Page 82 of Swallow Your Sorries

I grimace at the thought. If someone told me I’d be slowly falling into lust with my tormentor, a bloke that pissed on me, I’d have laughed in their face. I’d have crowned myself Miss Clown Cunt, the ruler of all the stupid bitches who think men like Gant are worth a second of their time. I should be plotting my revenge, my defence, when he pulls another stunt. Not cumming on his fingers.

Yet here I am, newly crowned because my growing lust is something I can’t ignore, as Gant politely pointed out on my leotard. Still, lust is simple enough to understand. Despite Gant’s terrible personality, he’s like a devil dressed up in the world’s finest suit. He’s charm and gorgeousness personified, and he’s showing an interest in me. My brain can’t differentiate that that interest is cruel. It just categories it as attention and combined with the devil’s good looks wrapped in a thin layer of darkness, it’s no wonder my body’s grown feral.

It’s not my fault my body is so irrational.

So then maybe that’s Gant’s line of thinking too?

But that’s where my confusion lies. My lust and Gant’s lust aren’t comparable. One, I’m not boxer-brief melting gorgeous to inspire such an obsession. Two, I’m not lusting after someone I genuinely believe destroyed my entire life by killing my mother and almost killing me.

But didn’t he nearly kill you too? In the lake?

Yet you still can’t stop thinking about him.

Dreaming about him.

Maybe he has a point with that primal comment?

Maybe he brings out something feral in us…

I wish there was an off switch for your brain. I’m so tired of it bouncing between logic and nonsense, especially when it doesn’t benefit me.

The point is, I’m not some revenge-driven psycho looking to fuck his enemy. Nor do I have some primal kink, like he implied. I’m just a girl who maybe wants to explore freakier waters, especially after my public orgasm last class. I hated myself for enjoying it but I did. I never came that hard on my own fingers or my poor pillow I subjected to random rubbings.

I’m just a late bloomer with a recent sexual awakening via the first boy who showed me a crumb of attention, good or bad. All my late-night fantasising about his fingers against my throat. All the replays of my tongue against his lips as I’d kissed him, marked him. All my secretly saved GIFS of boys who resembled him. It’s all just horniness and desperation.

Plain and simple.

That’s why I let him do it. That’s why I let him touch me.

All I have to do now is find a new muse. A new somebody to break the concentration I have on Gant because that’s the problem. He’s been dominating my time at Beaulieu. That’s the only reason I can’t stop thinking about him. I just need a shift of sexual focus.

Maybe that’ll get the point across to Gant that no matter what he says, I’m not his.

The problem is, what brave knight would go against the king?

“After you,” a voice calls, and it’s like the heavens have opened as I break my neck to look up at a boy who’s holding open the studio door for me.

I’d gone to the water fountain before shoving my crotch beneath the girl’s hand dryer in the bathroom before the advanced ballet class began.

His voice is cold,icy,but his face hasn’t caught up to his intonation.Yet.

He’s still too cute in a boyish way with round cheeks still padded in a twinge of baby fat that’ll be gone come summer. His shoulder-length windswept, white blonde hair and crystal grey eyes match his voice perfectly though, like a Nordic Viking that should be swathed in furs at all times.

His eyes are so clear that it seems impossible they could hold the dark twisted secrets that Gant’s can, and yet, that somehow makes me think he’s worse. Like, despite the clearness, it’s all an illusion. Just a thick layer of ice that keeps everything encased and frozen. For now.

I internally shake the thought. Being stalked, mocked and harassed by all the seniors has made me so jaded that I’m making up strangers’ personalities in my head before ever speaking to them.

I’m just paranoid.

But what’s playing into my paranoia more is the fact that he looks familiar. So familiar and yet so different from this vapour of a person I can’t conjure in my mind’s eye.

It prods at my subconscious naggingly, but there’s no way I’ve ever encountered him before. He’s not the type of person you can forget. And yet, I have the irritating feeling that I have.

“Thank you,” I say and it comes out as a whisper because I’m truly in awe that anyone’s doing anything halfway decent for me. To be fair, the girls harass me, but the boys merely ignore me, and laugh when appropriate, which is the majority of the time.

For a second I think he’s going to slam the door into my face and break my nose, so I quickly push on it too, and dart inside the studio, breathing a sigh of relief when it turns out I was wrong.

“You can relax around me. I’m not on Gant’s roster,” he calls after me with an easy smile that I can’t help but mirror. No one’s smiled at me since I’ve been to Beaulieu.

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