I could feel her beside me, thinking about what to say. She was just about to do just that when I cut her off.
"Shit, I'm sorry, Lily. That was a bit much, wasn't it? I-"
She shut me up with a gentle kiss, just below my left ear.
"It's OK, Callum. I want to hear your stories. Even the bad ones. I've got some of my own, you know. I'm just - I'm sorry that happened to you. I'm sorry it happened to Nigel. It's fucking horrible."
I exhaled. "It is, isn't it? But I don't know at what point in his life intervention would have stopped it from happening. Eight? Four? Younger? He had a shit life and he couldn't deal with it. It's no more complicated than that."
We were quiet for a few moments. Memories of Nigel came flooding back.
"You know what I do remember?" I said, focusing on some point in the distance.
"What?"
"This is going to sound really strange, but I remember the smack really cleared up his skin."
I turned, briefly, towards Lily. She was nodding, just a little, encouraging me to go on. Her eyes were full of tenderness, and I knew that if I kept looking at her I was going to start blubbering - or something equally ridiculous. So I turned away again and kept talking.
"Yeah. It's such a fucked-up thing to remember but it did - it cleared up his skin completely. Before he started using he was covered in spots all the time. The heroin made him look like a zombie - perfectly clear skin with huge, dark circles under his eyes and track marks all over his arms and legs and any-fucking-where he could find a vein. I don't know, I just remember realizing at some point that he was dying and that it was going to be soon."
"Did you try to stop him? Did you try to help him clean up?"
"Sure. I mean, I told him he was killing himself, but he already knew it. His death was officially marked as accidental but it wasn't - it was just a slow, covert suicide instead of a fast, obvious one."
Lily pulled away and turned her body so she was facing me.
"Do you miss him?"
"I don't know," I told her, managing, finally, to meet her gaze."Even when we were little, I always knew how it was going to end for him. I mean, I didn't know specifics but it was just - it was all just so inevitable. So when it did happen, I guess I wasn't shocked. I feel bad for the life he lived and the fact that no one who maybe could have done something at an earlier point did anything about it. But mostly Nigel dying just made me determined not to waste my own life. I know that's a cliché, and I don't mean it made me want to earn a billion quid or reach for the stars or any of that bullshit. It just made me determined not to let outside forces decide who I was, or what I wanted."
Lily reached up, then, and put her cold, soft fingertips on my cheek.
"I'm sorry, Callum. About Nigel. And you - I'm sorry you lost your friend."
It was so simple, what she said. And yet no one had ever said it to me before. When Nigel died, no one had talked about it, except in whispered conversations between adults that I wasn't privy to. To my utter shock, I watched the cityscape in front of me start to blur. Jesus fucking Christ, I was trying to get her into my bed and there I was sitting on top of a tower block trying not to bawl? Part of me expected her to run off, but she didn't.
"Fuck. I don't know why I'm doing this," I said awkwardly, rubbing my forehead with my fingers the way Gazza did when he was stressed out.
"It's OK to miss him, Callum. It's OK."
Lily was like an angel. Her presence was one of utterly sweet, feminine warmth and acceptance as she sat beside me on the edge of the roof of tower block E. I always thought it took sledgehammers to break down walls. Maybe what it really took was kind words and her soft little touches.
"I just," I started, swallowing and steadying the wobble in my voice, "I just never felt like anyone really cared that he was dead. It felt like everyone was secretly relieved. Even his own parents!"
We both looked out over the London night for a few moments. Then, without saying anything, Lily crawled onto my lap and put her hands on my face. I heard the sound of my own breath catching as she settled her warm body against mine.
"Callum," she breathed, looking into my eyes and pushing herself down on me until I could see her lips part slightly.
I buried my hands in her thick hair, reaching for her without thought and pulling her mouth down to mine. It was as if I wanted to suck out her soul, to consume her and all of her goodness until it was part of me. When she opened her mouth for my tongue I gave it to her, filled as I was with a thick, sudden aggression that I knew neither of us was going to be able to control.
