Drop (15 page)

Maybe I will drop at Georgia’s party after all.

I drift into a silky sleep, reliving a thousand times over that butterfly moment when our lips touched.

I wake at noon after an epic sleep. Best sleep of my life. Perfect dreams of summer days and flying and being absolutely content enveloped me from start to finish. I nuke some leftover chilli in the microwave and then doze in front of a
Come Dine with Me
marathon. Livin’ the dream.

I bring Finn’s cheeky grin to my phone screen and hit
CALL
.

“You want to come over?” I ask.

“Well, that depends,” he says, his irreverent voice like honey. “Have you got any donuts? Cold cans of Coke to tend my wounds?”

“I might be able to rustle something up. Where are you hurting?” I’m asking for trouble, but can’t help myself. It’s kind of exciting. Finn laughs.

Here’s the thing: I can’t stop thinking about sex. I’ve never felt like this before, like I want to be totally and utterly consumed by this intense … fire. And in
that
way. I wonder what it would be like to have his hands roam over me, to hear his breath catching…

Mum and Dad are out shopping for Alessi kitchen accessories (kitchens need accessorizing too, dontcha know) and faux Moore garden sculptures. I bet they come home with a water feature.
Shudder
. So, the house is parent-free…

“I can think of a hundred cringey answers. You want to hear them?” he replies.

“I do, genuinely. Be creative. I like that,” I say. “So, Finn, where are you hurting?”

“I’ve got a pain in my heart when we’re apart.”

“Oh, please.” I shake my head. “Keep going. This is amusing. Actually, I think I know exactly what the problem is. Have you got a sore little finger? It must be turning blue where I’m wound around it.”

“I’m aching all over for you, baby,”

“Ohmygod, that’s the worst, by far. Come on. Come over.”

“You’ve twisted my arm. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Get the Coke on ice.”

I hang up, quickly run a brush through my hair and change my T-shirt, a spilled-chilli casualty of lunchtime.

Nineteen minutes later Finn knocks. Early. He’s
never
early. Except to meet me.

I open the door and he immediately knots his fingers with mine and pulls me to him. His clean, man-musk scent revives me from lazy Sunday afternoon slumber like Victorian smelling salts. “Hey,” he smoulders, “how are you?”

“Positively sprightly.”

There’s electricity between us. The kind of frenetic energy sugar-fuelled kids have on Christmas morning. Strange how people regress when they’re in love … or in lust.

Up in my room, we talk, our words criss-crossing like a plait. Mad, incoherent, but completely right and natural. I tell him my stupid secrets: how I hate dunking my head in the bath in case I inhale bubbles; that I have a horseshoe-shaped scar on my elbow from when I fell down the stairs aged three; that waxworks freak me out big time, the same as people painted gold all over, pretending to be statues.

“We won’t be going on a date to Madame Tussauds any time soon then, will we?”

He says he hates courgettes, cucumber, avocado, aubergine, and all those slimy vegetables. That everyone thinks his favourite movie is
The Shawshank Redemption
, but it’s actually
Elf
. How he wishes his dad would get a girlfriend and start to live again.

I tell him I wish Mum was around more.

I curl my legs underneath me like a human pretzel. Mid-sentence, he’s kissing me, wanting me, but … just because Facebook declares to the world we’re “in a relationship” doesn’t mean we have to get straight in bed together, right?

We lie there. And kiss. We cuddle and well… His hands trace my curves, move under my top and I laugh, maybe it’s nerves, maybe it’s his fingertips gently tickling. He reaches his other hand to silence me, and suddenly, this is serious. My pulse gallops. I grip his shirt, twisting it in my fist, and then all I want is to pull it off, feel his skin on my skin and pull him closer than even that. But…

“Wait,” I say. It sounds like someone else; the old me, the invisible girl talking, out to sabotage. 

“You OK?”

“I … um … just need a minute.” I head to the bathroom. Splash some water on my face, careful not to smudge my new make-up. Look myself in the eye.
It’s no big deal,
I think.
You wanted this
. My gaze drifts and I catch myself looking through the window to the garden below, calculating the distance to the ground. You’re just scared. Looking back at the mirror, I straighten my top, take a deep breath, plaster a smile on my face, then go back to my room.

