All the Little Things Sarah Lawton (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

then she came up the stairs, quietly, every soft footstep hammering at me. Alex started to move his hips in small, agonising circles and resumed kissing me, nibbling at my neck, and I hated him with a sudden passion, paralysed by fear of discovery. Vivian went straight into the bathroom and I heard the shower hiss on, the sound of water hitting the floor muting when she got in. Alex heard it too and his slow hip movements turned into resounding, headboard banging thrusts and I orgasmed so intensely that I couldn’t breathe. He finished, kissed me once more, firmly with promise, and then slipped silently out of the bed, into his clothes and out of the house like he was a part of the night.

I wanted to get up and check on Vivian; she spent an awfully long time in the shower and I wondered if she’d fallen asleep in there, but eventually the water stopped and she padded into her room and I didn’t hear anything else. I didn’t even know what the time was because I had left my phone out in the studio, and hadn’t been out to get it.

I barely slept the rest of the night, imaging scenarios in which Vivian had come in to my room for some reason and caught me having sex with someone barely older than she was, or where Alex had bumped into her coming in the door, or any mixture of everything. I could feel my face burning with shame and the aftermath of a night of realising that all the needs and wants I’d suppressed for so long had never gone away; they were just waiting under the surface.

I got up when the dawn started to creep in, fingers of light reaching the bed, and I gave up on any pretence of sleep and went straight for coffee. I sat at the kitchen table drinking it as hot as I could bear it, scalding, and then I made another cup. I knew it would probably make me ill but I deserved to be ill. It felt like I sat there for hours, palms flat against the smooth wood. The table had come with the cottage and bore the marks of years. I loved it – I love all old things that are imbued with the past, which is funny considering how much I hate and fear my own. I traced for the thousandth time twin ruts in the wood that looked as if they had been made by a small child running an old metal toy car up and down, up and down. It had been sanded over and varnished again since then, but the scars remained. I’m not sure how long I sat there lost in that repetitive motion, in silence, thinking about scars.

Maybe it had been a mistake to close myself down to relationships for all those years, after Ciaran. It had been so intense with him, and now here I was with an equally unsuitable partner, having equally intense sex that I couldn’t stop thinking about, reliving it in detail. Not that I could let it happen again, I tried to tell myself: I mustn’t think any more of the slow drag of his fingers over flesh, the hidden promise of pleasure-pain in his gently biting teeth, his kiss.

I felt completely and utterly ashamed. I was aware of every place Alex had touched me, tender, used and even a little bruised on my shoulder where he must have nipped me. I pressed the sore spot, I dug my nail in. I deserved the pain.

I should have checked on Vivian.

London

Carol felt sick with anger when she found about what Vivian had done to Lexie. Lucy had been very good about it, unbelievably, astoundingly gracious in fact, but things weren’t the same any more. There hadn’t been any invites for tea after school in the weeks since, or a Friday afternoon glass of wine. She missed her friend, and couldn’t help a small part of her blaming her granddaughter. Why did she have to be so odd?

She found herself paying much closer attention to what Vivian was doing, and listing in her mind all the little things she had just dismissed over the years: that boy she had bitten, leaving a scar; the stolen phone (which had been found along with the missing handbag and sunglasses, stuffed behind Vivian’s wardrobe); locking that other boy in the cupboard and refusing to apologise or even admit it was her, even now. It was always someone else’s fault. It almost seemed like she didn’t understand how to be a child. She had tried and tried to speak to Rachel about it, but she refused to listen. Claimed it was Vivian attention-seeking, promised to cut back on work, nothing was wrong. She just wasn’t seeing.

There was no sign of Lucy in the playground at pick up. Vivian walked out of her classroom alone, her hands tucked behind the straps of her rucksack, head down. Carol felt a spurt of guilt at her earlier thoughts. She was just a little girl, and not a happy one. She needed support, not blame.

‘How was your day today?’ she asked, holding out the cereal bar she’d brought with her for a snack. Vivian looked at it and shook her head.

‘I’m not hungry.’ She was silent the rest of the way home, where she went straight up to her bedroom and shut the door.

Later Carol took a plate with a sandwich and some fruit up to her, moving lightly, and pushing open the door without knocking. Vivian, sitting at her mini writing desk, which was yet another guilt present from Rachel, startled. She pulled a book over onto the paper in front of her, the dark look on her face quickly smoothing away into its usual blankness.

‘What are you up to?’ said Carol, putting the plate down next to her. ‘What’s this—’ She moved a hand towards the paper underneath the book.

Vivian smacked her hand away.