Bedroom Eyes

by SJ Townend

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

My heels drag deep trenches in the dirt, causing the swing to lose momentum much slower than I’d like. Time for us to move on, but George is full of an idea. George hovers by the derelict bench, and he looks at me again with those heavy bedroom eyes.

I don’t want to go to the bedroom, not yet. Not his bedroom—as yet unseen—or mine, with its dog-eared romance novel stuffed shelves and its walls plastered with pencil sketches of our neighbour’s cats.

No other living soul has been in my bedroom, apart from my parents, and occasionally, when he stays over for protracted periods of time at Christmas and makes a wrong turn on the landing at night, Uncle Mark.

George now stands in front of me, staring. I stiffen.

For three weeks, each late afternoon date has curdled like this.

With George giving his bedroom eyes.

 “Can I kiss you?” The beginnings of an idea. George grabs the rusted chains of the swing and brings it to a stop.

“No. Not now. Not yet. I want to go dancing at Cosie’s. Or… we could go singing again. It’s Tuesday. Golden Mic night.” I squirm on the slat of wood.

George shakes his head. “I don’t want to spend any money.”

“Then let’s head to the river and play poo sticks. Can’t we just do something fun?”

George sighs.

“To the bridge, then.” He glances at his watch. “We’ve a couple of hours before I have to be home for dinner.”

Off we walk, away from the dishevelled mess that is St. Mary’s rec, with its solitary skeleton of a swing and its netless basketball hoop and its vandalised seating provision. Through the field, out of the field, towards the downwards slope of the canopied holt that leads to Wellow Brook Bridge we stride.

George drapes his sweaty arm over my sunburnt shoulders. Rough cotton—his t-shirt sleeve—bristles against the nape of my neck.

“Put your arm around my waist. Then it’s easier to move in unison,” George says as if he has walked with a girlfriend a thousand times before. But I am his first. At least, that’s the yarn he’s spun me.

With a tightening grip, George ensures we remain like this, octopused together. Over-starched denim chafes the meat of my thigh with each step. “You know, you’re very special to me,” he says. Such a charmer. “You’re beautiful. One of a kind. I don’t want anybody else.”

His words, as always, flatter my ego. “Thank you,” I reply. I melt into his warm side and smile up. Gentle eyes.

We head for the river before the late summer sun says goodnight.

It’s not that I don’t want to look back at him with my own bedroom eyes. Mostly, when George kisses me, slips his wet tongue in, and before he pulls away to ask, are you ready yet? heat throbs in my knicker gusset. And, on occasion, I wish I was in a bedroom—but I’m terrified of repercussions.

So, I give bashful eyes. Kitchen or classroom eyes. Any look that won’t lead him on.

Once a tightly packed suitcase is opened, the silhouette of Uncle Mark whispered to me last December while stood on the threshold to my room, it’s often impossible to zip back up.

And there’s always the risk of conception. Even on your first time. Even if you do it standing up and take a shower straight after. Even if you only do it under a crescent moon.

My parents don’t even know I’m out with a boy. A man. George is eighteen now, after all. Mother and Father would spit feathers.

I gather large twigs as we pick our way through alders, crack-and-white willows, bracken, and downy birch clusters. We reach the weathered steps of the bridge. “Come on then.” I am already standing on the middle of the bridge staring down at the dark water that flows beneath as I beckon George over with my voice. Over orange and white lichen-encrusted snarled roots, stumps of bracken, and leaf litter, he ambles in my direction.

From the crown of the bridge, the air smells bad. Sulphurous. Below, the river is crowded with detritus. Rocks and logs and scum in the water’s path will add suspense to our game. The game is a gamble because at least one of our sticks might fail as it endeavours to drift through the mouth of the bridge’s tunnel. But at least the water flows quickly. Fast enough for us to play.

