He’s victorious because I looked. He actually cares that I did.
Is it OK if I kind of like that?
‘So, uh … this book you’re writing …’ he calls through the door.
‘Yeah?’
‘What exactly do you think it’s missing?’
‘Realism,’ I say, but that’s not what I’m thinking. Passion, my mind whispers, and I know that’s true, too. There’s nothing I’ve ever put in a book, that’s half as good as you.
‘You think realism’s so important for a sexy book?’
‘I think that it’s hard to be excited, when you don’t really believe in something. When it seems unlikely that it would ever actually happen, in real life.’
‘And what kind of things do you think wouldn’t happen in real life?’ he asks, and I’m alarmed to find myself stumped. Was it the blindfolds and the talk of Masters that Lori didn’t buy? Or was it something else? When I look back on it now, the story seems so artificial. So full of things that I’ve never experienced.
But I don’t think that’s about realism, exactly.
It’s more about me, and all the things I’ll never be.
‘I don’t know. Some of the kinkier stuff, maybe?’
As soon as I’ve said it, I know it’s the wrong thing. And I was so proud of myself for hitting on an answer that didn’t sound quite so depressing! But of course, he homes in on it like a laser. I can almost hear him laughing, through the door.
‘Kinky stuff, huh?’
‘Well …’
‘That what you like to write about?’
‘Not exactly, I –’
‘Do you dream about being taken by a guy wearing a leather mask?’
‘That’s, uh …’
‘Or maybe you’re the one doing the taking, am I right? You got a secret dominant side, little mouse? You gonna tie me up and torture me with a hot poker?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about doing anything to you. At all. You know, in case you were worried about that. Which you don’t have to be, because I’m purely interested in … uh … in growing. As a writer. See – I even brought my little Dictaphone and my notepad and … and …’
And dear God I wish I could stop talking. He emerges from the bathroom – thankfully in a T-shirt and shorts – with an almost bursting look of amusement on his face. As though I’m just adorable, in the worst possible way. He even gives my hair a cute little pat as he passes me on his way to the kitchen.
And then he says this:
‘Hey, calm down, OK? My penis isn’t going to suddenly lunge at your face.’
Which makes no sense at all. I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking he was scared of my vagina suddenly lunging at his face. Lord, how can someone be so open and so mysterious at the same time?
Even if I sort of suspect that he’s not being mysterious at all.
‘Did you say you wanted a coffee?’
I should say yes here, I know – normal people have a coffee. But then, normal people also know what to do when a guy hugs them, so in for a penny, in for a pound. He might as well see me for what I am, right now.
‘I don’t drink it.’
‘Really? Great. Now I don’t have to pretend I’m not a child who only drinks soda.’
It’s the first time I’ve really laughed in his presence, but I just can’t help it. I’m startled by his response – so close to how I feel, about that very thing. I’ve just never really said the idea out loud. I’ve always been embarrassed by my lack of sophistication.
But of course, he doesn’t care about stuff like that.
He just swaggers back in, and hands me my fizzy pop.
‘I got beer too if you want it.’ He knocks the cap off his bottle on the edge of a table, then takes a casual swig before finishing the thought. ‘Maybe later though, huh?’
‘Why? What’s going to happen later?’
Christ. Yet again my brain speaks before my mind has chance to get into gear. He sits himself down on the box, and kind of leans back on another two boxes that sit nearly behind it – like an armchair, I think, only rubbish. And then he grins at me, lazily.
‘Ohh, you have no idea what I’ve got planned. Bad things. Outrageous things. You’ll be talking to your therapist about them in ten years’ time.’
‘You’re fucking with me.’
‘Yeah, I totally am. Take it easy, Kitty-cat – I’m not some sex demon.’
What a fucking liar.
‘I tell you what,’ he says. ‘Here’s how I think things are really going to go. Ready? You braced yourself?’
I have.
‘I’m going to talk about some stuff until you can’t take it anymore, then you’re probably going to throw a chair at me and run right out of the apartment. Am I close?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I was actually thinking of using the fire extinguisher.’
‘Oh, I like that deadpan, Kit. I like that a lot. How did you know my weakness?’
‘Your weakness is a woman using deadpan humour?’
‘My weakness is brunettes with bee-stung lips and big round asses. The humour’s just a bonus.’
‘So … you … fancy … yourself?’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, you’re a brunette with bee-stung lips and a big round ass. In fact, your ass is so big and round you could put it in the sky and mistake it for the moon.’
I’ve gone too far. I see that now. Flirting is just too dangerous for someone like me. I have no off switch on my mouth, and once it gets going it doesn’t know when to stop. Now I’ve not only told him that he reminds me of a hot woman – probably Angelina Jolie, if I’m interpreting his comments correctly – but I’ve admitted I looked at his ass.
And that it did shine its glorious light upon me.
It’s no wonder I’m holding my breath. But then he laughs, and I get to let it out. He really, really laughs. I’m starting to worry about how much he’s laughing. Is this the hysterics before the sudden axe murdering?
‘Is that a good thing?’ he says, finally. ‘I don’t know if that’s a good thing.’
