Telling Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

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