Eighty Days White (3 page)

I warmed to him more after that. His mother was a QC, he told us, and his father a banker. He’d dropped out of his law degree and begun training as an apprentice tattooist with his uncle, Jonah, as a way to get out from under the weight of his parents’ expectations.

Liana made herself right at home immediately, nestling into his couch and resting her tattooed ankle on top of an ottoman. I perched uncomfortably alongside her.

Nick handed us each a glass of wine and returned shortly after with a bowl of warm water and a clean cloth. He pulled up a chair in front of Liana and lifted up her skirt, exposing the length of her calf, her bare knee and half of her thigh, although he only needed to gain access to her ankle, which was already uncovered.

I took a gulp of my wine. It was cheap and red and tasted pretty nasty, but I needed the distraction. Anything to ease the discomfort of witnessing Liana and her new man fondling each other.

He ran the pads of his fingers around her ankle bone, circumnavigating each bump as if it were a mini universe until he knocked the protective film that covered her tattoo and she gasped.

‘Careful there, buddy,’ she said, through gritted teeth.

Her response only seemed to heighten his desire. A flush had spread over his cheeks and though it didn’t seem possible for his mouth to become any fuller, his lower lip hung very slightly open as if he’d already begun kissing her, at least in his imagination.

I glanced down at his trousers and immediately turned
away, startled by the size of the obvious bulge at his crotch. Nick seemed to be turned on by Liana’s discomfort and I was torn. We should have made a run for it, right then, and I knew that I was the responsible one of the two of us and that, as headstrong as Liana was, she would have come with me if I’d got up and left. She was reckless, but loyal to a fault.

But it didn’t seem like my business who Liana flirted with. She wasn’t drunk and clearly liked the guy.

‘Do you girls smoke?’ he asked.

I could tell that he wasn’t talking about cigarettes by the way that he rolled the ‘o’ in his mouth.

Liana grinned at him. ‘Why not? More fun than taking an aspirin.’

Nick gave her leg one last stroke and then stood up and rummaged in a nearby cabinet.

‘Just enough left for the three of us, I reckon,’ he said, tossing a small foil packet and a square of cigarette papers over to Liana. ‘You know how to roll?’

She nodded, and carefully dog-eared the sides of the foil open, exposing the flakes of dry green bud within. The smell was sweet, cloying and unmistakable. I had never actually smoked pot before, but I’d often caught a whiff of it on campus.

‘Another first time, my sweet, innocent Lily?’ she said to me, taking a liberal pinch of green in her fingers and sprinkling it over the paper. I nodded. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll show you how it’s done.’

‘No need to be smug about it,’ I answered. The wine was beginning to go to my head and I was feeling feistier than usual. Liana just laughed.

She lit the smoke and took a long drag, then gestured frantically for me to bring my face closer to hers.

‘Not as harsh if you take it from me,’ she mouthed, still holding the smoke in. She took hold of my shoulders gently and leaned forward, resting her lips against mine. I realised that she was blowing the smoke into my mouth rather than snogging me just in time to catch her exhalation.

‘Hold it,’ she gasped, quickly catching a breath as our mouths parted. Her lips were impossibly soft and tasted like wine, and I was surprised to find myself disappointed when she pulled away.

‘Ooh, I like that,’ said Nick, who had gone in search of more booze and returned just in time to watch our exchange. ‘My turn.’

He took the joint from Liana between his thumb and forefinger and sucked the end liberally, then bent down and clasped her chin, raising her face to his. His hand strayed down to her exposed throat and for a moment I panicked and prepared to lunge forward and push his arm away. Her neck seemed so alarmingly fragile clutched in his palm.

But instead of an expression of fright or fear, I watched in shock as she arched her back and lifted her mouth eagerly to meet his. He squeezed her neck tighter, holding her in place firmly as the smoke passed from his mouth to hers. He released her abruptly and as she sank back into the sofa, a look of blissful calm spread across her face.

The image of his hand around her neck and the way that she had responded to it replayed again and again in my mind and I bizarrely began to giggle.

