Free Red Queen by Honey Brown Page B

‘No.’
    ‘Go and get them, or I’ll go through your room myself.’
    ‘She shouldn’t have to sleep with you. She doesn’t like you. What if she says no?’
    He laughed. ‘You really are green, aren’t you? Didn’t you ever progress beyond the eighteen-year-olds on campus? She doesn’t say no. Would you like me to tell you exactly how she says yes? It might give you some material for the shower.’
    I stumbled back further. Something in my face made him back off.
    ‘Look.’ He raised a hand. ‘I didn’t want this. See … she does this. Anyone coming in would have done this. I didn’t want her here and she shouldn’t be here. But you stuffed around, you let her in, you wanted her to stay, and this is what you get.’
    ‘No. No – this can’t be about the guitar. Please, this isn’t a lesson.’
    ‘Everything’s a lesson.’
    ‘No … I’m sorry, all right? I won’t play. I’ll watch and I won’t even have it outside with me. Jesus, don’t sleep with her just to screw me.’
    ‘Everything has a consequence. You should have seen this, been ready for this. She knew, and don’t think she didn’t – she knew standing in that hallway listening to us whose bed she’d end up in.’
    ‘Please …’
    He turned and flicked a dismissive hand over his shoulder. ‘You need to toughen up. It’s the only way. Put the condoms on my bed – I know you’ve got a couple of boxes.’
    I did what he said because I could not think what else to do. I stood in front of the drawers in my dark room stacking condom boxes into my arm because that was simply all I could do. I’d been told. My thoughts had stalled.
    I took them all, not even leaving one box, shutting the drawer and leaving the room neat behind me. In the hall I met Denny coming out from the shower; the steam for the bathroom preceded her. She was re-dressed in her old clothes and had a bundle of wet towels in her arms; she came to an abrupt halt at the sight of me. Grey light edged in through the open door of Rohan’s bedroom and illuminated her clean skin.
    ‘He made you shower first,’ I said.
    She didn’t respond.
    ‘You smell good.’
    ‘Shannon —’
    ‘Will this be the first time? Or have you had sex while I’ve been asleep in the mornings?’
    ‘Please understand —’
    ‘Oh I think I understand all right. I’m just interested if you’ve been having sex while I’ve been asleep.’
    She shook her head.
    ‘Is that no you haven’t or no you won’t tell me?’
    ‘It has to —’
    ‘Yeah, right.’ I opened my arms and dropped the boxes. ‘You’ll need these then. You might as well pick them up, while you’re down there.’
    I regretted it later, what I’d said, and how I’d walked away and left her to feel in the dark for the scattered boxes of Rohan’s preordained sex. I regretted it most with my back to the stonework while I listened with glazed eyes for sounds of them together. What pinched at me, what made me tip back my head in an effort to properly breathe, was the silence from Rohan’s room.
    Rohan’s bed, my mother and father’s bed, was old-fashioned, made of timber bolted together; it squeaked. I knew the pitch it obtained under the conditions of sex. My parents’ sex life had been clandestine only in conversation – at night anyone within earshot had a pretty good idea of the health of it. So what I waited for was a similar tune and pitch, and what destroyed me was the absolute nothing I heard. It had my mind racing. I realised that the repetitive nature of actual sex was not the thing to be feared; Rohan just fucking her – and I pictured it – was not the worst it could be. This was. Silence. What do you do in silence? What did he make her do in silence?
    My mind ran with it and clocked over image after image of them together in their privacy and every possible sex act that could produce this … nothing. And I mean nothing – not one creaking spring, not one muttered word, not a moan, certainly not