George places his pile of sticks on the bridge next to mine and looks up at me from his crouched position. He’s showing his bedroom eyes again. He stands. He’s tall. Oak-like, with one hand on his hip. “Did I ever tell you that you remind me of that movie star—” he begins. A slow arm slides around my waist, and his wood presses against my waist.

Flustered, I step back and roll out a variety of looks—kitchen eyes, library eyes—before settling on church. Church eyes always calm him.

“I love it here. All the trees. The moss.” I coyly twist a curl of my hair around my index finger. “The serene sound of the water. Don’t you?  Don’t you, George? Perhaps we’ll get married here one day?”

“It’s alright. I s’pose.” With a sweat-slick palm, George flattens the rumple in his Levi’s and bends to select a contestant. “Come on then,” he says. “Choose your weapon.”

I take a stick, and we lean over the edge of the rickety bridge. Does it sway to the side as our combined weight rests on the splintered balustrade?

“Did you feel that?” I ask, steadying myself by placing my hand on George’s forearm. Wide eyes. “Did you feel the earth move?”

“We’re not on the earth. We’re on a bridge,” George huffs, “and No.”

 “Must’ve been in my head. We’re not that high anyway, are we?” I peer over the edge. The water runs no more than eight feet below us and perhaps no deeper than three or four feet at its worst. “It’s not even that far if we do fall.” I giggle nervously. Lengths and heights are arbitrary. Rumour has it, one can drown in a puddle.

“We won’t fall.” George exhales. “Just throw your stick.”

After a countdown from three, we both drop sticks at the same time because this is how the game works—one bridge, a river, two sticks, gravity, and a coordinated launch. Our sticks splash down, narrowly avoiding each other, yet still landing close enough, even without colliding, for one to have a significant impact on the journey of the other. Green water sprays up. A rustle behind us. “A squirrel,” George says on catching my eye. Rustling, again, as some startled creature skitters off, into the thick. Our sticks disappear under the bridge, into the hollow black, as if taken in by wet, unseen hands.

I spin around and lean against the other side of the bridge’s rails and stare down at the water. Whose stick will be spat out first? Or will one get lodged in the grim darkness of the tunnel and never again see the light of day?

I wait, hoping today my stick will come out first. Alas, out swims George’s.

“You win. Congratulations.” Out pops mine.

“Yep.” George sighs. Then, a flicker of bedroom eyes. His lips curl into a half-grin. “What’s my prize?”

I feel as if we are back at Cosie’s performing karaoke, singing the same scripted words to the same familiar song. He always asks what he gets for winning. I always return the same response. “A second game. You’ve won a rematch.”

“Really?”

His tone says he’s not feeling particularly poo-stickish today. Like he didn’t feel particularly poo-stickish on Thursday. He plunges his hands into his pockets and feigns interest in the patchy canopy that shields us from the sun. “Do we at least get to make out a bit first?”

“Can we play a little longer? One more game. Best of three.” Puppy eyes. Lash batting.

“Okay,” he says. “But it’s a dull game with sticks. Life’s far more fun when you take a risk. When you gamble with something of value.”

“Like what? What else can we throw over the bridge?”

He steps towards me, dips his chin, looks at my throat. “Your necklace?” I clutch the silver filigree crucifix pendant my parents gave me for my sixteenth.

“I couldn’t…”

I really shouldn’t.

“I’ll climb down the river bank and retrieve it once the game’s done.”

The river bank is steep. Littered with twisted stems. “You’d fall. You’d rip your jeans!”

“Worth it,” George says, “for the slim chance of improving this game.”

“Promise you’ll go down and fetch it?”

“Have I ever let you down before?”

We’ve been courting for three weeks now. He has been mostly respectful.

“And what about you? What are you going to drop?”

“My watch.” He unbuckles its leather strap and dangles it in the air. “Water-resistant. It’ll be fine.” He’s smiling. He’s smiling and he’s giving me playful eyes, and I can’t lie, I’m buzzing on the inside.

“Okay,” I agree. “Let’s do it.”

Three.

Two.

One.

Go!