Finn’s sitting up, hair wild, eyes sparkling, reading my sketchbook. He smiles openly in that way of his. “You really are very good at the art stuff. One talented girl.” He cocks his head to the side. “Everything all right?” he says. “We don’t have t—”

It’s my turn to put a finger to his lips to quieten him. Because we do have to do this. To keep him, for me to make that leap from invisible girl to someone, we do…

I kiss his neck, then his mouth. He pulls at my lips with his teeth, just gently.

This is happening. Mountains move, icebergs melt, volcanoes erupt… And vaguely, I’m thinking:
Nothing could be better than this, could it?

He touches my neck, kisses my eyelids… His lush, full hair sticks to his forehead, and I brush it aside. He smiles. Even though he’s right there, he’s not near enough; the feel of him, the smell of him, everything about him so achingly moreish.

“Tell me everything about you that you wouldn’t tell your mother,” he says.

I reach behind me for a pillow and hit him with it. And I’m happy, really I am. Except for, I don’t know, this kind of … lost feeling that washes over me.

“I
hate
suits,” Dad mumbles under his breath. I scan the room through the slightly open door. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, half a glass of red wine and a dog-eared copy of
Shantaram
on his bedside table. An empty wine glass sits on Mum’s table, next to a well-thumbed copy of
How to Get What You Want and Get It Now;
her Prada reading glasses lie among the pages of this week’s
Nature.
Dad fiddles with his silver cufflinks, light bouncing off them and dancing on the ceiling.

The alarm clock flashes 20:17 in red retro digits. I hear Mum in the bathroom, fixing her face, flossing her teeth, washing the purple wine tint from her lips.

“You need help?” I ask Dad, going in to fasten his cuffs. “Where you off to?”

“Oh, some prize-giving thing for Mum’s paper. They’re up for Newspaper of the Year.” He doesn’t seem too happy about spending the evening with Mum’s schmoozy colleagues. Networking, they call it in the business. Being tossers, we say in the real world.

“Yeah? Cool. Free fizz and nibbles. What’s not to like?”

“Hmm.” Dad sighs. I finish the cufflinks. “Thanks,” he says.

“It’s Georgia’s birthday thing tonight.”

“OK, love. Are you staying over?”

“Probably.”

“Well, take your key in case you change your mind. We won’t be back until late.”

“OK.”

“You’ve been in a better mood this week. Have you attracted a following of impossibly handsome suitors? Made it onto the gym team?”

I shrug, trying to act casual, but can’t hold back a smile. I’m chirpy as a bird on a blue-sky morning. My head is filled with Finn, Finn, Finn…

“You know you have, Carla, dancing about the place like a loon. I saw you knee-slide on the kitchen floor to some ‘song’, and I say ‘song’ in its loosest sense. It was more of a
dook-chooka, boom boom
.” Dad attempts to beatbox in a cripplingly embarrassing manner, for what is quite possibly the most excruciating eight seconds of my life thus far.
“Bleepety-bleep, umcha, umcha, doof doof doooo—”

“Please stop that.”

“I’m not complaining. Just wondering what’s brought about this miraculous transformation.”

“Oh, nothing really. I’m my usual melancholy self inside. I promise.”

“If you say so.” Dad gives me a nudge, and a look that says,
I know this is about a bloke
. He won’t push it though. Plus, telling him would mean telling Mum and sparking the whole focusing-on-my-studies talk.
Ugh…
I’m not up for that. I have a night to prep for. A date with fate – hot boy, pills, music – I’ll take that over fizz, nibbles and networking any day.

Georgia’s parents are flash with cash, and Citrus, the huge venue under the railway arches, has been transformed for Georgia’s party. It’s beautifully decorated with my designs. Silver sculptures, like giant glinting teardrops, hang from the vaulted ceiling, where a million fairy lights wink. The butterfly acrobats twist and turn on ribbons and hoops, my drawings brought to life. The DJ box is high overhead, a giant birdcage on a monster Meccano scaffold of steel girders, just like I pictured it. It’s a wonderland. Clearly nothing’s too much for Glen and Lucy Presco’s birthday girl.