Eighty Days White Read Online Free Page B

all fours not more than acouple of arms’ lengths away from me. I could have reached out and touched her, but I didn’t. The space between us felt like a chasm, the distance between one possibility and another.
    Liana came at last, her final scream the loudest of them all, and as she did so I felt a rush inside me so strong that I thought I might pass out if I didn’t come to my own climax. I wanted Nick to abandon her and touch me instead, to bring me to the same strange sort of pleasure that he had brought her, but my mouth felt as though it was made of concrete and my limbs were wooden, unmovable.
    He pulled the gloves from his hands with a snap, tossed them away and took Liana into his arms, cradling her against him the way that a parent comforts a sick child. She nestled into his chest in a fetal position as he stroked her hair and her face with a gentleness so absolute that I felt as though I had dreamed the roughness of his earlier behaviour.
    They lay there for a long time, and I continued to rest in the bean bag and watch. The intimacy between them was somehow more intense than the sex had been, and after a while I began to feel that my presence was inappropriate. What, I worried, if the spell that seemed to have been cast over the two of them wore off and they saw my voyeurism as unwelcome and unwanted? That I was some kind of pervert? My guilt was ridiculous under the circumstances, I knew, but it was enough to rouse me from my stupor and to my feet.
    I glanced at the clock. Hours had passed, though after we smoked the joint each minute had felt timeless. It was close to dawn.
    Liana was still curled up in Nick’s arms and they were now lying down on the floor with their eyes closed and their heads resting on the cushions that had earlier supported Liana’s knees.
    I took a blanket that was lying across the back of the sofa and carefully spread it over their bodies. Neither of them stirred.
    Then I collected my purse and fled.
    I didn’t see Liana for ten whole days following that evening. She didn’t come back to our flat for the duration, presumably staying with Nick, or maybe she had decided, after all, to pay her parents a visit.
    Neither of us tried to contact the other on our phones. Possibly for the same reason: shame at what she had got herself involved in on her part, and a similar reluctance on mine to discuss what I had witnessed and my reactions to it.
    I slept most of the next day and never left my room, subsisting on an old tin of biscuits and water from the sink tap, tossing and turning in my bed, clearing the wine and smoke from my system, and trying to rid myself of the images of Liana and Nick and the look on her face as he pleasured her.
    I was already trying to formulate what I might say to her next time we saw each other, but none of it made sense and I changed my mind every quarter of an hour or so. Maybe I should just be silent. Pretend I hadn’t been there, seen nothing.
    I didn’t answer the occasional knocks on my door until late afternoon when Neil finally called out my name.
    I moaned in response, threw off the covers and tiptoed over to open the door, still in my underwear.
    Neil’s first reaction was wide-eyed at seeing me so scantily dressed, but that was nothing like the look on his face when he looked up and caught sight of my teardrop tattoo.
    I had carefully removed the dressing as soon as I got home, and washed away the mess that had gathered there. It was still red, but the teardrop was clearly visible beneath the light layer of the antiseptic cream that I had dabbed over it as per Jonah’s instructions.
    Neil opened his mouth wide and just held it there for an eternity as I yawned and stretched in front of him, as if he couldn’t call up the right words from his subconscious.
    I smiled and mimicked the open O of his fish face. ‘Anything you want to say?’ I asked him.
    He closed is mouth and finally began to express himself.
    ‘What the … ?’ was all he