyes are on my fly and she licks her lips. I clench inside. It’s not a bad clench but still, I grab her wrists.

  “Grace,” I say with a warning tone.

  She looks at me, determination in her eyes.

  “Look at me, Silas. One lick. That’s all I’m asking.”

  I take my hands off her and dig my fingers into the duvet beneath us, by my hips.

  I nod, sharply.

  “One.”

  “One,” she confirms.

  I lift my hips to help her slide my jeans and briefs down and shut my eyes.

  “No,” she says and leans over to grab a pillow then pushes it under my head and shoulders, her shirt tails all the while softly brushing over my hard-on. “Watch!”

  So I do.

  I watch as she settles back down on my thighs and runs one fingertip along the length of my shaft.

  I watch as she lifts herself off me and shuffles around, so she is between my legs.

  I watch as she gently cradles my balls in her palm.

  I watch as she licks her lips.

  I watch as she runs her tongue in one, long sloppy stroke all the way from my balls up to the tip and swirls it around the head, my cock all the while twitching, trying to find her mouth. A mind of his own.

  “You taste so good,” she murmurs, looking up at me. “Stop?” she asks.

  My hands finally let go of the duvet and I sit up, slip one hand into her hair and cradle her while I run one finger of the other hand along her lips. That beautiful cat-like mouth.

  I shake my head in answer to her question and she smiles.

  And then she wraps a hand around my shaft to feed my cock into her mouth, and I can’t get enough of watching her. She is glorious as she sucks and swirls her tongue around me while her hand pumps me leisurely, fingers sliding patterns through her saliva.

  And then, suddenly, she runs her thumb gently along my banjo string while sucking at the top then slides her whole mouth down my length and I’m done for.

  My body tightens and I claw her head, grunting her name, as I spill into her. I fall back but I can feel her swallow and it’s an amazing feeling.

  A first.

  Niamh wasn’t a swallower. She’d take the come, but politely spit it out. I catch myself and banish the thought. It has no place here. It has no place between the beautiful woman climbing on top of me right now with a grin rivalling the Cheshire cat’s on her face and me. Ever. I look at her and I see both pride and concern in her eyes as she strokes my face.

  “Okay?” she asks.

  I pull her down for a kiss, tasting myself on her, and roll us onto our sides.

  “Yeah,” I say, stroking her face right back.

  Such a small word but I’m pretty sure she knows all the words it represents.

  ‘Cause she is Grace.

  And she gets me.

  I can see it in her eyes.

  Grace

  We lie for a little while just gazing into each other’s eyes and stroking each other’s face.

  Over the last month, I’ve kinda got used to looking at his body, got used to the abs, the tight butt, the sculpted arms and the shit-hot back muscles, but I don’t think I would ever get used to how utterly handsome he is.

  In that dangerous, had my nose broken a few times but that just highlights how fucking fantastic my cheekbones and my mouth are kind of way. But even if that handsomeness got lost, I would never tire of looking into his eyes. He’s got these amazing, very defined dark circles around the irises, like you normally only get from colored contacts, and from there the copper-brown color goes in concentric circles from very light to darker and darker, and
in between the circles are shot through with rays of yellow-green flecks. Hazel, I guess, is the official term for them. But it isn’t really their eccentric coloring that has me captivated. It’s the expression behind them, the total adoration and love with which they view me. As if I were something fucking special.

  As if to prove me right, he smiles and breaks the silence.

  “I want to give you something. A token, something of mine, so you won’t forget us.”

  I want to say something about how there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d ever forget him, but he puts a finger against my lips.

  “Wait here a sec.”

  He leaves me on the bed while he goes to the wardrobe and rummages around a bit. He emerges with an old, rusty biscuit tin in his hands, opens it, shuffles some stuff around in it and then takes something very small out. He puts the tin back and returns to me, looking at the object sitting in his palm with a wistful smile. He sits back down at the edge of the bed and gestures for me to join him. I sit up and shuffle over until I’m next to him.

  “I wish I’d thought about it earlier because then I could have got a chain for it, but I only just had the brainwave,” he says, somewhat sadly.

  Then he turns up my palm and drops something into it.

