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And more, I wished for so much more than that.
I was still rubbing my knees and I hadn’t even noticed. He pulled a face, and I stopped, but it was too late.
“Are you cold? We should leave, I didn’t realise you were getting a chill.”
“I’m not…” I lied. “I’m good. It’s not even cold.” A gust of wind caught my hair before the words had even left my lips.
“You need to watch it with the lying,” he chided, but his eyes were smiling. “You’ll grow a nose like Pinocchio.”
“I just… like it here… I don’t want to go yet…” I admitted. “Please…”
“Then take this.” He made to shrug his jacket off, but I put a hand on his arm.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Here. Let me.” His hands reached for my ankles and pulled them across his lap, and my tummy wriggled and tickled and my breath felt heavy in my throat. His thighs were warm through his trousers, but not as warm as his fingers as they rubbed my skin. I stared transfixed, watching him touching me, Mr Roberts actually touching me. And then my legs weren’t cold anymore. None of me was cold. And there were more tickles inside. Hot tickles that made me ache to slip my hand between my legs, where it feels so nice. Or his hand. The thought made my breath stop, made the world spin. Mr Roberts touching me. “Better?”
“Much… thanks.” In my head I saw Lizzie, open-mouthed, hands frantic as she urged me to seize the moment and be seductive. I wished I was her, wished I had her confidence, and her sexiness. But I was only me. I rested my weight on my hands, and tipped my shoulders back, displaying breasts I didn’t really have until I felt too shy and sat up again, but he didn’t seem to notice anyway. His gaze was on his hands and my skinny little goose-pimply legs. “I love it here. It’s nice… and it’s nice to talk… it’s nice to have someone… someone who understands…”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you talk? I mean, do you… have someone? Sorry, I shouldn’t… I just never asked before…” My heart thumped, as though the wrong answer would toss me into the wind, and I’d break into tiny slivers of glass.
He paused for a long time. A long, long time, but his hands didn’t stop moving. “No. Not anymore.”
Oh, the relief. It flooded me and fuelled me, and I wanted to pry, dig my way under his skin, until I found the soul of Mr Roberts. Of Mark. His fingers felt so good, and I felt so bad, daring to part my knees just a little, wishing wishing wishing he’d move his hand up my thigh. Wishing he’d put his fingers between my legs, where I was fluttery and wet and needy and it was all for him. Please touch me.
“And what about you, Helen? Do you have someone?”
I laughed. “No…” And then I checked myself. “I mean, I have had. A few times. But it’s over. Didn’t work out. Mutual decision, you know how it goes…”
I could tell he wanted to smile, I could see the little dips in his cheeks, but he didn’t. “I see. Yes, I know how it goes.”
“My boyfriends have always been vanilla, though.” I felt my face burn at my own stupid dorkiness.
“Vanilla?”
“Yeah… they were just… boys…”
“Boys?”
“Well, lads… idiots really… they didn’t, um, know. I didn’t tell them… about the things in my sketches…” I looked away from him, far away. Took a breath and a lungful of bravery. “I didn’t tell them about the things I want… the real things… the, um… the things I think about… with you…”
He swallowed, and his hands stopped moving, and I thought I felt something in his lap, something solid, against my calves, something hard and… and… I felt my pulse in my tummy, and I got a shiver, the kind of shiver that makes me draw the pictures in the first place. He shifted on the rock, pushed my legs towards his knees.
“We need to go,” he said. “I’d better get you home.”
My heart pounded, but I made myself keep talking. “Most of the time I’m sure I’m a freak, sure that you’d never understand… sure that it’s just me, and my crazy imagination, and that you’d never want the same things I want…” Now or never, and I was praying to the gods of this place, wherever we were, praying that the little flutter of knowing, deep inside me, was right, and that my soul did know Mr Roberts, even if my brain didn’t. “But then sometimes… we see with the same eyes… and I wonder…”
He gripped my ankles tight, and he stared at me, and his skin was paler than usual. “I can’t do this, Helen.” He lifted my feet and placed them back on the floor. “I’m your teacher, I need to stop.” And he sounded sad. No, not sad. Guilty. He sounded guilty.
