One again, a thousand thanks to Blueeyedfrog for her collaboration and general awesomeness.
Reposted to iron out some inconsistencies concerning Anna
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10. C'est juste un truc qu'on fait.
Effy
I don't really get why everyone makes such a big deal about sex. I mean it's just a bodily function, right? Just like eating, breathing or having a shit. C'est juste un truc qu'on fait. But then again I don't really get people full stop. It's why I spend hours watching them, trying to work them out. Ever since I've been able to think, I know that I think differently to them. As a kid I used to wonder where I came from, and why I wasn't like the other little girls. I used to listen to them prattling on and wonder what value they found in all that noise. In my arrogant teens I came to accept that I was human, but I considered myself more evolved. I wasn't trapped by the petty concerns of the rest of my peers, and the things that they all strived for came easily for me. Way too easily. I knew I was blessed with looks that others found attractive, and I could use them to manipulate everyone around me, man and woman alike. The masses bought into my disguise, and I became worshipped and envied in equal measure. Even the ones that reviled me swung perilously in that balancing act between love and hate. And I played them, I played them all.
Except for him. Except for Freddie. I could see even from the very beginning that he was pure. That his love for me was so powerful a thing that to play with it would have destroyed him. And though I might not have had any desire to conform to the generally accepted idea of love, with him I could not be that intentionally cruel. So I resisted his gentle attempts to woo me and went with the easier option – a hell of a lot of fucking. . La promiscuité me convenait, mais cela ne voulait pas dire que j'étais incapable d'aimer. I loved him enough to keep him away from me. To my way of thinking it was an enormous gesture of respect, to love him as a friend instead of dragging him into sex that would mean nothing to me, but everything to him. Of course he didn't see it that way, and all through our teenage years I could feel the force of his pining for me like a pressure on the back of my neck. He thought the fact that I wouldn't sleep with him meant I didn't care for him, when in fact it meant that I cared for him more than any man I'd ever met.
Sex. It's where everyone draws the line. We were back chilling out at the barn the weekend after the festival and I hadn't seen Katie all week. I was making dinner in the kitchen, and Katie was leaning over the table reading the newspaper. And I was staring at her ass. And thinking about fucking her. I thought about fucking Katie a lot. À ce moment là je songeais à passer ma main sous sa jupe et à la prendre, comme ça, par derrière à la table même. But if I fucked Katie I'd be a whore and a heartbreaker. If I didn't, and I kept these filthy thoughts to myself, I would be good. And the world wants you to adhere to its vision of good. No matter that its vision is ridiculous to me. I could go out into the night and fuck some random, and it would have no impact on me at all. Its resonance would be gone the minute the act was done and would leave no part of itself lingering in my body or my soul. But those nights of silent intimacy in Katie's tent had dug themselves into me so deeply they had fused with the nucleus of every cell. No fluids were exchanged, no morally unacceptable body parts were touched, but I had given myself away more recklessly than in any one of my countless fucks. So you tell me which one has higher value in the currency of betrayal.
On the last night of the festival the others finally gave up on their childishly transparent attempts to marshal my behaviour and everyone went for the burn. Freddie ran into some mates and ended up stoned round a sodding campfire as usual. Cook disappeared into the night with a semi-naked blonde. Which left me and Katie, a shit load of Class A's and a one way ticket to sweet oblivion. They say you always revert to type, and true to form, I got so blissfully wankered I don't remember much of the night. What I do remember comes in the form of sensation rather than coherent thought. There was dancing, beautiful colours, the exquisite scent of her, the sound of laughter, the feel of bass beats rumbling through my stomach. And freedom. La liberté de toute obligation; et ça c'était la plus belle drogue au monde.
I woke up sweating, and my eyes peeled open to an intensity of brightness and colour I had almost forgotten existed. I let myself laugh out loud at the irony of the sun finally coming out on the day we were going to pack up and go home.
"That's a nice sound to wake up to," said Katie, and extended sibilant of her lisp sent tremors through my limbs.
