Dirty Talk

by Jane O'Reilly

  He doesn’t mess about. It’s almost as if he knows why he’s here, and that it’s not about Dave, or Jules.

  It’s about him, and me, and whatever is happening between us. I know the words I want to spill down on paper later. I can almost put them together. But they lack the detail. I need the detail. I want it.

  God, I want it.

  But I’m afraid. All his girlfriends have been pretty and feminine, the sort who have beautiful pale manicures and long shiny hair and wear cream cashmere sweaters. I’m wearing a denim skirt and boots, because old books are dusty and the shop has a draught. I’ve got my hair tied back and my cardigan has a hole in the elbow.

  ‘You can tell me,’ he says, and his voice is low and tempting, and it makes me think yes, I can.

  So before I can lose my nerve, I do. ‘I have this idea for what happens next in the story. But I can’t make it work.’ I twist my fingers together, and I don’t protest when he takes my hands and holds them gently in his. ‘It’s the middle of the night, and she wakes up to find him missing from his bed. She’s decided that she wants to sleep with him, and she wants to do it now, before she loses her nerve. So she goes looking for him. But she finds him in her library. She’s got a book of erotic art, and he’s looking at it.’

  ‘And then what happens?’

  ‘She watches him for a couple of minutes, and then he notices her. And then he…’

  ‘He what, Amy?’

  I swallow. ‘I don’t know. I can’t get any further than that.’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s figure this out.’ He looks around us. The shop is empty. He walks over to the door and locks it, and just like that, the nerves start to build. He walks back over to me, and I sink my fingers into the front of his shirt, which is warm and crisp, and start to pull him towards the back of the shop. We need some privacy for this. I should probably have thought about that sooner, but it’s too late now, and if I put it off, I’ll lose my nerve. I know I will.

  ‘Steady there, tiger,’ he says, as I drag all six foot whatever of him between shelves and piles of old books. The carpet is threadbare, the lighting crappy, and the whole place smells of dust. I don’t let myself think how it must look from his point of view, with his fancy office and his fancy job at the bank where he talks to business customers in twelve different languages or however many it is that he speaks. I think about getting him to talk dirty to me in French, or Spanish, and I get another quiver of excitement. Dangerous territory, Amy. Scary, dangerous territory. So I tell myself that this is for the story. It’s all for the story. I’m a reclusive heiress, and he’s an escaped convict.

  ‘So,’ he says, when we’re right at the back of the shop, hidden out of sight, dark wood bookcases towering up on either side of us. ‘He’s looking at a dirty book.’ He reaches out, pulls a random title from the shelf, opens it up. ‘Like this?’

  I nod my head.

  ‘Good,’ he says. He settles his free hand on my waist. ‘Ever had sex in a library?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I’d have thought that would be just your thing.’ His fingers are flirting with the waistband of my skirt. ‘Doing it amongst the books, with your skirt up around your waist, trying to be quiet because someone might catch you, even though you’re on the top floor in the Russian poetry section where no one ever goes.’

  I mumble some retort, but it doesn’t come out properly. Has he done that? Has he had some woman up against the shelves, panting and thrusting with his trousers round his ankles?

  ‘Amy,’ he says, ‘you’re so lovely.’ He brushes the back of his hand over my cheeks, which are predictably flaming, with heat, with excitement, with embarrassment. ‘So come on,’ he says. ‘How does it go? What does she say, when she catches him?’

  I swallow, hard. I close my eyes. And then I force out the words that are swimming around in my head. ‘She asks him what he’s doing.’

  ‘And he says that he’s reading,’ Phil whispers. ‘He’s not doing any harm.’

  ‘She tells him to put the book back.’

  ‘He refuses. He’s enjoying the book. He doesn’t want to put it back.’

  ‘He has to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…because there is a photograph of her in the book, something she agreed to when she was young and foolish, and she doesn’t want him to see it.’

  ‘But he’s found it. He tells her she looks very beautiful.’

  ‘She rushes over, tries to take the book away from him, but he’s too tall, too strong.’

