Deep Desires

by Stein, Charlotte

  I think I fantasise about flesh hitting flesh, and the slow red trail of blood making its way through water. And then there’s a rushing feeling that’s probably me ascending to heaven. Or me descending to hell.

  Either way, it’s very bright and very fast, and once it’s over there’s a dark figure crouched over me. The devil, I think, but everything is so cold it can’t possibly be. I’m cold all over my outsides, and cold all over my insides, too, and not even the shroud he puts around my shoulders can stop it.

  Not even the sound of his voice can stop it, or the words he says that I’m sure I’ve misheard: Come back to me, Abbie. Come back. Come back.

  But his kiss … yeah, his kiss makes a difference. All of that cold rushes out of my body in one big glut, and then of course I realise what all of this is. My lungs were full of water, and now I’m spitting it all back up. He breathed air back into my lungs, and now I’m alive. I’m alive.

  And he’s holding me. My Ivan – he’s holding me.

  Stupid, really, that the first words out of my mouth are I’m sorry. He even seems to think they’re stupid once they’re out, because he shakes his head and strokes my hair, half laughing. Half laughing and half telling me something I never thought I’d hear.

  Don’t be sorry, he says to me. You don’t ever have to be sorry, my Abbie.

  And then I know it for sure: this isn’t a dream or a fairytale at all.

  For once, it’s real.

  * * *

  He carries me inside, trailing water like a mermaid he found washed up on the beach. I even feel a little like that. I suppose that’s a side effect of actually getting a sort of happy ending – you start feeling like you’re in a Disney movie, about to be gifted legs by your bearded father.

  Though I’ll take what Ivan actually does over that. I’ll take him cupping my body tenderly, with his eyes fixed on mine. Like he can’t bear to look at anything else, as he takes me into his bathroom. As he sets me down on the tiled floor, and takes off my wet nightgown, the wet robe I was wearing.

  I’m sorry, I try to say again, but he stops me for the second time. He takes my face in his hands and tells me that it doesn’t matter, that he’s glad I know now. That he wanted me to know, and that’s why he left the door unlocked.

  I didn’t jimmy it at all.

  It was already open.

  ‘I’m sorry I was scared after,’ he says, and then I hug him, the way I wanted to back there in the closet. My body tight against his, every part of us touching. My arms tight around his neck, until he prises me away long enough to submerge me in warm scented bathwater.

  Sluicing off the chlorine feels like sluicing off my old life. He washes it out of my hair for me, and kisses it off my lips and, by the time he’s done, I’m half-asleep. I’ve got a million questions on my lips: Where’s Sid? What did you do to him?

  But they all die away in the face of his neat bed and the feel of his big body sheltering mine. He curls around me, and then somewhere in the middle of the night, I curl around him, and everything is forgotten. Everything is warm, and safe.

  No one can hurt you now, I say. Or does he say that to me? I think he says it to me, just as I’m drifting off. I think he tells me that Sid won’t be coming back, that he hit him and that he won’t be coming back, though I could be wrong. I could be dreaming.

  Either way, we wake up tangled together. He’s already kissing me, and I have no problem kissing back. In truth, I kiss him back as though I’ve been starved of him for the last three days, and what I really need is to cram as much of him as possible into my mouth. I kiss his lips, and his jaw, and, when I kiss him in crazy places like behind his ears, he actually laughs for me.

  You should probably rest, he tells me, but I’ve been without him for too long. I don’t want to rest. I want to devour him. I run my hands all over his body, remembering places I’d forgotten, like the curve of his back just above his ass. It’s smooth and solid and good, and it grounds me in him. It makes me forget the taste of chlorine in my mouth, the feel of that brutish hand in my hair.

  Instead, I feel him. I lose myself in his kisses, which start out slow but soon turn frantic. He’s forgotten too, it seems. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be buried underneath bad memories, because he looks at me when he kisses me and he looks at me when I touch him.

  When I run my mouth all over him, from his shoulders to the soles of his feet.

  That last one makes him laugh, again, but that’s good too. I want him to laugh. I want sex to be happy and light, not dim and dark. If we play games, I want the games to come from nothing but desire, instead of a thousand different things that weigh us down.

  And they do. They do come from desire. He doesn’t stop me when I straddle his body on the bed. I’m looking right down at him, right into his eyes, but he doesn’t say anything. He just watches me, watching him. He lies there and lets me ride him.

  And when he commands me, when he tells me harder, faster, lift your hips, touch your breasts … I don’t feel commanded. I feel free. I’m free. The blackbird has flown away, and this is what I’m left with: the hot, insistent sense of someone between my legs. His eyes locking with mine, as I take him and claim him and make him mine.

  ‘I love you,’ I tell him, as I feel him swell inside me. He’s going to come before I do, I’m sure, he’s going to actually let go and give in, though it’s not a disappointment when he doesn’t. I still revel in the feel of his hips jerking up to meet mine, those rough hands of his replacing my own on my breasts, as I climb.

  And the look on his face is a picture. He looks caught between pleasure and determination, ready to give in but wanting to give me more at the same time. He’s even biting his lip, which isn’t something I ever thought I’d see. He’s too tightly closed for lip biting. He’s too restrained for what he does next:

  He throws me over onto my back in a tangle of limbs, and tells me what I already know. You’re a bad girl, trying to force me over the edge, he says, and then even better: But you don’t have to. I’m already there. I’m already lost in you.

