New Animal Ella Baxter (best books to read non fiction txt) 📖

wipe a streak of purple shimmer across each eyelid. I put a dark red lipstick on. I line my eyes white to look alive, a trick I’ve learned from work, and when I step back to look at myself, I think I look as good as most of my clients.

The toilet down the hall flushes and I hear Jack pad his way back to the study.

‘Jack!’ I yell, opening the bedroom door and sticking my head out. ‘I’m going to a party.’

‘Okay, honey. You want to take the car?’

‘No, Leo’s picking me up.’ I say his name like I’ve known him for years.

‘Okay, honey,’ Jack repeats as the study door closes.

CHAPTER TEN

I walk down the dark driveway with my arms straight out in front, feeling in front of me, in case I collide with anything. I stumble over the rocky dirt track like this for a few metres before remembering that Jack taught me how to see the path by looking up and using the stars as a guide. You can use the gap of sky between the two edges of the forest to show you where to walk. I drop my hands and continue on towards the road, moving further away from the light of the house. On my way to meet up with someone on a dark road in the middle of the bush, I feel profoundly alone. It’s the type of loneliness that someone in a one-man submarine at the bottom of the ocean might feel as they sink deeper away from everything that is familiar.

I reach the gate and stand there waiting for Leo to arrive. Right now, I’ve got a cold heart and a sadness that makes me want to cling to anything that might make me feel warm. Like a strange man taking off his jumper at the foot of my bed. Or, warmer still, a strange man letting me render his body full of holes that I can then squeeze into. A strange man letting me loosen my own grief and squash it into him: hot. I’ve thought about her one hundred times today, but maybe Leo will distract me.

Leo’s Commodore appears at the end of the road. As the car gets closer, he flicks on the high beams, and I am lit up like something nocturnal. I try to look friendly, but there’re speed stripes painted on the bonnet. This is exactly the sort of vehicle that women are warned to avoid getting into. As he pulls up, I glance back towards the house, thinking of my empty room, before opening the door and sliding into the passenger seat.

‘Well, well, well … Good evening!’ Leo says, leaning against the steering wheel and looking me up and down.

He has a 1950s short back and sides haircut and is wearing a black shirt tucked into black suit pants. He is showered and ironed, but you get the sense that something must have gone a little skew-whiff genetically; one parent was good-looking but clearly not both.

‘Evening,’ I say.

‘Sorry about the car. Usually I get it detailed once a week but I had rego due so …’

‘Not a worry,’ I say, as he peers into my lap while accelerating ahead.

‘No worries at all,’ I repeat, kicking a wad of scrunched-up paper that looks like the wrapping from a large order of fish and chips. Is it whiting that I’m smelling? Barramundi? Or just oil?

‘So, have you been to a club like this before?’ he asks, flicking his eyes between my hips and face.

We make eye contact briefly and I look away. He leans over and inhales, smelling me as I shift closer to the window and let out a small laugh. ‘No.’

‘I think you’ll like it. It might seem intimidating at first, but everyone is just there to be a freak and have fun.’ He hunches forward and drums on the steering wheel impatiently.

Leo drives fast down the narrow road, changing gears no less than three times, and I dig my right foot into the wrapper as if stepping on the brake pedal. I look around his car, trying to get a sense of who he is, but there are none of the traditional indicators. I make a mental note not to meet up with a man in a car again. Houses are far safer; you can tell immediately whether someone is a bit off from their bookshelf alone.

We hit the edge of town and Leo drives confidently through a red light. ‘Have you been tested recently—like an STI test?’

‘Last year,’ I lie.

‘Yeah, cool,’ he says, looking at me sideways. ‘Me too.’

I imagine silently unbuckling my seatbelt and tumbling out of the passenger door. I suddenly long to be in Jack’s house, lonely and painting my nails, while watching reruns of a sitcom with a canned laugh track. The first yawn of the night escapes, and as I try to clamp my jaw shut over it, my ears pop in response. In hindsight, I could have invited Bibi over. Jack probably wouldn’t have even noticed, and I wouldn’t have needed to leave the house. I am sure I could have asked the faceless Bibi to stand at the foot of my bed taking off his jumper, over and over, and he would have. The whole night could have been him threading back in and out, while I lay in bed, watching.

I fidget with the window switch, trying to lower it to let the smell of fish out, while getting my bearings on where we are exactly. We pass a road I vaguely recognise. I could probably walk back to Jack’s from here. If I’m still uncomfortable in five minutes, I will ask him to stop and I’ll get out and walk home.

‘Just so you know, I identify as a sadist,’ Leo says. ‘And obviously I’m a dom.’ He pauses. ‘And I really like new subs.’

‘Why new?’ I ask, while looking ahead for a spot where he could pull in to let me