Silas Read online

  Silas

  To say I was pissed off by the note I found taped to the staircase when I got in would be the understatement of the century. My mother and her fucking notes.

  Granted, I don’t have my mobile on at work and forgot to switch it on after, but still. Bloody unilateral decisions, bloody fucking notes.

  Not that it would have made any difference. Either way there’d be a fucking body in my room. In my bed. ‘Cause Mum would have ignored me anyway. As she does.

  I’ve told her time and time again that we can do without. We don’t need the extra money now that I’m working for George ─ Diego. Fuck, I really need to get out of that habit. Mum doesn’t know about the fightnights and I have no intention of telling her until I have enough dough stashed away to pay off the loan she took out against the house to pay his fucking debts off. Fucking cunt. But I’m making good enough money just from bouncing anyway, so that between us we can keep up with the repayments and the bills and shit until I come clean. So we don’t need any more ad hoc guests.

  The students are one thing. Kalina is nice enough. So was the last one. They’re no trouble. Don’t mind them. Do mind having to sleep on the shitty sofa bed in the living room. The mattress is paper thin, you can feel every spring in the shitty mechanism underneath it. I don’t even bother anymore. I just put the sleeping bag on the floor. Call me a pussy but sleeping on the floor isn’t my ideal scenario after a long night at the club. So to find another note just now, pushed under the living room door, telling me she’s offered the guest my room for another night really qualifies as the fucking highlight of my year. And it’s only May.

  I march up the stairs, crumpling up said note, and make a beeline for the bathroom to take a leak. My eyes are still down on the ball of paper in my hand when the bathroom door opens and a warm wave of soft, curvy woman crashes into me.

  She steps back immediately and before I look away from my hand, I see that she, too, is holding one of my mother’s infamous notes. Only hers isn’t scrunched up. It’s being held reverently by elegant fingers that end in unvarnished nails and that are presently smoothing out the crease made into the sheet by our collision. I’ve never seen hands as expressive as this. The way they are holding that piece of paper tells me more than I ever thought was possible to gather from a split-second image.

  “Sorry,” she says softly in an American accent. “I wasn’t looking.”

  I look up from our hands and into her face, and we stare at each other for what seems like an eternity.

  Her complexion is blotchy, she has circles under her amazing green eyes and an angry red spot that I swear she’s just squeezed on the side of her chin. Her long red hair is bed-tousled and full of rats’ nests.

  She is absolutely the most fucking beautiful woman I have ever seen.

  Grace

  I recognize him immediately, though he is bigger, much more built than the young man in the drawing. It’s the corner of his mouth that gives it away. And those teeth set in anger. That jawline.

  It goes with Slavic cheekbones, a Slavic nose that’s been bashed in a few times for good measure, medium brown, almost copper-colored, eyes and dark blond hair, shorter than in the picture.

  He looks a lot like his mother in a weird way. And an awful lot like trouble.

  He is wearing bleached-out denims but is naked from the low riding waist up, and I can see some dark, angry bruises across his abdomen. His very sculpted abdomen. I’ve never had any dealings with fighters, but it seems obvious what they are. Fight marks.

  And just like I wanted to stroke the glass over the drawing, I feel my hands itching to reach out and touch those purple smears. Touch him. His scent is undiluted now that he’s standing right in front of me and it’s not just a lingering memory in a room. It’s a full onslaught of deliciousness on my nostrils, and it’s doing funny things to me.

  My insides have gone mushy. My pussy contracts once, hard, around nothing, giving me a jolt all the way up to my tits. That’s never happened to me before from just looking at a guy.

  I mean, really?

  My breathing has sped up and I try to suppress it, try to get a grip. This is stupid. I’ve never had a reaction like this to a man before. I feel like an animal. At the mercy of my pheromones. It makes me feel almost ashamed but then, in the periphery of my vision, I see the movement in his pants.

