Restraint (Xcite Romance)

by Charlotte Stein

  OK, I’ll admit it – my eyes are stinging, now. There’s not even any sense in denying it, because after a second I can feel something that isn’t hot tub water, on my face. A tear actually spills down my cheek, as though Artie Carter can really affect me that much – but then, why shouldn’t he?

  He’s just said one of cruellest things I’ve ever heard anyone actually come right out with, and it’s not even as though he’s held back on the tone. His tone sounds like he’s trying to kill me with fire.

  I can’t possibly be ashamed that such a thing upsets me. That’s normal.

  The totally not normal part is how shocked he seems, when I make a stupidly distressed sound and try to rocket myself out of the hot tub. Because he does. He absolutely does. I’m kind of blinded by tears and I’m doing my best not to look at him or give him the pleasure of my sudden meltdown, but I see his mouth open anyway.

  I see his gaze lose all of its fury, in a big rush.

  And though that should be satisfying, in some manner, it isn’t. It can’t possibly be, because it’s got to overcome all of that disgust he just levelled at me and one glimpse of a possible expression really isn’t enough, on its own. Said expression could mean anything, when you think about it.

  And so could the words:

  ‘Oh my God, are you crying?’

  After all, maybe he’s doing it in the laughing at me way. I’m blubbering, and he’s like: ha ha ha, she’s upset! Look at the baby, all upset! Though I’ll admit, it’s hard to maintain this stance when someone just as suddenly tries to grab you.

  ‘Mallory, wait – please wait. Wait, let me explain … just let me talk to you for a second.’

  All I can say is some version of no, over and over again. Said version seems to have a lot of vowels, and absolutely no solid tone to it. It’s sort of like a blob of plasticine coming out of my mouth, though I doubt it’s helped by the violent squirming I then have to descend into. I have to, because a moment after he grabs my arm he decides to go one better than that.

  He actually grabs the rest of me. Which perhaps doesn’t adequately describe what he does because seriously: he puts one big arm around my waist and then drags me back down into the water. And it’s so the opposite of everything he seems to be about, and so shocking a thing to do – period – after just telling someone how disgusting you find them, that for a long moment I don’t know what to do.

  I think I thrash a little, in the hot water. I know I try to squeeze myself out of his grip. But here’s the main problem: he’s almost unbelievably strong. It’s like I’m being weight-lifted or crushed to death, and though I don’t want it to happen my mind automatically reminds me of how big he is.

  He’s six-five my mind tells me, and it doesn’t stop there. He’s probably going to drown you in the hot tub, now, for crimes against good taste. The jury will never convict him, because you said that thing about vaginas and now he’s all put out.

  ‘Artie, just fucking let go of me,’ I say, but he won’t, he won’t. And then somehow it’s just me and him, squirming and thrashing around in the bubbly water, limbs getting tangled, everything getting more and more frantic until … until …

  We both go very still, all at once. I don’t mean to. Most of me wants to keep trying to get away, but once I feel the thing that’s very definitely happened I can’t even manage a weak wriggle. And as for him, well … he’s gone beyond rigid and into some state of temporary paralysis.

  I turn my head just a little to see if I can make out an expression on his face, but there isn’t one. He’s just blank – so much so that I’d assume he was dead if I couldn’t see the flush creeping up over his cheeks.

  And if I didn’t know what the hard thing was, that’s currently pressing right up against me.

  He has an erection. Dear God, he has an erection. I can feel it against my thigh, so heavy and so obvious I don’t even need a paradigm shift to figure it out. It’s just there, like a pointed finger:

  Artie is turned on. The squirming or the words or fuck knows what has turned him on, and now his big stiff cock is apparently super-glued to your thigh.

  ‘OK, well –’ I start, though I’m not sure how. I’m almost grateful he interrupts me, because God only knows what words I would have used to finish that sentence. I thought you were a Eunuch, maybe? I can’t believe you’re actually able to achieve stiffness, perhaps?