We were alone in her tent. Both of us still dressed in last night's clothes, the covers kicked off in our sleep. She was lying on her back with her arm round my shoulders and I was snuggled right into her side. It would have been so easy just to slide myself on top of her and push one of my legs between her thighs. The desire to do just that flooded over me. I was standing on tiptoe on the edge of a cliff and the slightest of breezes would have sent me over, but at the very last moment I looked into her eloquent eyes, and she caught me and saved me. Once again, the intensity left me breathless. Elle savait à quel point on était près de capituler, et elle riait de nous. I propped myself up on one elbow, left my other hand draped lightly across her beautiful stomach, and gazed down at her. The world was upside down, because this was grand passion. This depth of understanding and the emotional intelligence to know that we were worth far more than a cheap shag that could destroy fucking everything. She was too precious, and I fucking adored her. For the second time in my life the absence of fucking became my greatest act of love.
"Sweet dreams?" I asked her.
"Yeah, well sweet," she smiled lazily.
"And what were you dreaming of?" I whispered seductively, knowing she would let me play without prejudice.
"I was dreaming of a fucking shower," she said aggressively. "I must smell worse than a heavy metal roadie right now."
Only Katie could make complaining into such a delightfully comedic artform, and she made me collapse into laughter once more.
"You still smell pretty sweet to me," I told her.
She shoved me on the shoulder and flipped me onto my back, bringing her upper torso to rest above mine.
"Then you are clearly still high," she asserted.
I watched her as her brain slipped through exactly the same thought processes as mine had moments earlier. How easy it would be just to slide her thigh between my own and then lean down and take me in a kiss. Part of me longed for her to do it, to take me helplessly past the point of self-control. To throw ourselves thoughtlessly into the chaos we could create. I knew there was an Effy that would love to revel in that darkness, and I knew she was still part of me, but Katie was much stronger than that. Her eyes travelled in a last longing sweep across my body.
"We're too good for this," she said.
"I know," I replied.
"So let's get out of this fucking tent before we suffocate or shag," she laughed.
Though clearly I am not too good for shameless acts of perving, or the obscene fantasies they engender. I pulled out a cigarette to try and calm my furious libido. At the rasp of metal and flint in the lighter, Katie turned round and looked at me over her shoulder. Her knowing smirk told me she knew exactly what I'd been doing, but thank the Lord she did not have the capacity to work out what I had been thinking. In that moment I secretly wished for the skeevy logic of religion. One of those ones where thinking about the deed is supposed to be as bad as doing the deed itself. If that were true I was already well on my way to hell and there would be no need for further abstinence. Perhaps that was why so many of those religious types failed to live up to the pressures of their morality. Just like me, they had no control over their thoughts, and with the sin already committed they might as well continue and be damned. But I had only my own ideas to control me, and I knew that though my thoughts might be a secret betrayal of my lover, the deed would hurt him more than I could bear.
"Do you think you could manage to not be quite so fucking sexy?" I said.
"I'm only reading the paper," she protested, but she knew the effect she was having on me, cause she removed the temptation of her beautiful bum, and went to sit down on the opposite side of the table. I distracted myself briefly with the stirring of pots, before turning back, thinking my compulsive window shopping might be a little safer now. But there was a problem. KFCP – The Katie Ford Cleavage Problem. There was always the Katie Ford Cleavage Problem. If there really was a war of the sexes, Katie's tits could be considered Weapons of Mass Destruction, and her chosen style of dress seldom kept those weapons hidden. The festival weather had deprived me of the sight of them for days, but back in the warmth of my kitchen they were revealed in all their glory as she leaned over the table reading. And trust me when I say absence does make the heart grow fonder.
"Putain de connerie de merde, fait chier," I muttered as a new wave of filthy ideas came flooding through my consciousness. I knew I was bad, but Katie's body drove me to new depths of imaginary depravity.
"Have you got a fire extinguisher in here?" she said, without looking up from her paper.
"Yeah, there's one in the corner by the veg rack," I replied. "Why?"
"Because if your eyes keep burning into them like that, I think my boobs are going to burst into flame," she said coolly.
"I wasn't," I protested feebly.
Katie raised her eyes from the paper.
"Really?" she said sceptically.