  His dick is twitching. He’s reacting to me the same way I’m reacting to him, and that gives me a rush like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

  I’m twenty-five, I lost my virginity at sixteen in a pretty unspectacular but not terrible fashion to a guy who was nice enough but not exactly the love of my life. I’ve had a few boyfriends since. Though not a lot in the last five years.

  After Mum was first diagnosed, the supply kinda dried up. It’s amazing how unattractive you become to the male of the species once you’re caring for the terminally ill. But the ones I did have before that? Not a single one of them ever made me feel as heady as this.

  By just standing there.

  Doing nothing.

  Silas

  Shit. Fuck. Bollocks.

  I’ve never had a reaction like this to a woman before.

  I want. My dick wants. My soul wants.

  This is the last thing I need. I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t do vulnerable. And lust makes you vulnerable. There is a reason there are so many films in which the man gets stabbed by the woman during his last thrust, literally. In those moments, from just before you come until your dick finishes jerking, you are meat. Weak.

  I can’t be weak. It needs trust and I don’t have any. I find it hard to let go. Really, really hard.

  I’m twenty-five and I’ve had exactly two girlfriends. Niamh, my first, I had known most of my life before we got together. She’s been a friend since primary school. I trusted her with my life. Until him. And all the bollocks that went with that. She lives in London now. Has done alright for herself. Runs a funeral home with her soon-to-be husband for her soon-to-be husband’s father. I meet her for coffee sometimes when she comes down to visit her parents. We’re alright. In a blanking-that-shit-out kinda way. Met her man once, too. Nice guy. Reserved but solid and you can see in the way they look at each other that they are happy. That they fit. I’m glad she’s happy. I’m glad she got what she needed. I’m glad she’s found someone who can give her all the stuff I couldn’t. Excitement. Orgasms. The flat. The mortgage. Kids one day.

  After Niamh, there was nothing for a long, long time. Then came Cerys. Approached me at the beach two years ago as I came out of the sea and asked me if I fancied doing some nude modelling. She was an art student at Brighton Uni. Had come out to Shoreham that day to sketch the lighthouse. Cerys had her own issues, though. Big issues. Sex between us was the most painful thing. Two people humping without either ever getting to the finish line. Frustration city. Outside of that, we had nothing in common. Picking a place to hang out? Two hours. Deciding on a takeaway? Three hours. Picking a film? Five. The whole thing didn’t last long. No idea what happened to her afterwards. Completely lost touch.

  From Niamh, I have a scar on the back of my left hand from when she ran me over with ice skates outside the Pavilion when we were twelve and a fuck load of trust issues. Though technically they are his fault.

  From Cerys, I have a nude drawing of me on my bedroom wall. About sums it up.

  And now I’m staring at this gorgeous woman and there is a voice inside my head wondering what she will leave behind.

  Fuck.

  Grace

  We keep staring at one another and someone soon has got to break this deadlock.

  Speak, woman, speak.

  “You’re the guy in the picture,” I blurt out, wondering where the traditional ‘Hi, I’m Grace, nice to meet you’ I had planned on got to.

  But it lifts the spell. He looks away, and I realize he’s embarrassed before he even utters his first ever words to me.

  “It was a present,�
� he mumbles.

  He has this really low voice. Not deep, just low. The kind of voice that demands everything around him to be quiet so he can be heard. It’s a sort of reverse psychology authority thing that sits in direct contrast with what is happening to him right now.

  He’s blushing. Not fully but there is a faint stripe of red that starts slowly appearing along his jawline as he looks past my shoulder into the bathroom. It’s ridiculously cute on somebody like him. Like when a mountain lion rubs its head against a tree trunk and starts purring. I want to giggle so hard it gives me hiccups. He looks at me again and the urge to giggle stops dead in my throat. So do the hiccups.

  “You’re the woman in my bed,” he says.

  Yes, I think, I am the woman in your bed.