I can’t leave him hanging. No one would.
‘It’s a good thing. Your ass is … very pleasant.’
‘Well … thank you. But, no. I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about –’
‘Angelina Jolie?’
‘Yeah – I hear she’s a real deadpan hoot,’ he says, sarcasm so thick I almost gag on it. I have to swallow quickly and compose myself, because then he comes out with this: ‘I’m talking about you, you idiot. You have seen you, right?’
And after he has, my world turns upside down.
‘Of course I have. I saw myself last Wednesday. My hair was doing this woo-woo thing,’ I say, but only because I’m panicking. My palms have gone all sweaty and my mouth has dried to a crisp. It’s like my saliva has disappeared down into my hands.
And all because he said I had nice lips.
‘Can you give me a demonstration of this woo-woo?’
‘Well, my fringe was kind of going out here like – Christ, what am I doing? Don’t ask me to do stupid things.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I might do them.’
Ohhh, Lord. I did not mean to say that. Now he’s got this weird, heavy expression on his face, and the pressure of it is fairly intense. His eyelids go all low over those smoky eyes, and I can almost feel what he’s considering.
He’s considering all the things he could ask me.
And all the things I’d definitely do.
‘OK, so … anyway. Let’s get back to why I’m here,’ I say, just to clear the air and restore normality. After all, I’m likely imagining the whole asking me to do stuff thing. That’s probably just his default setting: hot staring.
‘Is it seducing me? Because you’re doing a great job of that.’
Or not. Oh God, this isn’t his default setting at all.
‘Sorry – go ahead. First question,’ he says – possibly because he
can see how stunned I am right now. I think my mouth has fallen open, and my face feels like it’s on fire. My whole body feels like it’s on fire.
There’s a new pulse that’s just started up at the centre of myself, and it’s beating hard enough to show through my suit.
‘Um … OK.’
I get my notepad and flick it open, grateful to myself for having the foresight to jot down some mild queries. So it’s unfortunate, really, that they’re all now nearly impossible to say. I stare at the first few in dismay: Have you ever tied anyone up? Do you ever take a woman to the top of a glass building and blindfold her with red ribbons? Am I insane and too steeped in fantasy land, wanting to write about those things?
I can’t ask him stuff like that, after he’s said ‘seducing’.
‘Well … uh … maybe you could just tell me … something. Like in the group. You tell me a story, and I’ll … take notes.’
‘A story, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
He pauses, as though he’s truly considering. Though he doesn’t pause like a normal person, of course. Now he seems to be smiling without moving his lips, and his eyes are full of this devilish sort of delight. He’s going to really sock it to me – that much is clear.
‘OK. How about this? There once was a man from Nantucket …’
I come close to throwing my pad at him.
‘I was really expecting something then.’
‘I know. You’re practically pushing your pen tip through the paper.’ I glance down, and sure enough, there’s a blob of ink the size of a tomato, soaking through the top layer to seven other layers beneath. I’m a nervous wreck. ‘What exactly are you going to note down, anyway?’
Maybe he’s a nervous wreck too.
But if so, I wish he’d show it.
‘Just any relevant details.’
He makes a worried, this-food-is-going-to-taste-bad face.
‘Like … what? Girth, thrusts per second … are you measuring me for a sex suit?’
‘Yeah, and then I’m going to shoot you into sex space.’
‘Awesome.’
‘I’m just looking for some authentic experiences, that’s all.’
‘And what if my experiences don’t seem authentic?’
Alarms bells ring, at this point. But apparently, they’re the kind of alarm bells that make you want to move towards the danger, instead of running away. They’ve been wired wrong, and now I’m stumbling towards his so-wild-they’re-unreal stories without a thought for my own safety.
‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If you’ve done it, then it’s believable – whether I’m convinced or not.’
‘So it’s sort of like I’m giving you permission.’
‘To do what?’
For some reason I think of a swimming pool filled with writhing bodies instead of water, and me poised on some impossibly high diving board. Go on and jump, he says. But how can I, when I don’t know if anyone will catch me?
They seem pretty preoccupied by each other’s groins.
‘To write what you want to write.’
Oh, what a lovely concept. What a lovely, lovely concept. I don’t tell him how much it makes my heart sing, however. He’d only get the wrong idea.
‘I suppose.’
‘OK. So I’ll start at the beginning, then.’
‘The beginning?’
‘Yeah. The beginning of my escapades.’
My mind immediately sends me an image of a gaudy comic book, with the words The Madcap Adventures of Dillon on the front. At which point, I have to accept that I’m not going to get anything down to earth out of this. He probably doesn’t even know what down to earth is. He only knows wild, and electric.
Yet somehow I hardly care.
‘The beginning, then,’ I say, because apparently I’ve already jumped.
I’m halfway to the writing water already.