‘I think I need the bathroom,’ I whispered, when I finally found my voice.

Nick pointed down the hall. ‘Second door,’ he said, without looking up. His gaze was fixed on Liana. Neither of them had responded to my uncontrolled laughter. It was as if they hadn’t noticed that I was there at all, as if they were finally seeing each other for the first time.

I rose unsteadily to my feet, unaware of what I’d just witnessed, and set off down the hall, leaning against the wall to find my way. My head spun as I tried to make sense of what was happening between Liana and Nick and the drug began to take over my senses.

In the mirror my face was red-eyed and distorted by the presence of the tattoo that decorated only one cheek. It was as if I had cut myself in half, and there were now two Lilys: the old, respectable me and the new rock ’n’ roll version. I looked like a clown and the bandage itched. I wanted to tear it off and scratch at my skin, but I forced myself to leave it, and just splashed some water on my face and returned to the living room.

Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
was drifting through the stereo and the sound affected me so intensely it could have been playing from beneath my skin. I slumped down onto the nearest piece of furniture, a bean bag lying just outside the hall, and relaxed into the soft leather cushion as wave after wave of music washed over me. Even if I had wanted to get up again, I was going to have trouble standing.

It took a few seconds for me to realise that the scene in front of me was real, and not a figment of my imagination come to life.

Nick was now shirtless. His jeans sat low on his hips, exposing the long V of his loin muscles, which were like a
marker pointing down to the bulge below. He was cut, though in a lean rather than bulky way, and each time he moved, his sinews rippled like water. The light smattering of hair on his chest blended uniformly into the golden-brown colour of his skin. His hands were covered by a pair of black latex gloves, just like the ones that Jonah had been wearing when he tattooed me.

Liana was totally naked, kneeling on the floor beneath him, with her wrists tied behind her back and secured to rope that was bound around each of her thighs, framing her arse. Her head and knees were both positioned on pillows, protecting her from the hard wooden floor. Considering the way that she had been restrained, the presence of the cushions seemed almost comical, and I thought that I might burst into fits of giggles again.

My mouth was dry and still burned from the inhalation of the smoke. I opened my mouth to speak, but could only manage a croak, which was immediately swallowed up by the music. At first, the vision of Liana tied up like that was simply puzzling, and by the time it occurred to me that Nick might have taken advantage of her, I had caught sight of her face, which clearly painted a different picture.

Her expression was ecstatic, her lips parted and her tongue occasionally darting out to wet her mouth. She was not struggling to get away, not making any effort to resist his advances, but rather kept shuffling backwards and opening her knees apart wider, encouraging him to enter her.

Nick seemed as hypnotised by Liana’s bound figure as I was. He stood and stared at her kneeling beneath him for an age, before finally dropping to his knees and testing her wetness with his gloved finger. His first digit slid into her
easily and he added another, and another, until only his thumb was visible, resting in the hollow of her arse.

Liana pushed against him, thrusting furiously backward despite the obvious discomfort of the ropes that were cutting into her wrists and thighs. Her sounds of pleasure were clearly audible over the loud music and were much more guttural than a regular moan. She was keening like an animal in a combination of pain and acute arousal, each rising in accordance with the other. The harder Nick pushed his hand inside her, the harder Liana moaned. He was grunting in unison with her, as if trying to orchestrate her responses in time with his own.

He reached his other arm forward and grabbed her long hair, pulling her head back as she screamed.

‘What are you?’ he cried.

‘I’m a slut,’ she replied.

‘Not quite.’

‘I’m your slut,’ she corrected.

‘That’s better. Now, come for me.’

He released her hair and she fell back down onto the cushion as Nick raised his palm into the air and brought it down onto her buttock with a loud spank. His hand then ran down between her legs, and I could tell by the redness that rushed up her cheeks and the sudden change in tempo of her moans that he must finally be playing with her clitoris.

The air in the room felt heavy, and was thick with the scent of sex blended with the slightly chemical smell of the latex gloves. I was intoxicated, not just by the wine, the marijuana and the ache in my still-throbbing tattoo, but also by the vision of my naked friend on all fours not more than a
couple of arms’ lengths away from me. I could have reached out and touched her, but I didn’t. The space between us felt like a chasm, the distance between one possibility and another.

