Three stunning townhouses in a prime location
Louis considered the sign for a moment. It was a temporary thing that, strangely, perhaps due to some bureaucratic failing, had remained there throughout his entire adolescence. Of course, as the years passed, it became obsolete, the townhouses were sold, and the location grew more or less prime. But the sign remained the same. It was a redundancy; it no longer referred to anything in particular. This was likely why Louis had noticed the change. He was drawn to it, just as the eye is drawn to an expletive in a page of text. In black spray paint, a defacement of the words. "Townhouses" had been crossed out. Below it, there was a sort of juvenile correction; it read simply, "Girls". Just then, Louis thought, predictably, about girls. He supposed, after that thought, that the sign had intended to make the reader think about girls. Stunning girls, he supposed. Louis had always been susceptible to suggestion, especially regarding signage. He had a compulsion to read it. He also had a compulsion for reading girls. Well, not reading them literally; more compulsively, almost obsessively looking at them. In a vain attempt to curtail this perverse eyeballing, he often forced himself to stare instead at this very sign.
It was nondescript, plain enough for his purposes. He needed it to be, he used it to prevent himself from lingering too long on the girls. They were everywhere. So often he had found himself staring at this sign to keep his eye from wandering; only today it had had the opposite effect. Today the sign was redolent of girls—stunning girls. Louis looked away from the sign. Unfortunately, there were girls everywhere. It was Monday morning, and they were all waiting for a bus to go to school. All those girls. He resolved to open his phone, but there were girls in there too. At school, there were more girls, and at home, there was another girl—his mother. It would seem they were inescapable.
At the beginning of the week, Louis played tennis. His mother drove him; she had an annoying habit of prohibiting music in the car, only audiobooks. Embarrassingly, his parents still used cassette tapes as a result of the antiquated but still-functioning hi-fi system in their nineties Subaru. Louis watched as the tape revolved, gurgling out Alain de Botton. He stood in the dry of the winter afternoon as it faded quickly into dusk. His limp legs shivered and knocked in the cold, two bone-white protuberances from green mesh shorts. The game began, but he’d already thrown it. He darted left and right desperately, nipping the ball; he tried a shady underarm; and every now and then he’d attempt a return, but he could hardly look at her long enough to catch a serve. He couldn’t even remember her name.
Limber, legs like long branches, chest pillowing with short, cute breaths, steaming out in the cold night air. Her ponytail ticked back and forth like a metronome. Each tap of the ball hammered his eyes closed. His play style had once been called crass. This was the opinion of his long-suffering tennis coach. ‘A real tennis vernacular, a stroke of the people.’ The coach would boom, as he stood enormously over him. ‘Here comes trouble.’ He was wont to say, as Louis entered the courts. The game ended and he exited, embarrassed, beaten, run within an inch of his life, chest heaving, unsatisfied. She drank sexily from her water bottle. He beat his retreat hastily because now burgeoning under the soft armour of his greenish shorts was an unwanted member—his pimpled prince.
Midweek now. The ringing of the school bell. It was only a short walk to the library, where the chess club was held. He could have easily skipped—he’d done so in the summer—but his mother quickly found out and made it a point to pick him up promptly after the club adjourned. ‘Your dishonesty has forced me to give up the last fifteen minutes of my pilates class.’ She reminded him each time he climbed into the sullen Subaru. The game began blandly, as chess games do, but it took very little for the girl he was playing with to distract him, as girls often did. Just as the first trade was being made, she happened to brush Louis’s finger as they swapped pieces. Pensively, she took his pawn.
She lingered for a moment on the board with her great grey eyes. And Louis was gone again, just as he made eye contact. The prickling of his neck and the blushing of his face made an unsubtle confession. She smiled, looked up at the ceiling, and tapped the clock. Tick, tick, went the clock. He was hard again, this time through the grey wool of his school shorts. Nominally more robust than the tennis shorts, unmeshed though they were, they were no match for his teenaged inflammation.
