Stockholm Syndrome 3 - No Beginning, No End (20 page)

"That's more like it."
"You remember that time you made a video of yourself?" "Wanking in that pink corset dress."

"Mm. And you said it to make me jealous, I think, you said you weren't wearing underwear, you'd been out all night dancing with strangers and you weren't wearing underwear."

"I was really, I was just messing with you."

 

"I could have killed you. I was so mad, I nearly got in the car and drove back, but I kind of couldn't walk."

 

Pip starts laughing, muffling the sound in kisses against the back of Lindsay's neck. "Did it make you hard?"

"I was crippled."
"What about it?"

"Everything. You. You being shameless. The dress. Your waist looked tiny. You being... you're such a whore sometimes, you know?"

"Yeah."
"Looking up through your eyelashes like that."
"I know."

"It's all so calculated. Nothing about it was natural, it was you in a dress having a wank and doing everything you could think of to wind me up."

"Worked, too." "I wish it didn't. It's embarrassing."

"Why is it? It ain't embarrassing just thinking something's hot. You can be as sensible and respectable as you like through all the day and night but all that goes out the window when it's about sex. Just go with it. If it makes you hard and it ain't hurting no one who don't wanna get hurt, then it's a good thing. No drama. You need to just let go sometimes."

"I think I did," Lindsay says, still sounding sleepy and vaguely amused. A thrill dashes up Pip's spine like stroking fingers.

 

"Yeah, I ain't forgetting
that
one any time soon. You should let me do it again."

"Stop bringing the topic up when I'm drunk."
"No."
"I'll cane you." "You can fucking try." "Do you want the next question?" "Alright." "Have you ever had a threesome?"

"Kind of." The angle is strange and it's making his arms ache, so Pip slides his arms under Lindsay's instead and around his bare chest. "First time I got a blowie was off some stranger in a cab and the driver was watching. Olly says that's called being molested but I don't care, it made me come. I done it with other people in the room, too. I mean, not like proper doing it but sucking someone off, yeah, or getting sucked off. A few times. And I was in the same room with other people doing it. That's just what happens when you're a teenager at house parties, innit? Limited bed space for everyone who's copping off, you can't be selfish. But not a proper threesome like in porn. You?"

Lindsay winds his fingers in with Pip's. "No," he says after a moment.

 

"Is that the kind of no what actually means 'yes but I don't wanna tell you'?"

"Something like that."
"Were you wasted?"
"Sometimes."
"It happened more than once?"
"Maybe."
"How many?"
"I don't know."
"Roughly."
"No idea." "Yeah, but make a guess. Less than ten times?" "More."

That twisting, writhing curl of heat flares up again in Pip's stomach. There was a time when hearing anything like this would have driven him insane with jealous fury, but now he's intrigued and just a bit turned on.

"More than ten but less than... fifty?" "I really have no idea. Maybe more. I don't know."

"Fucking hell. And everyone thinks
I'm
the slaggy one." It's so obvious now. The thought was there before, but shadowy and unformed. It's getting clearer. "It was Ty, weren't it?" No answer means yes. "Who was the plus one, was it Danny?"

"Get stuffed."
"Was it Ellie?"
"No. He was so jealous."
"Prossies?"
"I don't want to talk about it."

"Well, then you should've
not
read the question." He kisses the back of Lindsay's shoulder gently. "Was you and him ever in love?"

"No. It wasn't like that. Just... sharing girls."
"Alright."
"God, that sounds horrible."
"What was I just saying? If it gets you off, it's good." "Don't you mind?"
"He's dead and they did it for pay. What's the point?" "Suppose." "What's the next question?" "Can I have a kiss?" "I think you made that up."

"Might have done." He turns round in Pip's arms, propping himself up with a hand on either side of the pillows and managing to look at him for about half a second until he bottles out and his gaze wavers off to rest somewhere above Pip's shoulder. "Well?"

"You can if you look at me."
"I just did."
"Properly."
"Why?"
"Why is it so awful just looking at me?"
"It just is."
"Do you love me?"
"Most of the time."
"So why can't you look at me?"
"I don't want to."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Lindsay."
"I'm drunk. I just told you things nobody else knows."