  ‘He grabs hold of her.’ Phil slides an arm around my waist, pulls me close against him. ‘She’s so warm, so soft, so angry, and she smells amazing. It’s a long time since he last fucked a woman. And he’s never fucked a woman like her.’

  And then he takes my hand and places it firmly over his cock, which is big. And hard. And did I say big? The shock in my voice is real. ‘She tells him no, this is wrong. They can’t do this.’

  ‘He knows that.’ He moves my hand ever so slightly, and I let him. I let him rub the palm of my hand over his lovely stiff prick. Through the fabric of his trousers, I can feel how hard he is, how wide. He pushes my hand lower and I feel the softer shape of his balls, then he moves it back up. ‘But he doesn’t care. That’s part of the thrill. So he asks her what she’s going to do about it.’

  What am I going to do? That’s the question, isn’t it? What the hell am I going to do? We’re supposed to be friends. We were friends. I don’t know if we are still friends. ‘She tells him that he has to stop,’ I tell him. ‘It’s wrong. He has to stop.’

  ‘Does she want him to stop?’ he whispers. And I know that he’s not talking about my imaginary heiress.

  I lean forward, until my forehead touches his shoulder. ‘No.’

  He exhales, strokes the hair away from my cheek. ‘Good,’ he says. He’s rocking me, gently, and it’s strangely soothing. My hand is still pressed against his erection. It doesn’t feel scary. It doesn’t feel wrong. In fact, it feels the opposite. ‘Because he’s so hard,’ he says. ‘And he doesn’t want to stop.’

  I close my eyes, focus all my attention on the feel of him under my hand. I want to capture every detail, want to burn it into my memory. Not just for the story. For me.

  ‘But he’s a bad man, Amy. A bad, dirty, perverted man, with dirty, perverted needs, and she’s not like him. She’s fragile. Precious. Worthy of more than a hard, rough fuck in the library.’

  He has me totally trapped in the fantasy now, and it’s becoming as much my fantasy as his. I’m forgetting all about friendship, about fear and stupid bets and anything other than this, than the way he makes me feel. I dig my fingers into the waistband of his trousers, fumble with his zip. ‘She isn’t that fragile and precious,’ I say, rude, frustrated, desperate. ‘She used to be wild. She used to be the sort of woman who posed in the nude, who didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. She wants to be that kind of woman again.’

  He lets go of my hand and slowly, carefully slides down the zip of his trousers. I make a strange sound. My face is hot, and I feel all sweaty under my clothes. My blouse is sticking to my back. My tights are clingy and uncomfortable. I’ve got an uncharacteristic urge to feel air against my bare skin. I unfasten the top couple of buttons on my blouse, pull the collar wider, try to cool myself down, but it doesn’t work.

  This is all so visceral, so real, so unlike the sex I’ve had before. It’s exactly what I need. I press one hand flat against the side of his body and rub him through his shirt as I slide the other inside the open fly of his suit trousers and encounter hard, hot, male flesh.

  He closes his eyes. ‘Amy,’ he says.

  I slide my fingers further in, find his erection, trapped inside his trousers. It’s pinned in a downwards position, straining to be set free. Carefully, clumsily, awkwardly, I ease it free. It points straight up, straight at me, with a slight curve to the left. It’s really quite lovely.

>   I stroke his firm belly as I stare down at it, fascinated.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asks. His voice sounds strained, harsh, dry.

  ‘You,’ I reply.

  Neither of us says anything else. I don’t know why this seems so important, given what happened yesterday, but something about this moment is different. I’ve almost forgotten why I’m doing this. All I can think about is Phil, and the things that he makes me feel. This isn’t about Jules, now, or Dave, or anyone else. It’s about the two of us.

  I stroke my hands up and down his thighs. I’m not surprised to find them firm, strong, but I am surprised when I realise that he’s trembling. ‘Amy,’ he says again.

  I stroke, stroke, stroke, and then I move my hands inwards and touch him. Just a touch, a gentle, cautious thing, but he pulls in an unsteady breath and shoves a hand back through his hair. I can feel his gaze on me as I look down at his cock, and wrap my hand around it, and watch myself stroking him. But it’s not enough. I want more. I want to do more. I want to experience more.

