Deep Desires (Mischief Books)

by Charlotte Stein

  ‘I’ve never known anyone remember so much about me. I’m not particularly memorable,’ he says, and my response just jerks right out of me, too hot and too giddy.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I ask, because seriously … those eyes of his – almost navy blue and thick with feelings he won’t tell you. Those cheekbones, that mouth like a kiss he’s just waiting to give, his manner for God’s sake. I don’t understand anyone who wouldn’t want to prise him open with a crowbar.

  ‘What do you think is memorable about me, then, Abbie?’

  I can’t say the eye thing. Or the manner thing. And I’m definitely not going to say the thing that occurs to me a second after all that head-swooning over him: Your cock,your incredible, delicious cock.

  Because that just sounds like I want to eat him. So I go with this, all tremulous and silly:

  ‘Everything,’ I say, only it doesn’t seem like enough all on its own. There’s no weight to everything, it doesn’t mean anything on its own. But then again, nor does: ‘I think you’re so beautiful.’

  Oh God. I’m getting into such a mess of emotion here. Whereas he … he probably doesn’t even know what emotion is. I’m wiping my feelings all over him, like a kid discovering finger painting for the first time.

  ‘Despite the way I am?’ he asks, after a moment, which at least mitigates that sense of making a mess on him. I mean, he clearly wants to know about this whole beautiful thing … and I can let him know, too. I’m capable of clarifying.

  ‘Because of the way you are.’

  ‘And how am I, Abbie? Do you know? Have you figured me out?’

  I think of the swinging jackets again. Of his boots, beneath, and of course I realise then what it reminds me of. It’s how I used to have to do things, back at the redbrick house – as though there’s some invisible presence always with him, constantly telling him to.

  Though I don’t say it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know why you are the way you are, Abbie. I know that you’re scared, even now, that he’ll find you.’

  My stomach clenches, but it’s not for myself this time. It’s for him, and the invisible weight on his shoulders. What did someone do to him to make him this way? Who could have hurt him to the point where he still follows the same routine, without anyone there to impose the rules?

  ‘I am,’ I say, and then I gather the courage and just ask: ‘Are you scared too?’

  I’m afraid for the answer, though. I’m so afraid I’m squeezing my eyes tight shut, waiting for some horrible, inescapable sentence. It can’t be just some person who abused him, I know. It’s got to be something worse, something I can’t even imagine.

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘It doesn’t have a name. It’s just there; it’s with me all the time. Feels like a big blackbird on your shoulders, doesn’t it?’

  Or an invisible hand, I think, but it’s the same thing.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  I’m crying. I’m crying.

  ‘But you trust me when I say I can see things so clearly, right? You know I can see you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then listen to me. Listen to me: the bird has gone now. It flew away when you weren’t looking, I swear.’ It’s like he’s reaching through the phone – just as he did through the glass – to stroke a hand over my back. ‘Go to sleep now, Abbie. I’ll go to sleep with you, and dream my blackbird is gone, too. You looked up at me, and it went away. For a little while, I swear, it went away.’

  I try the search terms ‘Ivan Orlinsky’ and ‘murder’, now that I’m not afraid to. But nothing comes up. His wife wasn’t found floating in a pool of blood. He didn’t kill his own son in a terrible car accident.

  He’s left no trace, like me. There’s no sign of his blackbird, though I know it’s there. I can tell it’s there, because, when I go round to his apartment in a rush of fuck-knows-what, this is the response I get through the door:

  ‘I can’t come out now, Abbie.’

  I feel like the biggest idiot on the planet for baking a goddamn pie. Apparently I know so little about intimacy I imagine it happens during a thirty-minute phone call. Now I’m just a fool stood on the wrong side of the door, holding baked goods. I don’t even get a chance to say, It’s me, Abbie. He probably saw me coming across the courtyard in a haze of adolescent love-feelings, and flipped his shit. He could probably tell it was me by the way I knocked – hell, who else is going to?