  I just don’t know, and apparently neither does he.

  ‘Please don’t say anything,’ he says, but strangely he doesn’t blurt the words out in a mean way. He hardly sounds angry at all, any more – just mortified. And though that’s perfectly understandable, I can’t help thinking even stranger things, as we lie like that in a sea of bubbles.

  I’m practically on my back, over the little plastic seats beneath the water. And he’s almost over me, his legs between mine and his big chest pressed against my breasts. I’ve got one arm around him, though I don’t know when that happened, and the second I shift just a little I realise he’s got an arm around me, too.

  We’re almost in some sort of weird embrace. Somehow, we’ve struggled and shifted until we’ve locked our bodies together in a very familiar shape, and the longer this silence goes on for the more obvious that fact becomes.

  His hand is pressed to the small of my back. The way that men do when … you know. They want to get a bit of traction and maybe fuck into you harder. And I can feel something in him, too – a kind of tension, vibrating through his body. As though we were in the middle of a good screw and I suddenly told him to stop.

  Don’t come yet, I think, mindlessly, and this giant awful thrill spills through me.

  What if he is about to come? What if he jerks and spurts all over the insides of his shorts – or even better, all over me? I can’t for the life in me imagine what someone like Artie would look like, if they had an orgasm, but I can feel my mind trying to gather the image together anyway.

  That tight, tense face of his, suddenly slack with pleasure. God, that mouth. Would he bite his plump lower lip, maybe squeeze his eyes tight shut? Someone like him would never moan, but the thing is – what if he did?

  I’d die. I’d die.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mallory,’ he murmurs, but I can’t even say what I suddenly want to. I can’t reassure him. I’m too full of a million conflicting emotions, too angry from a moment ago and too suddenly stuffed with bizarre erotic thoughts and just no, no. This needs to be over. He needs to move away.

  Only once he actually does the situation is made at least three times worse.

  He’s big. Like hugely, massively big, and not just in the shoulders, if you know what I mean. When he shifts a little I feel the full length of his hard prick, and by God it just keeps going and going. After too long a moment I kind of want to ask him if it ever ends, but even with those words he said to me I can’t be that cruel.

  He looks so shaken and unsettled. His face is bright red, and the harder he tries to disentangle himself the less he succeeds at it. By the time he’s finally gotten over to the other end of the tub, he’s practically shaking.

  Oh – and he covers his eyes with one hand, too. Just for extra I’m ashamed of myself measure.

  ‘Artie –’

  ‘Please don’t. Just don’t. Really – I’m so sorry, Mallory. Those things I said … I take them all back. I don’t know what came over me, I honestly don’t.’

  I can’t help feeling for him. He just looks so … distressed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say, and when I do the hand drops from his face.

  He won’t look at me, however.

  ‘It’s not OK. I just don’t know how to deal with … that kind of talk, you know? I react badly to it.’

  ‘Well, all you had to do was say. I could have toned it down, or –’

  He looks angry again, suddenly.

  ‘No. No. You shouldn’t have to tone it down. There’s nothing wrong with the stuff you say – it’s just me. I’m wrong. I can’t help being wrong but
I am just the same.’

  Of course I immediately flashback to the things I’d thought the night before. It’s not you, it me, I think, and the urge to be as apologetic as he’s suddenly being just wells up inside me.

  ‘Artie, lots of people don’t want a side of dirty talk with their dinner. I can watch my Ps and Qs no problems,’ I say, but it doesn’t seem to help at all. The second I’ve said it his expression becomes this weird, uncomfortable thing, as though he’s trying to move his face inside skin too small for it.

  ‘God that’s what my mother would say,’ he finally gets out, and then I can’t even pretend I’m not interested. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Artie say so much about himself, all in one go.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That you should watch your Ps and Qs – I’m just fucking like her.’

  And as for that word in particular – the one that begins with an F – I know for a fact that I’ve never heard Artie use it. It startles me when he does, though I have to say … it also loosens me in some way that I can’t quite explain. As though he’s turned a little valve inside me marked everything’s OK now.

