Selling the Drama Read online

  "You're all done." He breathed into her ear, smirking at the shiver she gave off. Releasing her shoulders, he stood rapidly, striding over to dive immediately into the pool.

  Toby swam the length of it under the water, not surfacing until he was on the other side of pool to where he had left Charlotte. Rising, he put his elbows up onto the cement edge and rested his forehead there, trying to get his breath back, grateful for the bracing cold temperature of the water. He heard a splash behind him but refused to turn around. He contemplated hauling himself out of the deep end without looking back. He felt the momentum as she approached, the force of the water pushing up against his back and then her hands, reaching around the front of him and diving down into his board shorts. She took hold of him, squeezing, both of her hands covering his hard length. Her lips touched his ear and he heard her voice, whispery and soft.

  "I want you to touch me like that again. And I want to touch you. And I want you to kiss me, and lick me, and put your mouth all over me." Her grip on him tightened.

  She was far more aggressive than he would have guessed and clearly far more skilled at this game of seduction than he was. He was completely in over his head and he should have just stayed up on that balcony. "If your parents found out, that would be the end of me. I have nowhere else to go."

  Her lips were at his ear once again. "They won't care. They told me to be nice to you."

  He laughed and shook his head at that. She was unbelievable. And intoxicating. He resisted the urge to move against her hand that was still gripping him. "This is not what they had in mind."

  Her answering laughter was breathy, tickling his ear, giving him cause to shiver. "Maybe not. But they won't mind either way. They have very liberal ideas about sex, you know. Haven't you noticed that about them? Haven't you heard them going at it? Mum thinks sex is as natural as breathing. She put me on the pill ages ago, and the sex talk I got from her was all about tapping into your own sexual needs; getting pleasure from each other. She made it sound so superb and fantastic, yet it's not until right now, with you, that I get a hint of what she was talking about." Her hand began to move slowly along him, a delicate grip pulling back and forth with expert precision. She had him pinned, and while he was much bigger and stronger than her, there was not much will to resist left within him.

  Toby gripped the poolside harder, refusing himself the option of turning around to touch her. "What about your father? Surely he won't be on board with me tapping into my own sexual need and getting pleasure from his daughter's body?"

  Charlotte nibbled at his ear before answering. "He goes along with everything Mum does. Anyway, why do they even have to know? We're here by ourselves all day, every day. There's a six foot fence surrounding this back yard. No one would ever see us, both inside the house, and out. And when they are here, surely we can keep our hands off of each other in front of them? Come on, we don't have to have sex. We can just fool around. Don't you want to fool around with me?" That voice of hers, breathy and girly, yet certain and strong, all at the same time; it was messing with his head. She was far too sophisticated for him. Shit. Shit. Bloody shit. Why the fuck not?

  Toby pushed himself off the side of the pool and turned around, his movements so swift Charlotte lost her grip on him. He reached out for her face and pulled it toward him, kissing her frantically, pushing his tongue into her mouth, his hands devouring her skin, so slippery under the water. Hormones raged within him and while he wanted to get out of the pool and go and lock himself inside his bedroom, far away from this temptation and the risk it posed, he was sixteen and horny, with a girl right in front of him who wanted anything he was willing to give. He was either incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky, but only time would tell because in the present moment he couldn't think about anything except for her skin, the smooth expanse of it, and the way it glided beneath his fingertips. She wanted him to touch her everywhere, to put his mouth all over her. Disconnecting himself from his common sense, he let it all go, and for the first time in his life, did something just for the hell of it.

  Charlotte lay in her bed, the overhead fan twirling above her doing nothing to alleviate the stickiness from her body. The air was oppressive, it needed to rain, but for days now there had been nothing but heavy humidity, with clouds that threatened but did not follow through. She ran her fingers over her breasts lightly, teasing herself with her own fingers, thinking about Toby's mouth, about how he had consumed her in the same place where her fingers were now trailing. He was lying in the room right next to her, just beyond the wall.

  Her parent's bedroom was upstairs at the opposite side of the house, the only room on the second floor, a sort of suite they had set up for themselves with their own bathroom and a small sitting room with a couch and TV that Charlotte imagined they watched their porn on. She'd had plenty of opportunities to go through their room when they weren't home and over the years she had found all manner of items that had at first confused her, but more recently, had started to excite her. In any event, it was two in the morning and they were shuttered far away, so Charlotte slipped out of bed, removing her underpants as she did so, softly padding to her door, quietly cracking it open and stepping out into the hallway.

  Their pool interlude this afternoon had ended rather abruptly, and Charlotte was still confused as to what had exactly gone wrong. One minute he was all over her, and the next, he was out of the pool and striding away without even a backward glance. He had kept himself hidden away until dinner time, where he had steadfastly ignored her gaze and eaten without saying very much at all, retreating back into his room in silence at the conclusion of the meal.

