The Nature of Cruelty Read online

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Sasha asks, annoyed. She knows how Robert's presence might make me feel uneasy, so she's clearly pissed off that he's decided to let himself into her house (not to mention helped himself to a sandwich).

  Despite all of the times I imagined seeing Robert again, and how I thought I would be confident and breezy in the face of his arrogant stare, I find myself reverting back into my tortoise shell. My cheeks blaze red as I let my eyes drop to the floor, just as his deep brown gaze locks in on me. There's a calculating look in his eyes, like he's figuring out some new and creative form of torture. Only now that he's an adult, his abuse will probably be ten times more elaborate.

  “Well, look who it is,” he declares. “Tampon all grown up.” He grins and dusts some breadcrumbs from his hands, eyes travelling over my body in a strange way. His brow furrows a little then as he takes his time lingering over my face.

  “Tampon” is one of the cruder names he thought up for me over the years. “Ginger minge” and “Fanta pants” were close seconds.

  “Call her that one more time and you’re dead. I told you Lana was coming today,” Sasha informs him coolly. “You're not supposed to be here.”

  I glance up just as Robert drags his gaze away from me to look at his sister. He grins with teeth. “Yeah, about that — you know how Kara moved into the penthouse a few days ago?” he asks.

  Sasha nods impatiently and gestures for him to continue.

  “Well, we had a fight, decided to break up, and now she's locked me out of the apartment. This was the closest place I could think to go.”

  Kara is Robert's long-term, on again/off again girlfriend. I take it they were having one of their “off” periods while Robert was with the married woman. Although you never know with him. Sasha's told me all about Kara and how she and Robert have this intense, drama-fuelled relationship. They're always getting into fights and cheating on one another, then enjoying passionate reunions. I don't get why people can't just fall in love and be happy with one another these days.

  “What the fuck, Rob? It's your apartment, not hers. If the two of you had a fight, then it should be you kicking her out.” She pauses to run a hand through her short hair, making the ends go all spiky. “I don't need to be dealing with this right now.”

  Robert puts on what I have come to think of over the years as his “puppy dog face,” which always seems to win Sasha over.

  “I would have kicked her out, but she was acting like a hysterical nut, throwing shit all over the place. I decided it was better to leave before she tried boiling my bunny. Oh, please, Sash, just let me stay here for a few nights.” He puts his palms together in a begging gesture.

  Sasha smirks at the “bunny boiler” comment. “What about the place in Finsbury Park — can't you go and stay there?”

  “Nope. Dad's got the builders in. They're installing new pipes or something.” Robert crosses his arms over his chest, a very faint smug gleam in his eye. You wouldn't recognise it if you weren't used to studying him, like I am. He knows she's about two seconds away from giving in.

  Sasha looks to me with an apologetic expression. I shrug. Perhaps living in the same house as Robert for a couple of days will finally enable me to move past the hold he seems to have on me. It's like I have this urge to triumph over that hold. Show him that he means nothing to me and can't make me feel like crap with a simple condescending look any longer.

  Sasha walks over and places both of her hands on my shoulders. She ducks down so she's at my eye level. Her voice is sincere when she asks, “Do you mind if he stays, kid? Just say the word, and I'll kick him out on his arse.”

  I try to come across as nonchalant, like the idea of sharing the same space as Robert is a mere blip on my radar, when really it’s a gigantic flashing red light blurring my vision. “No, I don't mind. This is your house, Sash.”

  Her brown eyes take me in. They are the exact same brown eyes as Robert's, even though they aren't identical twins, yet somehow hers don't make me feel quite so insignificant.

  Sasha lets out a long breath, still deciding. She seems to come to a resolution. “Okay, then.” She turns back to Robert. “You can sleep in the back bedroom. And if you make a mess, you'd better clean it up.”

  Robert smiles deviously. “Thanks, sis. You know I love ya.”

