Dying for Christmas Read Online Free Page A

him then. Just the most fleeting of glances. Enough to see the smile on his lips. Enough to know he knew there was no one looking for me.
    ‘I’ll just go and find it.’ I set out across the vast ocean of floorboards. ‘You put it somewhere behind here, didn’t you?’
    Though he remained on the sofa, I was aware of his eyes tracking me. When I arrived at the kitchen, with its half-wall leading to god knows where, I hesitated. I followed the partition around, coming out into a square, dark hallway with three closed doors leading off it.
    Two of them must be bedrooms, I guessed, with the other the bathroom. And yet, there’s always that fear, with unknown houses, that you might find something completely unexpected behind a closed door – a sauna or a darkroom or a temperature-controlled room for storing dead butterflies. One of my school friends once showed me her parents’ ‘sex dungeon’ in a windowless dressing room off their bedroom. I remember looking at the swing seat, covered in fake fur, and wondering how they washed it. If they washed it. The thing is, you never really know, when it comes to other people, what secret rooms they keep, and my hand, on the first doorknob, was unsteady, my breath too fast and too loud.
    It was a bathroom, that first room. Compact, compared to the open-plan vastness of the living areas, but still big enough for a free-standing claw-foot bath. The back wall of the bathroom was entirely mirrored, and my own reflection – pale and wild-eyed – shocked me.
    ‘You are lovely.’ He’d appeared without warning and his eyes in the mirror seemed to be defying me to contradict him. ‘You know, I feel so comfortable with you, although we’ve only just met. Do you feel that too? That we’ve known each other for years, rather than just hours?’
    I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak.
    He put out a hand and pulled me towards him. I watched us in the mirror. When he pressed his lips to mine, I closed my eyes automatically. It felt so completely different to Travis’ absent-minded peck. He took his lips away abruptly and I was taken aback to feel his tongue probing the inner corner of my closed eyelid like the tip of a damp sponge.
    He must have felt me stiffen because he said, ‘You don’t need to worry, you know, Jessica. I’m not about to take advantage of you. I don’t actually do sex.’
    That made me open my eyes.
    ‘I don’t like losing control.’
    Then he smiled as if he had just divulged an endearing character quirk, like being scared of spiders or only ever wearing navy. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said again. ‘I get my pleasure in other ways.’
    I felt the capillaries in my face explode in unison and didn’t need the mirror to know that my cheeks were flaming.
    ‘Gosh,’ I said, using that word for the first time in my life. ‘I can’t imagine. Do you knit? Or make exact-scale models of famous landmarks out of matchsticks?’
    ‘Funny girl, Jessica Gold.’
    Only now when he said my name, it no longer sounded like a caress.
    ‘Anyway,’ I said, glancing at my non-existent watch. ‘My bag? I’ve got to go.’
    ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he said, very softly. ‘We both know that’s not going to happen.’
    And there it was. The thing that had lurked beneath the perfect glass surface of our encounter. The thing I’d been trying not to face. The thing my mother always warned me against.
    And it was all my own fault.

Chapter Five
    When I was fourteen, a girl from my school disappeared. She was gone for two days and there was a massive fuss. Girls clung together in the corridors weeping, boys gathered in groups and muttered darkly about vigilante gangs. Her parents appeared on television with red-raw rings around their eyes, talking about how loved she was, how popular, how her smile could light up a room. Even after she was found shacked up with a twenty-six-year-old bus driver she described as her fiancé, a certain glamour still clung to her.
    For