She sits on me, naked, pinning my wrists back against the headboard. She laughs before she kisses me and shifts her weight so that my cock springs out from beneath her and rests against her thigh. Bringing her legs together, she wriggles, and my breathing becomes shallow.
‘I could just climb on,’ she says.
‘What?’ I strain to raise my head from the pillow to kiss her.
‘Nothing to stop me having my wicked way, is there?’
‘I think we should wait,’ I repeat.
‘It’s not every day you’ll have a girl sitting buck-naked on you, Rab, you know that?’
I nod, but then shake my head. Two days before, at the super-market with Gemma and Teagan, I’d looked at the condoms in their plastic security cases and thought about it, maybe… but we’d only kissed three times and I decided that there was no need… surely she wouldn’t want to… not yet, at least.
‘We could just cheat,’ Maddie says, and grins. ‘As long as you can control yourself.’
‘I just think that… without a condom…’
‘We could even just put him in a wee way, to check the fit?’
‘We should wait.’
I don’t think we should wait – I deeply, desperately, despairingly don’t – but we don’t have protection and we’ve only just started seeing each other. And she’s still seeing Ewan. This would be my first time – I haven’t asked if it would be hers – and I don’t want there to be cause for regret afterwards. There doesn’t need to be any great hurry, does there? We can be patient, surely.
‘It’s better to be safe, Maddie,’ I say.
She releases my wrists. ‘Two friends, both alike in dignity,’ she mutters.
‘What does that mean?’
There was no indication, earlier in the day, that it would play out this way. When she arrived at my house – still in her white shirt and school skirt – she showed little interest in anything other than the telly in the corner. There’s this Aussie soap actress – with blonde hair to her slender shoulders and a sly smile about her lips – who looks a bit like Maddie. Truth be told, you’d have to turn the brightness setting down and squint sideways to concede the resemblance, but an ex-boyfriend had told her it was uncanny and she’d been vicariously embroiled in the small-screen drama ever since. So, while I nuzzled at her neck and plucked distracted kisses from her lips, she watched this troubled twin going through a month of heartbreak in half an hour until a hasty engagement, in the last moments of the episode, that drew a sigh of satisfaction from Maddie. She turned to me, then, and kissed me as if I’d gone missing in a fire and been declared dead but then returned two weeks later to accuse the arsonist and propose to her in front of the ex-fiancé (also the arsonist, obviously) who’d jilted her at the altar.
‘Do you have something…’ she looked around the living room ‘… maybe not down here, maybe up in the bedroom…’ she leant in for another kiss ‘… something I could use to tie you up?’
Once we’d made our way to my attic bedroom, Maddie ignored the ties hung over the shirts in the wardrobe, the dressing gown cord hanging over the hook on the back of the door and the belts tucked away in my sock drawer. Instead, she guided me as I rolled off her tights, giggled as I tugged at her skirt until the zip gave way and grinned as my fumbling fingers fiddled with shirt buttons and bra strap.
Stretched out across my single bed, she looked up and said, ‘Now you.’
It took me only seconds to shed my clothes. My shirt went flying over to land on the desk in the corner, sending stacked sheets scattering, and my jeans were hook-kicked to drape over the chair beside. Socks and boxer shorts went up into the air like celebratory fireworks. I didn’t see where they landed.
‘Here,’ she whispered, taking my right hand and placing it against the stubbled firmness of her pelvis. We both clenched our breath between our teeth as my fingers went searching, then both let it out as the resistance gave way. I found the melting warmth and began beckoning her on…
It was only once she’d twisted her face away from my kisses, started this vowel-heavy panting noise – eeee – aaaa – oooo – and whispered, urgently, ‘Faster…’ only after she’d dragged her nails across the mattress and lifted the bedsheets, in fistfuls, from the neatly tucked corners. Only then did she turn me, by the hips, until I was lying on my back. She straddled me and lifted my hands, by the wrists, until I felt the rough wicker weave of the headboard against my knuckles.
‘Now, as I was saying, do you have something I can tie you up with?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘I like to be in control.’ She grinned. ‘Is that not OK with you?’
‘Just…’ I hesitated. ‘I think we should wait.’
Two days later, out walking Maddie’s dog Silo in the grounds of Gartnavel Hospital after school, I remember the butchered Shakespeare she used in those moments before she rolled away and got hurriedly dressed – ‘two friends, both alike in dignity’.
It’s a phone call from Ewan that brings it back to mind.
‘Don’t tell him I’m here,’ Maddie squeals, and darts behind a tree. Silo stays where he is, his lead taut. He’s a mongrel, no doubt about that, with a bit of bloodhound in the mix. His saggy jowls and long ears are ragged and trail in the muck. Maddie says he has sad eyes, but I reckon he just looks stoned. He stares up at me as I hold my phone out at the space where his owner used to be.
‘Ewan can’t see you,’ I say to the tree. ‘It’s a phone call.’
‘But if you can see me,’ it replies, ‘he might hear it in your voice.’