"Yeah, so if you're alright with telling me you and your best mate used to dee-pee fifty or more prossies how come you can't even look me in the eye?"
No answer. Lindsay starts kissing his neck instead, pulls Pip's tshirt up over his head, kisses down his body and over the tattooed name, unzips his jeans and peels them down and kisses him there as well. Fine. Pip curls his fingers around the bars in the bedstead, holding tight and watching the top of Lindsay's head as he sucks. He looks up once, hollowed cheeks and apologies in his eyes, but then his hair falls down in his face and hides him and Pip gives up.

"If you want you can bring a woman home and I can
try
," he says, helpless and desperate because being in love is easy but everything else is just stepping-stones of problems. "I got off with a girl before me and Olly got together cos I wanted to see if it'd work cos men were doing my head in but it was a disaster, we kissed for hours and that was nice and I got her bra off and that was nice but she took her jeans off and I couldn't do it. But if you want I'll try. Or you can just do it. It ain't cheating if I say it's alright, if I'm here when it happens."

"Shut up," Lindsay says harshly, replacing his wet mouth with his fast stroking hand so he can talk. "I don't want anybody else, don't be such a pathetic fucking martyr all the time."

"Do you love me?" Pip says again, and Lindsay slaps him hard on the side of the thigh.

"YES!" he yells, "YES, how many times do I have to say it? Yes I do and if you ever ask me again I'll break your neck." Pip tries to rub his stinging leg but Lindsay snatches his hand away and wraps Pip's fingers tightly around his own cock, still wet from Lindsay's mouth, and starts sliding his hand up and down to urge him on so he can move up the bed and finally look at him, direct and intense and barely even blinking until Pip lets out his held breath in a shuddering moan and comes all over himself.

"I'm just checking," he says quietly when he's got his breath back, feeling stupid all of a sudden – feeling small and useless just like he used to back when they first got together, when Lindsay was the most important thing in the world and his word was law.

"Why do you have to check every five seconds?"
"Because I don't know what you're doing with me."

"I'm not talking any more. We go round and round in circles and nothing ever gets resolved so what the fuck is the point?"

"Ain't it nice hearing it?" He starts wiping his sticky hand off on the sheet, slowly and methodically, finding creases to slip between his fingers and blot it all away. "I love you. Don't you like hearing it?"

"You don't have to say it all the time."
"Did you tell Ellie?"

"Yes," Lindsay says after a tiny hesitation, and it feels like a punch in the guts.

"Why did you tell her and you won't tell me?"
"Because she didn't
nag
."

"Olly told me. Olly looked me in the eye all the time and told me and never minded me telling him."

"So why don't you go back to him if he's that special?" "Why don't you go back to Canada?"

"Because. I. Love.
You
." He's speaking very slowly and carefully, and the words don't seem to match up with how aggravated he looks.

"You wanna hit me right now, don't you?" "You make me feel like that a lot." "What happens more, you liking me or you wanting to hit me?" "I can't tell any more. It all blends into one."

"I know I get on your nerves. I don't mean it, it's just what I'm like."

"I get it. I've known you long enough." "Just so long as you always like me more than you hate me." "You're so pathetic sometimes."

"I'm just saying." He unzips Lindsay's jeans and puts his hand there in the V between the two halves of denim, stroking gently. "Tell me what you want."

"I'm sick of talking."

 

"So tell me what you want so I know what to do, cos then I'll shut up, won't I?"

"Do what you want."
"Seriously?"
"Mm."

"Cos I'm quite tired, what I
really
want is a little sleep." He removes his hand suddenly and turns onto his side with his back to Lindsay, waiting and counting just four seconds before Lindsay's hand is on his wrist, squeezing hard enough to hurt and dragging him back. There's not a lot of talking after that.

Lindsay bins the question cards the next morning and Pip calls him an ungrateful cunt with no respect for Jesus, but then Lindsay cups Pip's face gently in both hands and gives him such a sweet kiss he forgets why he was annoyed.

15.

Things go wrong on New Year's Eve. He should have expected it, he thinks, covered in blood and shaking so much he presses the wrong buttons trying to call for an ambulance. It doesn't matter how happy, domestic, content,
sane
you feel, things always get fucked in the end.

It starts with an argument, as most things do.

"But I wanna spend midnight with
you
," Valentine says, looking at Lindsay's reflection in his dressing table mirror as he's drawing black lines under his eyes with a pencil. He's annoyingly sulky and completely delicious, in buckle boots and scarlet jeans and a ruffled white shirt. If he doesn't get that brattish look off his face...