He gratefully bumped against the cool wood of the chess table, concealed, if only for now. As the game drew on, however, he found himself increasingly distracted, his problem only becoming more prominent. As she took piece after piece from him, creeping her white army towards his, he found himself giddy. The game seemed elsewhere, and his moves grew increasingly flippant. It was only shame, deep and rending, that accompanied his defeat. She enclosed his king, and on and on he throbbed beneath the board. The triumphant climax was his own; at first red-cheeked and rash. Then came that sallow epiphany that he always seemed to glean—the information that he didn’t want, thrust upon him regardless. She stood up to shake his hand. He coughed, returning the gesture, but did not rise.
The end of the week was dinner, duly undulated in the pot before being transferred to the table by his unflagging mother. Then a movie, once out, now at home, times were tough, so intoned his father. The weekends he could keep to himself, he was told. It rarely turned out to be true. His father had a habit of waking him up in a flurry of domestic activity. The vacuum cleaner, sneaking under his door if he dared stay in bed after nine, poked its head through the crack. Some sort of dust vampire, sucking at the carpet, waking him. That or the lawnmower, gorging itself on the grass outside his window. How these household appliances seemed to take on sort of life of their own in the hands of his father. The way that the vacuum seemed to stare longingly under the doorframe as if to complain that it was overworked. The way the lawnmower appeared to howl at its engorgement, the way the lawnmower had a grass-eating disorder. He noticed how the plastic belly would grow fat and turgid before being emptied. He often forgot that his father even operated these machines. Often, he felt that he saw the vacuum and the lawnmower more frequently than his father. They were like strange, electrified effigies that served to represent him.
It was his mother that he saw too much. Dinner frequently overwhelmed him. It was a complex game of dodging. He deflected concerned looks from his mother, as she glanced from him to her phone, to increasingly apologetic texts from his father, which only engendered further questioning from his mother. As he ate, he responded monosyllabically to her questions. Like inquiring satellites, the questions swung low into his atmosphere, probing at the deep reaches of his mind. ‘You seemed distracted at tennis practice. You haven’t been playing as well recently. What is it? Is something wrong?’ She asked. His father interjected with a buzz: Running late at work, be home soon. Sorry, dad x. His father’s phone was a usually more interesting than his mother’s. Julia WORK, Lauren, Maddy XOX. His father’s phone was prone to interruptions and text messages from these contacts. I want to see you tonight. Louis first suspected his father’s dalliances in year eight, when the family iCloud was linked to his phone. I need to make you cum. He’d never seen a woman’s nipples before.
When he wasn’t being interrogated, the dull quiet of the table felt comparatively arctic, though he knew that its abrupt end would only bring further questioning. The scrape of the fork against the plate could only conceal the swelling silence for so long. He tried, as much as he could, to transfer the food into his mouth as fast as possible, to return the cutlery to the crockery, to make some sound at least. He hoped, in vain, that the noise could make up for the lack of conversation. It proved too little too late, however, and his mother sought to interject in the next available gap while he chewed glumly. ‘I’m worried about you, Louis.’ And so forth. He weathered the questioning, fielded the volley, and answered just enough to be satisfactory. Traffic. Be there in 15 promise, said his father. He was allowed up to his room with a wave and a sigh. In the bathroom, on the way to his bedroom, he unzipped his pants and began to urinate. After the last few drops had fallen away, he held his dick tightly, feeling it react to his touch. Like a fleshy ermine, caught by the hunter, it quivered in his grip.
He moved his hand up and down, considering himself for a moment, but grew distracted. He moved to open the door and pressed it, but found it would not give. His mother stood behind it, her ear pressed against the particle board. ‘If you’re sick, Louis, you need to tell me.’ Said his mother. I'll pick up ice creams on my way, said his father. Later, as he lay awake in bed, scrolling through his phone, he heard the sound of his father coming in downstairs. He crashed into the quiet of the house, like the quiet was a secret and he was yet to find it out. He heard them fighting often. The crinkle of individually wrapped ice creams in his hands. Talk tomorrow. Louis’ phone buzzed. He swiped the text away, returning to his website. His parents began their shouting ritual downstairs. He paddled on through a storm of videos and photos. He felt the stir in his pyjama pants. He could hear his mother crying. He reached downward with one hand while the other swiped the videos. He was looking for the best one.