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I hadn’t seen Tamara again for the rest of the day, and that was actually fine with me. It was probably about as much as I could take keeping myself in control while thinking about her shuffling around trying to keep everything off show.
Then I stopped dead halfway across the abandoned tennis court. She was there.
Not Tamara, fucking Julia.
I wished I’d had enough warning to be able to hide those panties in my bag. I didn’t want Julia knowing I had anything going on with someone else.
A sick thought grabbed hold of me: did Julia already know? She might have seen us before, if she’d been watching. Julia had dropped out of school at sixteen and she didn’t have much else she needed to do with her time.
I wanted to just turn and run in the other direction. That was what I should do, according to the law. But I had to get to my car to get out of here at all.
So I stepped close enough that I could speak to her without shouting. Julia was leaning against the near side of my car, twisting her hair around one finger.
“Julia.” I had to try to get her attention before she would even look at me, even though she’d probably seen me coming ages ago. ‘Just Julia things,’ I used to say, back when I was still desperately trying to convince myself there was enough good in her.
I flinched when she met my eyes. I still thought she was pretty… even if that was only on the inside.
“Steven, you’re not supposed to be so close to me. I could have you put away for this.”
“You could,” I said. “But I’ve got to get to my car, so what the fuck am I going to do about it?”
She looked at me with those big eyes, revealing no emotion I could make sense of. In the later days, I’d started to go with the conclusion that there was no emotion in there that any reasonable human could pick out.
“Okay, so are you going to tell me what you’re here for?” I didn’t have time for this. It felt strange, actually: for the first time in a long time my main feeling during a confrontation with Julia was just… impatience.
If she noticed something was different about me, she didn’t let on. “Just wanted to see how you were going. I don’t need an invitation to do that, do I?”
“I fucking do.” As if she needed reminding, that cunning bitch. “And since that’s your doing, you should have the decency to not try to get me into more trouble.”
“We can end that any time you like though,” said Julia, as if this whole thing was just a phase in our relationship. As if there might be some way Steven and Julia as a couple could move past her dad knowing what I’d done to her.
“I know what you want already. I’m not saying it.”
That provoked the first flash of something like a real human feeling: she was annoyed. “You said you were sorry before, I don’t know why this is suddenly a big—”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Julia. Including, apparently, just how far you can hope to push it.” I was fucking pissed now, and unlike Julia I didn’t get off on not showing it. I needed to get that out somehow but I knew she wouldn’t let me get away with it.
She shook her head. “If that’s how you want to play this.”
She stepped away from my car and turned her back on me, walking like it didn’t prickle her at all to have me glaring at her. Well as if I could make her nervous now. If I threw so much as a too-nasty curse at her, she would wreck me.
And, unless I decided to go along with her plans for my future, that was all she had really been there to tell me.
I’d been pretty fucking stupid to think I could go messing around with Tamara and not have it blow up in my face. Maybe Julia didn’t know about her… but that wouldn’t last long, would it? Not if the two of us were messing around all over the place. Julia would see sooner or later… and what? She couldn’t do anything to Tamara.
Well, there was no guarantee of that, either. I used to think I was such a nobody I had no buttons to be pushed… and then Julia had taught me that anyone could be fucked up, with a good steady pressure.
“Fuck!” I punched my car, right where she’d been leaning. Sent so much pain through my hand I could no longer feel my fingers. Just a shitty throbbing ball of pain.
There was no hope for me. No escape.
Chapter Nineteen: Tamara
I felt so awkward sliding into Ryan’s car with my underwear missing.
Why had I just let him take it?
I’d been so caught up in what we’d just shared, I felt sexy and wicked, and that was exactly the sort of thing a woman like that would do, right?
