Free Secret Smile by Nicci French

nothing
left?'
    'I'm just wondering what you'll think when
you get to know me,' said Nick.
    'I think I know,' I said. 'That's why I'm
going to such trouble to explain it to you.'
    'You don't need to explain anything to
me.'
    'But...'
    'Let's go home.'
     
     
    Afterwards we lay side by side, the room
dark except for the glow of the street lights around the curtain edges. I lay
with my head on Nick's chest, stroking his stomach softly down to the edge of
his soft pubic hair. His breathing was slow and regular, and I thought he might
be asleep, but then he spoke.
    'What did he say?'
    'What?' I said.
    'Brendan,' Nick said. 'What was it he
said? I mean, what did he really say?'
    I raised myself on an elbow and looked
down at his face.
    'You can ask me anything, you know,' I
said.
    'That's why I'm asking.'
    'I was going on to say that some things
aren't good to know. Sometimes you can feel contaminated by knowing something.'
    'But once you mentioned it, I had to know.
It's hard not to think about it. It can't be so bad.'
    I felt a chilliness on my skin, like I'd
once felt cold while suffering from a fever.
    'He said...' I drew a deep breath and said
it in a rush. 'He said he was thinking how he had come in my mouth. I felt — well,
I left the room and threw up. So now you know. Now you know the truth.'
    'Jesus,' he said. There was a silence, and
I waited. 'Did you tell anybody?'
    'I'm telling you.'
    'I mean, why didn't you tell someone?
They'd have thrown him straight out.'
    'Would they? I don't know. He might have
denied it. He might have said I'd misheard. He'd have thought of something. In
any case, I couldn't think clearly. I felt like I'd been punched in the face
and the stomach simultaneously. So was that worse than anything you'd
imagined?'
    'I don't know,' he said, and then we
didn't speak. I didn't fall asleep straight away, though, and I'm not sure if
he did. I murmured something to him, but he didn't reply and there was just the
sound of regular breathing. So I just lay there beside him looking at the
lights outside, the car headlights sweeping across the ceiling.
     
     
    When my mother walked into the bar, I
suddenly realized that it wasn't just Kerry who had changed. She looked lovely
and somehow younger than I was used to thinking of her. Her hair was brushed up
on to the top of her head and she was wearing a belted mac that swished as she
walked, dangling earrings, dark red lipstick. She smiled, raised a gloved hand
as she crossed the room. When she bent to kiss me, I smelt perfume, face
powder. Out of the blue, I remembered an episode from my childhood. We had gone
for a bike ride and I had struggled along way behind the others. I had tried as
hard as I possibly could, but they drew further and further away from me. They
would wait and I would catch up slowly, and then they would leave me behind
again as I pedalled stolidly through tears of rage and exhaustion. At the end
of the ride, my father finally took a look at my bike and saw that there was a
problem with the brake and it had been jammed down against one of the wheels
for the entire journey. Maybe it's too convenient a metaphor for times when
things just seem too hard: pedalling 'with the brake on. Now I wondered if my
mother had spent years with the brakes on and that now, with Kerry in love, she
was released and pedalling free.
    'I've got a bottle of white for us,' I
said.
    'I really shouldn't,' she said, which in
mother-speak meant thank you very much.
    'Don't worry,' I said. 'There's a special
deal here. You order two glasses and they give you the bottle. You know that I
can never resist a bargain like that.'
    I filled her glass and she clinked it
against mine, inevitably toasting Kerry and Brendan. I tried not to mind; tried
to banish inside me the five-year-old Miranda who wanted to be toasted and made
a fuss of.
    'Kerry's told me about your help with the
flat-hunting and letting them stay and everything,' she said. 'I know she's not
good at