The Education of Sebastian (34 page)

“I’ll help you.”

He climbed the fence easily, his strong arms pulling him up and over. He’d obviously done it many times before. He disappeared from sight briefly, then reappeared, balancing his torso on the fence as his arms reached down for me.

“Jump! I’ll pull you up!”

I took a deep breath and ran at the fence, jumping as high as I could. Sebastian grabbed my wrists and pulled me up but our combined momentum was too much, and we were pitched over the fence, crashing down onto the turf below.

The air was forced from my lungs and I lay there winded for several seconds. Sebastian struggled to sit up, which wasn’t easy as I’d landed mostly on him.

“Caro! Are you okay?”

I couldn’t answer.

“Caro!”

I gasped for air and started to giggle.

“Shit! You had me worried there for a minute. Seriously, are you okay?”

“Ow!” I sat up slowly, still slightly hysterical. “If I have to come in through your backyard again, I’m going to buy a ladder.”

Suddenly he pulled me to his chest and kissed me fiercely.

“What… what’s that for?” I gasped.

“You’re just so… brave!” he said, in awe.

I was pretty certain he had me confused with someone else.

“You are!” he insisted. “You always take that leap, whatever it is. God! I love that about you!”

I flushed at his unexpected praise: I really didn’t think it was justified, but I loved that he’d thought it, and loved it even more that he’d said it.

“Come on,” I whispered. “I want to make out in your bedroom.”

“Definitely up for that,” he agreed, laughing quietly.

He pulled me to my feet.

“Wait here a sec: I’ll make sure there’s no one around.”

I watched as he climbed onto a water barrel outside one of the rooms and levered himself in through a narrow window. I had the distinct impression that he was enjoying himself.

I stood alone in the darkness, knowing that I was being swept along by all the craziness; or maybe, finally, I’d just dove right in and stopped fighting it.

I saw a light go on upstairs and a moment later Sebastian was unlocking the back door.

“Coast’s clear,” he said grinning. “There’s no one in.”

From what I could see in the gloom, the Hunters’ kitchen was sleek and modern and well equipped. But everything had a pristine look about it, as if most of it had never been used. I remembered Sebastian saying that his mother never cooked. I could have gone to town in a kitchen like that – it was almost to a professional standard. I wondered why a woman, why anyone, would want to have a show-kitchen like that and not be tempted to use it. Maybe the answer was in the description: a show-kitchen; a kitchen for show – like everything else in Estelle Hunter’s life. Despite excessive opulence of the design, the room had a neglected air: the trash can was overflowing with pizza boxes and a surprisingly large number of empty wine bottles, beer cans and hard liquor bottles had been tossed haphazardly into the recycling box.

Sebastian towed me quickly down the hallway and up the stairs, eager to get me into his room. An unpleasant thought crossed my mind: how many times had he brought Brenda here, maybe to make out in his bedroom?

I tried to ignore it, but the idea was like a worm in my brain, wriggling, wriggling, burrowing away.

On the upper floor, we passed several empty rooms that looked like guest suites before Sebastian opened a door at the end of the corridor. From the layout of the house, I guessed that this room, his room, must overlook the back yard. The fact that his parents had put their son as far away from their own room as possible had worked out well for Sebastian – in the end.

He’d turned on his bedside light and drawn the curtains; I could feel the suppressed excitement coursing through him.

His bedroom was small, barely bigger than a box room, with a narrow, single bed pressed against one wall. Several old surfing posters were tacked to the only free wall space; the rest were covered by unmatched bookshelves, crammed with a mixture of CDs, paperbacks, a few hardcover books, with what looked like surfing trophies jammed in amongst them.

There was a large chest with one of the drawers partially open, and a couple of T-shirts hanging out.

My eyes were drawn back to the bed, currently strewn with a pair of jeans, shirts and the boardshorts he’d worn to the beach yesterday. The sheets and cover, however, were neatly folded, almost with military precision. I shivered as I imagined Donald ‘teaching’ his son how to do that.

Sebastian cleared away the clothes hurriedly, tossing them onto a small, wooden chair that was festooned with clothes already.

“It’s pretty small,” he said, sounding embarrassed.

