Each & Every Corner Ch. 04: Awake

She'd actually been quite relieved earlier on when Emma had turned her advances down. Even though Emma had been beautiful, really nice, and apparently interested. On top of that she had even had the level of direction and maturity in the way she presented herself which Lizzie was now very certain she was looking for in a partner. At the time she'd more than half wondered whether the introduction had been a subtle setup arranged by some of the people around her, several of whom were entirely capable of such basic machinations.

So she had done what she could to humour her hypothetical matchmaker, but try as she might there hadn't really been the spark she would need, something just wasn't quite working. In the end she'd decided to make her tactful enquiry anyway and suggested they might meet up sometime for drinks, you know, just the two of them. She'd been wondering whether in a dating world which was planning for the future she might have to start off by being pragmatic and see if the fire would catch later on.

But yes, it had been a relief, when she had put her suggestion out there and Emma had launched into that serious careful speech she seemed to have run through a thousand times before. Explaining how it was always flattering to be the subject of someone's attentions, but that she really didn't think about girls that way....

Emma was obviously more used to a disappointed reaction rather than the mild elation Lizzie had bounced back at her. So of course Lizzie had to explain herself ,and that had been a little uncomfortable at first. But they had both agreed that they could see the funny side instead and then they'd shared a laugh about it which had smoothed things over. They had parted on good terms and strangely, once they'd cleared everything up, they actually had exchanged contacts, and the chances were they would meet up again at some point as friends.

Lizzie gradually became aware that the sounds in the distance had become more focused, more urgent. She heard a drawn out wordless cry in Sarah's voice and the accompanying hyperrealistic image (head thrown back, mouth wide open, hair damp and stray locks plastered to her forehead, eyes staring intensely through half closed lids) made her wet right away. This didn't exactly take a lot at the moment. She seemed to be on a hair trigger basically all the time, especially when she was at home, and she was masturbating two or three times a day.

She brought her knees up, soles of her feet pressed flat against the mattress, and ran her open palms up along the inside of her legs, tickling the sensitive skin deliciously with the tips of her fingers. She pressed her lips together with the sides of her hands. Then, peeling them slowly open, she scooped some of the plentiful slippery liquid from inside herself and rubbed it onto her eager demanding clit with the fingers of one hand while two fingers of the other slid right up inside her channel to fill her and help quench, yet simultaneously stoke, that ravenous gaping thirst.

Soon she could hear the soft muffled rhythmic contralto of Ray's voice stepping up in increments toward ecstasy and her fingers correspondingly accelerated to a blur. Her imagination flickered rapidly, from picturing herself between Ray's legs, sucking her into her mouth to flick over her with agile tongue and force those urgent moans and yelps, to picturing Sarah, down between her own, hands locking her in place and slurping wetly and noisily as she feasted on Lizzie and she in turn gave herself up helplessly and joyously to be consumed.

I'm having a wank to the sounds of my flatmates fucking just over there, she thought. The transgressive even voyeuristic act of putting words to what she was doing building up her excitement even more. She could feel the nervous pressure of the impending orgasm rising, nearly ripe to wash over her now as she flicked and whipped it tighter and closer.

She turned her head to the side and looked across at the thin wall separating their bedrooms, from where Ray's moans were getting louder, closer together, and more desperate. Focusing intensely on the precise source of the cries as if she could turn the plasterboard to glass by pure force of will. 'I might as well be in the same room as them' she thought, and that was enough. It sent her crashing over the edge, throwing her head back and arching her body off the bed. Thrusting her hips forward onto her hands, bolts of blissful electricity coursing through her, once, then again, and again, and again.

*****

"Have you got Saturday free," said Ray. "I was thinking we could go out somewhere. It'll be just the two of us, Sarah's got some kind of work thing on."

Lizzie looked up from the chair in the corner of the room where she'd been fiddling with her phone, "Sounds like a thing I could call fun. Anywhere in particular."

"South," said Ray. "Off into the countryside a little way."