  ‘I’m sorry, Abbie. I can’t come out,’ he says again, while I struggle around in this mire of uncertainty. What does he mean, exactly, by ‘can’t come out’? He doesn’t even know that’s what I want. Maybe I just want to go in, though I don’t see how that would be any less problematic here.

  It’s pretty clear. It’s not that he can’t come out. It’s that he can’t even open the door. He’s forgotten how, because of that time thugs broke in and almost beat him to death. Or did he once answer the door to a real serial killer, and this is the result? The frustrated sound of his voice, the dull thud of his body against the wood.

  He wants to, I think. He just can’t.

  Though I can’t help remembering that he did for some burly guy he paid. He let him, all right. Why not me? I probably said too much, seemed too needy. After all, he’s technically a stranger, and I started crying on the phone.

  I’ve probably got attachment syndrome, to match his detached version of the same thing. We’re so fucked up we could convince Freud to analyse us from beyond the grave. I’m sure he’d have lots of undead things to say about the barriers we’ve built up, the things we can’t say, the fact that I’m actually ludicrously excited when he calls me later on.

  Despite the way he starts the conversation.

  ‘That was fucked up, right?’

  He sounds as certain as I am.

  ‘I don’t know. I probably would have done the same thing,’ I say, but I’m lying. I’ve got the image of him coming to my door in my head, right now. I’d open it and glue my body to his, let him lift me off the ground. Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him. I can even see the clothes we would be wearing in this imaginary fantasyland: me in something less baggy and formless, something pale blue and clingy so I can see the shape of our bodies sandwiched together; him without that coat. Barely anything between us.

  ‘So you don’t trust me.’

  ‘You started this. I should ask you first – don’t you trust me?’

  ‘It’s not about trust.’

  ‘Then what?’ I ask, but I think I already know. Contact, I think it is. Intimacy. He can meet me in the hall, touch my elbow. Help me up. He can talk to me on the phone or send me gifts that drive me nuts. But he can’t accept that image I’ve got in my head:

  My body with his body. No spaces between us.

  ‘Are you thinking about what the what might be?’ he asks, and I kind of hate how amused he sounds, how sure. I was so fucking hurt that he didn’t open the door. Does he know how much it cost me to go over there and do that?

  ‘I’m thinking about what an asshole you are,’ I say, and it’s only afterwards I realise what I’ve done. I haven’t spoken to anyone that way in five years. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken that way to anyone. It makes my cheeks flame immediately and the urge to be sorry rises up inside my throat, like a sickness. He’s going to kill me now. He’s going to backhand me across the face, through the phone.

  It almost makes me jump out of my skin when he laughs instead.

  ‘I know. I know I am. I’m sorry, Abbie.’

  Oh God – accountability. Is there anything sexier on a man? Actual apologies. I could drown in him, I could.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, you came real close to making me open up.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘A hair’s breadth away. A heartbeat away.’

  I can hear his accent again, thick and sticky.

  ‘And what would have happened then? If you had let me in?�
��

  ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  ‘I do.’

  He pauses then, the longest pause of my life. But he makes up for it when he finally, finally speaks.

  ‘I would have run my hands all over your body. You know how hard it was to keep them off you on those stairs? When you could hardly walk? Every time I didn’t touch you, it made me ache.’

  Of course I automatically think of what he would have found if he’d given in and done it. All the lumps and bumps all over me … all those vast expanses of pale, pasty skin …

  ‘You don’t even know what I look like under my clothes, not really. You –’

  ‘That just makes it sweeter. I spend long nights imagining your shape under those shapeless things. Imagining my hands pulling the material taut around the curve of your hip, the roundness of your breasts. Would you let me do something like that, Abbie?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Anything.’

  ‘Would you let me pull it over your head?’

  ‘Oh God, yes, take it off me. Take everything off.’

  He makes a restless sound that I appreciate ten times more from him than any other man. He’s so closed off he can’t even open his front door, but, oh, he can sigh for me. He can say: ‘Fast, or slow?’

