But he still had to struggle to stop his hand from shaking on the controls. Carlisle could scarcely contain his bitter anger. His girl, the gorgeous but prudish girl behind the mirror, the girl who was so careful to never show him anything, had just gripped the black one’s cock! It was outrageous, it was disgusting. It was a betrayal of the purity of the relationship that they had established together.
They shrieked, they laughed, they whooped. Nobody could quite believe that Dervla had been the first to get so specifically raunchy. It emboldened them all, seeming to give the whole game genuine class.
The cleverer, more manipulative people in the box realized that Dervla’s sudden sexiness was a pretty clever trick in terms of the public’s perception of her. There was nothing that kept up audience interest better than surprises, particularly sexual ones, and Dervla’s grabbing of Jazz had certainly been that. Moon, David, Hamish and Garry all realized that Dervla had raised the stakes and they would have to lift their game accordingly.
Moon decided then and there that she would later confess to Peeping Tom that she had had intercourse inside the box and had no idea with whom it had been. She resolved to admit to this whether it had happened or not, but actually she thought it probably would happen, because now the touching and feeling began with a vengeance.
“So are we going to play this identification game or what?” shouted Jazz.
“Yes!” came the reply.
“OK, then, go for it!” Jazz shouted. “Everybody move around and nobody talk, OK? And when you’ve had a really good squirm, cop a feel and guess who you’ve got.”
Suddenly it was all shrieks and giggles and boozy lust as they slipped about together.
Hamish was almost beside himself with excitement. This was the reason he had come into the house. Like Moon, he wanted to have sex, and then he wanted everyone to know about it. With Kelly, preferably, but frankly any female partner would do. He felt a hand stroking his back, gently teasing his sweaty spine, gently running all the way down to the cleft of his buttocks. Was this the one? Should he turn about and try to make love to whoever was touching him?
He heard a whisper in his ear. “Sally?” It was David’s voice.
“You’ve been in this house too long, mate,” Hamish whispered back.
“Fuck!” David barked, snatching his hand away as if Hamish was a red-hot stove.
“Shhh!” whispered Jazz from nearby.
David was annoyed. His mistake made him feel vulnerable. He wondered if Kelly had heard. All his doubts flooded back once more. Was she laughing at him in the darkness? Was she thinking to herself that Boris Pecker would not have minded at all who he found himself feeling up? Would she tell? Would she suddenly blurt it out and tell? David wanted to leave the sweatbox there and then, he wanted to run. But perhaps that in itself might provoke Kelly.
“Funny how he couldn’t take a bit of sex,” she would say. “I would have thought it would have been right up his street.”
“Up his arse, more like,” Gazzer would say after Kelly had explained, and then David would be a laughing stock, a national joke. David decided he had better stay put. He reached for one of Geraldine’s artfully placed plastic bottles of warm, strong booze and drank deep.
Hamish was not going to make the mistake that David had made. It was a woman’s thigh he was holding, for sure. So soft and smooth and not too firm. Kelly? he thought. Possibly, but just as easily Dervla or even Moon. Not Sally, he was delighted to conclude, and probably not small enough for Dervla, but you couldn’t be sure. Whoever it belonged to it was fun to touch and squeeze. Hamish was feeling much better about himself now. Kelly’s kind gesture earlier in the game had truly put his mind at rest, and now he felt safe and powerful and ready for anything.
He let his hand slip around from the outside to the inside of the thigh that he was holding. The flesh was hot and slightly clammy, it seemed almost to tug gently at his fingertips as he slid them across it. Whoever’s thigh it was, and he was sure now it wasn’t Dervla’s, she seemed quite happy to be touched. Her opposite leg was moving, her other inner thigh gently brushing against the back of Hamish’s hand. Hamish’s lips brushed against a soft shoulder. He kissed it.
There were hands on Hamish now. Someone was stroking his buttocks, but he ignored it. The girl he was holding was the one he wanted.
Kelly was now very drunk. As drunk as she had been the week before, when she had passed out. She had had to get drunk in order to get into the sweatbox, and she knew that if she didn’t get into the sweatbox she would lose the game. Now that she was inside and this hand was touching her she no longer really felt a part of her body, it was as if she was hovering above it and some other Kelly was being touched and caressed. It was not an unpleasant feeling, just slightly detached and uninvolved. This was how Kelly always felt about sex, possibly because she was always drunk when she did it. She liked sex, she was pretty sure of that, but somehow she always ended up wishing that she liked it more. Secretly she was sure that the missing ingredient was love, and she knew that she would have to wait for that. You couldn’t plan it.
The hand was being more daring now, working its way up to the very top of her thigh. Kelly didn’t think she minded, although she knew that she would probably stop him quite soon, whoever he was. On the other hand, why not let him play? This was what you did, wasn’t it? If you were a top bird, a mad-for-it, gagging-for-it personality like she was? You didn’t bottle out. That wasn’t what it was about at all, was it? You went for it, you lived it large. One thing you weren’t was a killjoy.
Now the hand was brushing at Kelly’s most intimate self. Now she would stop him, move the hand away. But she didn’t. She had become distracted. Something in her memory was stirring.
Hamish moved his hand and touched the little metal ring hidden within the folds of Kelly’s private flesh. And now he knew who it was he was touching. He was thrilled: this was who he had hoped it would be: Kelly, the one he fancied most, the one who had named him as her choice if sex were on the agenda. Well, sex was on the agenda. This was his chance.
He found her ear and whispered into it and as he whispered he gave the little ring the gentlest of flicks with his finger.
“Kelly,” he said, with a big broad smile.
And at that moment, in that very instant, they both knew.
Kelly was certain that she had not told a soul about her pierced labia, not even the girls. She had been specifically holding the information back to use as a triumphant, sexy revelation at some strategic moment later in the game, when she felt the need to shine.
But the voice in her ear knew. The voice of Hamish. Hamish knew because the moment he had touched that tiny wire he had whispered her name. And now Kelly saw the truth. The bastard had touched her vagina before. The half-formed suspicions that had troubled her aching head the morning that she had woken up in that horrible little sex cabin were suddenly turned to cast-iron facts.
“My God!” Kelly breathed, momentarily more surprised than angered. “You felt me up when I was passed out. You fingered me. You knew I was pierced.” Her voice was a whisper; the shock of the revelation was still sinking in. All of the other people in the box were busy with their own affairs.
Nobody heard her. Nobody heard.
Like Kelly, Hamish had realized the moment that he said it, in the instant that he breathed those two giveaway syllables “Kell-y”, that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. But as yet it was still a secret. Only they knew; the others were all too busy with their own giggling, their own fumbling.