  I resist the urge to snicker sarcastically. Robert wouldn't know love if it hit him square between the eyeballs. A second later, as Sasha goes to put on the coffee machine, Robert looks at me with an odd mixture of challenge and confusion in his eyes. Perhaps my acceptance of him staying here has taken him by surprise. I repeat a mantra in my head. You're a strong twenty-two-year-old woman, Lana Sweeney. You can do this. Robert Phillips is nothing. He has no worth.

  There's a small, awkward silence as Sasha digs some cups out of the cupboard. Robert continues eating his sandwich, and I sit down on a stool on the other side of the marble countertop. He has this way of making the room feel smaller, his presence alone sucking up all the space. His eyes flicker up to mine, and I force myself to hold his gaze. I will not allow him to cow me.

  “What happened — did you walk into a wall or something?” I ask, feigning concern and resting my sweaty palms on top of my thighs. I need to show a strong, confident front if I'm ever going to survive these few days living with him. With my sanity still intact, that is.

  His expression turns hard. “No, actually, my girlfriend's been beating on me. I had to call a helpline.” His sarcasm knows no bounds.

  “Hmm, normally I'd be shocked, but somehow I can believe you'd drive even a saint to violence.”

  Robert lets out a little snicker and shakes his head. He finishes off his sandwich and goes to rinse the plate in the sink. When he turns back, he's smiling at me with his white teeth all showing. Okay, I never realised how creepy his smile could be.

  “What are you grinning at?” I ask, trying to ignore the goose pimples on my arms.

  Sasha hands me my cup of coffee and looks between the two of us questioningly.

  “I think I'm going to enjoy having you around, Lana,” he says, his voice low. This is weird. He never calls me Lana; he always calls me by one of the many derogatory nicknames he deigns to think up.

  “Rob, you better not start any of your usual shit with Lana. She's here to relax before she starts her Ph.D. She doesn't need you playing your games.” Sasha points her finger at him. “Seriously, I will fucking end you if you begin acting like a brat.”

  Robert glances at me and raises one dark eyebrow. “You're doing a Ph.D.?”

  I glance away and then back at him. “Uh, yes, when I go back home.”

  He laughs. “Well, who would have thought you'd turn out to have a brain inside that little head.” He claps his hands together. “Come on, sis, let's show Lana to her new room.”

  “Get lost, Rob. We're having coffee, and then I'll show Lana to her room. You shouldn't even be here, so you can make yourself scarce.”

  I take a sip of my coffee as the two siblings square off. A moment later Robert slides right up next to me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Aw, come on, I haven't seen my good friend Lana here properly in years. I want to stick around and play catch-up.”

  My lungs freeze a little. His warm, muscled arm is on me, and I don't know how to feel about it. What new trick is he hatching? He's being nice, which is a first, but I don't believe it to be genuine. He can't have changed that much in six years, can he? To be honest, I'm sort of intrigued by his unexpected behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I'm not falling for it, but I want to see where he's going with this.

  Sasha seems exasperated by him. She glances at me. “You mind if he hangs out with us?”

  I shrug and reply, “I'm easy.”

  Robert squeezes my shoulders and peers down at me with an evil grin. “Are you, now?”

  Sasha marches towards him and pulls him off me. “Don't start, Rob — that's your last warning.”

  Robert raises his hands
in the air in surrender. “Fine, fine, I'll behave,” he says, giving me a wink behind his sister's back. I narrow my gaze at him.

  Sasha gestures for me to follow her, and we go upstairs to see my room, carrying our coffee cups with us. Robert trails behind. My room is at the very front of the house, and I smile in delight when I see that it's one of the rooms with the bay windows. In my head I'm visualising making a little nook where I can sit and read.

  It also has an en-suite bathroom and a double bed. A moment later, Sasha's mobile phone begins ringing from where she left it down in the kitchen.

  “Crap, that might be work. I'll be right back,” she says, and then dashes from the room.

  I stand there, fiddling with the hem of my cardigan sleeve. Robert plops himself down on the bed. He leans back on his elbows with his legs spread wide, watching me with one end of his mouth tilted up. I turn away and walk over to the window to look out at the view of the other houses across the street.