  ‘I doubt it. You did just say fucking,’ I tell him, but he won’t accept it. He shakes his head, instead, and for the first time I see what I should have seen all along. He hasn’t been hating me.

  He’s been hating himself.

  ‘I also just called you gross for talking about sex. I don’t think the word fucking makes me healthy.’

  ‘People have said worse to me, in the past.’

  They haven’t, but that’s hardly the point at the moment. The point is that he wants to tell me a bunch of stuff, and by God I want to hear it. I want to hear it so bad that I’m sort of leaning forward in the water.

  ‘Christ, I hope not. I can’t even believe I –’ He cuts himself off, that hand going to his face again. ‘I know what my behaviour towards you must look like.’

  Like you’re a gigantic ass, I think, but of course don’t say. I can’t say it now, and especially not when he then tells me something that almost makes me swim across the hot tub to him.

  ‘But you should know it’s not because I don’t like you, or want to be your friend. I do want to be your friend. I think you’re smart, and funny, and cool. It’s just that … when you talk like that …’ He hesitates, clearly wrestling with his next words. I understand why, however. I’d wrestle with them, if he turned them into people and forced them to get in a ring with me. They make me slide sideways into another dimension, so really when you think about it they deserve to be jumped on from the top rope. ‘It makes me feel insane. More than insane. Obviously you know now what it does to me.’

  It’s like he’s spat out something bad, after the last little revelation. He even winces, and won’t look at me – though the latter isn’t unusual. He refuses to look at me all the time, and if I’m starting to view that in a completely different light, well … there’s nothing we can do about it, now.

  He rubbed his erection on me. The jig is up.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, it’s not as though I’m getting … like this every 30 seconds, or anything. It’s just … I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman talk the way you do. I went to Bible college. People there don’t even tell you if they need to take a piss.’

  Curiosity gets the better of me, again – though it’s for all the wrong things. I should be asking about the fact that he went to something called Bible college, of course I should. But somehow I don’t.

  ‘What do they say, then?’

  He shrugs. Actually looks at me, for the first time since this insane conversation started – not that him doing so makes any of it any better. Instead it just reminds me of how lovely his eyes are, all soft-focus blue and ringed with those dark lashes.

  ‘I don’t know – if you’ll excuse me, maybe?’

  It’s true, too. He says that all the time. I just hadn’t known he meant I’m now going to go drain the lizard. Or even: I’m now going to go and masturbate frantically because you mimed giving someone a blowjob.

  Because that is what we’re talking here, right? I’m not insane to think that. He’s telling me that my potty-mouth gets him all worked up, and the only way he can deal with that is to be a big jerk about it. Correct?

  God, I can’t believe that might actually be correct.

  ‘Well … it’s nice to be polite.’

  He gives me an expression that’s actually so obvious I’m made breathless by it, for a moment. I’ve never been able to read something on his face, before. Usually it’s like solving a Rubik’s cube, but this time it’s clear.

  Oh, come on.

  ‘I think what I am goes beyond being polite. I think most people tend to call it repressed. And also maybe … being a jerk.’

  I actually do go to him, then. Not to do anything weird, obviously, because my mind is still trying to process he had an erection without imploding. Just to put a hand on his arm, and not let him go away thinking that’s what I believe.

  Even if doing so gets kind of hard, the second I start cutting through the water.

  ‘Oh, no – God, don’t come over here. Mallory, don’t come over here. Stay there, please.’

  I think I sort of freeze in position, half over to him, half not. Most of me still stuck in that place I was in before, where Artie seemed like a person who mostly just wanted to kill me. And I think I stay that way until he covers his eyes with his hand, again, and tells me:

  ‘I can’t deal with you being close to me. Not while you’re half-naked, anyway. I mean, rationally I know you’re not half-naked at all, but you’re just so … there’s just a hell of a lot of you, Mal.’