  ‘You decide,’ I say, and for once in my life it’s good to do it. Yeah, he can decide. That’s OK, it’s OK. I know he’s not going to tell me to do anything bad.

  ‘Slow,’ he says. ‘Slow.’

  And, oohhhhh, that’s not bad at all. I’m dying; I’m dead. I’m hunched over the phone like a starving animal, guarding my stash. The receiver has turned to a hot, slick mess in my hand, and I’m just barely hanging onto it. I’m clenching the plastic tight, but it’s not going well.

  ‘Lift that jumper over your head. Go on, lift it now for me,’ he says, so I do.

  I fumble my way out of it then discard it on the bed. Now I’m only in my bra, my big ridiculous skirt.

  ‘I’d get my hands underneath that jumper and just slide it over your head. Take my time working through the layers, unravelling you. You wearing a bra?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to keep that on, at first, just peel the cups away from your breasts. See you like that, with the straps still framing those gorgeous curves. Because they are gorgeous, right, Abbie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ I say, but only because anything more seems impossible. I’m almost struck dumb by his ability to say all of these amazing words once we’re not actually looking at each other. Once I’m not lurking on the other side of his door, like some strange new sort of threat.

  Girl with a pie, I’ll call it. It’s almost like guy with an axe, if you squint hard enough.

  ‘You do know. Go to the mirror and do what I’ve just described, then tell me exactly what you look like.’

  I could go to the window, I almost say, but it’s like him with the door. Too much, too much, and besides … I’m not sure that’s the point. He doesn’t want to look at me. He wants me to look at myself, which doesn’t seem quite as hard.

  Until I do, and then it’s very hard indeed. I look clumsy, I think – silly pink bra caging my breasts in, the waistband of my big skirt over my belly – and I tell him so.

  But he won’t have it.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, then more, more, oh unbearably more. ‘I know what your skin looks like … luminescent, like cream. And those beautiful breasts … they tilt up a little, don’t they? Full and heavy but with just that little tilt, made near obscene by the straps now around them. Am I right?’

  He’s right about the obscene part. My nipples are so stiff they look sore, all red and spiky and rude. And the straps on either side are just ever so slightly cutting in, like some strange sort of bondage that I’m not quite familiar with.

  ‘I bet they’re almost begging to be touched, right now,’ he says, and he’s not wrong. There’s a hollow ache thrumming through my body, and it starts at those stiff points and ends between my legs. Touch yourself, it says, go on, but I can’t quite make it happen until he tells me.

  ‘Go on,’ he says, as though he knows. He knows I find it hard and wants to make it so easy, and it is, with him talking in my ear. He lets me know all the things I wasn’t sure about, like how lovely I must look and how good it must feel to just run a hand over the smooth slope of my breast. I don’t even feel bad about the little gasp I let out when my palm grazes over my stiff nipple.

  Because he’s there to suggest otherwise.

  ‘Oh yeah, baby. Tell me how it feels,’ he says, so I do.

  ‘Soft. Really soft … and my nipples are tight.’

  ‘How does it feel when you touch them?’

  ‘Like this,’ I tell him. ‘Like this.’

  And then I moan, just for him. I’ve never moaned for anyone before. My life is a ruin of fake sighs and phony yeahs. But he pushes me to some real point of arousal without even trying, without even touching me, and I can’t help being grateful for that.

  I show him my gratitude, with words I could never previously say.

  ‘Every time I touch them this bloom of pleasures shoves down between my legs, close to an orgasm. Really close. I can hardly stand up for it, but I don’t want to sit down.’

  ‘You want to stay and look at yourself.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘Are you beautiful, Abbie?’

  ‘I seem beautiful when you talk. Oh God, that feels good.’

  ‘What does? My words, or the way you’re touching yourself?’

  ‘Both. All of it. Everything,’ I say, though I’m only partially telling the truth. His words are amazing and the way I’m plucking at my tight nipples feels good, but there’s so much more I desperately want.