When we came up for air she looked like she was going to say something, but I couldn't wait. I pushed her onto her back and lay down on top of her, my body stiffening at the needy little sigh she let out when she felt me pushing my body between her legs. I had to be inside her. I didn't even understand what was going on. I'd gone from nearly weeping over the loss of my best mate to barely in control of myself in another way, grinding my cock down against Lily and pushing my tongue between her lips like she was an oasis and I'd been lost in the desert for months. Maybe my whole life.
"Callum, oh my God..." she whispered, her voice shaking slightly as her hips lifted themselves up off the concrete, meeting mine.
I pushed myself up on my hands and looked down at her. Her mouth was open - hungry - and I could see her breasts rising and falling quickly. She was still moving her hips, just a little, rolling them against me mindlessly in a way that made her eyes flutter shut momentarily and then open again, so she could look right into me.
"You're so beautiful, Lily. You're so fucking beautiful," I told her.
She smiled, then sighed as I bent down and kissed her neck. We had too many clothes on. It was a chilly night, so we were both in shirts, sweaters, jackets, layer upon layer of fabric keeping my flesh from hers. I lifted up the hem of her sweater and pushed my hand up underneath it, yanking her bra down and closing my fingers around the warm, perfect roundness of her breast.
"Callum! Your hand is cold!" Lily gasped, although her back was arching, pushing her into my grasp.
She opened her mouth for another kiss and I slid my tongue between her lips again, pushing them open, settling my weight down on top of her once more. When we paused for a minute, she looked up at me and ran her hand up the back of my neck.
"I don't think I can do this anymore."
"Oh Jesus, Lily," I replied, my voice tight as I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to see if it was going to be physically possible to move off her.
She giggled. "That's not what I mean."
"Isn't it?" I asked, rocking my hips down, hard, until she sucked her breath in. "What do you mean then?"
"I mean, Callum, I-" She paused as she felt me against her, my cock so hard and so eager to be let out of my trousers that I was on the verge of grinding my teeth in frustration. "I mean I can't keep saying no. I'm - I just can't do it anymore. I tried. I just want you to acknowledge that. That I tried."
I stared down at her, not quite believing what I was hearing.
"Lily, you want me to acknowledge that you tried to say no, and if I do then you don't have to say no anymore?"
"Yes. Yeah. I never even wanted to say no, Callum, I just had to."
Then she reached down between our bodies and ran her fingers down the length of my cock outside my trousers, smiling up at me and watching my face for my reaction.
"Oh, Lily. Fuck."
As soon as I felt her little hand on me, I realized how close I was. My hips jerked forward and my cock twitched, ready to explode at one or two more touches.
"Wait," I said. She didn't wait. She stroked her hand down me again and I heard myself moaning. "No, wait. Lily. Wait!"
I actually had to grab her wrist and pull her hand away and it was only then, as I tightened my jaw against the little shocks of pleasure threatening to overtake me, that she realized what was going on. Unfortunately, it didn't slow her down at all. In fact, it seemed to make her t
hat much more eager.
"Callum. Oh - oh my God, Callum did you almost come?"
I sat up, because I couldn't touch her safely, but she just tried to crawl onto my lap, forcing me to hold her off. When she accepted that she wasn't going to be able to physically overpower me, she waited until she caught my eye.
"Callum. I want to make you come."
"Don't say that, Lily."
"But it's true," she said, her voice coy and playful in a way I'd never heard before. "I want to. It's OK if it happens fast. I want to, Callum."
"Lily, stop. I swear you are going to make me come in my pants if you keep saying that and that's no use to either of us."
She chose that moment to lie down on the concrete, hand pressed to her forehead and teeth clenched.
"You have no idea what you're doing to me, do you?"
