Excerpt of The Things That Make Me Give In by Charlotte Stein

Lessons

‘Let’s play a game,’ Steve says.

She thinks of plastic cups and saucers, tea parties, the little hidey-house she used to play in as a girl. Of course, there were never really any tea parties. Just her, hidden away, making her brother’s action figures wrestle each other.

But Steve doesn’t need to know that. She watches him whip his dark hair out of his eyes– beautiful eyes, really. Soft and smarter than he seems, set in that almost too-angular face. Brett is soft by comparison, but his big square chin still gives him an air of the Nordic.

Maybe the game can be dress-up, and they can both put on long wigs. Prance around in armour for her, pretending to rape and pillage.

But instead Brett grabs her quite suddenly from behind, and wraps a blindfold around her eyes.

He does it all in one smooth motion– they’re both quite graceful, really, when they want to be. One second she can see, the next her world is dark, with just the heavy masculine smell of them – tinged with soap and that baby shampoo they use – to guide her way.

She thinks she can feel their presence, though, too. They’re so big, it’s hard not to be aware of them– hulking around, just on the periphery of her senses. Irritation skitters through her again, but she finds herself groping for them anyway.

They dance just out of her grasp, sniggering. They dance until she stamps her foot and goes for the blindfold, but Brett has tied it too tight to get off easily.

‘Oooh, she’s getting mad,’ Steve says, as she wrestles with it.

‘Yeah, she is getting kind of mad. I’ll take it off if you want, Lacey.’

She turns to glare at him through whatever is over her eyes, and actually hears him shuffle with the knowledge of his own wrongdoing. A slap rings out, and she knows Steve has struck his friend. On the upper arm, maybe– somewhere solid.

The blindfold stays on. The blindfold stays on, and hands are suddenly back on her hips. Steve’s, she suspects. The hands rub suddenly, rudely, and then even more rudely– they clasp her bottom.

She immediately goes up on tiptoe. She goes up for his gruff words, too:

‘Lacey, you’ve got a great ass. Come and look at this ass, Brett.’

Brett obeys. Still contrite, she thinks, but lumbering none the less. The floorboards creek beneath his solid mass, and then she is boxed in by two giants with no way of seeing either.

Another set of hands join Steve’s on her ass. Sometimes squeezing hard enough to hurt, other times just testing, just cupping and stroking.

Both are now breathing hard.