Ray and Sarah had been talking about what to do. They were agreed that they wanted to see whether they could pursue a relationship with Lizzie, but neither of them was quite sure how to go about it. Ray had wanted to just ask Lizzie outright but Sarah was insisting they should take their time.

"Why don't you two go out somewhere together for the day," Sarah had said to Ray one morning while she was sitting on the side of their bed brushing her hair. "It feels as if I've shared a real bonding experience with Lizzie recently and maybe you two need something similar."

"You mean like a date."

"Possibly. Something like that anyway. I don't know Ray, maybe take her somewhere special, or show her something that's important to you."

She had turned this over while she was at work later the same day. Ray knew what was most important to her but she couldn't exactly show Sarah to Lizzie, she'd already seen her after all, and her next obvious option, Somerset, was a very long way away. She'd idled the morning away distractedly at her desk at work trying to come up with an idea she was happy with. Angela had given her a few quizzical looks across the open plan office, she knew Ray well enough to have figured out something was up and it was tempting to solicit some help, but Ray felt somehow that it was important she sort this one out for herself.

She halfheartedly arranged and rearranged pictograms and connecting lines on flow charts. Just giving her hands some work to do while she waited for something substantial to surface in her mind. Eventually her patience had been rewarded, and as is so often the way with these things, once the solution had made its way into her thoughts she had been amazed by its simplicity. And it turned out she had been wrong about her first assumption after all.

They set off mid morning on the Saturday after a late breakfast, because what's the point of a weekend if you can't sleep in, at least for a little while. Lizzie had expected they would take the usual left turn at the end of the street up toward the station. Instead though Ray led them first right, then left, then left again onto a residential street where there was a car club parking space. Ray unlocked the car with the app on her phone and rummaged in the glove compartment for the key.

"Our carriage for the day my lady," she said, presenting the gaudily painted vehicle to Lizzie with a theatrical flourish of one hand, "Not exactly a fashion statement I'm afraid, but it'll get us around."

Ray drove them out of town, picking her way out through the London suburbs, then taking the motorways, first a junction along the M25, and after that splitting out onto the M20 for a while. Lizzie had, after a little cajoling, convinced her phone to link up with the stereo and she'd put on some music. Classics from the nineties and noughties, catchy songs to sing along to. Pulp and Primal Scream, Luscious Jackson and Catatonia, Britney and Black Box. Moving On Up, Road Rage, and Ride on Time.

"But you-and-I-know, we. all. live. in the space age..."

The novelty of driving and being driven in an actual car was a pleasant change for both of the city natives. Lizzie found herself thinking back to the last time she and Ray had spent like this, in a van then though not a car, when they had been salvaging her possessions from her old flat.

She knew in an abstract sense that it had been traumatic while it was happening but funnily enough the enduring memory turned out to be that of having spent her first significant block of time with just the two of them. She recalled with amusement how Ray had kept on talking and talking while they were working, as if she was never going to stop.

Lizzie had thought it was just her nature at the time, as she had spouted out her running commentary all day. But looking back now she realised how unusual, and probably difficult, that must have been for the quiet, somewhat introverted, woman she had come to know since. She turned to look over at Ray in amazement, appreciating for the first time yet another example of how deeply considerate and unobtrusive her care was for the people around her, and for Lizzie in particular in fact.

"What?" said Ray.

"Just thinking," said Lizzie.

They turned off the M20, tunneling deep into the lanes of rural Kent. As they drove between the fields the hedges were low enough to show the sparse stubble left over after the harvest in some of the fields, and the livestock fat from summer grazing in others.

"Orchards," Ray pointed out as they came around one corner in the road.

To Lizzie, who'd always been a city girl, it looked as if they were suddenly driving past field after field all filled with hundreds of rows of threadbare hedging. Ray assured her confidently though that this was just how farmed fruit was grown in this part of the country.

On they went, passing through several progressively smaller hamlets and clusters of houses until eventually they pulled to a halt at the edge of a village green. It was dotted with bushes and small trees, and bordered on three sides by red brick houses with tiled roofs. The simple sign mounted on a tall wooden post told them they were in Elverton. Wherever the hell that was, Lizzie thought.

