Read Asking for It for Free Online Page B

children’s version of the Ballinatoom jersey, minuscule shorts and wedge sandals.
    ‘Susan,’ one of the WAGs mutters under her breath, ‘Paul’s coming.’
    He runs up to us and grabs Susan around the waist, although how he can pick her out of this line-up is beyond me, and gives her a massive kiss, ruffling her hair and saying ‘We won, we won!’ as if the rest of us hadn’t been at the match.
    ‘How come you didn’t go to the clubhouse?’ He turns to one of the others. ‘Ben was looking for you too.’ The girl looks guilty, her eyes darting to Susan and then to the ground.
    ‘Ugh, baby,’ Susan says. ‘It’s so gross in there – that rag they use to dry the glasses looks like it hasn’t been washed in twenty years.’
    He smiles at her, then glances at the rest of us, doing a barely perceptible double take when he sees me. He looks me up and down, just like his father did, running a hand across his brown buzz cut. Susan grits her teeth.
    ‘Emily, isn’t it?’ she says, walking towards me.
    ‘It’s Emma, actually.’
    ‘You must be freezing , Emily.’ She gives a sympathetic shiver, standing so close to me I can smell the biscuit tang of her fake tan. She unwraps my cardigan from around my waist and places it around my shoulders, hoiking up my crop top to cover my cleavage. Her friends snicker, and my ears start to burn.
    ‘Thanks for your concern, Sharon ,’ I say. I take off the cardigan again, wrapping it around the strap of my bag, and pull the top even further down. ‘But I’m not cold at all.’ I direct this at Paul with a smile. And as I walk away, my legs tremble with an adrenalin rush so strong I almost feel sick from it.
    *
    ‘There you are,’ Mam says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, tapping at the iPad. ‘I’m trying to watch something on playback and it keeps freezing. What’s wrong with this thing at all?’
    ‘Did you ask Bryan? He’s better at stuff like that than I am.’
    ‘He’s not feeling well. Food poisoning.’
    ‘Food poisoning?’ I say as I go into the TV room after I tried in vain to help Mam fix RTÉ Player. ‘I did that already,’ she snapped when I suggested turning it off and back on again. ‘And put a jumper on yourself.’ She handed me Bryan’s UL hoodie. ‘You’ll embarrass your brother if you go in to him like that.’
    Bryan is thrown down on the black leather sofa, a blue plastic basin next to him and one of Mam’s patchwork quilts in red gingham pulled up to his neck. His skin is tinged with grey, his dark curly hair coated with sweat and sticking to his head. ‘Looks like someone had fun last night.’
    ‘Tesco value vodka,’ he croaks. ‘May as well have been drinking lighter fluid.’
    I nudge his feet off the sofa so I can sit next to him, yanking some of the quilt away from him.
    ‘Ah, the poor Bryany.’ I pat him on the head. He grunts, turning his attention back to the TV. ‘You look very skinny. Maybe I should come visit you again, feed you up.’
    ‘And give me food poisoning for real? No, thanks.’ He pulls the quilt off me, looking a bit more awake. ‘And anyway, you’re not allowed back to UL, not after your visit at midterm.’
    ‘Are your roommates still pining after me?’
    ‘They’re managing to survive, somehow.’
Ali:
Today was fun, wasn’t it?
Ali:
I’m so bored.
Ali:
Anyone want to Skype?
    I tell Bryan to turn up the volume as Graham Norton flips an unfortunate-looking girl off the Big Red Chair.
    ‘The state of her,’ I say. ‘You think she’d have got her hair done or something if she knew she was going to be on TV.’
    My phone beeps again. Ali has tagged me in a photo on Instagram, a selfie of the four of us at the match captioned ‘Me and my girls, fresh as fuck.’
    I look at the photo closely. I’m definitely the prettiest out of the four of us.
    (It’s just because Jamie is tall. Models need to be tall.)
    (It’s just because Asian girls are on trend this season.)
    I turn my phone