She wasn’t even looking at him. Her head was bent, hair falling in a long golden sweep towards the glossy pages of her magazine.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “My feet are cold.”

“That’s okay.” His voice sounded quite normal.

She kept her feet there for the rest of the program, flexing her toes occasionally. After a while, Jake pulled discreetly at his jeans, hoping to ease the fabric that had bunched around his erection. He needed the toilet quite desperately by the time Carl came home but had been unable to get up, owing to the bulge in his jeans pointing outward like an accusing finger.

“Christ!”

Carl threw his briefcase across the floor of the living room and followed it with both of his shoes, eased and kicked off his feet as he moved. They scuttered across the boards like large black beetles, coming to rest against the legs of the coffee table. Veronica looked up, smoothing the hair back from her face.

“Hard day at the office?”

“You have no idea. The fucking muppets I work with…”

The rest of the sentence was lost in a hoof of exhaustion. Carl bent over his girlfriend and kissed her firmly on the mouth. Jake kept his eyes on the screen. His brother slung himself into an armchair, one long leg dangling nonchalantly over one arm. His black hair was raked back, thick with styling wax. It looks stupid, thought Jake treacherously and then berated himself for being an immature and jealous fool.

“What’ve we got to eat?”

Veronica smiled. “You know where the fridge is.”

“This is not good enough. I want my dinner on the table when I get home. Served up, by you, in a tightly strapped corset and black stockings.”

“I refuse to ruin my best underwear by filling it with spaghetti bolognaise.”

Carl stared at her for a moment, nonplussed, and then gave a great bellow of laughter.

“Come here, Stepford Wench. I’ll let you off this time.”

Jake looked away as Carl pulled his girlfriend on to his lap and kissed her.

The three of them spent so much time together but only rarely did Jake feel like a fifth wheel, the odd one out, a gooseberry. Partly it was Carl, protective of his little brother and trying not to make him feel awkward. Jake realised this and loved him the more for it. And partly it was Veronica’s distaste for public displays of affection, for overt sentiment and too-enthusiastic touching. She kept herself at a physical distance, even from her lover. With almost anyone else, such reserve would have been repulsive but she somehow managed to make her standoffishness seem right, natural, the way it should be.  It helped that her smile was warm – it softened the ice-maiden image.

Jake had hoped that living with Veronica might lessen his obsession. He’d assumed that by seeing her every day, in every domestic situation, constantly observing her very human characteristics and behaviours, that this might possibly knock her off the pedestal, both erotic and chaste, that he’d placed her on. He’d also hoped that by seeing her with Carl, by seeing the evidence of her love for his brother before his very eyes, might also persuade his heart, groin and head that she was not for him. That she never would be. A month after her little brass lock installation, he wasn’t convinced that it was happening. If anything, he seemed to be getting worse.

Every day, he struggled not to open her door and plunge himself into her possessions, rifle through her underwear drawer, prostrate himself on her bed. So far he was winning, but how long could he hold out? He spent too much time already mooning over the lacy frivolities she left drying on the radiators. Things had got to a bad point when he found himself rubbing the ball of his thumb over the splayed bristles of her toothbrush, thinking that’s been in her mouth, next to her tongue…

Most of all, though, he was afraid of Carl finding out. Not so much because of the retribution that would no doubt be meted out to him in some violent and prolonged fashion – more that he couldn’t bear to see his brother hurt. Nor could he bear to break the closeness that seemed to exist between the three of them, despite the roiling emotional tension bubbling under the surface. Things were so easy in the house; he would hate to be the one to change that. Better, by far, to swallow down his own feelings in the hope that one day he’d be able to rise above them.

He loved to look at her, though. He’d perfected the art of the sideways glance, the use of a mirror to observe while being unobserved himself. He loved to watch her read, flicking his glance over her face as she turned the pages. She always frowned slightly as she read. He loved to watch her eat, to watch her long neck undulate as she swallowed. She liked to swathe herself in Carl’s dressing gown as she ate breakfast, her long toes flexing away from the cold kitchen tiles. The sleeves hung down past the slender tips of her fingers, trailing in the marmalade on her toast. Jake would watch as she’d laugh and lift the material to her mouth, licking the smear of jam away with a crumb-strewn pink tongue.

At the same time, he was too nervous to look for long. His eyes seemed super-charged with the weight of his passion and it seemed impossible that Carl would be blind to the significance of his gaze. So he watched her in snatches, grabbing glimpses here and there.

He found her long blonde hairs in the bathroom, trailing from the taps, twined around the neck of the shampoo bottle. Once, from the bottom of the bath, he picked up a crinkled pubic hair, softer and lighter than the ones that fell from him and his brother. Holding it in his pinched fingers, thinking about where it had come from, he pulsed and stiffened with blood.

He grew to savour the moments of standing in the doorway to her room, talking to Veronica as she lay curled cat-like on bed. The room smelled of perfume, warm female skin and the scent of the dying flowers drooping in the vase on the windowsill. Once or twice, he daringly went over and sat on the bed next to her, wondering what she would say if he lay down beside her. Wondering was about as far as he ever got. She had a battered old teddy bear that shared the pillow next to hers - whenever Jake sat next to her, he could see it staring accusingly at him with its black button eyes. When she sat in bed, she wore cream satin pyjamas that fell in luscious, shiny folds across her legs. Once, she wore a black nightgown with a tight lace bodice, through which her nipples protruded in tiny pink points. He’d masturbated furiously over that nightdress for nearly a fortnight.

Jake knew he wasn’t the best at facing reality. But after Veronica had been there two months, he had to reluctantly face the fact that he was getting worse, not better. Every evening was a struggle; the weekends were two days of sweet agony. He tried his own version of aversion therapy. He savoured the moments when she said something stupid (not often but they did occur) and repeated them to himself again and again. He tried to mentally freeze-frame a picture of her face when it was startled or screwed up in laughter and in anything other than its normal, beautiful repose. He tried to think of her in negative terms; he told himself that she was cold, skinny, flat-chested. He even tried deliberately listening when she was in the bathroom, straining his ears for the sound of a fart or the splash of a turd. Then he’d hide himself away when she flushed and left the bathroom, only to race back inside to take deep breaths of the fading pungency that remained, only half disguised by the odour of synthetic flowers. He hugged these moments to himself – it was as if he knew a secret about her that she didn’t, that he’d discovered something about her she was desperate to hide – the tell-tale fact of her own animal being.

It only partly worked. In some ways it made things worse. He was more aware of her than ever – she was more there in the house; more physical, more real. At times the whole house seemed full of her scent, the very rooms filled with her breath, the walls warmed by her skin and the ceilings lit up in the flickering golden light of her hair.