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

He laughed, easing his body over mine. Surely not again? He dipped his head to kiss slowly along my collarbone, propping himself on his arms which were either side of my chest, framing me.

‘I don’t know, really. I’ve had a few girlfriends. Women seem to like me for some reason.’

I couldn’t think why.

‘I just never thought it was always as nice for women, you know? My first girlfriend didn’t seem to like anything, so I tried things until she did.’

‘What happened to her?’ I asked him, feeling suddenly short of breath as I felt his body start to stir again.

‘She went to uni, miles away,’ he murmured, mouth at my breasts, breath tickling. ‘Were you worried you had deflowered me, Rachel?’ He looked up at me with those wicked eyes and used his knee to move my legs apart, teasing me again. They were dark pools of colour in his face that I could have drowned in. Perhaps I did drown in them, the pleasure numbing everything else.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, thrusting suddenly, marvellously, gasping. ‘I’m thoroughly despoiled.’

Later, I made my way to the studio, leaving Alex asleep on my bed, after he’d fucked me again. I want to say he made love to me, but how could it have been love, what I was doing? I was using him to hurt myself, and it was as delicious as it was painful. Self-harm without the razor blade. I knew that if it were found out, I would be a pariah in the small judgemental village; I was risking my carefully crafted small life. Vivian would be furious, disgusted. She would quite possibly never speak to me again, or worse.

Better now to remember it as somehow brutal, animalistic. Better to forget the sweet trailing kisses that searched out every tender spot, the hands that stroked me as though I were clay to be moulded, perfected. The ocean eyes that held mine as my body shook, again and again, our hot breath fusing. It was a madness.

I had sat and watched him sleep for a while, traced him with my eyes, but it felt deeply wrong, like I didn’t deserve that vulnerable part of him. He looked even younger when he was asleep, and I felt as old as I have ever felt. So I pulled on a dress and nothing else and I left him there, and retreated to the garden.

The air sang with light, it burst through the trees and sparkled on the glass doors of my studio. Such a bright, light day, despite the fear and the grief and the guilt that swamped me. Surely it should have been dark, cold, grey. Surely the colours should have been muted. I tried to work, but I couldn’t find that place inside myself where it came from, that spark. Nothing came out right – how could I paint a prince who wasn’t the boy sleeping in my bed? Much less pair him with the girl I had pictured as being my daughter, before I had replaced her face with my own. I didn’t belong there any more, so I went back to the house.

Alex was sitting at the kitchen table, the kettle starting to boil. He looked up at me unsmilingly as I walked in, and pushed himself back on the chair. I took off my dress.

Abi called me on Wednesday, around lunchtime. She had finally convinced the police to take her seriously. Molly was a serial runaway – never longer than forty-eight hours – but there were records of it, and they’d done two full-scale searches, the whole village out in the woods, on the previous occasions, only for her to saunter home as if nothing had happened. The girl who cried wolf. But now they were listening, and they wanted to talk to Vivian.

I took the call from my bed, where Alex and I had ended up after he had appeared yet again, minutes after Vivian left for school. It was like her voice was in a bubble, and I was in another. Alex was kissing the insides of my thighs and running his hands up and down my stomach, down over my hips to my knees and back again. I wanted to grab his thick, silky hair and direct him to exactly where I wanted him, but there was this voice on the phone, telling me that the police wanted to speak to my daughter. Through the haze I remembered another voice, long ago, telling me the same thing – little red hands – but I didn’t want to think about that, either. I managed to tell her, to choke it out, that Vivian would be home around four and I hung up and I buried my fingers where I wanted them and roughly pulled Alex to where I wanted him, and everything dissolved around me.

‘What was that call about?’ Alex was nuzzling into my neck, brushing the tip of his nose through the hair above my ear, inhaling as he did. I cringed away, ticklish, but his arm was over me, holding me fast against him. He slung over a leg for good measure. ‘Rach?’

I took a breath, reluctant to break the spell we had created together with such horrible news. ‘One of my daughter’s friends has gone missing,’ I told him, watching his face change. ‘The police want to speak to her about it.’

‘Really? That sounds bad. Is Vivian worried?’ He moved back and propped himself on an elbow, looking down at me.

‘I… I haven’t really spoken to her about it…’

‘You haven’t spoken to her about it?’

I could hear something in his voice, concern maybe. Or contempt. But it was true, I had barely seen Vivian, let alone spoken to her about it.

‘Molly has a habit of pulling stunts like this.’ I felt guilty for saying it, but it was true.

‘Disappearing? Do you think Vivian knows what has happened to her?’

‘I’m sure nothing has happened to her, Alex. But the police are coming