The A-Z of Us by Jim Keeble Page A

tell Molly everything. It wouldn’t be difficult spilling the beans to such a beautiful woman. Just looking into those eyes would make you confess to everything. To anything.
    If I’m honest I’ve always fancied Molly. You’d have to be gay not to. I first met her while Gemma and I were at university, but I was careful to be nothing more than friendly towards her. I’d always wondered about us getting together – she seemed to like me – but then I started travelling, and I was dating a series of foreign women who flew to England at the weekends, and then she got engaged and married Will, the dashing stockbroking genius.
    I hardly saw anything of her during the three years she was married. Then Gemma told me on the phone one night that her sister was getting a divorce, and to my surprise an electric spark of desire flashed through my stomach.
    We got together at Gemma’s office party. We all got badly drunk and ended up back at Molly’s loft playingdrinking games. Raj was absent, for some reason I can’t remember, and Gemma drank too much and threw up. Molly and I helped her to bed, and ended up talking, sitting outside the door to the guest bedroom on the premise of keeping an eye on Gemma. We drank vodka from the bottle, and chatted about music and films and people we fancied, and it seemed so easy, vodka-talk, and I noticed the small crow’s feet at the edge of Molly’s eyes when she smiled, and her long slender fingers.
    Despite being adverse to instinctive acts of passion, I took another swig and leaned over and kissed her quickly on the neck. Her flesh was hot. She hesitated, and I was terrified in that instant that she’d slap me. Then in a miraculous moment, she moved her mouth against mine, soft-hot, and we kissed for a while. I pinched her nipple, then moved my hand to her lap where I undid her Levi’s.
    She breathed in, I pressed my damp hot hand against her flat stomach, still kissing, it was easy, good and right, and my spread fingers smoothed down, the first soft bristle of pubic hair, and I slid my middle finger further down, to touch the crease of her. She was wet. She moaned and shivered.
    I shifted, delicious agony, finger moving deeper, closer, wetter and she exhaled my name ‘Ian’ and with both hands pushed me away gently, wriggling back, taking my hand and slipping it upwards out of her, casting it to one side as if severing it from my arm.
    We went for breakfast, just the two of us, the following day, and at the tube station she kissed me, the kiss that started everything.
    â€˜Can I call you?’ I asked, my heart thumping. She looked at me, head cocked slightly to one side and whispered:
    â€˜Why not.’
    I danced all the way home.
    The next morning, when I come downstairs, Gemma is sitting once more in the front window of the semi-derelict house. She looks wrecked – her eyes puffed as if she’s recently finished crying, her nails bitten low, her body seemingly shrunken overnight, skeletal beneath the loose pyjamas and hooded sweatshirt.
    She’s in a terrible mood. She declines my offer of coffee or tea, or any other form of beverage (which is fortunate, because the only other form of beverage is a third of a bottle of gin, which is going to do neither of us any good).
    I make some Lavazza, and propose sitting out on the unfinished patio.
    â€˜Make the most of the sun?’
    Gemma shakes her head, without looking up.
    â€˜It’s a lovely day.’
    â€˜For fuck’s sake, Ian, I just want to sit here and do fuck all! All right?!’
    When Gemma uses two fucks in a sentence, it’s time to leave her alone. I open the glass doors and walk out, slyly leaving one of them open, to allow a sliver of fresh late-August air into the house that I hope will blow in and dispel the unhappy scent of decay.
    I stand in the bright sunshine, sipping my coffee. I wish Gemma could be enticed outside, to be cured by the