Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [49]
‘I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.’
‘Is that for me?’ He waved a boot at the wreath.
She smiled. ‘Simon’s play starts in a couple of days. Are you going to cause any trouble?’
‘Not if you shag me right here, right now.’
She sighed. ‘You really go out of your way to prove you’re no good, don’t you?’
‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you, don’t fall for the bad boys?’
‘My mother’s dead, Kane.’
He winced, and lunged upright to snag a fag out of the packet on the grass beside the tomb.
‘Sorry.’
‘What?’ she put a hand to one ear. ‘Did I hear right? Kane Good For Nothing sawyer said sorry?’ she turned her back and walked through the graves to her mother’s memorial. He called after her.
‘No kiss, no promise. On your head be it.’ He lay on the tomb smoking and drinking for a while, watching her from across the churchyard.
They had started kissing in the classroom. He must have seen herdawdling in there after the rest of her year had filed out followedby the teacher, Caston, who he’d always hated. She’d known he
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would come; she’d seen him through the glass in the door as she sat listening to her boring biology lesson. Of course she’d known he would come. She was one of the cutest girls in the school, even if she did say so herself.
That was the first kiss. she was thirteen and well developed for her age, he was fourteen and wise beyond his years - at least she’d thought so at the time. A dark sort of wisdom, maybe a confused sort of wisdom. But that was just part of the attraction.
He’d picked up on her signals and now at last he was going to act on them.
Of course he was the bad boy, the one her mother would have turned white over if she’d known. He was weird, and scruffy, had an attitude, and his hair was unfashionably longer than that of any other boy in the school. He wasn’t clean. He didn’t care. His eyes were a little frightening in their intensity, and his face a little wolfish, but she liked him.
She’d snog him.
So she did.
Of course his hands started to go everywhere, and she had to sort that out, but it was only what she’d expected after all. His predictability in that respect disappointed her a little, but what the hell, he was a wild kisser.
Then he suggested they go out in the playing fields. Nobody would see them out there. They left the classroom flushed and excited, and she didn’t think they’d been spotted. It was home time and there was no reason to suspect big brother had guessed what was going to happen and would be looking for them.
He waited until she and Kane were under the old oak tree and lying on the grass, kissing as if their lives depended on it. Then he had come out of nowhere. And he’d brought his friends.
That was it. The end of her and Kane’s little... ‘thing’ - the only word she could think of to describe it. It had been so long ago.
Her brother had made her go home... alone. The next day she’d tried to speak to Kane, to find out what her brother had said, but he wasn’t having any of it, wasn’t having any of her.
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Seventeen years ago.
And now?
She reread her mother’s memorial, and time seemed so insubstantial. It felt like she could just walk around the corner, down the lane, into the playing field and under the oak, and he’d he lying there waiting for her - fourteen again, and almost innocent. She pictured him now, considered the lifestyle he had chosen for himself. There was no way back, even if she had never been quite able to forget that kiss. Her first.Her best.
She was nearly thirty, and had no one. Not for want of offers -
she knew she was beautiful. There was just something inside her forcing her to wait for the right one to come along.
And that right one would never be Kane.
He watched her lithe figure as she stood over her mother’s grave, and scratched his chin ruefully. I know you want me, Cassandra Girl, and let’s face it, there’s nothin’ wrong with that. You’re only female, after all. But well, a bloke’s got to play it cool. Don’t want folk thinking old Kane’s an easy lay, now do we? Don’t want to spoil his good