Liana came at last, her final scream the loudest of them all, and as she did so I felt a rush inside me so strong that I thought I might pass out if I didn’t come to my own climax. I wanted Nick to abandon her and touch me instead, to bring me to the same strange sort of pleasure that he had brought her, but my mouth felt as though it was made of concrete and my limbs were wooden, unmovable.

He pulled the gloves from his hands with a snap, tossed them away and took Liana into his arms, cradling her against him the way that a parent comforts a sick child. She nestled into his chest in a fetal position as he stroked her hair and her face with a gentleness so absolute that I felt as though I had dreamed the roughness of his earlier behaviour.

They lay there for a long time, and I continued to rest in the bean bag and watch. The intimacy between them was somehow more intense than the sex had been, and after a while I began to feel that my presence was inappropriate. What, I worried, if the spell that seemed to have been cast over the two of them wore off and they saw my voyeurism as unwelcome and unwanted? That I was some kind of pervert? My guilt was ridiculous under the circumstances, I knew, but it was enough to rouse me from my stupor and to my feet.

I glanced at the clock. Hours had passed, though after we smoked the joint each minute had felt timeless. It was close to dawn.

Liana was still curled up in Nick’s arms and they were now lying down on the floor with their eyes closed and their heads resting on the cushions that had earlier supported Liana’s knees.

I took a blanket that was lying across the back of the sofa and carefully spread it over their bodies. Neither of them stirred.

Then I collected my purse and fled.

I didn’t see Liana for ten whole days following that evening. She didn’t come back to our flat for the duration, presumably staying with Nick, or maybe she had decided, after all, to pay her parents a visit.

Neither of us tried to contact the other on our phones. Possibly for the same reason: shame at what she had got herself involved in on her part, and a similar reluctance on mine to discuss what I had witnessed and my reactions to it.

I slept most of the next day and never left my room, subsisting on an old tin of biscuits and water from the sink tap, tossing and turning in my bed, clearing the wine and smoke from my system, and trying to rid myself of the images of Liana and Nick and the look on her face as he pleasured her.

I was already trying to formulate what I might say to her next time we saw each other, but none of it made sense and I changed my mind every quarter of an hour or so. Maybe I should just be silent. Pretend I hadn’t been there, seen nothing.

I didn’t answer the occasional knocks on my door until late afternoon when Neil finally called out my name.

I moaned in response, threw off the covers and tiptoed over to open the door, still in my underwear.

Neil’s first reaction was wide-eyed at seeing me so scantily dressed, but that was nothing like the look on his face when he looked up and caught sight of my teardrop tattoo.

I had carefully removed the dressing as soon as I got home, and washed away the mess that had gathered there. It was still red, but the teardrop was clearly visible beneath the light layer of the antiseptic cream that I had dabbed over it as per Jonah’s instructions.

Neil opened his mouth wide and just held it there for an eternity as I yawned and stretched in front of him, as if he couldn’t call up the right words from his subconscious.

I smiled and mimicked the open O of his fish face. ‘Anything you want to say?’ I asked him.

He closed is mouth and finally began to express himself.

‘What the … ?’ was all he managed, though his eyes were drawn to the mark on my face, transfixed by it.

‘It’s a tattoo, Neil. That’s all it is.’

He peered, scrunched his face.

‘Is it real? Or just temporary?’ he asked me.

‘It’s real. Not a fake. Very real.’

If he’d asked me why, I think I would have just sent him packing, but he didn’t. Although I was sure he would do at some later stage.

‘When?’ He was visibly attempting to figure out how it could have happened to me since he’d left us at the Komedia bar late the previous afternoon.

‘Yesterday, not long after you went home,’ I informed him calmly. ‘Liana also had one done. On her ankle.’

‘Her ankle?’ The idea of a teardrop on Liana’s ankle must have puzzled him.

‘A different one,’ I helped him out. ‘She wanted a butterfly.’