All the Little Things by Sarah Lawton (the best books to read txt) 📕

have never felt so terrified. I don’t feel frightened now. I am trying to sort through many different emotions, but fear is not one of them. How I feel about Alex. How I feel about Molly. Alex and Molly. Molly and Alex. What they were doing, together, in that room. I let different images, scenarios, run through my head, to try and detach myself from them. I don’t want to think what I am thinking – I don’t want to think about a room with no windows. My phone buzzes insistently with messages from Molly but I ignore it. She has betrayed me, she has hurt me like Lexie hurt me. She wants what is mine.

Nothing else happened when I followed them. Alex disappeared, so I just ended up behind Molly as she was looking for him, trying to sniff him out like the bitch that she is. I tailed her back round to the school entrance, where she stood, waiting for me. I watched for a while, saw her texting me, saw her get cross that I wasn’t there for her at the exact moment she decided to remember me. She’s a hypocrite. Tells me he likes me, that I should like him, then goes after him. I am starting to think that I hate her.

When Mum leaves to go to the pub yet a-bloody-gain I quickly get changed, because I have a feeling that Alex isn’t going to be far away. Since the first night he came over – the day Tristan died, I suppose – we’ve been meeting up every day after school, or at night when Mum has gone to sleep. We haven’t really done anything except talk a lot and kiss, but I have decided that I want to do more. I don’t know for sure what he was doing with Molly in that room earlier, if he was reciprocating (because I have no doubt about what she was trying to do), but I want to put my mark on him before I deal with her. He’s mine.

I’m debating over lip gloss when there’s a knock at the door – I knew it – and I run down and open it to see Alex standing on the step, leaning casually against the frame, his dark hair falling into his eyes. He reaches up and sweeps it back, his eyes flicking over me as he steps into the room, gathering me up and kissing me hard. In between the fluttering in my stomach and the usual sudden smoothing out of anything I had in my brain, a niggling thought manages to remain and wonders why he always turns up after my mother has already left. Obviously I don’t want her to know about him, because she will make a fuss, but does he sit somewhere and watch the house? I feel excited that I’m worth stalking, and that surely he doesn’t want Molly instead of me, and my mood picks up even more when he lifts me easily and carries me into the front room, collapsing us both onto the sofa, laughing in a breathless way that doesn’t leave much room for anything else. I wrap my legs around him and pull him towards me as hard as I can manage, but he wriggles away from me as usual, and sits up, pulling my legs away and tucking them over his own so I’m lying back and he’s looking down at me. I’m not happy.

‘Don’t you want to?’ I ask him, trying to pout like Molly does.

‘Are you feeling all right? You look a bit weird.’

‘Alex! Answer the question. Don’t you want to? You know?’

‘Want to what?’

Jesus, he’s as bad as bloody Molly. I could strangle him!

‘Stop it. Have sex with me. I want to do it with you.’

‘Viv, you’re only fifteen. Aren’t you worried about getting in trouble?’

‘No, why would I? I don’t care about that stuff. I’m on the pill, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ My mum took me to the doctor’s about my horrible periods last year and they’d prescribed it. Convenient, now I thought of it. Surprising that my mother didn’t think of this. Unless she didn’t think of this because she thought no one would want to have sex with me, which is rude, but not beyond the realms of possibility. Always thinking I’m still the vulnerable little girl of her imagination.

‘I’m not worried about that.’ He leans back, eyeing me sideways. ‘But I think you care about what people think about you, don’t you?’

‘That’s a strange thing to say.’ He really is a complete weirdo sometimes.

‘Have you been in trouble before? Like, proper trouble?’

‘With police and stuff?’ I frown at the even-odder-than-usual turn of conversation.

‘Yeah.’

‘Why are you asking?’

‘I’m just interested. I want to know everything about you.’

He follows this up with leaning over me and kissing me, nuzzling into my neck and ear. I don’t like it. I want the fierce kisses, not soppy bullshit. I shrug, hunching my shoulders, forcing his face away, pushing him until he’s sitting up again. Why would he think a fifteen-year-old girl would ever have been in trouble with the police? I mean, obviously I have, which makes me unusual. Maybe he knows that. Maybe he is unusual too, which is why he’s asking. He knows we’re the same. I decide to touch on honesty.

‘When I was younger, once, but it wasn’t my fault. It was this other girl. Everything that happened was her fault. She ruined my life, but I don’t want to talk about it. I told you before, I was bullied.’

I don’t think he was very happy with me pushing him away, because suddenly his face seems to fold in on itself, his expression. His lips almost disappear into a white, pinched line and the tendons on his neck stand out. I lie very still and listen to the small sounds he is making as he breathes in slowly. He brings up his palms and scrubs at his face and