Willing Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

neck and arms, piercings in his nose and eyebrows. He looks her up and down. He’s gorgeous and knows it and exactly the type Becx always gets snarled up with, but Arabella has his measure.
    ‘You want to …’
    ‘Fuck off,’ says Arabella, placing an open palm on his T-shirt chest. ‘I’ve got Darius.’
    He looks her all the way down to her heels and sneers. ‘Looks like it.’
    He goes into the flat and Arabella follows him in. The place is done up nice with soft lighting and ethnic knick-knacks. It is warm and a red glow comes off the electric fire pulled up to the sofa. Both bars are on.
    Arra wouldn’t need much to get her and Darius a place like this. It is time to have that chat with her father. Time, too, to work on her music; for Darius to go back to his art.
    ‘Where’s the guitar?’ says Arabella, looking around the living room.
    ‘In our bedroom.’ Mitch smiles at her, pulling on a leather biker’s jacket. ‘I’m popping out.’
    ‘When’s Becx coming back?’
    He pauses by the door, ‘No point having a rummage.’ He taps his pocket. ‘It’s all here. Stay out the bedroom, girl, I’m warning you.’ His smile goes off like power, cut. He suddenly looks capable of the terrible. ‘Slag,’ he says, closing the door.
     
    Arabella heaves off her boots and flops onto the sofa. The sheet of heat from the electric fire hits her shins straight away, works its way down to her toes and up along her long, thin thighs. She closes her eyes, the mind slowing right down, memories drifting, to that sad house across town. She misses her mother, who was Imogen and beautiful; making the men smile but sometimes crying when she drank wine, which her father didn’t like. They would argue and her brother, Roddy, would run to his room, but Arabella would clutch on to Imogen’s skirts, sobbing, looking up at her father and wondering how she could love such a man. After, he would hold Arabella tight and they would cry together and she loved him again.
    From the bedroom, music pipes through. It is house but with a Latin flavour and the swooning trumpet loop ushers her to a deeper rest. She dreams that she cannot hear the sound of her own name in her mother’s mouth.
    The warmth of the fire seeps deeper into her flesh. She dreams, too, that she is standing at the gate, looking up, a small case in hand. Her father calls her a whore. ‘Nothing but a whore like your mother.’
    When she falters from sleep, Arabella has been crying and the music from the bedroom seems to get louder but Arabella keeps her eyes closed. She thinks, ‘If I open my eyes, all the changes will begin to happen.’ She hopes that Becx will come. The music goes up another notch and this puzzles Arabella. Moments later, she feels a shadow scroll across her.
    A tall figure looks down at her. He is tall and fair, with a straight nose – just like her – like Imogen, too. She scrunches her eyes tight shut and rolls away onto the floor.
    She waits for him to come at her, but he doesn’t. He just stands there. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Bella?’
    ‘Roddy?’ She sits up, peers up at him. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ She scoots back on her bottom, away from him, her back against the sofa. Even though he is her brother, whom she bullied when she was young, now she is afraid. He is one of them and a different kettle of fish when their father is not around.
    ‘I can come see my big sis if I want.’
    ‘I don’t want. So fuck off.’
    ‘He wants to see you, Bella.’
    ‘Father? Is it me, or my friend he wants?’
    ‘You have to settle this nonsense.’
    ‘I’m not afraid of you.’
    ‘But you can be.’
    Roddy seems altered tonight, wearing twisted jeans and a white T under a combat jacket. He’s put wax in his hair. ‘How did you get in here?’
     
    ‘He needs to know you won’t do anything stupid.’
    She looks her brother up and down and wishes she could feel different, says, ‘Don’t tell him you know I’m