Read Online Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest - Free Book Online

her. She gave off absolutely no vibes that she was that way inclined, by the way. I was just fixated on her, the way I’ve been fixated on a dress or a book or a lipstick.”
    He’s making a ballpoint dash here and a ballpoint dash there, and he looks up for half a moment and simply smiles when I say:
    “She didn’t mention she had a husband.
    “I’d just landed, and there she is at the airport, waiting for me, and she takes me for lunch at a pier-side restaurant. She waves in the middle distance as this beautiful boy walks towards us. But he doesn’t stop when he sees her: he keeps walking, right to the edge, then he dives into the water. And as all the restaurant patrons gape, he climbs out of the water, shakes himself like a dog, and sits down with us.
    “Her husband was much younger than her. He was in his twenties, maybe his early twenties, it’s hard to judge other people’s ages when you’re sixteen. Everybody’s just
older
. Everybody is nefarious and wants you and has ulterior motives and everybody is playing at Dangerous Liaisons. You know?”
    Tick. Dr. R goes: tick, on his notepad.
    “So her husband was completely surly and rude. He barely acknowledged me when she introduced us and it took me the lunch to understand that they were married. They argued all through dessert and they never stopped. My heart was pounding and I thought, I’m sixteen, where am I, what have I done?
    “We got to their apartment and I realized they had to walk past my daybed to get in and out of their room. She and I would spend our days on the beach—she’d photograph me in my bikini. I pretended I was Bettie Page and she was Bunny Yeager, you know, the female photographer who made Bettie a star. She’d take all these pictures of me and I loved posing for her. I had all this tits and ass that felt exciting in a strange land. Back home in England, the tits and ass just felt like bad omens.
    “At night I’d hear them argue, screaming fights, and I’d hide under the blankets, like a kid and her parents.
    “He got into my bed one night, said he needed to talk. That they couldn’t stop fighting and he didn’t know what to do. I was flattered. I told him that I knew she loved him and they’d sort it out.
    “What did I know? I’d never had a boyfriend. My platinum-bobbed beauty started to be too busy during the afternoons to hang out with me—she had a new shift in a bar. So she assigned him to keep me entertained. We went to see
Two-Lane Blacktop
at a revival cinema. The film was confused, largely silent, and bubbling with sexual curiosity, just like me.
    “He took me on a motorbike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was shaking so hard the motorbike was startingto swerve and he was saying ‘Goddamnit, Emma! You’re shaking like a fucking leaf! You’re making the bike swerve. We’re gonna have an accident!’
    “We nearly did, several times. By the time he let me off, I was drained of all color, all feeling. It was evening, and he said I needed a shot.
    “Then we were watching her band play. She had this great girl playing bass. Then we were at a bar. No. Then we were at a bar, then we were watching her band play. He had been feeding me Jägermeister shots. I couldn’t stand up, and her band was done, and she wanted to stay out and party. I was spoiling it.
    “So he told her he’d walk me home. They kissed for a really long time before we left.
    “We were in an alleyway when he said that he had seen the photographs she’d been taking of me in my bikini, on the beach.
    “And then he kissed me.
    “And I kissed him back.”
    I wait for Dr. R to write that down. He doesn’t.
    “Then I stopped kissing him back. But he kept going. He moved me forward until we were leaning against a church and I could see a stained-glass window. No light was refracting through it, because it was night. He pulled down my pants. Because it was from behind, and because I had never had sex, I didn’t even know if it was normal