Our trinkets splash into the water.

The throb I get in my crotch each time George holds me close begins again. But this time, it commences beneath my ribs. Fists balled tight with anticipation, together, we both spin one-eighty to see which item drifts out first.

His watch emerges.

“You always win,” I say.

“It appears I do.”

We meet at the bridge every evening for a month. George insists that each time, if we have to play, we must take increasingly sizeable risks.

He brings his mother’s new china vase, and I bring my precious leather-bound journal, cocooned in cling film. Over the side they go.

George brings his father’s wallet. I bring my O’Level certificates inside a taped-closed plastic bag. His father’s wallet floats out first. I cuss before allowing a short wet kiss.

My childhood photograph album. George’s father’s favourite aged Lagavulin single malt—before it goes over, George swigs from the brown bottle, searing his throat, then re-seals it and rolls it in bubble wrap. Baby teeth from Mother’s underwear drawer. The key to George’s Nova, along with its faux-leather fob. Martha, the button-eyed doll Uncle Mark gave me years ago. The small dress I was christened in. George’s Sony Walkman. His cousin’s prized flute in its blue-velvet lined case. My hardback edition of Sweet Valley High: Double Love. These treasures and more go over the bridge rails.

And each time, George wins.

“You always win,” I say. A droplet of sweat curls down my neck and finds its way between my breasts. George’s bedroom eyes track its journey.

“But you enjoy it, the excitement, don’t you?” George has just returned from the water’s edge. Mittens—my neighbour’s now soggy kitten—worms in George’s clumsy left hand. In his right, George carries the plane ticket for his gap year to Australia. I take Mittens from him. “And isn’t it lucky how nothing ever gets stuck? In the darkness. Under the bridge. Aren’t we incredibly lucky that everything we drop always drifts back out?”

I nod. He’s right. We’ve been extremely lucky.

“I can’t imagine anything worse than being stuck down there in the darkness where the leathery-skinned troll breathes and grunts and grabs at things it fancies with its oversized hands and feeds on rancid bones,” he says. He’s wriggling his fingers at me, in my face, while giving me wild eyes. Storyteller eyes. Raring eyes. This is a first.

I smile. Awkwardly. “There is no troll,” I say. I fight the childish urge to peer over and down into the tunnel to check. Stories are, after all, just stories. And stories are nothing but well-dressed fabrications. Although I can’t work out whether George is trying to scare me or trying to make me laugh. Most likely, neither. He’s simply overexcited about his travels. Yes. That’ll be it. His gap year. My forced smile drops.

I eyeball his plastic-wrapped plane ticket. If only his plane ticket had remained down there, in the dark and under the bridge, in the dank water, to rot or be fed on by the troll.

In sixty-three days and fourteen hours, he’ll be on the other side of the world. For a year. Might as well be forever. I am in love beyond my wildest dreams. George must feel the same. Must. I know he must. In fact, I can see it in his eyes right now. In George’s bedroom eyes.

“You love the excitement of taking a risk, don’t you?” He cups my chin in his hand and gives me the most penetrative bedroom eyes yet. Boudoir eyes. Love nest eyes.

“I guess I do,” I say, a little hazy, somewhat hypnotized. George pushes a lock of hair from my cheek. That yearning starts in my gusset, but the kitten squished between us releases a loud meiow, breaking the spell.

I turn for the journey back. “Mittens needs to get back to his mum. Same time, same place, tomorrow?”

“Sure,” George replies.

The next evening, down at the river, as we stand too close beneath a sky that holds both a low-slung sun and a wisp of white crescent moon, I toss my virginity over the edge of the rickety bridge. One risk that forever will remain lost in the dark tunnel never to re-emerge the other side, good as new.

And I’m not sure precisely what risk George drops into the rushing water this time, but it’s all over as fast as a stick under a bridge and the event plays out, for me at least, with considerably less excitement.

I endure a torrid shower as soon as I’m home, then retreat to my bedroom.