“It’s very you,” I said, watching him throw his clothes on the chair. I turned to examine some of his books. I always thought you could learn a lot about a person by the kind of books they had on their shelves. David didn’t have any books; he only read the newspaper and occasionally medical journals.

Sebastian had a whole shelf of Conrad, several Alain Quatermain paperbacks, Jack London’s
The Road
, countless travel books and
The Red Horse
by Corti in translation caught my eye.

“Wait, what’s this?” I pulled out a heavy book, bound in cloth, and ran my fingers over the cover. I stared at him in disbelief. “You still have this?”

He nodded, his face serious.

I flicked through the pages depicting Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel... all the gruesome stories from the Brothers Grimm.

I turned to the frontispiece, knowing what I’d see,

To Sebastian, from Caroline

And a date, nine years in the past.

“You kept it.”

“Of course,” he said simply. “You gave it to me.”

I didn’t know what to feel, standing there with the evidence of his childhood in my hands, the grown man in front of me.

“It’s always been you, Caro.”

I continued to stare at the book, at my handwriting, evidence in black and white, of our innocent and childish friendship.

His voice became anxious.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Caro, not like that.”

But it did, to me at least. It had been a horrible mistake coming here.

“I think I’d better go now,” I said quietly.

“It’s just a book, Caro, just a damn book. Please don’t go!”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to look at him.

“Caro! Stop it!” he said, almost roughly. “I was a kid: we were friends. That’s all. You haven’t done anything wrong.” He shook me, making me grab onto his arms. “I’m younger than you: so what?! It doesn’t mean
anything
.”

Suddenly my knees gave way and I sat down on the bed hard. I felt sick. I hadn’t eaten anything since the omelet I’d made earlier, and that had ended up on the gravel of the country club’s parking lot.

“Caro?”

“Could I have a glass of water, please?” My voice was shaky.

“Sure! Sure!”

I heard him running down the stairs. I put my head down and tried to breathe deeply.

He was back a moment later with a large tumbler of cold water. I took the glass from him and drank a few sips gratefully.

“Are you okay?” he said anxiously.

“Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. It was just… a bit…”
Disturbing? Shocking? A devastating reminder?

My hands were still trembling and I was in danger of tipping the rest of the water onto his pillows. He took the glass from my hands and placed it on the tiny bedside table.

“Come and lie down with me,” he said, tugging gently on my hand. “Just lie with me. I’m not going to do anything you don’t want to do, you know that.”

He pulled me down and held me in his arms, softly stroking my hair. We lay there peacefully. Somewhere in the room I could hear a clock ticking: my life was passing with every second.

He continued to soothe me, kissing my hair, stroking my back and my arms, threading his long legs through mine.

“Do you want to hear a bedtime story?” he said, quiet humor in his voice.

“Not funny,” I muttered into his chest.

He laughed gently. “You’ll like this one. It starts with a girl and a boy… a motorcycle and a full tank of gas.”

“Very romantic.”

“Told you you’d like it.”

“Well, the boy says to the girl, ‘Hey, baby, let’s go see the world.’ And do you know what the girl says?”

“‘I’m washing my hair’?”

“Ha! No, not quite. She says, ‘Let’s go see Italy because the whole world starts there’.”

“She sounds like an idiot.”

“Hey! This is
my
bedtime story.”

“Okay, I’ll be quiet.”

“Is that even possible?”

I punched him lightly on the arm and he laughed.

“Okay, so the boy says, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s fly to Switzerland…’”

“On the motorcycle? Because I should explain to you…”

He put his hand over my mouth, so I kissed the palm and snuggled in a bit more.

“‘Let’s fly to Switzerland, drive over the Alps and then we’ll go to Milano and see
Il Trovatore
at La Scala’.”

“That’s the opera where everyone ends up dying.”

“You said you’d be quiet.”

“Sorry.”

“So, then they stay at this amazing hotel where they have breakfast in bed, served on silver plates…”

“And they scappati in the morning because they can’t pay the bill?”

“Yeah! Then they ride off on their trusty motorcycle and go to Verona, one of the most romantic cities in the world…”

“It’s not romantic: that’s where Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself to death.”