  She turned the handle of his bedroom door gently, easing herself into the room, sliding the lock into place as she shut it quietly behind her. His fan was blowing overhead and he had the windows open with the curtains pulled back. His room was illuminated by the moon, the shadows soft within. Her eyes landed on the bed where he was sprawled asleep, no covers on top of him, only a pair of pyjama shorts on. Charlotte stopped by the side of the bed, her eyes surveying him. He was beautiful, in the way that young men can be, as they hold on to the remnants of boyhood while beginning to look like the man they will soon become. Toby had a vulnerability about him that slipped out when he wasn't trying so hard to cover everything up. She had intended on coming in here to wake him, entice him into making out with her some more, to tease him into wanting sex. Looking at him though, his face so soft in sleep, she wanted nothing more than to curl up beside him and sleep against him herself. It was the most curious of feelings, a sensation within that was entirely foreign to her, and not necessarily wanted. She did not develop feelings for boys. She made out with them. Teased them. Mocked them. Made them lust after her. She did not curl up beside them so she could sleep against their bodies. Frowning, she backed away from the bed, not at all comfortable with this odd instinctive reaction to him. Instead of going back to her own room, she decided she would instead go out into the moonlight for a swim in the pool. She could do with a cooling off, for more reasons than one, and if she was quiet enough, no one would know she was even out there.

  Despite her best efforts at getting him to break, Toby resisted Charlotte over the next few days, to the point where he began to impress even himself with his level of will power. Of course, he was becoming intimately acquainted with his own hand a bit more than he would have liked, but it was the lesser of two evils, given the possible ramifications that could come from indulging in the real thing. She appeared to have given up on her relentless pursuit after five days straight of topless sunbaking with no further reaction forthcoming from him. She had even put her underpants back on under those flimsy sundresses she liked to wear. The days slowly began to be less fraught with sexual tension, and he found he was able to relax a bit more in her presence, even going so far as to have a few conversations with her that contained no sexual innuendo whatsoever.

  None of this changed how much he liked her though. Whether she was flash
ing her legs open to him or crossing them demurely, she had him on his knees. There was very little he thought about that didn't involve Charlotte and the more she talked, the more he showed up to listen. She was funny and smart, loved music and books of all sorts. She was an out of this world gymnast, not that he knew much about the sport, but her trophies and medals seemed to speak for themselves. She thought he didn't watch her while she trained, yet she was so focused on what she was doing that she didn't notice how he couldn't tear his eyes away from her. The way she would spin in the air, ribbons wrapping around her body as she flexed and moved with grace and skill. She was mesmerising and he could not get enough of looking at her.

  He got to know some of her friends as they dropped by the house and found them to be girls he could easily like, for they were also kind and funny, but with an innocence about them that was entirely devoid within Charlotte. There was a promiscuity about her that secretly excited him. He had caught sight of her one afternoon, while she was lying on the couch in the family room reading, her hand up her own skirt, blatantly touching herself as she read. She had no knowledge he was there, he was certain of it, and that fact alone began to cast her into a different light for him. He had at first thought she was trying to wear him down in order to trap him, have some power over him with her parents. Now he wondered if it was nothing more than blatant desire. He was here, he was male, and she liked sex. He looked for the book she had been reading later on, when she was out at the pool. It was a novel filled with the type of sex he had never even dared to imagine, and he couldn't help but wonder if she read it for enjoyment or for education. It was hard to tell with her. He was sure that if he asked her she would be more than happy to tell him.

  She would read a book like that one day and then be seen reading a novel by Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens on the next. She was a contradiction like no other. She listened to Pearl Jam and Mozart in the same sitting. She would lie by the pool with Madame Butterfly screaming out through her earphones, the words indecipherable to Toby, yet the vision of her lost within the music so symbolic to him that he couldn't help but want to listen to it also, to discover what it was within the sounds that she sought, what she absorbed and took away from the experience. He found himself becoming slightly obsessed with understanding her, if such a thing was even possible.

  Now that she was content to sit poolside with her bikini in place, he felt it safe enough to join her again. They had fallen into a bit of a routine, lying by the pool in the mornings, having a swim before eating lunch together, going their separate ways for a few hours before meeting up by the pool again in the late afternoon. She was non-intrusive with her topics of conversation. She asked him questions about his former school and friends, teased him about whether he had left a girlfriend behind or not, yet stayed firmly away from the subject of his former home life. The sensitivity of that was not lost on him.

  "You can ask me about them, you know. My parents. I won't freak out." It was a big offer. He wasn't entirely sure if he really wanted to answer any questions about them, but for her, he was willing to try. That alone was confusing. This connection to her he was feeling. It was seamless, as though it had always existed between them.

  Charlotte merely shrugged though and turned her gaze away. "I don't particularly want to know anything about them."

  He exhaled with relief, glancing down at the book beside her pool lounger. "What are you reading today?" He reached down and picked it up, flipping through the pages more for something to do than to actually look at the contents.

