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.