  So I get down on my knees, awkward in the narrow space between the overloaded bookshelves, and I taste the end of his erection. There’s a little drop of fluid at the end of his cock, and I lick it away. He’s familiar and sweet, and I don’t know why he tastes that way, but I don’t question it.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes. Suck my cock. That’s right. You want that, don’t you? Look at you, a bored, wealthy socialite sucking off the man who broke into her house.’

  I open my mouth around his penis, which is thicker than I’d realised, getting wider the more of it I take in. He digs his fingers into my hair, and it’s not gentle. I can feel him pulling on my scalp, those long, strong fingers tangling in my hair as he gets a good grip on my ponytail and starts to flex his hips.

  ‘I’m a dirty pervert,’ he says. ‘I’m more than just a criminal. I’m a horny, debauched pervert.’ I look up, see that his eyes are closed, his mouth is tight, his face flushed. His hips are flexing harder now, as he uses my mouth for his pleasure. I can feel the hard thrust of his penis rubbing against my tongue, getting dangerously close to the back of my throat. I’d never realised that a man could use a woman like this before. I’d never realised how much I might enjoy it.

  I didn’t know I wanted to be used like this.

  It’s horny and real and I lift my hand and wrap it around the base of his thick erection, squeezing tighter when he groans. ‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘Don’t let me come. I don’t deserve it. Punish me, Amy.’

  Oh. Oh, god. Am I controlling this? It didn’t feel like it, but now…

  He loosens his grip on my hair, and I pull back, and start to work his dick with my hand. He’s still wet from my mouth, and the friction is slippery and delicious, and in my mind I’m no longer Amy, the second hand bookshop owner who would rather read a book than talk to a real person. I’m that affection-starved socialite in her red silk dressing gown, down on her knees in front of the only man capable of giving her the pleasure that she craves.

  ‘Harder,’ he says, wrapping his hand around mine and making me grip him even tighter. The end of his cock turns darker, and I stare at it in fascination, enthralled, aroused, excited, lost in the fantasy that we’ve created. ‘Tell me what happens next.’

  ‘He drops the book,’ I tell him. ‘It falls to the floor, open to her favourite page. You see, she often sneaks in here and looks at the book after the servants have gone to bed, when she knows no one will see. Even though she’s the lady of the house, she’s ashamed of the way she feels, of the things she secretly craves.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…because she’s not sure that it’s right for a woman to want those things.’

  ‘But she still does them.’

  ‘In secret,’ I point out.

  ‘What is she afraid of?’

  ‘What other people might say. What they might think. What they thought before, when she posed for that photograph and they found out.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Amy,’ he whispers. His hands tangle their way into my hair again, only this time it’s gentle, not the rough grip of before. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  But there is. There’s always something to be afraid of. I don’t have time to think about that, though, because he’s filling my mouth with his cock again. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Punish the dirty criminal. Show him who’s in charge.’

  So I suck and stroke, work him with mouth and hand. He’s starting to sweat now, his stomach muscles tight with the effort of holding himself back. ‘Oh fuck, that’s good,’ he says. ‘You’re making me so hard.’

  I can feel the wet slip of arousal building between my thighs, fiercer than I had possibly imagined. I lift myself a little higher, so I can take him deeper into my mouth, completely focused on him now, cataloguing his every response.

  ‘Then what happens?’ he asks, his voice even rougher. He’s breathing fast.

  I move my head back, letting the hot length of his erection press against my cheek. I can ask for anything, and he’ll give it to me. It’s a choose your own ending story now. If I asked him to fuck me, he probably would. Oh god, I want that. But if we do that, we’ll be crossing a line that I’m not sure either of us really wants to cross. For now, we’re just fooling around. Just playing. We’re just two friends talking dirty to each other.

  And I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to push that boundary and find out that I’m not enough for him, which is why I don’t say anything. It’s why I open my mouth over his cock again, and suck him deep. He’s so vocal that in just a few minutes he’s told me exactly what he likes, what he wants, what he needs. And I give it to him, fast and hard and greedy.