“Shh! Then they drive down the spine of Italy, stopping to eat pasta… and have
a lot
of sex…”

“This story is NC-17.”

“Yeah, that’s because it’s
my
bedtime story. Then they ride to Salerno and take this little mountain road to a tiny village called Capezzano Inferiore and they meet all these wonderful, crazy people who turn out to be cousins and aunts and uncles of the girl, because she’s kinda crazy, too…”

“And then what?”

“They live happily ever after.”

I sighed. “Okay, that was a pretty good story after all.”

“Told you you’d like it.”

I felt very comfortable lying in his arms and my attack of guilt and disgust was slowly passing.

He didn’t speak after that and neither did I. We drifted to sleep, wound around each other.

A loud crash woke me suddenly. I sat up, disoriented and panic-stricken in the darkened room.

“Oh, fuck. Mom’s home,” said Sebastian sullenly. “Are you okay, Caro? Don’t sweat it; she won’t come up here.”

My heart was pounding; it was so loud I felt certain he must be able to hear it knocking against my ribs.

“Are you sure? Is your door locked?”

“I haven’t got a lock – I put the chair up against it when I want some privacy.”

I couldn’t believe how casual he sounded. I almost leapt out of my skin when he reached out to stroke my hair.

“I’ll go see if she’s passed out,” he said, reading my mood.

I nodded, nervously twisting my wedding ring around my finger.

He frowned, then rolled off the bed and gently opened his bedroom door. He was gone for less than a minute while I waited anxiously.

“She’s out cold – like I said. No problem.”

He pulled the chair up against the door, letting all the clothes slide off into a heap, then wedged its wooden back tightly under the handle.

He turned slowly, staring down at me.

From the look on his face, I guessed he wanted to cash in the rain check on the make-out session I’d promised him. I definitely wasn’t on the same page; the adrenaline rush caused by Estelle’s noisy return had freaked me out.

I pulled my cellphone out of my jeans pocket and flipped it over to check the time: it was after 1
AM
.

“It’s late,” I whispered. “I should get back.”

“Stay. Please.”

He sat down next to me again and ran the tips of his fingers down my arm.

“We don’t know when we’ll have another night together,” he said persuasively, kissing my shoulder. “What difference does it make if you go now or in a few hours?”

When he didn’t meet any resistance, he pushed me gently back onto his bed and used his body to press me into the thin mattress. I could feel that he was already aroused. Boy, it didn’t take much. I still felt shaken, but at the same time it thrilled me that I could make him feel that way, make his body respond that way.

“Stay,” he whispered as he ran his tongue up my neck and tugged at my ear lobe with his teeth.

His right hand rode up under my T-shirt and cupped my breast, circling his thumb over my nipple. “Please stay.”

For that moment, his touch pushed away all my concerns, all the dull considerations of a rational mind and I wrapped my hands around his neck to pull him closer.

My tongue swept into his mouth and I raked my nails down his back, making him cry out.

“Ssh, you have to be quiet, tesoro,” I reminded him.

I tugged on the hem of his T-shirt and he immediately yanked it over his head, throwing it across the room. Mine soon followed and the cold metal of his pants button pressed into my belly making me shiver.

I lay on my side so he could unhook my bra; this time he didn’t fumble – within seconds it had joined my T-shirt on the growing heap. In fact, there wasn’t any floor space that
wasn’t
littered with clothes, his and mine.

He knelt up to watch me as I undid my zipper and shimmied out of my jeans and panties. He ran his hands down my body and then slid his fingers back up along my inner thighs. I closed my eyes and sighed deeply with pleasure and desire.

His body hovered over mine again and I enjoyed the rough feel of his denim against my bare flesh. I pulled his waistband towards me and slipped my hands inside, running my hands over his fine, sculpted ass. A tremor ran through him and he leaned down to kiss me again.

Hastily I unzipped his jeans, pushing them down over his hips. When he sat up to kick off his pants, I reached up to run the nail of my index finger from his chest to his stomach, watching the faint white mark I left behind quickly fade. His eyes fluttered closed and he sucked in a deep breath as his body quivered.