Selling the Drama by Theresa Smith Page B

wish she would?"
    He licked the side of her neck, shaking his
head again. "No."
    "Would you like me to read to you again
sometime?"
    He nibbled on her ear, his fingers plunging
deeper inside of her. "Yes."
    "Nobody needs to know that we do this, Toby.
It can stay between us. Something just for us."
    His only response was to trail his mouth
down to her chest, to take that piercing and what it was attached
to into his mouth, his tongue twirling around it, a fantasy made
real. She slipped her fingers into his hair, resting her face
against the silky strands, shifting slightly to open her legs
wider, barely suppressing a moan as he obliged her. "You're like
me, Toby," she whispered. "You like this. You understand, that with
the right person, this can be a complete experience. Something
more."
    It was an experience alright, one that he
might regret in the morning, but for now he was fixed in place,
powerless to do anything other than worship Charlotte and what she
was letting him do to her body.
    "Happy birthday, Toby." Her voice was as
soft as a caress.
    Best birthday ever. No question.
     
    Charlotte skipped school the next day. This
was not hard to get by her mother, she almost never took a day off
school, so Iris was unconcerned when Charlotte said she wasn't well
and wanted to stay home. She simply took her daughter at her word
and left for work. Charlotte lay in bed for an extra hour, getting
up long past nine. After potting around the house for a while,
eating toast, listening to the radio while washing the dishes, and
then hanging out the washing her mother had left in the machine,
Charlotte went back up to her room to lie down again. She changed
her mind though once she was at her doorway, entering Toby's room
instead, and lying down on his bed. Turning her face into his
pillow, she inhaled deeply. She lay like that for a long time,
inhaling the scent of him, wrapping herself in his sheets, sinking
into his bed, wishing for every moment that he was here with
her.
    He had pulled back from her again last
night. Fled the room, shutting himself away, from both her and what
he really wanted. Charlotte wished now she had never started
reading that book to him. What they had done together was the most
intense experience of her entire life, yet in the end, it had been
too much. She had scared him off again, misread the signals, and
driven him right back to that stupid fucking dishrag, Anne. It was
taking all of her self-control on a daily basis not to knock the
bitch to the ground, just so she could wipe that smug, pink lip
glossed smile, right off her stupid Barbie face. Charlotte buried
her face into her hands, tears stinging her eyes. She let out a
loud, shriek of frustration. He had ruined her. Completely ruined
her. She couldn't even so much as look at another guy anymore, not
after the way he had called her out as a slut. She would die with
her virginity grown back and the memory of his hands and lips on
her as the only thing to sustain her until it was all over.
    And maybe some of Anne's blood on her
hands.
    Charlotte had thought for a brief mad moment
that she might talk to her mother about it all. But Toby's fear of
her parents knowing about them held her back; he would be furious,
and also, if she were entirely honest with herself, she was not as
confident about her father's reaction as she was about her
mother's, and anything at all she told her mother was likely to be
almost immediately disclosed to her father. That was just the way
they were.
    She reached over and took up the book from
his bedside table, the one she had given him last night. He had
started reading it, a page bookmarked with a scrap of paper. She
ran her finger down the page, reading the part he had read up to.
On a whim, she got up and crossed over to his desk, searching out a
pen. On the scrap piece of paper she wrote some words:
    You have ruined me for anyone else.
    It was overly dramatic and not at all like
the sort of thing she would normally