  The heat is back on full force and I can see in his eyes that he is as shocked about what just came out of his mouth as I was about what came out of mine a minute ago. There are definitely some filters missing here. Maybe that’s what true attraction is all about. Convention and politeness go out of the window. All that human bullshit we plaster all over everything. Instead, we just say what we’re actually thinking. Let the hormones do the talking.

  We’re back to the staring game and the longer it goes on the more charged the air becomes between us.

  My pulse is racing, my insides clench and unclench in rhythmical intervals and my skin feels too tight for me. A furtive glance down tells me his cock isn’t just twitching anymore, he’s got a raging hard-on now, bulging out his jeans. And I’ve got the wet pussy to match.

  I wonder if he can smell me. I can smell me.

  He’s caught my eyes wandering and his breath hitches. He glowers at me, and I know if he pushed me backwards, planted me up against the sink, pulled my pants down, bent me over and shoved into me from behind right now, I’d happily let him.

  And that’s so not my scene.

  I’m not into sex with strangers, rough and ready, spanking and having my hair fisted and being fucked until it hurts. I’m pretty vanilla.

  I have my kinks, I think. In my fantasies, I have a thing for doing it outside, not that I’ve ever had the chance to try.

  But, really, I like kissing for hours. Making out on the couch until bedtime. A cock in my mouth to explore without hurry, to savor not to milk as quickly as possible.

  A guy’s mouth between my legs when every lick of the tongue is complete in itself, not a chase to orgasm.

  And when he enters me, I want it to be with love.

  Not en vogue, I know, but there it is.

  Put the race on me and I clam up. Demand I come for you and I want to vomit.

  I like normal guys with normal physiques whose chests are comfortable to lie on and not like a slab of stone. Who snuggle up when they are done.

  Not this.

  This beast-man type.

  Silas

  Fuck me. I don’t even need to look at her nipples to know they are hard as diamonds.

  It’s all in her face. She’s horny as hell.

  I can smell it on her.

  I know I could just take her, here and now. She’d love it. A hard ride, bent over, hands on the edge of the sink, me fisting her hair and spanking her arse.

  If I was that man.

  But I’m not.

  There is enough violence in my life. The last place I want more of it is with a woman. If anything, I would just want to hold her. Spoon against her, cup her breast, stroke the pad of my thumb over one of those pebbled peaks and kiss her neck until she shivers and moans. Until she turns her face to kiss me, so I can leisurely tongue fuck her mouth.

  Shit. Where the fuck did that just come from?

  This has got to stop. We’ve been standing here a good five minutes now. Her on the bathroom tiles, me on the landing. I frown at that. She’s got bare feet and the floor in the bathroom is always fucking freezing. I don’t want her getting a chill. I want her to be...what the fuck? Enough!

  “I need a piss,” I inform her gruffly and it finally dispels the magic.

  I step to the side, so she can come out onto the landing and she leaves promptly, walking back to my room without looking over her shoulder. I should take a leaf out of her book and not stare after her, but I do. I already know her front is soft and squishy with big, heavy boobs, thanks to our collision. Now I see her butt and I’m doubly fucked. Round like a peach and just the right kind of jiggly. I might find it hard to get intimate with a woman these days, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know what I like to look at.

  And, man, I like what I see.

  Grace

  It takes me ages to compose myself after the Mexican stand-off on the bathroom threshold.

  I get dressed and try to brush my hair, but I just end up braiding it loosely down my back with a promise to take care of it later. I take the sheets off the bed, fold them and put them in a neat pile on the desk. Then I pack my suitcase and lug it down the stairs.

  No way am I staying another night now. I’ve made up my mind. It’s not exactly part of the plan, but I’m going to London. There must be a cheap hotel somewhere that has room. Stay there for a couple of nights, regroup. Think what Mum would have wanted me to do. After all, this trip is all about her.