It was her eyes that broke me. Like they always do.
"Fuck," I said, thinking about sticking my head under the cold tap.
"You're having lust issues," said Katie. "I should go."
"No," I said almost immediately. "I'll deal. At least stay for dinner."
"Ok," she relented. "But maybe I should go up to the living room for a bit."
"What, so you can give the boys lust issues instead?" I said.
"Thomas is too much of a gentleman, Freddie only has eyes for you, and Cook's gone out to the off-licence," she laughed. "But thanks for the ego boost."
Dinner was easier with everyone sat round the table and the ridiculous banter flowing back and forth between my boys. It was great to have Thomas's measured calm back in the mix, and I spent a lot of time catching up with him over the meal. I loved it when we all sat down together, and despised the English traditions of just grabbing food in front of the TV or eating working lunches at your desk. The boys enjoyed it too, and it was an important part of the glue that bound us all together. Afterwards we all retired upstairs and drank a few more beers and hung together whilst doing our own thing. Freddie was playing on his X-box, whilst Thomas was chatting to his cousins in the Congo on the Internet. Katie was flipping through a copy of Vogue, that Cook had brought her back from the shop, whilst he was rolling spliffs and talking nonsense as usual. Ma belle famille.
"So ya really like looking at all them clothes and shit?" Cook asked her.
"I've been spending way too much time around hippies," she replied. "I need some glamour in my life."
"What could be more glamorous than spending time with us?" he grinned.
Katie just smiled condescendingly until Cook decided it was time to annoy someone else. He turned his attentions to Freddie, and I was free to watch Katie as she perused her magazine. I could never get a handle on those types of magazines. It always seemed to be a case of hunt the article in amongst the pages and pages of ads, and they very quickly bored me. But Katie seemed in the grip of a deep fascination as she turned the pages. She always seemed so self-assured, but I know she missed the lifestyle that her former job had given her, and there was a part of her that still seemed a little lost. It wasn't my world, and I would never quite understand it, but I was still gripped by the passion and intelligence with which she studied the pages. Besides, I could get excited by catalogues of explosives, so who was I to judge? She was so beautiful, curled up on my sofa with her legs tucked up underneath her and that look of happy concentration on her face. But her beauty was a bomb that was threatening to explode in all our faces. I looked around at the relaxed and happy atmosphere in the room and marvelled at how fragile it was, and how I could destroy it in an instant. All because other people made such a big deal out of sex.
I turned back to look at Katie just as she was turning another page. Her breath hitched and a look of alarm spread across her face. She looked away and I could tell she was swearing under her breath. When she returned her attention to the magazine, a look of infinite sadness crossed her features. It was almost more than I could bear. I wanted to rush over there and sweep her up in my arms and kiss away that sadness. I wanted to make sure she never felt that sad again. I wanted to be able to hold her every night the way I'd held her in the tent. I wanted to make love to her slowly and purge her of her pain. And that's when I realised I'd been fooling myself all along. I couldn't separate the love and the lust with Katie. Coucher avec elle ne serait jamais un acte purement physique et dénué de sens. Sex with Katie would be a very big deal indeed.
"Anybody want more beer?" I said, getting up from my armchair, to be greeted with a chorus of positive replies.
I ran downstairs but instead of getting the beer, I went straight to the freezer and grabbed a bottle of Absolut. I pulled off the cap and took a hefty swig straight from the bottle, not caring about the threat to my lips from the freezing glass. I slammed the bottle down and got myself a shot glass, pouring the temperature-thickened clear liquid and draining it straight away. The next thing in my mouth was a cigarette, and I pulled a few deep, searching drags, before refilling the shot glass, and downing it again. Fuck, I had to get a grip on this. I had to shut it down. Katie was too far in for me to abandon her completely. She was the best female friend I had ever had, but I couldn't allow things to stray into sexual territory any more. She was far too fucking dangerous. The no flirting rule was going to have to be more rigorously enforced. We had to move on from this, and fast.
By the time I had calmed myself enough to go back upstairs all traces of that terrible sadness had vanished from Katie's face, and she was laughing at some inane joke that Cook had made.