  If he could just tell me it’s OK …

  Or if I could just tell him. I can. I will. I’m going to.

  ‘I want to lick my fingers.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks me, but his voice is very hoarse now. I think he knows. I think he more than knows, in fact – I think he might be touching himself, as I moan and whisper into the phone.

  ‘So that I can rub that slickness over my stiff little nipples. It’s not enough, like this. But if I just put my fingers in my mouth and suck …’

  ‘Ohhhh yeah. God, yeah. When you did that for me in front of the window, I almost lost my mind,’ he says, but all I can think of is how still he had seemed. Fierce in the eyes, but motionless otherwise. You would never have known that he was close to losing his mind, but then, that’s the benefit of words. That’s the benefit of being just this little bit closer.

  Now all I have to do is get him to come closer still.

  ‘You liked that, huh? I do too. I like imagining it’s you when I slide them into my mouth. My fingers aren’t as thick, of course, but I can almost feel it.’

  ‘You can feel my cock in your mouth?’

  ‘Yes. Mmmm, yes. Do you want that?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer me directly. Not yet anyway. A little bit more maybe.

  ‘I want you to make your nipples all nice and slick. Do that for me, Abbie. Rub that wetness all over them, and tell me how it feels.’

  I’d be frustrated by his evasion if I didn’t love how much he wants to know about me and my responses. Not his. Mine. My pleasure, my desire, the things that turn me on. I swear this wouldn’t be half as easy as it is if I didn’t feel so valued.

  ‘Like I could come just from touching them,’ I say, and this time I get a full throated groan from him, so loud I almost sink under the pressure of it. The sigh was enough on its own to waste me, this is beyond what I thought I’d get.

  And he’s definitely masturbating as he gives me it, too. I can hear the slick shuttle of his hand on his dick, quick enough to make him nuts but not quite enough to make him come. He’s waiting for me, I think, before he goes over. He’s waiting to get his composure back so that he can say to me: ‘No. No, not yet. Take your skirt off first.’

  But I’m like him.
I can hardly do anything. I can hardly think the way I normally would; I’m half insane with arousal. My pussy is one thick throb between my legs, and when I shift I can feel every little inch of it – my swollen clit, my slippery folds.

  Taking off an item of clothing is agony, on my already oversensitised body. Just the feel of the material sliding over my legs is enough to make me sob, and, of course, it’s all so difficult. It’s nearly impossible. My feet get tangled in the masses of material and all the while I can hear him breathing too hard and being too expressive.

  He’s not like this, he’s not like this, I think. But apparently he is once he’s worked himself up to a certain point. He’s like me in that regard, exactly like me – one half cut from the same cloth I’m made out of.

  And, ohhh, that’s even better than all of this blistering, impossible sex.

  ‘Are you naked?’ he asks me, and I tell him I am aside from the bra. I can see my sex glistening beneath the tiny strip of hair I’ve got, clit so swollen it’s visible between those flushed folds, and somehow I tell him that, too.

  And he answers in the best possible way he could.

  ‘Oh God, baby, I want you. I want you.’

  ‘You want me?’ I ask, because I need to hear it again, before the door slams shut. I’m talking to him through a crack in it, and one of his hands is almost all the way through to me.

  But the chain’s still on.

  ‘You’ve no idea how much I want you. I want to bury my face between those legs, taste how wet you are, lick that stiff little clit.’

  ‘Ohhh, it’s so stiff. I can hardly touch it.’

  ‘I’ll touch it. Spread your legs for me, baby,’ he says, and now I can no longer tell. Who are these words persuading – him or me? Am I at the door, gazing through at him?

  I feel like I am, but, if so, he should know:

  It’s open. I’m open. At last, I’m open.

  ‘Anything,’ I say to him. ‘Anything for you.’

  And I mean it, too. I spread my legs in front of the mirror, and tell him how it looks when he asks – so slippery I can hardly stand it, so flushed with arousal and ready to be fucked.