Page 112 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

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Idon’t know if it’s all opera or justTosca, but it turns out to be exceedingly dull. The performers sing in Italian with an English translation overhead. They’re perpetually angry, even while singing. Rory watches avidly, and I find my gaze attached to him more than the performance, feasting on his handsome profile in the dark and itching to trace the soft swoop of his hair as it falls across his eyes.

In the end, Rory’s existence is so distracting that I lose the small thread of plot I’d picked up at the beginning. From the little I’m able to glean, it seems like there’s some big overblown drama, resulting in a terrible blackmail plot, and everyone storms around the stage in a state of constant, hand-wringing fury.

Passionate exclamations are followed by loud booming drums, and I find everything so ridiculous and overblown that I end up having to stifle my laughter. Rory slants a sidelong glance at me, an eyebrow raised in disapproval.

Laughter is my one small act of rebellion, because I also find the performance irritatingly sexist. The main female character is leered at, leched over, and held on some kind of pedestal by all the entitled men in her life. At one point, she seems to be bargained away to save a man. It’s so stupid. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch and, no offense to Puccini, but I don’t consider the songs modern-day bangers, either.

So it’s no wonder my attention begins to wander. When I glance around the hall once too often, Rory pinches my arm. I try not to huff, swinging my head back to the stage to watch the main character get assaulted yet again.

I don’t like opera. I don’t get it. They’re just shouting in each other’s faces under the guise of singing.

As though to console me, Rory’s hand lands on my thigh, a warm, welcome distraction. I subtly elevate my leg at an angle, trying to inch Rory’s hand higher and higher up my dress to engage me with some kind of teasing, sweet agony. When his hand lands at the top of my hip, Rory glances in confusion at its new position, and then up, with suspicion, toward my too-innocent face.

“Pay attention,” he chides, and then removes his hand from my leg entirely, as if in punishment. I want to weep.

Rory must sense my anguish, or maybe he just can’t resist, because his hand soon returns — not to the middle of my leg like before, but to the very top. His long fingers curl around my dress and over the inner curve of my thigh, his thumb stroking the crease of my hip in a steady rhythm.

Adrenaline pumps through my body, the heartbeat in my ears suddenly more riotous than the orchestra below. I don’t move a muscle. I sit, tense and unmoving, in my plush red seat, hyper-aware that anyone could be looking at us. At me.

Rory is the picture of perfect respectability, focused intently on the never-ending drama occurring on stage, while his hand lazily trails across my inner leg. And I sit, frozen in place and as stiff as a board, trying not to stare at the leisurely journey his hand makes across my body, trying not to have bug-out eyes or look like anything at all out of the ordinary is occurring in this none-too-private box.

I swallow, loud, in my throat — my one giveaway. A flicker of a smirk, devious as hell, appears on the corner of Rory’s mouth, but otherwise he looks the perfect little opera fanboy.

Slowly, incredibly slowly, his fingers slide into the soft juncture of my groin. They sink all the way down toward the seat, and without giving away any hint on his face, Rory’s thumb and little finger begin to stretch out, denting my inner thighs to spread my legs wider.

I obey in a heartbeat.

“Fuck,” I whimper, giving Rory access, even though this is crazy, this is so fucking risky and I can’t believe it’s happening inpublic. I feel a sudden desire to grab my purse and jacket and spread it out over my lap, to shield Rory’s casually exploring hand from the world. To hide.

But a larger part of me is enjoying this. Getting off on this. The subversiveness, the constant pound of my heart, the thrilling idea that we could be caught and shamed.

I gaze at Rory, wondering how he can remain so composed. He frowns at the characters on stage as though, as well as teasing me to distraction, he could, if prompted, simultaneously provide a lengthy political analysis on the plot ofTosca, like his head is on a different plane to his caressing hand. But the longer I watch him, the more I realize his eyes have taken on a glassy sheen and his breath is growing increasingly unsteady. It’s microscopic, but I’m used to studying every quirk in Rory’s behavior. I can predict the length of his next breath, I can tell the exact meaning of the glitter in his eyes. Only someone as hopelessly obsessed as I am could know, right now, that Rory Munro is as equally out of it as me.

It’s the most difficult thing in the world, sitting still. Rory’s fingers drag across my folds, a delicious friction that’s as agonizing as the pure, deliberate tease it is. With one single stroke, his touch fills me up everywhere, as though he’s enchanting my body with the mere whisper of his fingertips. Warmth spreads up my ribs while shivers seep down my spine. I’m a mess of sensation from the tiniest movements Rory deigns to offer me, and all I want to do is rock my tensed body to completion on the chair.

And always, always, there’s the constant fixation on politeness, that main lie, to present the idea that nothing strange is happening in this box, that the act is on stage and not here.

When Rory’s thumb hooks beneath the elastic of my pantyhose, my eyelids flutter closed in bliss; I snap them open as soon as I realize. He toys lazily with the stretched cotton of my exposed underwear, as though the caress of soft material against his skin pleases him, as though the fewer layers there are around me the better, before tugging it aside.

I hear him swallow beside me when he carefully brushes my curls, and it may be the sexiest noise he’s ever made. With parted lips, I watch the slow, graceful descent of his Adam’s apple as the pad of his thumb repeatedly grazes the tight coils of my hair.

The first touch of his fingers against my cunt has my thighs quivering beside him. My hips tilt upright, as though zapped by the soft warm caress, and I try, I try so achingly hard, to resemble an enraptured theatergoer.

But it’s too much. The easy way his hand trails down and across the most intimate part of me, in public, as though it’s his for the taking… My throat tightens, my lips clamp, my muscles bunch. My eyelids flutter — it’s an ache, an effort of endurance, to remain upright, when all the while Rory inches toward my entrance, when all I want is to offer myself up to him.

When he seeks out my opening, I inhale sharply and cast my gaze toward the expansive ceiling. Even with the lights darkened, it’s still wholly inviting, the perfect swirl of beauty and innocence. The gold glimmers. The cerulean sky is an ideal. The ceiling looks like heaven, and it’s a scene where I know my soul will soon be taking its place.

Rory works me diligently, as though this were a test for him to excel, as though every one of my bitten-back moans is an extra mark toward the highest grade. The blunt tip of his ring finger slowly probes me, until it’s not so much Rory probing as my body somehow claiming him. The sensation of Rory getting pulled into me knuckle by knuckle is too much. It’s all too much. This is fucking madness.

And still he manages to wear that look on his face, the one of polite, detached interest as he gazes down at the stage.

I am not gazing at the stage. It’s too distracting, the performers bustling about arguing with each other through the medium of forgettable song. Instead, I stare at the swoop of the thick drapes at the sides of the stage and imagine being nestled inside its curving lines, of being protected and safe and ensconced by velvet.

When Rory’s finger slides into me completely, his expression barely shifts. There’s not a hair out of place, whereas I’m a breathless, fluttery, panting mess beside him.

And then Rory begins to add another finger. I don’t know how much more I can take — already, with just one finger, I feel full to the brim — but like the greedy thing I am, I obligingly open my legs for him. A smirk beats at the corner of Rory’s mouth, and I try not to examine why it makes my stomach dive with nerves, I try not to wonder what he has planned for tonight.

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