On the fourth open side of the green the land sloped down to look out across open fields and in the middle distance a river. The foreshortening of the ground concealed the water itself but partway across the flat floodplain at the bottom of the valley the upper halves of a couple of narrowboats were visible where they were moored along the bank.

Ray walked over to a painted wooden bench facing down toward the river and Lizzie took a seat beside her. The amber autumn sunlight added a rich patina of warmth to the scene laid out in front of them.

"It's a pretty place," said Lizzie. "But I'm guessing that's not why we're here."

Ray looked out over the village, you could see most of it from here, there wasn't a lot to it really and yet once upon a time she could still remember when it had been the whole world. She wondered what she was going to say, and then she wondered how the hell she was going to say it.

"It isn't as pretty as it looks," she replied eventually. "That building over there, the one that looks like a village hall, or a barn, that's their church."

Lizzie over where Ray was pointing with some surprise. The church, in spite of her instincts she couldn't doubt that what Ray was saying was true, was simply constructed with a low-peaked roof. It was terracotta tiled like everything else around here, and with walls which were weatherboarded and stained matt black by layer upon layer of creosote preservative laid down over the years. There was no tower or steeple to advertise its religious function, and its low, practical, rectangular profile spoke more of agricultural architecture than it did of the ecclesiastical. It was certainly well looked after, in good enough repair, but she'd seen plenty of churches, from red brick Methodist chapels to ornate Catholic confections, and this didn't look like much to stand beside them.

"I see what you mean, it's a little, plain."

Ray laughed appreciatively, "Plain, good word, they'd like that. That's exactly what it is meant to be.

"They're chiliasts here you see, the whole village, most of the closer farms too. Life is supposed to be hard, we're living in a world full of sin, waiting for God to take it away and give us something better, that sort of thing, you get the idea. It was a pretty popular worldview a couple of centuries ago but there aren't a lot of them left now, especially in this country."

Lizzie hadn't had a religious upbringing. Her parents would have called themselves Christians but she'd only ever been taken to wedding services as a child, and there had been that one funeral of course. Her own sense of spirituality was largely inchoate when she wasn't mainlining meditation. A general sense of a deeper universal rightness underpinning the ethical code she had devised through her own experience of the world.

"I didn't even know there was anywhere like this at all."

"Most people don't. They keep apart from society when they can, and why would anyone go looking, they aren't an inviting bunch. They have a lot of prejudices, a lot of things which they believe are wrong. They don't approve of the space colonies for example, they're intruding on God's territory, like Babel mark two. And they don't approve of people like us either Lizzie, with the usual justifications."

LIzzie knew what she was talking about. She turned things over in her mind some more.

"So we're not welcome here."

"Not particularly, no, although to be fair nobody from outside is. But they'd be polite enough if we said hello, while they kept an eye on us and waited for us to leave."

"How do you know all this stuff anyway."

Ray nodded. It was a fair enough question, and it had been where she was headed anyway so it was convenient to be gifted such an easy route in.

"Well, you see that farm over there, on the far side of the river."

The little cluster of buildings and grain silos she was pointing out was part way up the other side of the valley, the sunlight didn't reach it.

"Yes."

"That's where Sarah was born." said Ray.

LIzzie's head whipped back around to look at her, searching for the joke which she knew already wasn't going to be there. Instead she saw the muscles and tendons moving in Ray's throat as she swallowed deliberately before she continued speaking.

"She's three years older than me. I've worshipped the ground she walks on since before I could speak I suppose. One of my earliest memories is of her talking to my mum while my mum was changing my nappy."

They sat in silence for a while. Lizzie dumbfounded and trying her best to process this new information, Ray just giving her some time to do so. It was a lot to take in though and it would be hours, maybe days, maybe even weeks, before it really worked its way into her mind.

"So that means you grew up here too," Lizzie said. Grasping at one of the less complicated ramifications, and prompting Ray to go on.