"What?" I asked, still too jumpy to touch her, "Do you really think I have no idea? Look at this-"
I nodded downwards and her eyes followed mine to the obvious bulge standing out against my belly. She closed her eyes and made a whimpering sound.
"I think maybe you have some idea, Callum. But I don't think you have the whole idea."
"Come back to my flat, Lily. If we walk I'll have cooled down a little by the time we get there."
Lily rolled onto her side and locked her eyes on mine, holding me there. I could feel her weighing the decision in her mind. I also knew what it was going to be. She was inscrutable and smarter than she had any right to be, but I had felt the way she moved her body against mine, I'd heard the raw hunger in her little sighs. If she walked away from me that night her status as superhuman was confirmed.
"OK, Callum. Let's go to your flat. I want to warn you, though, that I might just fucking die on the way."
"Why would you do that?" I asked, shaking my head and almost laughing at how hard I was, and how steadfastly it was refusing to go down, even a little.
She was still staring at me, hardly blinking. It was like being caught in a tractor beam.
"Because I want you so much it feels like I might die. I don't even know if I can fucking walk, Callum."
I was on my feet in less than a second, reaching down to help her up.
Chapter 14: Lily
I'm not the world's most spontaneous person, I admit that. There's always been a part of me that finds comfort in plans and certainty. So on the rare occasion when a moment I can't resist does come, it's like an earthquake struck deep in the ground, so deep you can almost feel the earth shifting underneath your feet. There's a sense of something elemental, something experienced on a level so base that some part of you knows even thinking about trying to refuse would be pointless. It's not as if I lost my mind that night, or someone put a spell on me. All the reasons not to let things progress with Callum were still there and I knew it. My body had simply decided for me that none of those reasons mattered anymore. The only thing that did matter was being with him.
We walked back to Callum's flat from tower block E and it felt like we would never get there. We didn't say much because there was no need. I knew what was going to happen. I knew it was inevitable. So did he. I just wanted his hands on my body, I wanted him inside me, all over me. It wasn’t that I thought it was the rational, logical choice, it was that I understood that I - we - were beyond rationality. I didn't have any fight left in me, and it was never Callum I was fighting, anyway. It was myself, it was that part of me that feared any loss of control the way some people feared tigers or airplanes.
When we got to Callum’s flat he closed the door behind us and I stood in front of him, looking into his clear, blue eyes and burning up.
"Wait," he said, when I leaned in to be kissed. "Just wait a second, Lily."
"What?" I could hear the breathlessness in my voice, my skin prickling with the desperation to be touched.
Callum reached out and ran a single finger down my face slowly, then over the curve of my breasts under my jacket and down to my hip, which he grasped tightly. His grip felt so strong.
"I want to watch your face."
I barely managed to stay standing up. He was perfect. I was used to men being in a rush all the time, pushing on and on as fast as they could. But Callum wanted to savor every moment, every tiny gesture.
He kept his eyes on mine while he unbuttoned my jacket and pulled it off carefully, methodically. I could sense him controlling his breathing, refusing to go any faster than he was, aware that the moment he let himself slip for even a second would be the moment he lost it entirely. When he ran his hand over my sweater-clad breasts, cupping one gently and sliding his thumb over the nipple, I couldn't help a little sigh.
Callum shook his head and chuckled a little, as if to himself. "You're killing me, Lily."
He reached down for the hem of my sweater and I lifted my arms over my head so he could pull it off, followed swiftly by my bra. The air in the room was cool and my skin, primed to an extreme level of sensitivity, immediately came up in goosebumps. I felt very vulnerable standing half-naked in front of Callum as his eyes devoured me, but I also felt completely safe - because I was with him.
"Callum."
"Yeah?" He replied, his voice rough and low.
"Put your hands on me."
He smiled and reached out, tracing the outside curve of my left breast with his fingertips, then suddenly closing his hand over it and pushing me back against the door we'd just closed behind us, pressing me against it with the whole weight of his body. I leaned my head back and opened my mouth for his tongue. There was nothing except hunger in his kiss. He didn't have to tell me how much he wanted me because I could taste it. When we paused for a few seconds his eyes were clouded with lust and his breathing was audible. I took the opportunity to unzip my jeans and push them, along with my panties, down over my hips and off.
