Malcolm and Juliet Read Online Free PDF

seconds before the light faded. Brooding and intense, then suddenly light as air. Unpredictable, original, an impulsive perfectionist, and above all clever. For Charlotte had been convinced of this one thing as long as she could remember: she could only ever fall in love with a genius.
    She looked into the mirror and wondered again if it wasn’t possible that at last she had met just such a man. He had arrived unannounced, right here, inside this very house, and he had come with a camera. While the others at her party had been content with drink and drugs and bad jokes told too loudly, he had settled on a greater purpose. And now she couldn’t get him out of her mind, that look of concentration on his face as he squinted at his LCD screen, the way his tongue pointed out from the corner of his mouth as he had circled the fountain, wading through water, crashing over shrubbery, brushing aside onlookers, an eye only for the perfect, naked shot.
    She hadn’t spoken to him, although it had taken all her restraint to stay away. She had to be careful. If fate had delivered him it would expect her to treat the opportunity with respect. So Charlotte had kept her distance, and quietly collected her information. His name was Malcolm, which she had no great feelings about one way or the other. He was making a documentary on teenage sex, which threw her at first. The line between creativity and deviance was a fine one. But he was known for the purity of his intellectual endeavour, people said, and it was the steady hand of a film-maker she had seen direct the lens that night, not the shaky grip of a pervert.
    Charlotte sat down and an idea came to her, while on the walls her idols looked on approvingly. She would offer herself, as a subject for his documentary. It was the perfect scene to enter on. True, she didn’t actually have a first sexual experience, but she did know exactly how she would like it to be. It was all plotted out, perfect frame by perfect frame. All she had to do was convert it from the celluloid of her imagination. Yes, that would do it. She would paint him a picture so compelling, so breathtaking, so damned sexy, that he would have no choice but to open himself up to her, invite her in to the world of his camera, and all its twisted genius.
    Charlotte took her pen and held it poised above the formidably blank sheet of paper. Then she waited for the inspiration hovering in the room to fill her.
    My first sexual experience…

Secrets
    ‘Still on your sex thing then?’ Juliet asked. She had called in on the way home from school, the way she often did. Even in the heavy uniform her private college made her wear, designed to keep the physical form hidden from the world, she was compelling. Muscles twitched in her calves as she bounced on her toes before him, and she held her cream bun carefully between two fingers, as if afraid she might crush it.
    ‘It’s a Science thing actually,’ Malcolm reminded her.
    ‘Never said it wasn’t. So how’s it going? Did you get to Charlotte’s place? Great house eh?’
    ‘A bit tacky, I thought. There’s such a thing as too much money.’
    ‘Not in my life there isn’t,’ Juliet said, but Malcolm found it hard to take that too seriously.
    ‘It must be awful being poor,’ he joked.
    ‘Fucking desperate actually,’ Juliet told him, and the expression that slipped over her face, just for a moment, was so far from her usual Xena-like display of invincibility that Malcolm sat forward on the couch and felt an emotion he’d never before directed toward Juliet. Concern.
    ‘Is there something wrong?’
    Juliet sat down beside him and swallowed the last of her bun.
    ‘I need money. One thousand dollars. It’s sort of an emergency.’
    ‘So why don’t you ask your dad?’
    ‘Because then he’d find out what it was for.’
    ‘Oh.’ Malcolm knew better than to ask, but knowing isn’t everything. ‘What is it for?’
    ‘I can’t tell you.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ he