Unfurl: Chapter 18

Oh no.

I take a step away from my phone. From the WhatsApp message from Rafe on my lock screen.

I am indeed at home. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see him.

Except I do.

I leave the message as unread and scurry into the bathroom where I brush my teeth, comb my fingers through my hair and spray my perfume into the air before walking through the cloud of scent so I smell good but not like I’ve just squirted perfume all over myself.

Only then do I reply with studied casualness.

I’m glad I haven’t put the cod in the oven yet. I don’t want the place smelling fishy.

I survey my parents’ kitchen. It’s immaculate and stuffed full of industrial-grade stainless steel appliances and fixtures. Not only does Mummy love to cook, but she and Daddy entertain so often that it helps to have a kitchen the caterers can take full advantage of.

I’m just uncorking a bottle of Sancerre—I’m going to need wine for this—when the doorbell goes.

I swallow.

When I open the door, Rafe is standing there looking just as hot and delicious and perfect and sexy and wicked and dangerous as he did last night in the bar.

And, presumably, as he did after the bar, in that room, when his mouth and hands were on me.

He’s in his usual weekday uniform of white shirt, open-necked and so well pressed that you’d never guess he’d been wearing it all day, and trousers that I know will give me a fabulous view of that perfect bum if he walks in front of me. His hair is a little messed, and there’s a light of concern shining in those brown eyes of his.

Concern that makes me feel a little special and a little pissed off, because I don’t want him treating me like some fragile virginal charity case.

‘Come in,’ I say. Before he can attempt anything awkward, like kissing me, I turn to lead the way through to the kitchen. I may or may not be secretly pleased that I’m only wearing short shorts and a cotton vest over my sports bra. Maybe the sight of my bare arms and legs and chest will remind him that last night he was quite into the fragile virginal charity case, actually.

Sure enough, when I turn around, his eyes are firmly on my backside, and it feels like a tiny win.

‘Wine?’ I ask, trying not to smirk. I hold up the bottle. ‘I was just about to have a glass.’

He hesitates. ‘Er, sure. Thank you.’

As I pour, he says gruffly, ‘I wanted to check in. After last night. Wanted to see how you were doing.’

‘I’m doing fine, thanks,’ I say in my airiest voice.

‘Excellent.’

There’s an awkward pause. I slide his wineglass over to him. ‘Cheers. Happy Friday.’

He picks it up and holds it aloft. ‘Happy Friday.’

More silence.

‘Um. I know you spoke to Gen earlier,’ he says.

‘I did.’ I let his unspoken words hang in the air. I’m going to need him to say them.

‘And she confirmed that I was… in your session last night.’

I lick my lips. ‘Yeah. But I’d already worked that out for myself.’

He sighs. God, he’s gorgeous. Such a beautiful man. His brown eyes search mine, and if I wasn’t feeling so mortified, I might be amused that a guy who’s slept with God knows how many women is finding this conversation so excruciating.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I am too. But I have zero experience with this type of thing. Rafe should find it child’s play.

Maybe he’s better at the shagging part than he is at the post-mortem.

I bet he’s really, really great at the shagging part.

Not that I even know what that means.

‘Are you angry I participated?’ he asks.

I consider. ‘I’m not angry. I’m—I feel a bit blindsided. Kind of vulnerable. Like it gave you an extra advantage over me. You knew, and I didn’t. Well, I worked it out, but no thanks to you.’

‘I get that.’ He takes a step closer, his eyes on me the whole time. ‘But I find it hard to be remotely sorry about that. It turned me on.’

‘Control freak,’ I mutter, even though it turned me on too, and therein lies the problem.

It pisses me off Rafe was in on the plan and I wasn’t. That I had to figure it out for myself. That someone I knew—my parents’ neighbour and my sponsor, at that—took part in something so intimate without my prior knowledge or consent, when I’d laid my trust on the line.

But last night? It made everything better, knowing he was there. It bathed the whole experience in technicolor. Gave it meaning. And it’s not like I can fault a single thing he did.

He was perfect.

It’s seriously weird standing here in Mummy and Daddy’s kitchen, talking to Rafe and knowing I was with him last night. It’s like we had a drunken one-night stand, except I was sober, and there was no sex, and it was all choreographed, and it wasn’t just him I was with…

God. It’s seriously freaky. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act.

Supposed to feel.

He laughs at control freak. ‘And your point is?’

I attempt a glare.

‘Look.’ He takes a sip of wine and puts his glass on the counter. He’s close to me now, and the thrill of being quite alone with him hits me. ‘There was always a good chance I’d be involved. I felt responsible. I mean, I know your parents. Not that I want to think about that fact at all right now.’ He rubs his forehead. ‘But you know what I mean. I wanted to make sure it was as good for you as we could make it. Good, but also that you felt safe. I needed to oversee everything, but I wasn’t going to tell you that beforehand because I didn’t want you being self-conscious.’

My stomach’s been steadily nose-diving since he said responsible.

Ugh.

God, I’m so stupid. He’s a total man-whore, and he does this kind of thing every single day. He shags women the whole time, and he feels up the odd virgin on the side, weaving his magic on them, making them feel like the most desirable woman on earth for those few, transcendent minutes before he moves onto something that’s probably kinkier than I could even conceive of.

Good.

Safe.

He’s in teacher mode, basically. He’s trying to communicate with me that I’m his little pupil, or I was last night, at least. That he’s the grown up, that there are parameters for how he acts and what he teaches me. And his subtext? For God’s sake, little girl, don’t get a crush on your teacher.

In one fell swoop he’s made me shift from feeling like we were partners in crime last night, with intense, amazing chemistry blazing between us thanks to that kiss and those hands of his and the alchemy he and his friends worked on me, to feeling like a stupid little girl who’s not cool or sophisticated or experienced enough to hang with the grownups.

Because that’s what it’s come down to, these past few years at uni when I guarded my virtue and refused to put out. I was labelled inexperienced, and somehow that translated to gauche, which was a joke given I was probably one of the most sophisticated and worldly and widely travelled students at my university.

I’m so sick of it. That’s why I’m doing this bloody programme, for God’s sake. I want it to be over, and then no one can patronise me. My embarrassing, cumbersome burden will have been taken from me and my currency will soar and I will be mistress of my own destiny.

Or something like that.

‘I get it,’ I tell Rafe now, my tone clipped. Dismissive. ‘It’s not a problem.’

‘Okay.’ He’s looking at me like he expects me to have some kind of childish meltdown.

‘Will you be in the next session?’ I ask. ‘Just so I know in advance.’ This time.

Those brown eyes of his turn almost black. He swallows. ‘Yeah. I’m leading it. Gen will brief you, but it’s—it’ll be pretty different. Full on.’

I almost laugh. Because having had three guys touch my practically naked body and bring me to orgasm in a sex club while I’m blindfolded wasn’t remotely full on, obviously.

‘I’ll speak to her about it,’ I say, ‘but that’s fine.’

Fine. Rafe, king of a sex club, is standing in my kitchen telling me he’ll be leading some kind of ‘full-on’ sexual session with me and I’m just about pulling off being blasé. I mentally pat myself on the shoulder for a job well done. This cool-girl lark is exhausting.

‘Excellent.’ The relief is clear on his face, and I muse that you can take the boy out of an all-male boarding school, but you can’t take boarding school out of the boy. Champion lover of hundreds of adoring women he may be, but he’s still got that social awkwardness that shouts I was not brought up around women. Growing up with my brother, Dex, gave me an insight into the weird and wonderful workings of the male brain, which has been helpful, given I went to a convent school and all that. Although he moved to New York while I was at school, so it’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to count on him for the male perspective.

Not that I blame him for abandoning ship. He had the right idea. He wanted to get away from Daddy’s ‘toxic Catholicism’, in his words.

‘What did you all do when you left the room last night?’ I blurt out. I can’t resist. My FOMO was sky high when they walked out, and it’s still up there. I’m still the little girl the grown ups walked away from. They’re still the ones who got to go and have their own sort of fun in a room I can’t even imagine, a room I’m horrified by and fixated on in equal measure.

He scowls. ‘What?’

‘That guy, Callum, said you were…’ Turned on. No, I can’t say that. ‘Going to take care of business,’ I finish lamely. I put a hand on my hip. ‘Did you?’

He shakes his head at me. ‘Believe me, Belle, you don’t want to know.’

Which is, in my head, an exact paraphrase of don’t ask questions about things you don’t understand, little girl.

‘I do want to know,’ I say, more bravely than I feel. ‘I want to know what I’m missing out on.’

Rafe looks down and swills his wine around in his glass, as if considering what to say next. A muscle jumps in his jaw. Then he looks up at me, those brown eyes practically all pupil. He takes a step forward, and his proximity has me suddenly nervous.

‘Fine,’ he says through clenched teeth. ‘Yes, Belle. We all needed to take care of business, as he put it, because you were so fucking amazing in there.’

My heart rate ratchets up a notch at his voice, and the look in his eyes, and his apparent lapse of control.

‘We went through to the Playroom, and I found a girl who looked vaguely like you—long, blonde hair—and I bent her over the back of a sofa and ate her pussy until she was screaming, and then I fucked her. Hard. Until we both came like fucking freight trains. And then I walked away and left her for someone else. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. Happy now?’

I should be horrified and mortified, and I am, but I’m also mesmerised and aroused. Because it’s the first time he’s spoken to me like a real equal, or an equal in the realm of which he is king, anyway.

It’s the first time he’s really let me in. Let me see the side to him I wondered about and suspected existed but couldn’t really guess at. Not accurately.

His words have conjured up a vivid image in my head, and I’m there, in a dim room that pulsates with bodies, and Rafe is pushing me downwards and flipping up my dress and peeling down my thong and sinking to his knees and burying his mouth and tongue in my exposed folds, and oh God.

A single thought rings with utter clarity in my head.

It should have been me.