  “So, what do you think of the place?” he asks.

  Turning my head to him, I reply honestly, “It's very...high end. A whole other world from back home.”

  “You could certainly say that. My parents come from entirely different backgrounds. I don't know what Dad ever saw in Mum, to be perfectly honest.”

  This is typical of the harsh things Robert is famous for coming out with (and sometimes I think he says them just to piss people off). His mother is one of the nicest people I know; her background shouldn’t even come into it.

  “You really are an awful excuse for a human being, you know that? You're lucky to have a mother like Liz. She's a rock. Your dad might be rich, but he's flighty.”

  Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said that, but it's true. Alan is what you would call a fair-weather father. He likes to be around his kids when it's fun and exciting, but if anything bad is happening you won't see hide nor hair of him.

  “Flighty?” Robert repeats the word back to me like a question, testing out the sound of it on his tongue.

  “You know he is, Rob. Remember when Sasha broke her leg that time during a game of basketball and had to have surgery? He never came to see her, didn't even send her a ‘get well soon’ card.”

  “Well, now, you've certainly grown a pair of balls these past few years. Who knew you actually had the ability to express an opinion, Lana?”

  When I was younger I would do my best to be as insulting to Robert as he was to me, but most of the time he hurt me so badly that I didn't have the strength to fight back. I'd end up getting what I like to call “crying eyes” and red cheeks, and then I'd run home before he had the chance to notice he was getting to me.

  One such incident was when my mum got me a new bike for my thirteenth birthday. When I left it out in my front garden Robert stole it, slashed the tires, and threw it into the sea at the beach just beyond our houses. Liz grounded him for a month when she found out what he'd done, and he actually had the gall to blame me for telling on him.

  “I'm not a little girl anymore, Robert,” I say, my voice hard.

  He smiles in the way a python might smile at its prey if it were capable of facial expressions.

  “No,” he says. “You're certainly not that. You up for going a few rounds in this bed?” he asks, patting the mattress he’s sitting on.

  The way he’s looking at me gives me a strange shiver that radiates down my spine. Is he being suggestive?

  “You’re disgusting.” I tighten my arms, which are folded in a blatant defensive posture across my chest. I’m sure Robert notices this; people like him recognise each and every weak spot in a person’s armour.

  “And you’ve grown into your looks. I wouldn’t mind checking out what’s underneath those god-awful clothes.”

  “Disgusting and shallow,” I add. A small sense of victory runs through me to know that he’s noticed how I’ve lost the teenage skinniness, even if he did just put down my taste in fashion. I guess I might be a small bit shallow myself.

  “Look, Lana, we’re adults now. Why don’t we agree to be friends, for Sasha’s sake if nothing else?”

  “I’m not interested in being your friend.” I keep my voice steady.

  He levels his palms flat on the bed, rubbing them over the duvet cover. I don’t like him touching the sheets on the bed where I’m going to be sleeping. I imagine he knows this, and that’s exactly why he’s doing it.

  “Okay, then, perhaps not friends, but could we at least keep things amicable?”

  I shrug. “Sure, I’m not the rude one here.”

  Robert laughs. “You just called me disgusting and shallow.”

  “That was a statement of fact. Nothing rude about stating a fact.”

  “There is if the fact is offensive.”

  I scoff at that one. “Your ego is so well-honed, Rob, that I don’t think you’re even capable of taking offence to a criticism.”

  “That’s only because you can’t critique perfection,” he answers, and gives me a razor-sharp grin.

  “Touché.” I roll my eyes just as Sasha comes back into the room.

  “It was work calling,” she says. “Apparently some pop singer has gone off the rails and is on a crazy bender with her friends all around the city. They’ve called me in to cover the story.” She blows out a breath, looking nervous. She’s clearly unsure about leaving me alone in the house with Robert.

  “You go. I’ll be spending the day getting unpacked anyway,” I tell her.