  As I make my way down, the smell of fried bacon hits my nostrils and I realize I’m starved. The last thing I ate was half of one of those meals on the plane, which consisted of tough chicken with rice in a tarragon sauce that still repeats on me each time I think about it and a small lump of rock-hard bread roll that competed in carat with the small rectangle of frozen butter I tried to spread on it. There was a ‘cheesecake’ for dessert, but it had a dubious gelatinous quality, so I didn’t even try it. That was about twenty hours ago. And that bacon smells good. But there is only one person in the house who could be frying it and he’s the last person I want to see.

  That said, there is still the matter of settling up. I can’t just leave the house without paying for my stay. So once I’m at the bottom of the stairs, I dig out my money and count out the amount Sheena wanted for the room. I stand there, staring at the cash in my hand for quite a while, not sure what to do with it. I need to leave it somewhere. And write her a thank you note.

  Means I need to ask for some paper and a pen. I sigh deeply, bracing myself. Off to the kitchen I go.

  I leave my suitcase by the front door and make my way toward the bacon wafts. The closer I get the more my stomach starts to rumble. I’m not just starved, I’m ravenous. As soon as I’m out of here I’ll find myself a café or something. But first things first.

  He’s standing by the stove, his torso thankfully covered up in a gray t-shirt now ─ tight, of course ─ and is idly turning bacon rashers in a pan. I notice that there are two plates on the countertop with two pieces of white bread laid out on each, carrying slices of tomato and lettuce leaves. There is a selection of sauces on the side. Ketchup, mustard, mayo and something called HP.

  I stand in the door for a minute and watch him, while his eyes remain trained on the frying pan. I know he knows I’m here and is deliberately ignoring me. But it’s not rude. It’s...shy, it suddenly dawns on me.

  He’s finding this about as difficult as I am. I want to laugh out loud at that.

  I watch him gather himself before he turns to me and attempts a smile. Looks good on him. He’s got really nice lips, fuller at the bottom than the top and very, very kissable. Shit. Here we go again. I close my eyes for a second, squishing the lids together hard, then open them again and smile back.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m Grace. Grace Turner.”

  “Silas.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Want a BLT?”

  I can’t help but beam at him.

  “Hell yeah!”

  Silas

  That smile.

  I’m sure mountains have been moved and countries been renamed for smiles like hers. She’s got these amazing lips that turn up a l
ittle at the corners, cat-like, and when her face lights up it’s like the sun comes out. Romantic tosh, I know, but true all the same.

  I beckon her forward and gesture at the condiments on the worktop.

  “Choose your weapons.”

  She stuffs a wad of fivers she’s been holding in her hand into the back pocket of her jeans and comes over to stand next to me. She looks at the different options and selects the mayo jar. As she unscrews it, her elbow brushes lightly against my arm and I can feel it all the way down to my toes. Here we go again. Ridiculous.

  I clench my teeth hard to suppress what’s going on and wait for her to finish putting mayo on her bread before I transfer the bacon slices onto their nest of lettuce and tomato. I do the same with mine and reach for the HP.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  I notice she is waiting politely for me to finish putting my sandwich together before she starts on hers, despite the fact I can hear her stomach rumbling. I like that. She has manners.

  “Brown sauce,” I reply. “I thought your mum was British. How come you don’t know what brown sauce is?”

  She freezes and looks at me shocked. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Let’s sit down.”

  I cock my head towards the breakfast table, take my plate and carry on talking while she follows me over and we sit down opposite one another.

  “Mum rang about ten minutes ago,” I explain. “Told me to be nice to you. Said you’re on a pilgrimage for your dead mother who was originally from around here. That’s how I know.”

  “Right,” she says and looks down at her sandwich. “Actually, she was from Surrey, but she used to run the hotel your mum works for. Before I was born.”

  I can see that all of a sudden she’s struggling with the idea of eating. My fault for being so blunt.

  “Eat,” I tell her.

  And, after a while, she does.

  Grace

  I need to start chewing slowly because the fact that Silas knows why I’m here took my saliva away.

  That’s personal.