At least George isn’t going to Australia.

Standing at the altar of the dated registry office, my right hand rests on my white-silk-clad bump, and my left stretches out as if disconnected from my body. George slips a thin gold band onto my ring finger.

Our mothers, dressed in their Sunday best, glare at both of us, George’s with someone-has-chipped-my-Wedgewood-Jasperware-vase eyes, mine with an expression I can’t quite name. Our fathers fidget throughout the service and gaze down at their respective polished shoes. As does George. An attempt, no doubt, to try to stop his world from spinning.

“I do,” George says. He’s shaking. This part at least, he gets right, after fumbling most of his vows. The cloy of excessive Davidoff Cool Water is failing to mask the sweet chemical waft of ethanol rot on my husband-to-be’s breath.

“I do,” I say, and George looks up from his hired black patent leather Oxfords and gives me married eyes. The whites there, so prominent, yet each eye an unreadable bloodshot map. Married eyes, so prominent and white and webbed with red and wide.

The baby swirls in my belly and kicks my stomach. A surge of vomit as sour and thick as stagnant river water lurches up my throat. I hard-swallow and smile with only my lips before offering my husband a bulge of an attempt at married eyes in return.

For a while, after the wedding, after the birth of our daughter, sometimes we return to the rickety bridge, George and Lizbeth and I. We watch the water flurry under. But little is said. The silence, the babble of the brook, is only broken by the baby’s screams.

And once Lizbeth is walking and has, in George’s words, become more of a handful, on Saturday mornings while George sleeps off a bad head, I visit the site of her conception with just her. Together, half-heartedly, we play poo sticks, my daughter and I, and I contemplate the risk of her or me throwing ourselves into dark waters.

And then Lizbeth is grown and elopes to Australia of all places, and she marries and becomes a mother herself. And I still visit the river alone each week. But I don’t throw anything in.

I merely offer, over the side of the bridge, my woes and tears to the river, to the leather-skinned troll, the troll with the oversized, grabbing hands who lurks down there in the darkness, hiding in the abyss. The troll that gnaws on lost things and fetid bones.

At first, my woes drop into the water and return nothing. But time makes drawing myself away from the bridge and the company it offers harder. I learn to listen there, to the echoes of my spoken sorrows, the comforting echoes that are not echoes, more like grunts that float back out.

George stirs, rouses. The stale sheets writhe as he tries to free his arm from beneath them. I lean against the door jamb, between George and the hallway, and I glower at him.

George gives me bedroom eyes. His bedroom eyes bore into me despite the dim light of the increasingly claustrophobic room.

Jaundiced eyes. Eyes always better shut than open. Yellow-tainted eyes. George’s middle-aged eyes have the hue of the parasitic fungus, Tremella mesenterica, Witch’s Butter, which clings and sucks on tree trunks that I have spotted more than once during my time spent down by the bridge.

I enter and settle on the side of what was once our but was now solely his rickety double bed. He fingers the lace neck of my nightie but does not want my breast. Rather than recoiling, though, I cup his tremoring hand with mine.

“Just one more drink. Please, Cindy.”

White crud at the corners of his mouth cracks as he speaks. It disgusts me. The bedroom eyes and the foul odour, like nail polish remover, on his breath as he speaks—repulsive. I turn my face from his.

“No, darling. It’s too risky for you to drink again. One drink could cause mental confusion. Or internal bleeding. Or rapid liver and kidney failure. Don’t you remember the doctor spelling it out?”

George groans.

“Patience, darling. Patience is a virtue. A donor might still crop up.” Monotone words slip from my mouth. We have had this conversation on many nights, a dry karaoke performance. “No alcohol.”

“But it might help with my pain—” His voice: nothing but a scratchy whisper. His face contorts into a grimace. The bedroom eyes he’s been giving me for months remain riddled with delusions of whisky and terminal cirrhotic agony.

