to protest, only to discover I’d already moved my face in close to meet his hand. I pulled my head away.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Depends. What do you want me to do?’ he asked, lowering his hand to my chin. He turned and tilted my face so that I was looking at his lap.
He had an erection. Part of me registered that, alone with him in his car like this, I’d left myself vulnerable. For a brief moment I let myself imagine how Jason would feel if something bad were to happen to me.
Using one hand to keep my face turned towards him, with his other hand, he began stroking himself through his jeans, making me watch, daring me to take over.
When I didn’t, he stopped what he was doing and reached his hand in between my thighs. Spreading his fingers out against my flesh, he paused and looked at me.
‘What do you want?’ he asked again.
Apart from the odd few stragglers, the car park had now emptied.
He moved his hand up towards my knickers and, as he made contact with the cotton, I gasped at the realisation of my own wetness. He’d just started to edge my underwear to the side when a car swung past in the lane to our right, their headlights flashing directly through the windscreen. I startled and squeezed my legs together. Patting my hand against the car door until I found the lever, I grabbed it and pulled hard. When it didn’t open, I tried again and again. He must have put the auto-lock on.
‘Open the door,’ I said, wriggling away from him. ‘Please!’
‘Fine,’ he said, withdrawing his hand and bouncing back into his seat. He pressed a button and, as soon as I heard the doors click, I stumbled out into the dark.
Sobbing, I collapsed onto the grass and mud, my dress tangled up around my waist. I got to my feet and began walking towards my car, trying to make it back before the clouds covered the moon and cast everything into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I drove home slowly, my head clotted with filmy images of Tommy’s fingers on my thigh. Pulling up outside the house, I saw the hall light was on. I felt a rush of happiness. Jason was back. But then, thinking about what had happened tonight, what I’d let happen, the rush was replaced with a sharp, cringing shame.
Inside the hall I felt a draught. The back door was open. Heading through to the kitchen, I saw that the garden’s security light had been triggered. Fixed above the window, its sensors were designed to respond to any kind of movement – burglars, foxes, squirrels – and would switch on for a brief, timed period before switching off again. Moving to the open door, I saw Jason. Sitting on the bench underneath the apple tree, he had his head bowed low.
I stepped out onto the gravel path that cut down the middle of the lawn and as my heels crunched against the tiny stones, he looked up. Wearing an oversized T-shirt, and tracksuit bottoms that looked borrowed from someone else’s wardrobe, he blinked a few times as if to make sure it was really me.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I went out with Carla.’ With my make-up and mascara smeared all over my face I knew I must look a fright. Hopefully he’d put it down to the tears I’d cried in his absence. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘I was worried.’
He didn’t respond and so I took a seat next to him. Together we stared at the back of our house: the arrangement of the bedroom windows and kitchen door like eyes and a nose that had been cut into the flat, red brick. Drawing down my gaze, I saw that the security light had attracted a group of floury-winged moths. I watched as they battered their furred bodies against the bulb’s hot glass.
‘I’m not proud of that file,’ said Jason eventually. ‘When the papers used to say those things about Vicky …’ He stopped, unable to voice the actual allegations. The garden had been free of movement for a few minutes and so the security light clicked off. We found ourselves in darkness. ‘I was so desperate to know what happened. I wanted an answer. Any answer.’ He shook his head in rebuke.
‘And what did you find?’
‘Nothing, I found nothing.’
He dipped his head to his chest.
‘Maybe you did find something? Maybe you just didn’t realise it? Have you told Martin about any