I shake my head, then answer the phone. There is a moment’s anxiety, just a tightening of nerves, because it’s possible that someone’s seen me out walking with Maddie. Ewan’s shouted splurge of words is about something else entirely, though. He’s managed to get me into a showcase competition for singer-songwriters, in a city centre club, which has a studio recording session as a prize for the winner. Better than that, even, the judge is a music manager from down in London.
Without telling me, Ewan took the rough cut of that song about Maddie, recorded on my laptop, and entered it. Along with my cover of ‘Masters of War’. He jazzed up my CV a bit as well, by putting down my weekly slot at Cesare’s café as something close to a residency and listing open-mic nights at the Queen Margaret Union as gigs. Still, that’s what a manager’s for, I guess.
‘Are you not bloody excited?’ Ewan screeches down the line.
I feel guilt, more than anything. ‘Of course I am, mate,’ I say. ‘But bricking it a bit, you know.’
‘Well, you’ve got a week to get over your nerves. Valium, smack, masturbation – whatever it takes – just make sure you’re loosey-goosey by next Thursday, OK?’
‘OK.’ I pause. ‘Listen, Ewan – thanks, mate. That’s awesome.’
‘No worries. I’ll call you later, you fucking superstar.’
I say goodbye and tuck the phone away in my jeans pocket. Then I take it back out again to make sure that the call has disconnected. It has. Maddie steps out from behind the tree, with an eyebrow arched. Silo has been looking up at me expectantly since the phone started ringing. They both seem to be waiting for me to speak.
‘He’s got me a gig,’ I say.
‘Thank fuck.’ Maddie lets out a wee giggle. ‘I was sure that was going to be about me… He didn’t mention me at all, then?’
I shake my head. ‘It’s a really good gig, with industry professionals.’
‘When is it?’ She hooks her arm around my waist. ‘Can I come?’
‘Next week,’ I say. ‘Thursday. But Ewan’ll be there.’
She nods, bites at her lower lip. ‘I’ll have a chat with him before then.’
We start walking again. To our right are the psychiatric wards of the hospital, to our left the train tracks leading to and from Hyndland station. The tarmac path weaves through the space between the two fences, fringed by patchy grass and sprouting weeds.
‘The other day,’ I say, carefully, ‘up at my house, you quoted the opening line to Romeo and Juliet. Well, you changed it, but you kind of quoted it at least…’
‘Mr McIntosh would be proud, eh?’ She grins.
‘Who’s Mr McIntosh?’
‘My drama teacher.’
‘Oh, right.’ I smile. Silo has gone wandering off. His retractable lead spools out through the silence. ‘What did you mean by it?’ I say.
‘What was it I said again?’ She frowns.
‘Two friends, both alike in dignity.’
‘Right.’ She tightens her grip on my waist. Her head nestles in at my shoulder and I have to angle my body to accommodate her. ‘It was just a joke, Rab, a throwaway comment.’
‘Was it about us not having sex?’
She nods. I feel the tip of her chin against my collarbone.
‘Because I wanted to wait,’ I say. ‘And Ewan…’
She nods again, then looks up at me. ‘Yes.’
‘You’ve got to know, Maddie,’ I say, looking off to the side towards the psychiatric ward, to where Silo’s lead disappears into a thick clump of bushes, ‘you’ve got to know that I really want to. That I will.’
‘Really?’
‘Like that.’ I try to snap my fingers, but they don’t really catch.
‘Why wouldn’t you, then?’
‘Because we didn’t have a condom.’
Yesterday I went round to the chemist on the corner and thickened my wallet with enough condoms to raise a throat-clearing from the elderly pharmacist behind the counter. The wallet bulges in my pocket now. I would gladly suggest to Maddie that we take advantage of the great outdoors, but the only likely location is the bushes, and I suspect that Silo is making use of them to create a smell worthy of his name.
‘That was the only reason, honestly?’ she says.
‘Yes.’ Guilt takes the conviction out of my voice. ‘Although, there is Ewan as well.’
‘Eunuch Ewan,’ Maddie says.
‘Can you not…’ I begin, drawing away from her. ‘He’s my best mate.’
‘Sorry.’ She squeezes back in towards me and raises her face for a kiss. ‘I’ll talk to him, I promise.’
I kiss her. At first we walk blindly on, but we stumble, slow and stop as the kiss deepens. ‘Are your mum and dad still out at work?’ she asks.
My dad is a curator down at the Hunterian Museum, and most days he gets so absorbed in his work that he only realises that it’s time to go home once the building is empty and echoing. My mum is a different matter – she watches the clock for five pm – but the solicitor’s office she works in is at least a fifteen-minute walk from the house.
Maddie takes my phone out of my pocket, purposely grazing her hand against my erection on the way down. She checks the time on the screen. ‘Four-fifteen,’ she says, handing me the phone.
There is a message from Gemma, probably about the gig. I ignore it. ‘We should have an hour or so,’ I say, smiling. ‘Good enough?’
‘Silo!’ Maddie shouts. ‘Heel, boy!’