Lindsay makes an actual effort to stop thinking like an oversexed teenager and shrugs into his shirt. "You can. You can come to Ronnie Scott's with us."

"I'd rather dip my face in acid."

 

"This ticket is still going spare."

"You're sick in the head. I wanna
party
, not sit there surrounded by rich wankers in dinner jackets fapping over some cunt on a trombone. Only tossers and twats and sad old men listen to jazz, it's the fucking worst crime ever committed in the history of humanity."

Lindsay discreetly checks his watch. Loads of time. Valentine always starts getting ready long before he needs to and then changes his mind a dozen times about what shoes he wants to wear or how dark his make-up should be. Well, this evening he's just going to have to make his mind up more quickly.

"You'd better take that back."

"As if I will! Jazz is for paedos and people who fuck their mums." He's almost laughing now, Lindsay can see it brimming up in him, trapped behind his tightly-clamped lips. Lindsay moves quickly so he won't crack up himself, hooking one arm around Valentine's neck and the other around his body and dragging him backwards off his stool. He yelps angrily and almost falls but Lindsay's holding him too tightly, fighting back against his squirming and trying to dodge the kicking heels.

"I warned you. Now shut up."
"Fuck off, Lindsay! You'll make me late!"
"It's ten past five."
"I ain't done my hair yet!"

"You shut your mouth when I tell you to," he hisses, twisting his hand in Valentine's hair and tugging hard, "or you'll have no hair left." "You fucking bastard, you wouldn't da-OH!"

But his chest is heaving under the press of Lindsay's arm and it wasn't an ow of pain, it was an oh of
please
. Lindsay moves his hand again, slowly this time but pulling Valentine's hair taut until he whimpers. It doesn't happen so often any more, this thing Valentine always used to call
playing
– rough, snarling, painful, hurting him when he's done nothing to deserve it just because it gets them both off – but he's still never said his words yet and meant them, not since Lindsay's birthday back in August when he was on the brink of tears and trying to escape.

"Tell me you love jazz and I'll stop."
"Oh. Oh you fucking cunt, that ain't fair."

"You chose the words." He drops his other arm and pulls Valentine round to face him with the hand fisted in his hair, slapping him hard across the cheek. "And mind your mouth, you filthy brat."

The bloom of red isn't just on the place Lindsay slapped, but creeping into Valentine's other cheek as well. He looks longingly at the scatter of pencils and nailpaint bottles on his dressing table for a moment like he's weighing up the pros and cons of each activity, then makes his choice. "What if I don't?" he says, all brazen defiance and infuriating smirk

Lindsay's just following all this along, making it up as he goes, trying to read Valentine and find out what he actually wants. It's grown since the beginning, this thing, it's turned epic and sprawling. When it started it was about Lindsay taking what he wanted, controlled enough to stop if the kid really asked him to but not controlled enough to stop
himself
. It was about a jigsaw of flaws fitting together, his need to be in charge of every tiny detail in his life to compensate for the years he felt like it was skidding away from him versus Valentine's need to please. It felt like a crazy balancing act and they'd each fallen off opposite sides of the beam; when Valentine felt useless and like he had no say in his own life, he just sat down and gave up and attached himself to the first person who could tell him what to do, right down to bedtimes and meals and the consequences that came when he didn't do as he was told. Everything's different now, and the thought's always lurking there at the back of Lindsay's mind: he never needed to be told what to do. He needed encouragement, independence, his friends, no matter how much he stamped his foot and insisted he wanted Lindsay and nothing and nobody else. Valentine needed Olly, and the thought makes him fucking sick. Before, hitting him when he played up and ordering him around happened everywhere, not just in the bedroom. It's a game now. It was a game before, sometimes, but now it's
only
a game and it feels wrong because...

"Sometimes I still want to hit you," Lindsay says, pressing the quiet words in a murmur of kisses down the long line of Valentine's neck. "I want you to do as you're told and come and go when I say and shut up when I tell you to and not talk to anybody but me." Valentine stops pretending to struggle against his grip and goes very still, but he's tilting his head for Lindsay's mouth. Lindsay bites him just where his neck starts to curve into his shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark and make Valentine choke out a desperate needy noise of pain.