Read a bit
An excerpt from SOUL LOVE
Jenna has been packed off to spend the summer with her flaky Aunt Sarah. She opens the curtains on her first morning and looks out of the window….
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I opened the curtains the next morning to see a semi-naked body in a deck chair in next door's back garden. I took a step back from the window and risked another peek.
I could make out a tight muscular torso with small brown niples. His skin was startlingly pale. My eyes slowly traced a fine line of dark black hair from underneath the belly to the top of his faded jeans. They continued along the line of his jeans pausing to take in the tear on one of the knees and the white toes that were rhytnmically stroking the grass.
His face was hidden from view by the book that he was reading. I watched and waited, hoping no one could see me. Every now and then his hand would scratch his chest or brush away a fly.
The door squeaked suddenly and I jumped away from the window. no one lieks to be caught drooling, do they?
'Tallulah!' I sighed with relief as the cat padded in, looking for attention.
When I looked again, the boy had turned round and was pulling on a faded red T-shirt with his back towards me. I liked the way his dark black hair curled around his neck.
I smiled as Tallulah batted me with her paw and meowed crossly. Then I smiled again , because it had felt wierd to be smiling. The only smiling that I'd ben doing lately was of the joyless, laugh-out-loud, 'Ha! I don't give a damn' variety that made your face ache and your heart burn.
I looked out the window once more before heading to the kitchen. The deck chair was empty, apart from the book. Hadn't I sworn that I was going to have nothing to do with boys for at least a year? Liking boys had played a large part in the trouble Mia and I had got ourselves into. One boy in particular, but I wasn't going to think about Jackson now. I couldn't even bear to look at his photo, hidden away in my purse.
I found Sarah standing on her head in the lounge. She called out, 'Help yourself to breakfast!'
The kitchen was only marginally less dusty than the rest of the place. There was an assortment of cupboards, a grease-encrusted cooker and an ancient fridge. As I tugged the heavy door open the fridge rumbled and shhok. Inside was half a carton of milk and some bean curd that looked more like green turd. Eating the entire contents of the fridge instantly lost its appeal.
There was a large shelf full of cookbooks, but the rest of the cupboards were empty. I found an old box of cereal and the milk didn't smell bad. I wandered out into the back garden to eat it. it was a lovely sunny morning and it wouldn't do any harm to check out Torso Boy some more from a better vantage point.
Sarah had maintained the 'neglect' theme into the small back garden. It was an overgrown tangle of weeds with a rusty car door right in the centre. I sat down on a wobbly wooden bench.
'Bit of a mess, isn't it?' Sarah said as she sat down next to me.
Your life or the garden? I thought to myself, but aloud I said, 'Isn't Kai into green things? His poems are all about nature, aren't they?'
Sarah started to laugh loudly. It startled me because the laugh didn't seem to belong to her. It belonged to a coarse loudmouth, not to my quiet, sensitive aunt. Then she gulped in some more air and said, 'Ha! You thought Kai was into green things, did you?'
I watched in horror as the huge belly laughs transformed themselves into floods of tears and she lunged at me. I had no idea how to deal with this, so I gave her back a few awkward pats as if she were some grotesque oversized baby.
After a painfully long time she said,'Kai's left me.'
I was speechless again. This wasn't supposed to be happening. Sarah was supposed to be supporting and guiding me.I wasn't equipped to deal with her problems. The only thing that should have been on my mind was trying to see if Torso Boy's face was as cute as his body.
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© Lynda Waterhouse