"Oh Jesus, Lily," he said, slipping his hands around me, sinking his fingers into my ass and jerking me towards him. I knew we were both on the verge of losing control.
"Wait, Callum, wait, wait."
"What? Lily, I can't wait," he replied, panting and staring at me like a bull with a sea of red flags being waved in its face.
"Just one thing," I said, smiling up at him."I just want you to feel something."
He was going to say something else so I just took his hand in mine and pushed it down, between my legs. The look on his face when he pushed one finger between my lips and felt exactly what he was doing to me was too much. I thought I could drag it out a little longer, but I couldn't. I wrapped my body around him when he picked me up, pressing my face into his warm, muscled neck as he carried me into his bedroom and lay me back on the bed, looking down at me as he undressed. He looked like he intended to eat me alive. And that glint in Callum's eyes was all it took to make me want nothing else except that.
"I love the way you're looking at me," I whispered. “You look like you want to eat me alive.”
He was fumbling with his zipper, swearing with frustration before just giving up and ripping it the rest of the way open.
"I am going to eat you alive," he growled, yanking his pants off. "I'm going to make you forget your own name, Lily Parker."
Only a few men can get away with talk like that, and only then because you know they mean it, you know it's true. Callum was one of them. I remember grimacing, rolling over onto my belly and back again, completely unable to stay still while he took the rest of his clothes off. I remember him crawling between my legs and using his hands to push my bare thighs open.
I don't think either of us realized just how fast it was going to happen. It caught us both by surprise when he pushed my legs the rest of the way open with his body, and we knew it was going to happen right then. I did think about a condom. So did he, he told me later. There just wasn't room in either of our heads for anything else at that point. Both of us were beyond thought. I felt the head of his cock on my thigh, trailing wetness over my skin, and that was it. My hips shifted underneath him without any conscious in
put from me and I was suddenly arching off the bed, digging my fingers into the tight muscles of his shoulders and whimpering his name as he filled me up with himself, groaning.
The feeling of him inside me - all the way inside me - was like a sudden feeling of total rightness. He held out longer than I did because he had to, but I was lost right away, whimpering his name into his neck in a voice that was high-pitched and shaky with need.
"Callum, Callum...Callum..."
It was the only thing I could say because there was no room inside me - not in my mind or my body or my heart - for anyone or anything but him.
"Lily, fuck, oh Lily, baby," he breathed, kissing me like a starving man eats food, "you feel so good."
I'd had a feeling he was good, and I wasn't wrong. His thrusts were deep and controlled - I knew if he went any faster he was going to come, and he badly wanted me to get there first. Usually, I didn't. But that time, he hit that little spot inside me from the very beginning, the spot that feels like an itch that just gets more acute the more you try to scratch it.
"Look at me, Lily," he told me, moaning as he felt my breasts crushing against his chest. "Don't look away."
I didn't look away. Even as the little ache inside me bloomed into a desperate, dragging need, I tried not to look away. He started to move a little faster and it was too much, I could feel the last shreds of my control slipping through my fingers.
"Callum - I - Callum, mmm, Callum!"
He kissed my open mouth and bit my chin gently.
"Tell me you're going to come, Lily. I want you to hear you say it."
His voice was so low I almost couldn't make out what he was saying, and my body was racing ahead of me, faster than I could think to speak. I felt the edge approaching and locked my arms tightly around his shoulders, pulling him down closer to me.
"I'm, Callum, I'm going to...oh God..."
And then he thrust himself all the way in, hard, one more time, and my mind exploded into white, blissful blankness. I was barely aware of clawing at his back, repeating his name over and over and over as rhythmic waves of pleasure tightened my helpless body around him.
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