“Please, George. Close your eyes.” That harrowing squint. Those pleading, rotting eyes. In truth, I haven’t been able to stand the sight of him since the first affair.

I recall it clearly, the first night of betrayal and the tale he’d spun on his return, one exceptionally well-dressed fabrication: a cold Friday evening precisely forty years ago today. Lizbeth wouldn’t settle. George swanned off to the bar, just for one, and didn’t skulk back until Monday at dawn. So many years ago. So many betrayals and fabrications I’ve let slip past since. Time passes fast. Decades slip along like water under a bridge.

“I’ll get one myself.” He scuffles off the top sheet and tries to swing his withered legs out of bed. The clack of femur on patella. His flaccid cock slips free from his boxers and splays on the stained sheet. The repugnant sight of it, of him, violates my guts.

“No. Please don’t move,” I say. “Not yet. I’ll fetch you a drink.” Where did I stash his alcohol? I’m tired. Exhausted. I can’t think straight this evening. My heart is heavy with memories and memories of memories—the cupboard. Beneath the kitchen sink. Of course. Behind the wire-wool scourers. “I’ll bring you a whisky. If you’ll play a game.”

“Sure.” Desperate eyes.

I head to the kitchen, pour him a large one and carry it back upstairs. It’s a challenge, but I encourage him to lean forwards slightly and press the plastic tumbler to his bark-dry bottom lip. “One drink for one game. One game of poo sticks,” I say. He slurps. I tip the cup with each gulp. Amber liquid trickles into him with expediency.

“One more game. You said you would.” His brows rise. Drained, I take the cup and place it on the windowsill. “Let’s take a risk. Let’s each drop something under the bed. Into the river.”

His eyes roll back with the short-lived buzz of alcohol into his pitiful, sunken orbital sockets. “What shall I drop?” My husband croaks.

“What greater risk than our bodies?” I whisper. “Once so fresh and supple, now so weary and frail—”

With several tugs, I jimmy George’s stick-thin legs around until both calloused feet press into our threadbare, once ocean-blue carpet. The stench of his unwashed body. At least he’s as light as a feather. As light as a loved-up virgin atop a fairytale bridge.

George chokes on the foam of vomit which reverse-waterfalls up his throat. He splutters. Breaking waves of whisky and stomach acid spray into his lungs.

I give him a moment. Slap him gently on the back. He sucks in air, finds his rhythm, and nods. “Okay. Okay.”

“Here, get down on your hands and feet. Crawl with me, under the bed, under the bridge that is the bed,” I say. I pat the carpet at my side.

Slowly, he moves. On all fours, we make like cautious beasts, side-by-side, towards the bed’s veil of grey cotton, the single, thin sheet that separates our faces, our shoulders from the abyss beneath.

“Three. Two. One. Go,” I say, but remain still.

George creeps forwards. Tortoise-like, he dips his head beneath the frill of sheet. By the neck, in one swift motion, his body is sucked under, drawn inwards, as if by a current, or a pair of strong, oversized hands.

The scents of silt and drowned moss flood the room.

George’s body glides like a coffin on rollers towards a furnace, like a stick carried by dark water into the grim maw of a tunnel beneath a bridge.

I do not rise.

I have no urge to spin one-eighty. Nor any desire to sprint to the far side of the rickety wooden frame, to wait, on tenterhooks, to see what drifts out. Because this time, one moment following another, perhaps, nothing sacrificed would re-emerge.

A sharp crunch, like the snap of a dry branch, comes from underneath the bed.

Still on hands and knees, I lift the grey sheet and whisper, “I win,” into the abyss.

Then, another sound, a deep and comforting echo, but also not an echo, floats out.  

I stand and walk into the spare room where shortly, my new lover, with his oversized hands and fragrance of river silt and drowned moss, will lie down with me, and I’ll be wearing nothing but my bedroom eyes.

Want another gripping story from SJ Townend? Read “QVC” in Horrific Scribes July 2025 and “When One Door Closes” in Horrific Scribes December 2025.