"What's up Effy?" he grinned when he saw me lurking in the doorway. "Did ya have to go and brew the fucking things?"
"Yeah whatever?" I said, handing out beers to everyone but him.
"Awww man, play nicely," he said, as I clinked bottles with Freds and chugged, leaving him still thirsty.
"Then do not question me, minion," I said, dangling the last bottle just out of his reach.
"Yes, Your Majesty," he said making mock bowing motions. "Yes, O Great One, O She Who Must Be Obeyed."
The room collapsed into hysterics at his antics, and the terrifying fragility of the group I had witnessed before was once again cloaked by a curtain of laughter. I finally let Cook have his beer, and he did a stupid victory dance before downing half the bottle in one.
"Here's a question for the floor, and everybody gets to play," he said, his eyes burning with mischief. "Who's the hottest girl you've ever shagged?"
"That's easy," laughed Freddie. "It's Effy."
"Oh shut up, you big boring pansy loser," howled Cook, ruffling his hair. "I want some juicy dirt. Come on everyone. Well not you obviously, Katie."
"Actually," she said with all the calm of a trained assassin with her finger on the trigger. "I have slept with a supermodel."
Every pair of eyes shot towards her as the room descended into stunned silence. Cook was the first one to break it.
"Ah ha ha, nice one, Katie," he said. "You almost had me going for a minute there."
"I'm serious," she said, fixing him with a superior stare.
"Yeah?" he said, still doubtful. "Which one?"
She picked up her copy of Vogue from where it lay on the coffee table in front of her, flicking through the pages until she found the right one.
"This one," she said, shoving the magazine into his face.
His eyes nearly popped right out of his head.
"Fuck me," he exclaimed, grabbing the publication from her hand. "You've seriously had sex with this girl?"
With his free hand he grabbed one of Katie's and stared at it reverently.
"These hands, have been on these tits?" he asked in wonder.
"They've been a lot more places than that," said Katie smugly.
"Let me see," I said, wondering who it was that had managed to send Cook into such stupefied wonder.
"Seriously Eff, this girl is superfit," he said, handing me the dishevelled magazine.
"Putain de merde!" I gasped as I looked down at the picture in front of me. "This was your girlfriend? Anna Markova was your girlfriend?"
"Anna Markova?" said Freddie.
The others were to busy drooling over Katie's former lover to notice the sting that laced his voice, but I picked up on it straight away, because I knew why it was there. I had always laughed at other people's celebrity crushes. It wasn't like you were ever going to know them and they were probably arseholes anyway. But Anna Markova was my Kryptonite, and every time I saw one of her images, I couldn't help but stare. Yes, I knew it was fashion and she had had a small army of stylists, and that the pictures were doctored to within an inch of their life, but lust for a manufactured image was still lust all the same. They always photographed the tall Russian beauty as icily superior and aloof, and in this picture she was standing on the top of some cliff, her long, straight, rich dark auburn hair blowing artfully in the wind, and her dangerous deep hazel eyes fucking the camera. Fucking the observer. Fucking me. And I could hear the disapproval in Freddie's voice, because he knew of my desires. Any time the subject of fanciable celebrities cropped up, hers would be the only name I'd give, and he knew exactly what I'd be thinking as I was staring at the page. Though they were few and far between these days, I knew he hated any reminders of the girl I was before, et mon désir pour d'autres femmes était quelque-chose qu'il était impatient d'oublier.
"Come on, Effy, sharing is caring, ya dirty bitch," laughed Cook, taking the magazine from me and showing it to Thomas.
"She is a very beautiful woman," said Thomas politely, nodding his head in gentle approval, but Cook's attention was still firmly rooted on me.
"Wait a minute, is this that Russian bird that you like?" he laughed, turning to Katie. "Effy fancies the fuck out of her."
"Really?" said Katie, with an amused little smile.
The temperature was rising. I had to diffuse this situation. I pulled off my most dismissive shrug.
"She's hot," I said casually as if it didn't really matter, but my blackboard was screaming with the screeching of chalk. I must not think about Katie and Anna together. I must not think about Katie and Anna together. I must not think about Katie and Anna together.
