‘Sorry? What?’ My head’s down, eyes to the pavement, avoiding the sky, when Max stops me on the street one away from Jacob’s, whatever he was saying blocked by the music in my earphones.
‘You’re actually doing it then?’ Max says for the second time, and he can’t be talking about what I think he’s talking about, so I just shrug, like, huh, and he literally puts into words the thing even Jacob was too polite to name. ‘Sleeping with him,’ he says, voice like an awkward laugh at some politically incorrect comedian. ‘With Jacob!’ And he shakes his head then, like Jacob’s only gone and pulled this off. ‘You know he didn’t actually have any photos other than that first Fingers one.’ He doesn’t even stumble over ‘Fingers’, like all this is just a normal part of everyone’s vocabulary now.
‘You what?’
‘He conned you, Izzy.’ Thing is, Max isn’t smug or vicious or mean, he’s just, like, you should have known – we all know what Jacob’s like, yeah.
And I try to say something, but Max’s words have torn into my heart and down into my stomach, my head spinning with the kaleidoscope of pictures Jacob would never have had if I hadn’t been so stupid. So naive. So me. It must be obvious too, cos Max lays a you-all-right hand on my shoulder, sits me down on a garden wall.
‘I can’t believe you fell for it. I mean, I know you were pissed at that party, Izzy, but were you honestly that out of it that you couldn’t remember what you’d done? Maybe ease up on the drink next time, yeah?’
What else can I say but ‘Yeah’?
‘You still going? To Jacob’s?’
‘What choice do I have?’
Max looks at me like it’s a given. ‘S’pose.’
‘He hasn’t, you know, shown you anything, has he?’
‘Nah, mate. Just told me what he’s got. Anyway, least you didn’t have to wait until you’re twenty-six! Silver linings.’
And I must look at him, like, you cannot be fucking serious, cos Max is all ‘Sorry, my bad, and I shouldn’t make a joke of it, but…’
‘You couldn’t have a word with him, could you?’
‘With Jacob?’ And he doesn’t have to say anything else cos the snuff of won’t make a blind bit of difference is clear enough to make his point. ‘I’m sorry, Izzy.’ And he sounds it too, looks like he’d do something if he could, but this is Jacob we’re talking about, right?
‘See you later then.’ I put my earphones back in but don’t bother pressing play because, you know what, it feels like all the music has gone.
It’s a bit like being at home, cos Jacob and I don’t talk, not beyond the ‘All right’, ‘You wanna drink?’, ‘’S OK’, ‘Come on’, ‘Won’t you just…’ and ‘Mmmm’. Difference is, here in his bedroom, the quiet isn’t burdened with not knowing. We’re the opposite of that cos there’s no question of what we’re here for, of why, less than twenty-four hours after my First Time, I’m back for a second go.
His laptop, rose gold and gleaming, is still open on his desk, streaming films that are different but pretty much the same as before, another heap of those bodies with their compressed wet flesh, mashed into each other like naked commuters on the rush-hour Tube, slick men casually taking from all those blank women unconvincingly up for the game.
Am I up for it? I don’t say if I’m not. I lie still, roll when I’m told and drift through Jacob’s pleasure, my left hand reaching for the thin strip of light on the floor, wishing the tug of it could pull me up and away to the moon.
It had seemed so reachable when I was a little kid, everything had, before Daniel swept in with his love and his brawn and his gravity.
I let go of the light and give into the weighty cloak of Jacob’s body and, you know what, there’s a small release in it, in the obviousness and simplicity of what he needs, in how easily he takes it. And even when I see how he’s not looking at me but at his laptop, this expression on his face that’s not quite pleasure not quite pain, even then it’s easy, sort of peaceful, I guess, because the moon isn’t an option, because the dark is just that, no glimmer or slither of anything bright.
But then Jacob’s grunts go from satisfaction to frustration, and his hands are a desperate grip at my shoulders to keep him going, his face hard, his dick soft, the condom snapped off and into the bin, and his voice slurs my name as he says I haven’t done enough, I’m not shaved enough or wet enough, and his eyes flit back to the screen where the guy’s monstrous penis stands as raging and red as fire.
It’s only then, when the lamp makes light on the barest, ugliest bits of me, that I feel the depth of my hollowness, wondering how I’ll ever fill it in.
‘I swear it hasn’t happened before,’ he says, and it’s funny, right, how that shame in his voice is the one and only thing we have in common.
I’m pulling my jeans up over my knees when Jacob tosses me my bag.
‘Tomorrow, Izzy. Finish what we started, yeah.’
And I nod because, honestly, I think maybe my words are as futile as the music, cos my fate is pretty much done.