  I don’t think he’s ever called me Mal, before. Usually it’s the whole name, with each syllable stroked over by that syrupy voice of his – though of course I know this isn’t what I should be thinking about. I should be thinking about that last comment he made, which definitely punches a bit of the air out of me.

  He’s just so hot and cold, that’s the thing. One second he’s calling me gross, the next he’s trying to be my buddy. And then we’re right back into gross territory, again, because I’m pretty sure he just called me fat.

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ I tell him, though I mainly do so because most of my other words are failing me. I’m just stumbling around in the maze of him, and the maze doesn’t get any less complicated, the deeper you get.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, and that mortification already all over his face gets deeper. His hand drops from said face, and he kind of almost reaches for me. ‘Oh, no, no. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘That I’m a hippo?’

  ‘Christ, no! I meant … I meant … you know.’

  I wish I did know. The blankness that’s clearly all over my face seems to be making him agitated in the extreme. He even puts a hand into his hair, as though the answer’s somewhere in all of those thick near-waves.

  ‘Are you really going to make me say it?’ he asks, and it’s like I’m being cruel. He sounds almost tortured, now, and that hand in his hair is making a fist – but I still can’t help him. Even after he’s said the words, I’m at a loss. ‘You know. Your bosom.’

  I wonder if that Bible college he went to was in 1955.

  ‘You hate my bosom?’ I ask, but I’ll be honest. I actually am trying to be a little cruel, now. It’s starting to turn a little comical, seeing him get all flustered and lost in words he’s definitely not wanting to say.

  ‘God, no I don’t hate it. I love your – I mean, I don’t love it. It’s just that your bathing suit is very … low … right now. And there’s a lot of … cleavage.’

  ‘So you hate cleavage.’

  His mouth makes that mean, compressed line I’m so familiar with. It looks different now, however, I have to say. There’s even a faint glint of amusement somewhere, way back in his foggy gaze.

  ‘You’re messing with me now, right.’

  ‘Maybe a little bit. You did call me gross.’


  ‘Sorry. You’re not gross at all, you know.’ He pauses, as I ebb just a little closer to him. ‘I’ve always thought you were kind of lovely, actually.’

  ‘That’s a really sweet thing to say, Artie,’ I tell him, though I swear I don’t intend the strange low tone my voice takes on. It’s like I’m not saying sweet at all. It’s like I’m saying something else. ‘But realistically I don’t think I’m half as lovely as you are.’

  I don’t expect his lips to part, the second I say it. But they do, anyway. And they do so in a really specific way, too – like he’s just waiting for something to slide between them. A finger, maybe. A tongue, possibly.

  ‘You really think I’m lovely?’ he asks, even though he can’t fail to know it. He must know it, right? Before he started all of this weirdness around me, I used to catch myself just looking at his face, sometimes. At the softness of his upper lip, and how it so often seems to curl inwards. At the heavy curve of his jaw, and then oh then … those incredible eyes. They kick his face away from preppy, and into something else, instead – something that goes with what James once said about his family. His grandparents were born somewhere cold and strange, like Siberia, and that’s what I always think of when I look into those eyes.

  Somewhere cold, and strange, but oh so beautiful.

  ‘Don’t girls tell you all the time?’ I ask, as I dance just a little closer. Just enough to feel his breath on my upturned face, and see that gaze of his drifting all over me, suddenly. ‘They must tell you all the time.’

  ‘I don’t usually get near enough to ask,’ he says, but that just leaves a little opening for me. It’s big enough for me to squeeze through, but small enough that I don’t have to think about it too directly.

  I just say.

  ‘You’re pretty close to me, now.’

  His eyes nearly roll.

  ‘Yeah, and it’s making sweat prickle all over the nape of my neck.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the heat in here,’ I tell him, but once I’ve done it I have to say – I don’t know who I’m suddenly turning into. My voice has gone all weird and low, and though I’m really trying hard not to, I can’t seem to stop my chest rising and falling far too dramatically.