The House of Lost Secrets by Harris Anstey

Author:Harris, Anstey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2024-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Tris made a space for me in the crook of his arm and I lay against him in the moonlight. I remember that the top of the tiny mullioned window was open but that the room was thick with heat.

We were both trembling.

There was no preamble, no small talk or questions – Tristan leaned his face down and kissed me. His lips were dry with toothpaste but his tongue was wet and soft.

I kissed him back without a moment’s hesitation, without the smallest thought of Rachel. I had left her on the landing, put her away as I turned the doorknob with my hot hand, my guilty fingers. I ran the same fingers, my flat palms, across Tristan’s chest, mirroring – with far less experience than him – what he was doing with mine.

His hand worked down between the elastic of my pyjama bottoms and my skin, wriggled round my hip and hitched them towards my thighs.

I turned on to my side so that he could get them down.

And then, as suddenly as she’d vanished, Rachel came back. My wordless mantra of what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her became my mother – staring at me – saying be sure your sins will find you out.

I grabbed the side of my pyjama bottoms with my hand, moved my hips backwards a little to put space between us.

Tristan’s face was pressed against mine and his words were warm on my neck when he spoke. ‘It’s OK, Jo. Shhh.’ And his hand went back down on to my belly.

Rachel loomed back into the darkness of my imagination. ‘My brother isn’t a good person.’

‘We can’t do this, Tris. It’s all wrong.’

He kissed me again and I tried not to kiss him back.

‘I can’t.’ I reached a hand out of the bed, snapped on the little bedside lamp as if light could defuse this.

‘You know what a prick-tease is, don’t you?’ Tristan’s voice was bitter, but he kissed me after he spoke. It felt deliberate, as if he was giving me time to think about the words.

I closed my mouth but his tongue snaked between my lips and my body ached for him, ached to do the thing I’d dreamed of for so long. The thing I’d turned down from all the other boys I’d kissed, because none of them were him.

It was like drowning again.

He rolled me on to my back with one flat palm on my shoulder; the fingers of his other hand made me tingling and breathless.

‘No,’ I said. And this was the other kind of no. The one I was used to. The one that meant nothing because no one listened to it. Beside me, the photo of little-girl Rachel on Rosie’s nightstand beamed that gap-toothed smile, radiated innocence from the halo rays around her.

Tristan manoeuvred himself, tipped his weight from one hip to the other and on to, into me, and I said it once more. I said it in that quiet voice that no one took any notice of, the one from my house, from school, from my mother’s church.

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