"Well I know what's going in my wank bank tonight," announced Cook triumphantly.
"Maudit Cook," I spat all too eagerly, before attempting a rescue. "You disgusting prick."
I saw him open his mouth to imply that I was hardly any better, but he caught the pleading look in my eye, and was smart enough to hold his tongue.
"So you didn't just get to fuck her, like? She was actually your girlfriend?" he asked Katie instead.
"Yeah," said Katie softly.
"What's she like?" he asked, intrigued.
"Surprisingly sweet," she replied. "And a lot more down to earth than her image suggests. I was in love with her."
I saw Freddie watching Katie as she spoke. I knew him so well I could almost see the inner working processes of his brain. Suddenly there wasn't just an elephant in the room, it was a Sapphic vampire elephant with fangs. Freddie liked to live in the comforting denial of the cosy home life he had constructed for us, and I know until this moment he hadn't given a second thought to the woman he had welcomed so warmly into our midst. But this new information had slapped him out of his complacency. Katie likes sex with girls. And Katie was gorgeous. Outwardly nothing would change, and he would certainly not say anything to her face, but I watched him mentally moving her from the compartment marked 'safe' to the compartment marked 'threat'.
"So how long were you together," asked Thomas.
"Two years," sighed Katie fondly.
"So why did you break up?" asked Cook.
"She was a ho," replied Katie, echoes of that grave sadness flickering across her brow. "I caught her cheating on me."
"I'd have forgiven her," Cook laughed. "Just to get that back in my bed."
"She broke my heart, Cook," said Katie, a touch of moisture gathering in her eye. "It was horrible. I thought we were special. We had something that was so fucking beautiful, and she destroyed it as if she didn't care at all. It just hurt too much to take her back. Besides, I'm not like you, Cookie. I have principles."
And with that sweet, noble Katie diffused her own bomb. I saw Freddie visibly relax, and even my own thoughts were no longer tainted with sinful desire. Instead I saw only a friend who had been hurt, and I went to her and instinctively wrapped my arms around her.
"Group hug," Thomas suggested, and both he and Cook were quick to rise to the task, coming and pressing their bodies closely against Katie's in a protective embrace. It took him a few more moments, but finally Freddie got up to join us.
"It's ok, Katiekins," said Cook warmly. "You've got us now."
I had to swallow hard to try to remove the lump in my throat that began to rise as I felt her body shake and she began to sob quietly into my chest. Oh my dear sweet, wonderful, beautiful Katie, you were right. You have been right all along. We were too good for this. In spite of all the contradictions she invoked in me, I was a better person when she was around. My goodness was not an artificial construct when I was with Katie. It was something she inspired in me.
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The language of the beautiful bomb….
1. C'est juste un truc qu'on fait. - It's just something that we do
2. . La promiscuité me convenait, mais cela ne voulait pas dire que j'étais incapable d'aimer. - Promiscuity suited me, but it did not mean I was incapable of love.
3. À ce moment là je songeais à passer ma main sous sa jupe et à la prendre, comme ça, par derrière à la table même. - Right then I was thinking about putting my hand up her skirt and taking her from behind at that very table.
4. La liberté de toute obligation; et ça c'était la plus belle drogue au monde. - Freedom from obligation, the most beautiful drug of all.
5. Elle savait à quel point on était près de capituler, et elle riait de nous. - She knew how close we were to weakness, and she was laughing at us
6. Putain de connerie de merde, fait chier - So my instructions to Froggie were 'Insert some colourful French swearing here' and she has done me proud. I think even KFF would be proud of this one.
7. Ma belle famille. - My beautiful family.
8. Coucher avec elle ne serait jamais un acte purement physique et dénué de sens. - Sex with her could never be a meaningless physical act.
9. Putain de merde! – more swearing!
10. et mon désir pour d'autres femmes était quelque-chose qu'il était impatient d'oublier. - and my desire for other women was something he was all too eager to forget.
11. Maudit Cook - Damn you, Cook
12. C'était quelque-chose qu'elle inspirait en moi. - It was something she inspired in me.