Beyond Repair (Deeper Than Desire)

by Charlotte Stein

  “You sure on that, chief?”

  “Well, okay. Maybe not perfectly normal. You know in that movie Shame when he’s wandering around with it dangling away and everyone did a collective gasp? It’s kind of like that. I have a lot of excessive dangle. And you just can’t show excessive dangle in a romantic drama. Arthouse only, for sudden shocking penis.”

  She wished she didn’t know what he was talking about. She wished she didn’t even know what a penis was at this current moment in time. But alas she did, and so now she had to do her very best to minimize the image in her head.

  “This is the most insane conversation I’ve ever had. Are you just trying to brag about your massive penis in a roundabout sort of way?”

  “I swear I’m not. This is the honest-to-God truth.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You can peep if you want to.”

  “And get eaten by this supposed sea monster? No thank you.”

  “Come on. I need you to wash my back, anyway.”

  “What am I, your lackey?”

  It wasn’t the response she wanted to give. But it was the only solid refusal she could think of on short notice. A snorting laugh would have come out fake and full of inappropriate blushes, and storming off in a huff wasn’t the tone she wanted to strike. She wanted something funny and lighthearted, and came fairly close with lackey.

  Unfortunately, she also left the door open for his answer.

  “Okay...how about I beg you to wash my back, and tell you how much I’d love to have your hands on me, and if you’d only consider I’ll be in your debt forever.”

  Oh, his answer. Did he realize how he sounded, when he spoke like that? Was it intentional or just a side effect from years of doing love scenes he didn’t actually mean? She had to imagine it was the latter, but her insides wanted to tell her differently. Her insides were buying it hook, line and sinker.

  She almost swooned right off the toilet and into the tub, even though neither of those things were possible. Swooning wasn’t a real action, and the tub was around ten feet from her. She would have had to float for about a meter before getting anywhere close—something that seemed more possible as the moments ticked on.

  All she could currently think about was doing just as he’d said. Her hands, smoothing over those incredibly round and incredibly large shoulders. His skin against her skin, just rubbing and sliding through that sheen of soapy water...the thought alone was near hypnotic. It was more than near.

  It made her tell him something really stupid.

  “Maybe our minds are connected,” she found herself saying, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. Somehow her tone had turned sleepy and hungry all at the same time, and it was obvious he could hear it.

  His answering expression was sleepy and hungry, in return.

  “You’ve been wanting to do it too?” he asked, and he just sounded so...excited. He wasn’t supposed to be excited, for God’s sake. He was supposed to be aloof and vaguely contemptuous at the idea of her wanting anything—a thought that seemed to fit so well it made her a little guarded again.

  “Kind of,” she said, but she needn’t have.

  His excitement was now so enormous it was actually starting to suck her in. He clapped his hands and called her a sweetheart, and once he’d added I tell you what—you do me and then I’ll do you, she knew she was done for. She came close to standing just because of his expression, all sin and grin. But the words do you really finished her off.

  Suddenly she was by the tub, with almost no idea how she’d gotten there.

  “Want me to lean forward, or are you happy with me just like this?”

  She couldn’t answer him, and not just because he was being a rotten tease. He was almost biting one corner of his lip and there was a laugh brewing inside him, she could see it. But that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem was that she didn’t want him to lean forward at all, and just couldn’t say.

  If she said, he’d know what she meant. He’d know that she was just trying to work up the courage to look over him, and if he leaned forward she wouldn’t be able to see anything. He’d be covering the best bits, and dear God, she really wanted to see the best bits. Her curiosity practically demanded satisfaction on that score.

  And that just left her silent and stiff, unsure of what to do.

  Should she kneel? Kneeling would probably be the best move. It would answer his question without using words, but might also seem quite innocent.

  “Oh so you’re just gonna get right in there.”

  Fuck fuck fuck, it did not seem innocent at all. She looked as if she’d bobbed down to get a closer look. She felt as though she’d gotten out her goddamn magnifying glass—even though she hadn’t so much as glanced yet. She’d fixed her gaze on the left side of his head, and was currently refusing to accept that any other body part existed.

  He was just one big ear.

  He didn’t even have a penis.

  “Well, I need to be here if I’m going to do this.”

  “You make it sound so ominous. And kind of like a dangerous job.”

  “It is dangerous. I might fall and bludgeon myself to death on your shoulder.”

  “I’d turn just in time and catch you on my pillowy bosom.”

  “I don’t think ‘pillowy’ is the word I would have used,” she said, but even as she did her mind was comparing his chest to something she could rest her head on. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, all broad and plump. It looked just as inviting as it had in Swan Song, only here in reality he had chest hair.

  He had all of this lovely, rough chest hair that she couldn’t remember ever seeing in any of his movies. And she would have noticed too, because it wasn’t just rough. It was pretty thick and very dark, and it reached all the way down to his insanely hard stomach and the jut of muscle arrowing down from his hips and, and, and—

  “Want me to pose for you?”