  It’s a wrought silver pendant, a beautiful art nouveau ‘G’.

  “Wow, Silas,” I look up at him, stunned. “It’s absolutely gorgeous. Where did it come from?”

  As we both stare back at the treasure in my hand, I’m secretly praying his answer is not gonna be ‘my gran’ or something like that because then there’d be no way I could accept it.

  “I found it,” he replies to my great relief. “James moved in with a metal detector and before we got into MMA, Rowan and I spent endless hours on the beach, metal detecting.”

  He looks away with a mildly embarrassed smile.

  “We were twelve, we thought it was cool. That,” he nods at the pendant. “Was the first actual thing I ever found. Mum even put a picture of it on lamp posts and social media because it looked like something someone would be searching for, but nobody ever claimed it. I took it to a jeweller once and they reckoned it was genuine nineteen-hundreds. So I like to fantasise it came from a shipwreck. You like it?”

  I wrap my arms around him in a tight hug, the pendant carefully cradled in my hand, and clamber onto his lap. I hold him tight, tears pooling in my eyes.

  “Lasagne is ready!” Sheena shouts from downstairs, and I reluctantly let go.

  He lays his hands on my face, when I lean back, and wipes my tears away with his thumbs then gives me a gentle kiss.

  “I take that as a yes. Let’s go eat.”

  Silas

  When we return to the kitchen, I am instantly reminded of what an absolute beauty my mother is even as a middle-aged woman.

  Kalina has gone all out in the makeup department, in a starkly edgy way, which suits Mum down to the ground, and has even managed to do something with the godawful frumpy haircut Sheena O’Brien has been cultivating for a few years now, simply by slicking it back with some product. The whole effect is that of a 1980s faux noir pop video. Mum’s bone structure lends itself to stark lighting and dramatic makeup, and it makes me both happy and sad to see her like this. Happy because it reminds me of the person beneath all the crap that fate has slung at her over the years. Sad because ever since Rowan landed us with all that debt, she’s kind of completely given up on all of life, bar trying to keep us afloat. It pisses me off and it reiterates the point why I need to win this fight. Maybe once she doesn’t need to fear losing the house any longer, she’ll return to the living.

  While I take the lasagne out of the oven, Kalina clears the table of her paraphernalia and Grace asks her if she has any hair braiding string in her beauty case. She does and Grace fashions herself a necklace out of three different autumn colours for the ‘G’. Mum doesn’t say anything, but I can see her watching Grace with a faint smirk playing on her lips. She catches my eye and nods approvingly.

  We sit down and eat and drink, though Grace switches from Gimlets to water, proclaiming she doesn’t want to be hung over on the plane. I like that. A lot. Because I cannot make love to a woman who’s off her face. And that’s what I want to do before she goes.

  We’ve fooled around, we’ve fucked, we’ve shagged, we’ve made love.

  And before she goes, I want to love her once more, gentle and slow.

  So that that’s what she remembers.

  What it feels like to be loved.

  That, I can give to her.

  Grace

  It’s only when I’m on the plane that I allow myself to feel sad. Silas took me to the airport in Sheena’s car and all the while we kinda pretended it was just another one of our outings, laughing and joking and listening to SAM FM on the radio, playing recognize the tune before the lyrics start.

  Once at Heathrow, he insisted on going the whole hog by parking up, taking my luggage to the check in for me and seeing me all the way to security. There, he held me for a long time, rubbing circles on my back and nuzzling into the side of my neck. I took a last lungful of Silas’ scent, and then he kissed me, one long languid kiss, and sent me on my way with a hoarsely whispered goodbye.

  We both turned away and I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. During the endless hours waiting on the other side before my gate was announced, I tried not to think about what I was leaving behind, but the irony didn’t escape me that on my way to England nobody had been there to see me off, nobody was being left behind. Now, on the way home, I was leaving behind the one man who’d ever made me feel loved.

  I shut my eyes, lean my head against the backrest of my aisle seat and think of him above me, last night and then again this morning, slowly sliding in and out of me, like he was savoring every stroke, every moment inside me. My insides clench at the thought with both lust and sadness.

  He is going to be a hard act to follow.