"Yes, that's right. In that house with the green door, down there opposite the church. From when I was born until I went to live with my aunt in Somerset when I was a teenager. Sarah had already gone by then."

It was an innocuous enough statement, but there was something about the way Ray had spoken which caught Lizzie's attention, and she knew instinctively that they were reaching the crux of things now.

"Ray, how did Sarah leave. Where did she go."

Ray looked out into the distance, she was breathing deeply, slowly, entirely within conscious control. As recently as a month ago Lizzie might still have thought her emotionless, but now she could see that the opposite was true. She felt a huge surge of empathy for the woman beside her as she shared with her some of the effort she was having to expend to maintain her composure. At last Ray spoke.

"It was harder for Sarah. There were, difficult circumstances, and she tried to kill herself. For several years I thought she'd succeeded actually. But as it turned out she'd gone into hospital, then into sheltered accomodation for a while. Her family disowned her after it happened so she didn't have a lot of choice."

Lizzie stared at her, wide eyed and open mouthed, "Holy shit Ray."

"She built her life back up from nothing to where she is now Lizzie, she's the strongest person I know."

For a long moment Lizzie again studied Ray's adamantine self control, still casting its illusion of calm, while she tried once again to take in what she was hearing, what she was seeing.

"I think you're strong too Ray," she said, shyly and in awe.

Ray sketched out the rest of the story. How they'd bumped into each other purely by chance in London a few years later, how Sarah had then gone on to subtly, patiently, seduce her most devoted servant.

"I'm not even sure why I'm telling you all this," she said. "I just thought it might be good for you to know. But I'm terrible at this kind of stuff. I can't imagine what you must think of me right now."

She leant forward and kicked at the scuffed depression in the turf in front of their seat with her trainers.

"Lizzie I'm sorry I brought you here. I don't know how to say what I want to say. I just wanted to show you something and I don't think it's working. I expect you'd rather we'd gone to the seaside for the day."

She felt Lizzie's smaller hand creep into hers. "You couldn't be further from the truth Ray," she said. "With any of that. I'd rather be here with you than anywhere else in the world. And I think it is working, I think I understand. You wanted to show me how much you love her."

"It seems such an inadequate word," said Ray. "But yes, that's it I suppose. She's my world you know."

"Yes, I can see that, and I can see why. She's magnificent Ray."

Ray grinned, "She is, isn't she. And I'm glad you think so because that was part of it too. I really wanted you to understand that."

"I do Ray," said Lizzie. "Don't doubt it for a moment."

"That's good then. So anyway if we want to move somewhere bigger do you want to come along too? We've been thinking about a proper house, one with the stairs on the inside, and a garden."

Lizzie laughed at the glorious incongruity of this. Marvelling all over again at the spectacular mind which could somehow find those two ideas lying adjacent to each other. She wanted in that moment very much to be able to peer into that head to see how it all fitted together.

Failing that her voice took on a jokingly serious lilt, and she held out her hand to shake Ray's with mock formality. "Why thank you Ray, that would make me very happy. As long as I can have a bigger room ok, and as long as you both want to have me that is."

"Trust me," said Ray, because it was true.

"Always," Lizzie replied, because that was true as well.

*****

"I'd like you to have met my mum," said Ray as they were driving away. "But if we'd knocked on the door people would have seen, and she'd have had to do penance for talking to us. It wouldn't be fair on her."

It hadn't even crossed Lizzie's mind that Ray's family, the woman who had given birth to her even, would still have been there in the house she had seen.

"It's fine," she said. "Maybe some other time."

They had lunch at a pub in one of the villages on the way back to the main road. While they were sitting at the table in the beer garden after they had eaten Lizzie told Ray about her brother and how his thirst for the poppy had stolen him from her through a thousand tiny inattentions and betrayals. Until the grand finale. The desperate phone call from her parents who couldn't find him. The rush up on the train, the hours spent asking around, trying to find someone who'd still call him a friend and who could tell her where he slept.