  He fills my mouth, my senses, and when he comes, he fills me even more. I swallow it down, greedy for it, for him. We can do this, I think to myself. He can be my muse, and I can write about the wonderful, filthy things that we do, and I can hide the way I feel about him. It doesn’t mean anything to him, and it doesn’t mean anything to me either.

  But when it’s over, when we’re done, when I’m fastening my blouse and he’s fastening his trousers, neither of us says a word.

  Chapter Five

  I cling on to the feeling of him, of being with him, long after he’s left. I can still taste him, even after coffee and lunch, still smell him, still feel him on me. At the end of the day, I close the shop and go home. I don’t turn on the television, or bother with food. I pull out my laptop and pour everything out onto the page. All the things he said¸ the way he looked, the way it felt. I’m the beautiful socialite, drowning in silk and diamonds, and he is my rough, uncouth lover, with his hard body and dirty words. When it’s done, I sit and stare at the screen, barely able to breathe. I didn’t know I had this in me. I didn’t know I could do these things, feel these things, spill these words.

  But I have.

  I crawl into bed and dream of red silk and white sheets and Phil. I thought I knew him. I’m beginning to realise that I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know myself, either. I knew I was attracted to him, but I didn’t know I could want him like this. For so long, I’ve been what other people told me I was. Shy. Quiet. Prudish. I didn’t want to break out of the boxes they had put me in. It was an easy place to be, and I was comfortable there.

  I’m not comfortable any more.

  At some point, I became someone other people walk all over. I don’t want to be that person any more. I want something else, something more. I want to feel the way I feel when I’m with Phil. I can’t live the rest of my life trapped inside the four walls of this flat and my bookshop, living my life through the words of other people.

  When I get to work the next morning, Phil is waiting for me. ‘Hey,’ he says, handing me a takeout latte.

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ I say, taking the cup. I take a sip, and the warm, sweet taste of hazelnut syrup spreads over my tongue. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

  ‘I’ve got a little time,’ he say
s, as I unlock the door of the bookshop. I go in, start turning on lights. There’s an awkwardness between us that wasn’t there before, and it’s more than just the things that we’ve done. It’s this new awareness we have of each other.

  ‘I wanted to see if you’ve got anything new in.’ He holds up the last book he bought from me. ‘I finished this one.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ he says.

  I can sense every move he makes, as he strolls between the bookshelves. I can sense him watching me as I settle behind my desk, get my laptop out of my bag and turn it on. Neither of us says anything.

  Every time I look at him, he looks away.

  I wish we’d never started this. I wish I’d given Dave his fifty quid and left it at that. I wish I could convince myself that was true.

  I put my face in my hands, and keep it there.

  ‘That bad, huh?’

  I drop my hands. Phil is stood in front of the counter. He’s holding out a copy of Fahrenheit 451. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Just take it.’

  ‘No,’ Phil says, putting the money down on the counter. ‘This isn’t a library, Amy.’

  Our gazes meet, and I know we’re both thinking about yesterday, when it was exactly that. When he was a criminal and I was a reclusive heiress and he came in my mouth.

  A flush hits his cheeks.

  It makes his eyes look very blue.

  He pushes his glasses further up onto the bridge of his nose, something I’ve seen him do a thousand times. Only this time, it’s inexplicably sexy. ‘I was thinking,’ he says, ‘about your story.’

  ‘You were?’ And did you lie in bed awake for hours, thinking about it, and touching yourself? Did you sweat your way through pornographic dreams in which I ran my fingers over every inch of your bare skin?

  ‘Yes,’ he says. He shifts his weight, tucks a hand into his pocket. He’s wearing a pinstriped shirt and yellow tie today. No sign of a vest. ‘And I was thinking about how the two of them have done…things.’

  I stare at him. I’ve never seen him this tongue-tied before. It’s true that he doesn’t talk much. It’s one of the things I like about him, his ability to just be, without having to fill every second with noise. But he’s always coherent.