  She smiles. “All right, then, call me if you need anything. I’ll bring dinner home when I’m done. Is Chinese okay for you?”

  “Chinese would be wonderful, sis,” Robert pipes in.

  She gives him a light slap on the head. “I wasn’t asking you, fucker.” She looks to me, waiting for an answer.

  “I like Chinese. Just make sure you get something I can, you know, eat,” I say cryptically. Sasha is one of the few people who know that I have Type 1 diabetes. It’s not something I like to advertise, because I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for me. But it means that I always have to be careful with food.

  Robert glances at me, confused. He’s never known about my condition, and I prefer to keep it that way. Knowing him, he’d probably try to steal my insulin as a practical joke or something.

  “I will — see you two later,” says Sasha before disappearing down the stairs.

  Once he hears the front door slam shut, Robert lets out a cackle and rubs his hands together. “Now I’ve got you all to myself, Lana.”

  “Get out of my room.”

  “This house belongs to my dad, so technically it’s more my room than it is yours.”

  “You do know I’m going to tell Sasha everything you say to me when she gets back. You should be on your best behaviour.”

  God, I heard the shake in my voice just then, and so did Robert. He has this knack for turning me into an anxious little girl. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to be around him after all. And maybe my mother was right when she forced me to bring along the rape alarm, I think darkly.

  He studies me for a long time, and then he gets up from the bed. “Fine, if you’re going to go and cry about it, then I’ll go.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  He looks almost sympathetic when he glances back at me as he stands in the doorway, but that can’t be right. “Sure you’re not.”

  The door closes, and I drop down onto my bed, burying my face in the palms of my hands.

  Two

  After I’ve unpacked my things, I go and take a long bath. Since I had to get up at five o’clock this morning to make my early flight, I’m extremely tired, so I take a nap after the bath. A few hours later, the sound of tapping wakes me, and I slowly rub my eyes before opening them. When I do I practically jump out of my own skin, because a pair of heated dark brown eyes are staring right back at me.

  Robert is sitting in a chair that he’s pushed up to the side of my bed and is tapping his short fingernails against the wooden surface of the nightstand. T
he moment draws out, and I feel a blush creep across my skin. I fell asleep lying on top of the blanket in shorts and a vest top. Robert is eating me up with his gaze.

  “What on earth...” I mutter, trying to figure out whether or not this is a dream. Robert is still there, though, even after I blink several times. Now he smiles.

  I gape at him, at the audacity of him to come in here while I was sleeping, but he doesn’t give me a single word of explanation.

  “Well done, Rob. You’ve succeeded in creeping me the fuck out. You can leave now.”

  One end of his mouth twitches, and he continues tapping his fingers. “Creeping you out? I don’t understand.”

  “You need help, do you know that? It’s no wonder your girlfriend kicked you out of your own apartment, especially if this is the kind of behaviour she had to put up with.”

  For a split second he winces, but then he covers it up with a laugh. “You are fiery these days, aren’t you?” He glances at my hair, which has curled a little because I slept on it damp. “I suppose it matches those locks.” His eyes move lower and stay there. “Now, that’s a good look for you.”

  I narrow my eyes, not knowing what he’s getting at, before I glance down to see I’m braless. Feeling indignant, I reply, “What, breasts? I should hope so. Women are generally supposed to have a pair.”

  He gives me a vague look that’s almost a grin, but not quite. “Nipples, too.”

  “Huh?” I say, embarrassed now, rubbing at the back of my head. Two seconds in Robert’s company, and I can already feel a headache coming on.

  He leans in closer, and I jump back instinctively. He keeps coming, though. His breath whispers over my cheek when he gets close enough, and he says, “Women have nipples, too. And I can see yours.”

  Okay, that’s the last straw. I push him away from me, hard. Then I get up and push him to the door, and then out into the hallway. “Stay away from me, Rob. I’m serious. I’m not getting sucked into your games this time.”

  He’s laughing now. “Sasha’s downstairs. She told me to call you for dinner. Chinese, remember?”