  I smile to myself. I’m pretty sure that was his intention and though it should annoy me, it doesn’t. Not even remotely.

  He’s raised the bar. To top notch. And I’ll be eternally grateful for that.

  Still smiling, still with my eyes closed, I reach up to rub the pendant dangling around my neck between my fingers.

  “Wow, that’s one hell of a smile,” says an unfamiliar male voice, traveling over from across the aisle.

  I open my eyes and let my head flop to the side to look at the stranger. He’s a good-looking guy in a business suit, not surprising since I spent all my air miles accumulated over five years to fly business plus on this trip in honor of Mum. He’s a bit older than me and would give Chris Pine a run for his money in the blue eyes, chiseled chin department. He probably works out, don’t they all, and he might even be sophisticatedly funny. He probably gives good mouth, too. He has those kinds of lips. But he does absolutely nothing for me.

  “Thanks,” I answer. “I was just thinking about the last orgasm my boyfriend gave me this morning.”

  To say he looks taken aback is an understatement. I can sense the woman who is sitting in the window seat in my row chuckle quietly, as she keeps staring studiously at her tablet. There is nobody between us and I didn’t exactly lower my voice. She heard.

  “Hooo-kayyee,” the guy replies, nodding. “I’ll let you get on with that.”

  “Thanks,“ I say, let my head loll back to its original position and shut my eyes again.

  My boyfriend, I think.

  And then I let the tears roll.

  It’s not like the guy next to me is gonna ask what they’re about.

  Silas

  Walking away from Grace outside security at Heathrow was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I went to collect the Capri from the car park in a daze, drove out of the airport and onto the motorway, feeling like someone had sucked out my soul.

  I’ve been stuck on the M25 for almost two hours now. The motorway is choc-a-block and I haven’t made it very far. I can still watch the planes take
off and land above my head as we crawl along, feeling a stab in my chest with each one I watch leave, wondering if that’s the one that is taking her away from me. We didn’t address it, but we both know full well we’re never gonna have the funds to see each other again.

  She is completely skint with not even a home to go back to, and even if I win next week, the prize money plus all the cash I’ve hoarded from winning so far will be swallowed up entirely by our loan repayment. Rowan really knew how to rack up the numbers being a loser. Mum can start breathing again, I can stop fighting and do something normal. But at no point will there be money to finance a transatlantic relationship. That’s for movie stars, rock gods and gazillionaires. Not for the likes of us.

  So after all is said and done, I didn’t see the point in asking Grace for her contact details. We spent so much time together, I’ve never needed her number while she was here and that’s probably a good thing. It would just sit there on my phone, taunting me. I’m sure Kalina has it and I could probably find Grace on the net or through the Atlantis. But what’s the point in prolonging our pain by ‘keeping in touch’?

  Absurd sentiment, ‘keeping in touch’, if you never get to hold them again, never get to actually touch them again, never get to sit in a kitchen together eating breakfast with cats meowing at your feet again.

  What’s the fucking point?

  Grace

  I cry myself to sleep on the plane, not waking up until we get to Dulles. As a bonus, I miss all the delicious airplane food that way. Only drawback is, I’m absolutely parched when I wake up, but it’s too late for the flight attendants to bring me any water because we are already mid-descent.

  By the time we touch down, I’m half delirious with dehydration and it makes me panicky about not having a fucking clue what to do next. I haven’t got enough money left to stay even one night at the only place in DC I feel at home, so I guess some grimy hostel it’ll be.

  I really should have organized something while I was still in England, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about going home, about the loneliness awaiting me. I take out the phone I haven’t looked at in weeks and see that there are two messages from Cindy. One asks if today is the day I’m back. The other asks to ring her as soon as I land. She’s the only person other than Vince, the bar manager at the Atlantis, who knows, or cares, that I’ve been away, but it still surprises me that she remembers exactly when I’m due back. It makes me feel slightly less desolate. It’s kind of nice to know that there is at least one person back home who would have noticed if I’d disappeared on my trip to England. So as I wait for my luggage a bit later, newly purchased water bottle in hand, I call her. It’s early afternoon in DC and I wonder if she would be at work. You can never tell with Cindy because she works as an office temp, but she picks up the phone on the second ring.