Page 53 of We All Live Here
This time he pulls her gently toward him and he kisses her. It is a kiss filled with certainty, shot through with actual desire. She had forgotten the utter deliciousness of being desired and it smoothes out whatever wrinkles of discomfort were left in her and she feels her body turn fluid, molten. They kiss and his hands are on her, in her hair, holding her face, intertwining with her fingers, then sliding down her thigh. She surrenders to all of it, long-dormant cells in her body sparking to life, his weight, pleasingly solid, pinning her as she eases herself backward onto the bench. I can do this, she thinks, as he kisses her neck, making her shiver pleasurably, her hands pulling him to her. There is a brief flicker of anxiety when she remembers her underwear choices that morning—she’s pretty sure nothing more exotic than an old Marks & Spencer five-set cotton brief—but then she decides that Jensen is not a man who is likely to worry about the lack of expensive lingerie. He has gently undone the buttons on her shirt with one hand, his mouth not leaving hers, and when he touches her breast she finds herself arching toward his hand, in thrall to her own body, to his—
He abruptly lifts himself up on his elbows. “I need to ask. How drunk are you?”
She opens her eyes. “What? Not that drunk.”
“I mean, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Because we started with you being very clear that this wasn’t a date and—”
She puts her hand to the back of his neck, pulls him to her so that their faces are inches apart. She wants his lips back on hers. She says softly: “Do we have to have this conversation right now?”
“Well…yes?”
“It’s not very sexy.”
“Nor is waking up tomorrow feeling like you took advantage of someone. I like you, Lila. I know you’ve been through some stuff and I just…don’t want to be…more stuff.”
“You are absolutely not going to be stuff.” When he doesn’t look convinced, she reaches out with her right hand and fumbles in her bag for her phone. She finds voice memo and says, into the microphone, her eyes not leaving his: “This is Lila Kennedy, stating for the record that she is a grown woman of sound mind and slightly more infirm body, absolutely not being taken advantage of by Jensen…” She stops. “I don’t know your surname.”
“That’s disgraceful,” he says. “What kind of woman are you?”
“A woman who is trying to put your mind at rest, and have an excellent shag.”
“Well, now you’ve introduced a whole new pressure element.”
“Okay, a mediocre shag. Just a shag. Look, why are you making this so difficult?”
“Phillips. It’s Phillips.”
He is kissing her again and laughing at the same time, which is odd, but nice, and then he stops laughing and she relaxes, and then feels something quite, quite different from relaxation, and then, as he stops kissing her and starts moving his lips down her stomach, she drops her phone and stops thinking altogether.
Chapter Eighteen
Celie
The weirdest thing ever happened before school this morning. It made Celie laugh, and then it made her sad because it was the kind of thing that before everything got messy between them she would have called Meena straight away and told her and they would have laughed their heads off.
She was in the bathroom trying to cover up a really annoying spot on her chin that just wouldn’t go away—honestly, it might as well be one of those flashing lights you get above zebra crossings. She could actually feel it pulsing. She knew everyone was going to notice it, and that would probably end up being the thing they used to talk shit about her today—that she was growing an extra head or she had the plague. Celie had just put a second layer of concealer on it and sealed it with powder and was about to do her hair but Violet had nicked her good hairbrush—the onethat gets out tangles without you actually screaming and wanting to die—and she was about to run into Violet’s room to tell her she was going to kill her when she heard the front door shut. There was something weird about the silence that came after the sound—and Truant didn’t even bark—so she went a few steps down the stairs to see what was going on and there was Mum, standing in the doorway, staring at something Celie couldn’t see. Her hair was all messed up at the back and had dust in it—flour or sawdust or something—and she was pale and wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday when she went out in a hurry, but she was sort of rumpled, like she’d slept in them.
Celie stared at her for a minute because, to be honest, she had assumed Mum was in the other bathroom brushing her teeth or in the garden clearing up dog poo, or something. She hadn’t actually seen Mum, but that didn’t really count for anything first thing as she could be anywhere in the house, and yet as Celie stood there she realized Mum must have been somewhere else last night.
Then she took two more steps down and peered over the banister behind her to where Mum was looking at something, her face a bit stunned, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. And there was Bill, dressed with his tie and his shiny shoes, like he always is, even at seven fifteen in the morning, holding a wooden spoon with porridge still on it. And standing beside him was Gene, in a Joni Mitchell T-shirt and a pair of really scrubby boxer shorts and clutching a packet of cigarettes. They were both facing her and staring back at her and then, just when she opened her mouth to speak, they looked at each other, then back at her, and said, at exactly the same time in this really disapproving voice, “And where the hell do you think you’ve been?”
Chapter Nineteen
Lila
“That is absolutely hilarious. How old are you?”
Lila and Eleanor are in the gym changing room. They have just done a workout class—since she turned forty, Eleanor has been religious about staying in shape—and Lila has sweat in places she didn’t know could sweat (she thinks it may actually be coming out of her eyelids) and her T-shirt is basically two panda-eyes of wetness.
“Sixteen, apparently.” She is still finding it hard to breathe.
“And they actually told youoff?”
Lila rubs at her face with a towel. “Gene gave me this lecture about how it wasn’t smart just to disappear and there were all sorts of bad men out there and I had no idea because I hadn’t been out there and didn’t I even watch the news about what happened to women out there late at night on their own?”
“But they knew who you were with.”
“But Bill insisted they hadn’t known where I was because they had assumed Jensen had dropped me off as I wasn’t romantically involved with him, and then I hadn’t answered my phone. And then when I said I had been with Jensen, actually, Bill said sort of pompously that he valued his relationship with Jensen very much and he hoped I wouldn’t mess it up for him. And then he sniffed—thisreallyjudgmental sniff—and added that perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to sleep with someone with whom I had a working relationship.”