  “What? No, no, God, no—sorry. Sorry, I just—”

  “I’m teasing.”

  “It wasn’t... I didn’t—”

  “Alice, Alice, I’m teasing you. I asked you to come in here, remember? I wanted you to wash my back. It’s fine for you to look at whatever you want to look at. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s kinda giving me goose bumps.”

  He showed her his bristly arm to prove it, though that didn’t really explain anything to her. What exactly was it about her gormless expression that was giving him goose bumps? She felt like an explorer who’d just discovered man, and he seemed to agree. She asked him why before she could stop herself, and his answer made her entire body burn with embarrassment.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. You’re just so...intense about it. So curious—like you’ve never seen a guy’s body before.”

  There was probably a non-humiliating way she could have told him here that she hadn’t, but if there was she couldn’t think of one. Twenty-year-old women were supposed to have seen naked male bodies—and she knew “movies” and “one time when I accidentally walked in on my dad as he got out of the shower” did not count.

  In fact they probably counted against her.

  Adults did not tell stupid naked-dad stories.

  “You say that as though your body is typical,” she said, and almost nodded in satisfaction. There—that got her off the hook. Of course it also got her into a very thorny area in which she had to explain why his body wasn’t typical, but she would deal with that hurdle when she came to it.

  As in right now.

  “You think it’s not?”

  “I think you’re very...big.”

  “And that’s a bad thing.”

  “I didn’t say bad.”

  “So it’s good then, huh?”

  He knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard. She could actually see him trying to suppress his teasing grin, as she worked on a way to say no without seeming like a total liar. And just when she was sure she’d come up with the perfect answer, he cau
ght her gaze with those sparking eyes and she was lost again.

  “I wouldn’t say it was awful.”

  “Well that’s kind of you.”

  “It has some positives.”

  “Such as?”

  She didn’t answer him with words. It seemed best not to answer him with any words. She couldn’t trust them to behave once they were close to her vocal cords, so instead just went with shoving the bunched-up washcloth against his left shoulder blade. He’d get the gist then and even if he didn’t—this was what she was supposed to be doing. She was supposed to be washing his general back area.

  He couldn’t make her feel weird about that.

  “So you like it there, huh?”

  Christ, she’d really misjudged what he could make her feel weird about. Not only that, but she’d misjudged how weird he could possibly make her feel. She’d imagined a simple answer that maybe veered into a joke, and instead he’d just said something that sounded pretty close to sex talk.

  It sounded so close that she found herself flushing from head to foot. Random parts of her tingled too intently the second the words were out, and they carried on for a long while afterward. Too long a while, if she was being honest. She was meant to be answering him, and all she could muster was a noncommittal sound and a lot of scrubbing at his broad back.

  Unfortunate really, that the latter only made things worse.

  She didn’t intend it to. She went at him like a nun briskly rubbing a pair of underpants against a washboard, full of pure vim and gusto. But no matter how sexless she tried to be, sex kept slipping in there anyway. All the vigorous movements just made her realize how hot she was getting, and how humid this stupid room was, and most embarrassingly...

  Her nipples had gone really stiff. She could feel them chafing against her nightshirt every time she stroked over him, and the harder she worked the more it seemed to happen. The material just kept catching on the tips, and every time it did a wave a thick sensation ran right down, down, to the suddenly swollen and very sensitive place between her legs. Everything just felt so big down there, to the point where moving around was kind of a problem. She had to go slower just to stop herself moaning.

  Only slowing didn’t help at all.

  Now she was practically reveling in washing him. The washcloth was no longer bunched—though she didn’t know how that had happened—and her hand was almost on his skin. She could near feel him through the material, all smooth and slick with soap, muscles bunching and flexing as she worked. It took a monumental effort to keep any sound in under that sort of pressure—though even after she’d succeeded at restraining herself she couldn’t exactly celebrate.

  Mainly because he didn’t restrain himself at all.

  “Mmmmm yeah,” he said, in a way that could have been perceived as innocent. Just like with those words he said—it was possible that there wasn’t any sexual meaning in there. But it was also possible she was pretending that this was the case in order to stop herself from having an orgasm.

  She was already fairly close as it was. Hearing him make that husky, breathless sound and accepting that it might be a sex thing was simply a step too far. It was all too much. She had to count to ten and stay very still just to maintain her sanity, but apparently sanity wasn’t intent on giving her a break today.

  The moment she slumped against the tub he turned and tilted his head a little, in a way that put his face far too close to her face. She could almost feel his breath against her cheek—which was bad enough on its own. But then he went and asked her a question like this one. “Did my groan of delight accidentally paralyze you?”

  After which she just wanted to throw in the towel.

  How did he make it sound both suggestive and considerate?

  How that was even a thing? That wasn’t a thing.

  “No, no, I...I’m just resting here for a second.”

  “Really? It doesn’t look like you’re just resting there. It looks much more like you collapsed over the edge of the bathtub.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe my back gave out.”

