Listen by Kate Veitch

James over to the side of the pool: their prize catch.
    There was a chromed steel ladder mid-way along the pool’s edge. The girl still in her underwear hooked one arm around the ladder, facing the water. The naked blonde girl, laughing, her arm around James’ neck, darted her face to his and kissed him quickly, triumphantly. Then she leaned in to her dark-haired friend and kissed her, too. James lifted both his hands to the girls’ breasts, the right breast of one and the left of the other, reaching inside the bra cup to free the perfect mound of buoyant flesh.
    ‘Oh!’ said Vesna again. She turned away. ‘You know what?’
    ‘Time for us to rejoin the party, I think,’ said Robert.
    ‘I think we’d better!’ she confirmed, and was already moving quickly back towards the ballroom. Robert followed, crackling with anxiety. What if she judged him by his brother’s behaviour and thought he was going to… to try something with her? As if I would! Robert thought indignantly. But Vesna had stopped by the door and was waiting for him. She was smiling.
    ‘Still hate to be that good-looking?’ she teased.
    ‘I’m not like that, Vesna,’ Robert said earnestly. ‘That’s not for me.’
    ‘I know,’ she said, laying her soft hand against his cheek for a moment before she stepped back into the tumult of the party.
    Down in the pool, James didn’t know or care whose hands were on which part of him, or which girl he was touching at any given moment. An image danced in his mind: one of those Indian statues of multi-armed, full-breasted goddesses come to life. Someone ducked beneath the water and stripped off his underpants, freeing his penis to leap upright. The water felt like silk around it. Briefly a mouth enveloped its swollen head, sucking, and then it was surrounded by wateragain, and then by a hand, and pressed against a thigh, then a taut belly. The girls pressed close against him; he was kissing and fondling one and the other and both. Then he found himself behind the naked blonde, whose hand was inside her friend’s panties and clearly knew what it was doing there. The two girls were kissing passionately, and James had his arms round both, stroking and squeezing. The blonde girl wriggled in the water, nestling her rump against him, and with her free hand reached between her legs and positioned him against her slit. She pushed down as he pushed up and suddenly he was inside her, the heat and juiciness in there all the more delicious for the coolness of the surrounding water. He pushed in deeper, harder.
    As he rocked back and forth in her the blonde leaned forward, undid her friend’s bra and lifted one breast clear of the water as she sucked and tongued the nipple, her other hand still working deep inside those panties. ‘Oh god,’ the dark girl cried. ‘Oh god, oh fuck!’ The blonde was moaning and gasping too. James watched the face of the dark-haired girl as she came, and just a moment later the blonde’s back arched and her buttocks bucked hard against him, inner muscles gripping him tight as her orgasm surged through.
    I really want to paint this! he was thinking. The way the light from below and behind makes the flesh look almost translucent, the way the waterdrops magnify the pores. Her mouth just above the surface, half-open… that strange expression, the intensity, like pain almost… How can I get that just right?

CHAPTER 6
    Robert was standing in his living room. He was not in a good way. He felt as though his skull belonged to somebody else, like it had been fitted on to his body by accident. He lifted his hands to the back of his neck and rubbed there for a few moments, and then at the temples. Weird, the disparity between the information from his fingertips and the way his skull felt from the inside, like an enormous ball that had been dangerously overinflated. He held his hands apart for a moment in the air on either side of his head. There, that was how big it felt. The size of a