Charlotte Stein - Telling Tales

‘The ending’s smutty, OK? No no no.’

It’s more than smutty – it’s downright pornographic. But I don’t say that and I’m glad, because even something as tame as the actual word I used has made Wade touch his tongue up to one pointed incisor, and I can see Cameron sitting up even straighter, on the periphery of my vision.

Plus Kitty starts giggling like an idiot into my lap, spilling wine from the glass she should no longer be holding, while she’s sprawled all over me.

‘Great. Great, guys. Laugh it up.’

But Kitty goes one better than that.

‘I always knew you wanted to write porn,’ she says, in-between hilarious, hilarious laughter. ‘All those stories about ghosts that wanted to have sex with people but couldn’t.’

Oh, Lord .

‘I didn’t really want to write about porn, OK?’ I say, but then Wade has a go too.

‘I think you kind of did.’

And then even worse: ‘I do remember a lot of sex-ghosts.’ Everyone turns to look at Cameron immediately. Mainly because he just used the words sex-ghosts as a term, and he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time searching for it. He just blurts it out and then, when we all stare at him in amazement, he takes a massive swallow from his wine glass.

Definitely half-cut.

‘See. Even Harvard over there thinks so,’ Wade says, and of course Cameron rolls his eyes in reply. Sometimes Wade would call him Yale or Dartmouth, but the result was usually the same.

‘We went to the same university!’

‘Yeah. Yalevard.’

‘There’s no such place.’

‘Harvale, then.’

‘That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.’

Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.

Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.

It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.

‘But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,’ Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.

Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.

‘I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.’

‘Your stories were always like that, Allie,’ Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. ‘But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.’

OK, maybe not a traitor, exactly. Maybe more like a really evil partner in crime who drags you down with her, into disaster. In all my many dreams of how this reunion would end up going – minor explosions, someone killing someone else, nervous breakdowns – none of this ever featured in even the tiniest, remotest sense. I didn’t even imagine myself ending up in bed with Wade, really, because whenever I let myself want something it almost never happens.

Did I do the opposite of wanting this chat about sex stories?

‘Yeah, also guilty,’ Wade says, and I rack my brain trying to think of where they crammed all this boiling lust into tales about being a pig who could fly (Kitty) and a cyborg from the future (Wade).

Maybe the pigs and the cyborgs had a lot of sex I just don’t know about.

‘It’s OK, Cam, you don’t have to put your hand up for this one,’ Wade adds, and my brain automatically makes an odd little dinging noise. As though it’s decided to tally up all the little digs Wade’s going to get in about Cameron, for no apparent reason. ‘Everyone knows that you’re not a part of our dirty perverts club.’

Seriously. Were they like this before? Because that last part seems even meaner than the first bit, as though Wade would like nothing better than to slice Cameron right out of our group forever, for some end I can’t quite see.

I can’t see it so much that I’m compelled to say something in too big and too funny a voice, as though I can just smooth everything over by being ridiculous.

‘Hey, how do you know he’s not a dirty pervert? You seem really perverted to me, Cam, I swear.’

By being really ridiculous. Because in truth, there isn’t a person on Earth who seems less sexual than Cameron. I’m sure Mother Teresa was more adventurous with her lovers than Cameron is with his. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen him with someone I could loosely term a ‘lover’.

He probably has constant, epic sex with the robot girl he’s built.

Annnnddd… now I feel mean. Especially when he then says: ‘Thank you, Allie. Your faith in my perverted-ness is very…welcomed.’

He actually does seem heartened too. When I look at him he’s getting really close to smiling in this strange, almost-definitely-drunk way, and after a couple of long, weird moments have ticked by I find my mind rolling back and back to that word he used.

Welcomed . And the pause he had before it, as though he had a couple of other contenders before he settled on something so mundane. Though for the life of me, I can’t think what other word he could have slotted in there. What replaces welcomed, easily? Pleased? Sweet?

And then my brain throws up arousing like an insane hiccup, and I move along quickly.

‘OK, so, maybe I liked to occasionally write about sex-ghosts,’ I say, but it comes out less funny and more wounded than I intend. And Wade spots it, which is weird because he never used to. He never used to know when I’d taken a mortal hit and was down for the count.

‘Hey, what’s the big deal?’ he says, and there’s this creamy, smooth note of conciliation in his voice that sounds weird. Weird, but not exactly unwelcome. ‘We’re all grown up now. We can be perverts if we want to be.’

‘I didn’t care about being a pervert before, quite frankly,’ Kitty says.

Of course, my mind flicks to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers in the bed next to mine, in our tiny dorm room. Though I’ll admit, my mind sometimes goes to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers when I’m busy plunging the toilet or waiting for a kettle to boil, so it’s no real commentary on the things we’re talking about now.

‘So where are the stories, Kit? The dirty stories, about something other than magic balloons that get lost?’ Wade asks, and Kitty heys !

Then tries to hurl a cushion at him and fails, miserably.

‘I wrote loads more than kids stories, you doof. I wrote fabulous tales of rip-roaring sexual adventures the likes of which the world has never seen.’

I can well believe her. One of her postcards just had the word ‘five-way’ on it in big letters. Is five-way even a word? I’m not sure and largely felt too afraid to ask.

‘Yeah?’ Wade says.

And then he does something that makes my stomach kind of flip-flop. As though maybe I’d just thought this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.

It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with ‘one-way’ on it in big, fancy glitter letters.