  “Well, that is a possibility,” he said, but she knew he didn’t think it was a possibility at all. She could tell by the way he touched her hair as he said it—just one little damp curl—with the tips of his enormous fingers.

  It was quite possibly the sexiest caress of her entire life, and it wasn’t even skin-to-skin. Christ knew what would happen if it was skin-to-skin.

  “Or it could be that I have a rare freezing disorder.”

  “I had entertained the notion.”

  “And then there’s how close your face is to mine, right now.”

  “Is that making it harder to move?”

  “It’s making it impossible to move.”

  “And you mean that in the bad way.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. What’s the bad way?”

  “The bad way is when you’re so terrified by all of this that you can’t escape, as opposed to not really wanting to go anywhere at all.”

  “I think I’m both of those things at the same time,” she said, but she didn’t quite understand in what quantities until he turned his head just a little. Barely more than an inch, she thought, but an inch was all it took. One second they were only talking—in a heated way true, but still only words—and the next he was actually moving in for something that made her heart seize up.

  He was doing it. She knew he was doing it. She should have known but somehow she hadn’t and holy crap he was really going do to it, he was, he was, and suddenly the terrified part of her punched the part that didn’t want to move right in the fucking face. It got it in a chokehold and squeezed until the excited bit of her passed out.

  And that manifested in the worst possible way.

  She actually skittered back across the floor, in a manner last seen on a Discovery Channel special about bugs. Her entire body did things it hadn’t been able to do in years, and it did them just because he’d been about to do that thing she didn’t want to think about. She didn’t want to think about it so much that she almost took out the bathroom wall in her effort to escape, and even after she’d lost her unearthly speed and grace the fun didn’t stop.

  She stumbled into the toilet and flailed around for about five minutes—and all while he looked too stunned to say or do anything. He raised a tentative hand in her direction, but that was all.

  And she was grateful for that.

  Running away from a kiss was humiliating enough on its own, without adding a naked man charging after you into the mix.

  Chapter Five

  She decided the best course of action was probably breakfast. Breakfast was normal, breakfast was wholesome, breakfast said, “I did not just destroy my bathroom because you almost kissed me.” Or at least, breakfast said that for ordinary people. It was a bit more of a struggle for her, considering that the insides of her fridge looked like an abandoned Chinese takeaway.

  The only thing resembling normal food in there was a block of cheese she’d somehow gnawed into a ball, three potatoes that had sprouted arms and legs and tried to take over the salad crisper, and an aubergine. She hadn’t the faintest clue where the aubergine had come from, but its origins weren’t really the problem. The fact that it wasn’t an egg or a slice of bacon was.

  She didn’t even have cereal. Her cupboards were full of things a three-year-old would buy, if they were given brief control of the grocery shopping. There were bags of marshmallows and jars of peanut butter mixed with something unholy—like mint-flavored peanut-butter spread. Why had she thought peanut-butter-mint spread would be a good idea?

  More to the point—why had the manufacturer thought peanut-butter-mint spread would be a good idea? Surely the average American shopper wasn’t interested in something quite so bonkers. No, no...only someone who wasn’t American would buy such ghastly items. Only someone who went nuts online shopping at Walmart—drunk on the idea of a thousand things that shouldn’t exist—would want mars
hmallows filled with mature cheddar.

  She’d unwittingly flagged herself as an insane three-year-old foreigner.

  And any second now he was going to come down and figure that fact out. He was probably already on his way right now. It had been over ten minutes since she panicked in the bathroom. Surely he would want an explanation soon? She was surprised he didn’t want an answer right fucking now—though of course he could have fled out of the nearest window.

  She wouldn’t have blamed him.

  Hell, she might have thanked him. At least that way, she wouldn’t have to tape her fridge and cupboards shut and pretend they were full of spiders. I have a real insect problem, so I guess we’re going to have to go out for food, she pictured herself saying. Only you know I’m also physically incapable of walking out my front door, so maybe just imagine spiders have completely taken over planet Earth instead.

  Yeah, that was never going to work.

  For one thing, he knew what an actual spider invasion looked like. He’d battled them in that B movie he’d made before he hit before the big-time. And for another, spider invasions were not a real thing. He would know that they were not a real thing. She could have been a lying ninja, and he would have understood.

  But she was not a lying ninja.

  She was barely a lying beginner. The first thing she did when he suddenly appeared in the doorway to her kitchen was jump so violently she accidentally sprayed the kitchen with mini marshmallows, swiftly followed by some blurted words.

  “I don’t have anything normal to eat.”

  She’d blown her own cover. The amateur lying Olympics were not going to be calling any time soon. Luckily, however, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter for two very important reasons—the first being his response, as sweet as anything she’d ever heard.

  “I gotta be honest, I’d have been disappointed if you did.”

  And the second being the thing he was wearing.

  She hadn’t taken into account that he didn’t have any clean clothes to put on. She’d somehow imagined him coming down in a fabulous outfit live from the red carpet, as though his skin spontaneously grew tuxedos. At the very least she’d pictured him in his own underwear, with the same t-shirt up top.