The Rose Petal Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

over an hour later and I don’t know what it is going on either here or there.
    I should not be here. I know that. I should be at home, but I can’t go home until I know he is OK. As long as they stay asleep, they’ll be OK. I so want to sleep. I so want to curl up and sleep and know this is not happening in my life.
    Sixteen years ago
    ‘What are you doing with
that
?’ he said to Scott. His sneer smeared his words, curled up his lip and caused his eyes to snake nastily over me.
    Scott and I were leaning against a wall, waiting for a bus into Wimbledon. I seemed to do nothing but wait for buses in my life outside of work, and when Scott was back from college that didn’t change.
    ‘What did you say?’ Scott asked conversationally, the barest hint of an edge to his voice.
    His brother repeated his scrutiny, the disgust of his gaze sliming over me once again. I didn’t glance away, as he expected. I wasn’t an idiot so I didn’t glare at him or narrow my eyes at him – didn’t want to aggravate him further – but I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me. ‘What. Are. You. Doing. With. That.’ he said again.
    Scott glared at his brother, a fox-faced man who wore the ravages of his life on his face: he’d been glassed or slashed on more than one occasion and as a result his left cheekbone was a patchwork of badly put together stitches, while the bottom of the right side of his jaw held a puckering of scarred skin. His right eyebrow was dissected in three places.
    Scott leaned over to me, looked into my eyes for a moment too brief for me to communicate anything, and he covered my lips with his. His kiss went on a fraction too long, his lips were a bit too insistent and firm against mine, for him to be just making a point to the man in front of us.
    ‘You mean my girlfriend?’ Scott replied as he straightened up, staring down his older sibling.
    The sneer on his brother’s face deepened, but he’d stopped staring at me, he was focusing on Scott. ‘What’s the matter, can’t get one of your own kind to suck your cock so you have to go slumming it?’ His brother was being quite restrained, I suspected, because there were people – also known as witnesses – at the bus stop. He wouldn’t think we were worth going back to prison for.
    ‘At least my own kind are humans,’ Scott replied. ‘Out of interest, which species of animal are you getting your kicks from nowadays?’
    His brother’s entire body became a rigid mass of anger, his face filling with puce-red rage. ‘Say that again,’ he snarled.
    ‘Why, too clever for you?’
    ‘You’re not too big for me to put you down, boy, don’t forget that.’
    ‘Yeah, funny how you stopped doing that the second I got big enough to hit back,’ Scott replied. His voice, which had been smoothed and shaped by his time in university, had taken a step back into his youth, to the part of London where we’d grown up.
    ‘Don’t push me, boy,’ his brother growled.
    ‘Who’s pushing?’
    ‘I see you with
that
again, you’re going to wish you’d never beenborn,’ his brother said. As punctuation to his threat, he snorted then spat at our feet.
    ‘Scared, that’s me,’ Scott replied.
    ‘You’ve been warned, boy. Just watch yourself.’ That last sentence was aimed at both of us before he marched away.
    I finally understood what it was about Scott. I reached out and took his hand in mine. I finally understood that it wasn’t everyone else that made him so cautious about going out with me, it was his family and what they might do to me.
    As soon as my flat door shut behind us, the world – his family – firmly on the other side, we reached for each other; moving at exactly the same time, our lips meeting at exactly the centre of the space between us. Our mouths kissed slowly as we undressed each other; nothing rushed or forced, just fluid, and simple; uncluttered by talk and plans and thoughts of what next.
    In the bed, we gently groaned as we became