  Turning back to him, she smiled widely. "Oh, you'll like this one. It's called Heaven. It's about a girl who lives in the mountains in Virginia - it's American - and she finds out she's got a different father and goes to live with his family instead of her hillbilly one. She's got this mysterious young uncle there and they start to have an affair." Charlotte laughed with delight at Toby's shaking head. "Your face! You crack me up with your prudent mortification."

  "This sounds creepily like that one with the brother and sister locked in the attic having sex with each other. My mortification is justified." He tossed the book back down onto the ground, stretching out on his own lounger to face her.

  "It's the same author!" Her face was lit up with laughter, radiant and glowing with heat and happiness.

  Toby felt a fluttering deep inside at the sight of her. "I didn't see that one coming," he teased.

  She poked her tongue out him. "Hey, listen to this, I have a new album." Sitting up, she reached down for her Walkman and passed Toby one of the earbuds attached. "You put one in and I'll have the other. We can listen together." She pressed play and lay back down, the Walkman resting on the ground beside them.

  Charlotte closed her eyes but Toby kept his open, watching her listen to the music, the sounds of REM singing Night Swimming making him think of her, and the way she would sneak down to the pool every night to swim when everyone else was in bed. Toby always made a point to watch her from his window to ensure she didn't come to harm swimming alone at night. If she were to hit her head or have seizure or something, no one would be able to help her. It wasn't safe for her to swim alone, but the nightly vision she presented, swimming naked in the moonlight; it was too ethereal for him to feel any motivation towards stopping her, so instead he watched her from the shadows, telling himself it was for her safety. His eyes settled onto her chest, watching as it rose and fell with her even breaths, her skin glistening with perspiration and sunscreen. There was so much to her, so much more just below the surface. He wanted to know everything, every single thing that she thought of, dreamed about, hoped for. Pulling the earbud out of his ear, he reached over with it and placed it into her own ear, allowing his fingers to linger in her hair for a few seconds. Her eyes flew open in surprise and he smiled at her, standing up, his touch leaving her with reluctance.

  "It's a great album."

  Nodding, she closed her eyes again. Toby left her side and dived neatly into the pool, staying under the water for as long as he could, holding his breath until his chest burned. Yet the image of her skin, the scent of her hair, it remained with him. He would have to be careful, so much more careful around her if this friends thing between them was going to work, because right now, he wanted to be with her in the purest of ways; not to kiss her or lose himself in her body like he had that first day by the pool, but to lie beside her holding onto her hand, listening to the sound of her voice until the sun went down, immersed within the sheer brilliance that encompassed her existence. And that was something you most certainly did not do with your friends.

  Charlotte opened the letter first, more eager for news than what was contained within the parcel. The letters were sporadic, at best, near non-existent, at worst, but always deeply treasured, for she was the only one who got them, the only one who mattered enough, and that had always been significant to her. Running her eyes across the page, she read it through once, rapidly, and then again at a slower pace:

  Dear Charlotte,

  How is my sweetie going? You must slip me a photo of this incredibly hot guy who is living with you into your next letter. I must be the judge of who is hot. I have far more experience than you, ha ha! How is your mum? She sent me an incredibly boring letter a week ago outlining her expectations of my behaviour while I was over here, blah blah, more blah and then a bit more blah to finish up on. But at least she wrapped the letter around a hundred, so there was a reward for endurance at the end! Seriously, when did she stop being fun? I know she's much older than me, but she's such a grown up. It's as though she thinks she has to parent me now that Ma and Pa are both gone, but I'm twenty three years old, well and truly an adult and more than capable of taking care of myself now. Although, if she intends on giving me a hundred dollars every time she annoys me, then I'm probably willing to put up with it! Ha, ha!

  Now, enough of all that, I have news. I am in love! Completely, head over heels, this is the one, in love. All the men over here in Ireland are just beautif
ul, they all seem to sing and be able to sprout poetry like nobody's business, but I have met the most adorable, gorgeous, one of a kind man, and I love him so much you may never see me leave Ireland! His name is Dermott and we are going to spend Christmas with his family in Dublin. It's all very exciting. He wants us to get married next Easter. I know! Me, married, can you imagine? Iris won't feel the need to baby me so much then, when I am a married woman just like she is!

  Now, I have enclosed a few Irish treats for you. DO NOT OPEN THIS PARCEL IN FRONT OF YOUR MUM!!! You'll thank me for warning you.

  I miss you heaps and heaps.

  Love and big sloppy kisses,

  Jenna xoxox.

  She had wrapped the presents individually, and then again all together. Charlotte tackled the biggest one first, which turned out to be books, written by Irish authors. The next one was an EP, by a band called 'The Cranberries', and there was a note attached where Jenna announced she had seen them perform live at a pub, and that they were fantastic. The last gift was double wrapped, and Charlotte expected this was the one that her mother was not allowed to see. On the second layer of paper, Jenna had scrawled: Maybe you can try these out on tall dark and handsome in the next bedroom over!! Tearing off the remaining layer of paper, Charlotte stared at the two boxes contained within, laughter bursting right out of her.