Free Dead Lovely by Helen Fitzgerald Page B

recognised them.
    It was nice to see them like this, but after five minutes or so I gave Sarah long significant stares, which she didn’t seem to notice. I started getting a bit annoyed that they were hanging around for so long chattering away, and then, when Sarah asked how Robbie was, I nearly died. Why did she want to stuff it up for me when Matt and I were obviously well suited?
    To my shame, I clarified the Robbie comment to Matt with: ‘He’s my budgie. Mum had to take him to the vet.’
    After the long uncomfortable silence that followed I had to say something.
    ‘I’m off to bed.’ I turned to Matt. ‘You coming?’
    He seemed surprised, and then delighted as I took his hand and walked him towards my tent.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    Kyle watched as Krissie pulled Matt towards the tent. When Matt bent down to go in, she put her foot on his bum and kicked him inside, then jumped on top of him before she’d even zipped the tent flap three-quarters shut.
    Kyle looked at Sarah and raised his eyebrows. Krissie’s sexual aggressiveness was nothing new. She’d always been ‘proactive’, as she called it, and she put up a good feminist argument as to why this was okay. But having known and liked Krissie for so long he’d always wondered about the pathology of her particular combination of promiscuity and lack of emotional commitment to the men she slept with. It wasn’t as if she came from a dysfunctional family. Quite the opposite, in fact – since both her parents were delightful and very loving.

    Even more striking were her close friendships with men like him and Chas with whom she didn’t have a sexual relationship. She’d always been oblivious to how much Chas loved her, determinedly keeping her relationship with him playful but platonic. It seemed to Kyle that Krissie never entered into sexual relationships with men she actually liked.
    After raising her eyebrows back at him, Sarah unleashed some long overdue bitching. ‘I can’t believe her,’ she said.
    ‘What do you mean?’ asked Kyle.
    ‘Last week she shags a neighbour, leaving her baby alone in the house. Tonight she pretends Robbie doesn’t exist so she can screw the brains out of some other dope.’
    ‘She’s depressed,’ said Kyle, as Krissie’s naughty giggles ricocheted from the tent.
    ‘How can you defend her?’ asked Sarah, before going to their tent in a huff.
    Kyle did feel protective of Krissie. She was finding it hard to be a mum – what single mother wouldn’t find it hard? She was all alone, and had not completely anticipated the responsibilities of motherhood. Plus, she was a free spirit, a creative spirit with dreams and passion and excitement. Of course it was hard.
    He was getting pretty hard himself, Kyle noticed as he tried to stand up to go to the tent. He looked at his semi-erect penis and quickly sat back down.He’d been thinking about Krissie, and this was what had happened to him. Was he developing feelings for her? And why was he looking at the unzipped part of Krissie’s tent, where he could see a tiny piece of flesh, and feeling so discomfited? And why didn’t he stop looking? Why, instead of stopping, did he crawl along the ground, closer to the gap, commando-style, his semi now becoming fully detached, and park himself one foot from the zip so that he could see more bits of flesh moving in the darkness?
    Kyle was not a premature ejaculator. He had always been quite proud of his ‘yardage’, which was a mathematical equation he and Chas had developed that went like this:
    Y = t × l
    or:
    Yardage = total number of thrusts × length of erect penis.
    Anyway, Kyle’s was good. Good length, good number of thrusts per session = good yardage. (Chas calculated that his was even better, but Kyle guessed this was probably to do with anti-depressants which stopped him from coming, although he had no proof of this.)
    But by Loch Lomond that night something happened to Kyle that hadn’t happened since he was thirteen