Chapter Five
‘I didn’t know her first name. She was always Mrs Goldman, to the staff. Hell, I think she was Mrs Goldman to everyone. Her husband probably called her that in bed. I know I wanted to call her that in bed. It was bad enough that I was seventeen and still a virgin – I lived in permanent boner-land anyway. But trying to trim the hedges round her pool while she lay there on a sun lounger, half-naked, all oiled and shit …
‘It was pretty torturous. She had the kind of breasts you don’t see any more. Eighties breasts. Really round and real, always trying to burst out of tiny bikini tops. And eighties legs, too – strong, thick thighs that sort of slid against each other when she moved. She glowed, you know? Her skin was always like satin. Some days I’d go inside to the bathroom just so I could, you know, take care of myself … which I’m pretty sure she knew.
‘How could she not? That summer was so hot you couldn’t wear anything but shorts, and I knew my dick was always straining through the material. Weird thing was, though – that only turned me on more.
‘She told me once that I had a blow job mouth, and I guess that’s true. I do love to suck on things.’
He gazes off innocently at some innocuous spot, everything about him so casual, so calm about this. He’s propping his chin on one hand, his bottle lying lazy in the other – while my mind frantically fumbles towards thoughts of that thing he said, about Alan.
It doesn’t get very far, however. It went sort of blank right around the idea of him looking at himself naked. The image he paints is so vivid that I can’t see anything but it for a second – like the photo-flash of something, seared on the insides of my retinas. There’s the outline of his body, thinner than he is now but somehow just as compelling. And his skin … oh, God, what must his skin have been like at that age? I imagine it the way he described hers: as glossy as syrup, as smooth as silk, so beautiful you want to die the moment you see it.
He must have been stunning. He’s stunning now, and that’s without the other thing my heated imagination has latched onto: how dazed he must have looked, under the pressure of all that lust. I think of those blue eyes of his, near-blank and foggy with a thousand thoughts of her, and I can’t imagine how she didn’t jump on him immediately.
Though I’m guessing I’m going to find out.
‘Back then, though,’ he says. ‘I honestly thought I was being real subtle. That she had no idea about the private sex sessions I was having with her, in my head, in her bathroom. I pictured myself suavely seducing her – giving her exactly what her puny husband never did. I’d seen him around, in his shitty suits, as skinny as a reed.
‘Whereas I was … well. I was six-two before I graduated junior high, and had already hit two hundred pounds of mostly muscle. I just knew I could give her what she wanted. I’d grab her and throw her onto the antique Italian silk couch, then pound her until she screamed for more. Then I’d bend her over the kitchen counter, the way I’d seen some guy do in the electric seven minutes of porn I’d dared to watch in my parents’ basement – then shove myself inside her. She made me feel electric.’
I flick from this to that, in the maze of all the things he’s saying – the idea of him swaggering around, contrasting with the expression he has on his face now, as he talks about it. He thinks he was ridiculous, I can tell – and I like him for that.
But I like him more for the last little bit. The way he says the word electric, as though some probably pilfered dirty movie sent a charge direct through his body to his dick. I know how that feels, all right … oh, I remember the delight of digging through all kinds of movies and books, searching for that one illicit scene.
We have something in common there, I think – though I suppose everybody does. I’m not about to get excited over it, or anything. I mean, his next words are these:
‘I spent actual hours trying to imagine what she would feel like, around me, so I could emulate the sensation exactly. I’d slick my hand with every slippery product known to man, then fuck my fist into the mattress. It was a real time of sexual discovery, for me.
‘Does th
at sound sort of foo-foo?’
He’s laughing at himself, a little, but I hope it’s clear that I’m not joining in. I can’t even answer him. He just talked about fucking his fist into a mattress. I mean, the image of him standing naked in front of a mirror was bad enough.
This is turning my insides purple.
‘Well, maybe it is. But that’s how it was. I started understanding stuff I liked – slippery things, obviously. The amount of times I imagined oiling her all over with that suntan lotion of hers, then getting to ease myself between her soft thighs …
‘Though that wasn’t the only lesson I learnt. I realised pretty quick that holding off made it sweeter, when you finally let it happen. Sometimes I’d keep myself on the edge for hours, until my orgasm felt too intense to take. I felt feverish, too on edge. I felt like pheromones were leaking out of my pores. She had to notice me, eventually.’
I think he’s right. I’m noticing him, and I wasn’t even there. I’m fifteen years into the future and a million miles away from whatever American town he’s talking about, but I’m sure I can smell that earthy, saltwater scent from here. And though it’s never been something that particularly interested me, I find myself tingling at the idea.
What would it be like, to see him aroused and in this state? I don’t know, but I’m no longer content to wait and find out more.
‘And did she?’
‘It’d be a pretty weak story if she didn’t, right?’
He pauses, and for that one second I think he really means it. This is just some tale of for ever wanting and not getting. He could call it The Madcap Adventures of Kit Connor.
But then he continues – like a warden, granting his sexual prisoner a reprieve.
‘So, the longer this went on for, the worse things got. And the bolder I became. I stopped being satisfied with the bathroom, and makeshift masturbatory aids. I started wanting the smell of her perfume, the feel of her silk underwear against my skin. I turned into her stalker, slipping into her bedroom when I knew no one was around. Running my hands over the clothes in her wardrobe – the works. It got so bad I could get hard by stuffing my face into one of her couch cushions.
Addicted (Mischief Books) Page 5