  He kisses those last words into my mouth, skin so hot against mine I can hardly stand it. Perspiration has made a gloss between our slowly working bodies, but it only adds to the sensations that are building through me. My nipples feel too taut and sensitive to be rubbing against his solid chest, and his cock is ever so slightly sliding back and forth over that good good place inside me.

  The one that makes me nuts. The one that makes me want to put a hand down between our bodies and find my stiff clit, just to take the edge off. Just to take me to that place of relief and bliss.

  It’s almost agony when he stops me.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’

  And for just a split second, I do think he’s cruel. Before he lets me know the reason for his denial. For the way he takes my hands and puts them above my head. It’s not to stop me from touching him this time. It’s for another, sweeter purpose altogether.

  ‘I want you to come like this,’ he says, as he sits up just a little. Just enough to take any pressure away from my clit, and give him all the leverage he needs. He yanks my hips into his lap; spreads my legs wide. The muscles in my thighs almost, almost protest, but he keeps it on just the right sort of edge.

  He’s dominant, without being too much. Forceful, but for all the right sorts of reasons. The right sorts of reasons make me moan in delight the moment he moves just right. That gorgeous body of his displayed to its best advantage, between my legs. His two good, strong hands on my hips, pulling me roughly into pleasure.

  I almost come right there and then, just at the sight of it. At the thought and idea of it – my strong man, my saviour, the man I have saved in return, taking me so insistently, like this.

  ‘Oh yes, like this, like this,’ he says, and I just nod my head helplessly. I blink, and water runs in two thin streamers out of the corners of my eyes. I don’t even know why, really. Because I’m alive? Because I almost drowned, and now
I’m alive?

  And I get this, instead of dying.

  It doesn’t seem like something that should happen to me. I’ve been waiting all this time for my end, and I didn’t think it would be anything good. But this is good. This is so good I can’t even speak, and tell him in how many ways. I just arch under his touch, hands scrabbling for his.

  He presses them into my hips, like I’m doing this as much as he is. He put his hands over mine and rocks into me, over and over, that same deliciously abandoned look all over his beautiful face. He’s really going to do it, now, I know, but that’s OK. Because every stroke is hitting just the right spot, so firmly I could faint over it.

  I’m not prepared for the pleasure that hits. I can’t even let out a sound to relieve some of it because my teeth have formed a cage to keep everything in. My body doesn’t want to let go of this rolling, too-tense orgasm, and even after it’s done I can still feel it. I can still feel it in the clench of my cunt around his still working cock. In my belly, where it began; in my clit, which still aches to be touched.

  Though I scream when he actually does it. I beg him not to, but of course he disobeys. He runs one teasing finger over the very tip of that slippery little bud, and just as I think it’s going to be too much it turns into not enough.

  ‘Please, please,’ I tell him, while he gazes down at me, this teasing look on his face. This teasing, light-hearted look on his face. It’s a revelation, and it gives me more than the thing I’m begging for.

  I don’t even want it anymore. I just want him to come too. I want his body to tremble the way mine is doing, and his expression to lose all of its tension. And when I lift my hips a little, when I rock against his grip and gasp his name, I get a little bit closer. Then closer still. He moans for me, and that’s almost enough.

  But it’s not quite the reaction I get when I tug my hands free and rake my nails down over his chest.

  ‘Abbie,’ he says. ‘Ohhh God, Abbie.’

  Followed by unintelligible Russian words that mean just as much. I love the sound of him giving in. The look of him, the way he arches his back and lets all of these sounds tumble out of him. He looks raw in the low light. Primal.

  But once he’s done shuddering through his pleasure, that same strong body turns boneless. He caves like a house of cards on top of me, the sounds he’s making now more like sobs than gasps of dissipating pleasure. He’s relieved, I think. The way that I am.

  The way I’ll always be now – though, to be clear, it’s not because I’m unafraid. I still am. I even say to him in the afterglow, while my body is lax and satisfied and I’m not really thinking about anything too closely.

  ‘He’ll come back, you know,’ I say to him. ‘He’ll come back and try to hurt me again.’

  But the thought doesn’t have the impact it once did. There’s still room for relief amidst the fear, because even if it all happens again, even if he gets me by the hair and drowns me for real, this time, I know this:

  I got to have something lovely before I met that end. I got to do something wrong, something terrible … to make a mistake and have it turn out OK. I got to make someone as all right as he’s made me, in so many, many ways.

  So it’s OK now.

  Though I don’t think I fully understand what OK is until he turns and looks at me over my shoulder. His blue eyes hold mine, not covered by anything. Not veiled, not misted over. Just pure and dark and true.

  And he says to me the best thing he possibly could.

  ‘He won’t ever be coming back, Abbie. Because, if he does, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill anyone who ever tries to hurt you, the same way you would kill anyone who tried to hurt me. Isn’t that true?’

  I think of the boy, and the kite, and then I say the words as fierce as any I’ve ever spoken.

  ‘You don’t even have to ask.’

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  Copyright

  This petite novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Mischief

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2012

  Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook Edition © 2012 ISBN 9780007491582

  Version 1

  FIRST EDITION

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