You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  Because he isn’t hairy at all. He doesn’t have shovel hands, or an air of some underworld I don’t understand. Instead, he’s soft-mouthed and blue-eyed. Big, true, but not in the way I’d expected. I’d thought of grizzly men who’ve earned the term ‘brick shithouse’, but instead there’s just this odd fullness to him. As though he lives just ever so slightly on the edge of delicious excess.

  Too many cakes, I think, but that’s unfair – and not entirely true. It doesn’t look like he’s eaten too many cakes at all. It looks as though he’s been filled with something else altogether, and just when I think my mind can’t get any stranger it writes in the correct description for me.

  It’s like he’s been filled with come.

  Of course I flush red the second I’ve thought it. Not because it’s too rude, but because I know it’s rude and yet it seems to perfectly fit him, anyway.

  That’s what he looks like. Like someone who’s just had his ass fucked by ten men, and is now absolutely swimming in jism. It’s running down his thighs, inside those immaculately tailored trousers he’s wearing. He can still taste it at the back of his throat, when he swallows.

  And somehow this thought is more paralysing than the other one, about the brutal men who want to gang-rape me. For a long moment I just stand in the middle of the room, while this obviously refined and certainly handsome gentleman looks at me without a single idea of what I’m thinking in his head.

  He’s probably the son of an oil magnate. He’s probably Christian Vanderhoof the Third. Really he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing here, and very soon he’s going to tell me to turn down the bed and clean the bathroom.

  Only then he says: ‘Would you care for a drink?’

  And after that I don’t know what to think. His voice is extremely cultured, his tone utterly polite. Everything about him is coated in a protective sheen of fabulous wealth, and yet I’m certain I can hear something underneath it all. A little burr of nervousness, I think, that doesn’t quite fit my preconceptions of this evening.

  Why is he nervous? He paid a thousand pounds for me. I can’t even sneeze without his permission – though to look at him you wouldn’t think it. He shifts in his chair, awkwardly, in a way that suggests he’s impatient for my answer.

  He’s impatient, but he won’t demand it.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I tell him, though in truth I’d love a Scotch. I can see from the empty glasses on the table next to him that he’s had three, though I can’t see why he needed a fresh container each time. Or why he needed so many.

  Clean Dutch courage, I think, then feel a strange little surge go through me. Yes, that surge says. He likes things clean and neat and ordered. He likes things a certain way – a new glass for each drink. Each one exactly the same, with a curl of lime and two ice cubes.

  And he needs the alcohol to steady his nerves, because he’s never done this before.

  ‘I suppose … you just want to get started.’

  Oh, definitely never done this before. It’s like looking in a mirror, for a second, though I suspect my half of the reflection is starting to seem a little different. I feel a little different, though I’m not sure why.

  Because of the row of glasses? Because of the look of him and the way he stands, hands still flat on his thighs? All of the above, I think, and then I simply watch as he starts peeling off his clothes.

  I won’t deny it: it’s almost a treat. I’ve never even dated a man half as handsome as this, and here he is, paying me for the privilege. And it is a privilege. His shoulders are broad, his chest big and solid. When he moves, things flex and shift beneath the skin.

  And that’s before I even get to his thighs – dear God, his thighs. They’re thick and solid and curved in places I’ve never seen a man’s thighs curve, though after a moment I have to look away from them. I have to.

  He’s hard. And though I know that’s what I’m here for, and understand the rules of this game utterly, it’s still something else to see it in the flesh. To have to face it, and know that’s what my purpose is.

  Even if I can feel my purpose shifting, as we speak. It’s like it’s poised on the top of a sand dune, and the more time ticks by the further down it slides, until I’m suddenly at the bottom, in a heap. I’m looking and looking at his thick, stiff cock, and I’m not exactly afraid, any more.

  I’m not exactly anything. I’m just staring like I’ve stepped outside myself, and when he says: ‘Do you know what I want you to do?’ I don’t tell him what I should. I don’t say, No, not really. I just stand there and examine every naked inch of him, with this strange lewd sort of detachment.

  And he seems to see it that way, too. In fact, after a long, long moment of staring, he actually says as much. He shivers once, all over, before telling me how good it feels to be looked at like that. Then once he’s managed to force those words out, he goes one step further.

  ‘Like a possession,’ he says, but I swear I have no idea what he means. Is he suggesting that I should stand there, naked, while he maps me out with his gaze? It certainly seems as though it needs to be that way around, but here’s the thing – I’m not sure it is.

  He told me that he feels like the possession. That my eyes are the cruel, cold ones, judging the various parts of him. And when I really think about it, I am judging him. I judged him before I even walked into this room, and doing so now just feels like a natural extension of that. It’s like armour – I need it.

  I just didn’t think he’d want it. I thought he’d have a little tool, rusted and mean. And the second I stepped in here he’d get that tool beneath the metal plating covering my skin, and lever it all off.

  But he doesn’t.

  Instead, he says, ‘What do you want me to do now?’

  While inside I rise and fall, all at the same time. I get to choose – is that what he’s saying? That I get to choose what happens now? I can hardly believe it, but before I’ve even worked up the courage to actually ask him he says it again. And this time, he says it far more clearly.

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ he says, the safety of that question mark now long gone. He looks like he doesn’t want the safety of a question mark any more, anyway – as though little extra things like those ones have held him back.

  But of course he doesn’t have to hold back, with me.

  And for the first time I realise something strange, something that hadn’t even occurred to me before this moment. How could it possibly? This is a horrible thing, a painful experience I’ve been forced to endure. There is nothing pleasant about selling your body, I’m certain of it.

  Or at least I’m certain until I think of those words, when applied to me: I don’t have to hold back with him. He isn’t my boyfriend, who’s likely to dump me if I do something forbidden in bed. He’s not a one-night stand that might spread the urban legend of the girl who likes to lick a guy’s asshole.

  He’s my client. And now he’s said: Go ahead.

  ‘Get down on all fours,’ I say – just to test it out, I suppose. He can always laugh and say no at this point if he likes. There’s still a chance I’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick, after all, and I wouldn’t hold it against him.

  Only then he does exactly as I’ve told him. He does it. This big, smooth-as-silk-looking guy gets down on his hands and knees on this expensive carpet and, as he does so, his eyes flutter closed. As though the whole thing is just too much to take, before we’ve barely done anything at all.

  I understand how he feels, however. My legs seem weaker than they did when I first walked in here, and somewhere inside me there’s this new sensation, blooming – one that gets stronger when I tell him to crawl towards me.

  And he does.

  ‘You like it down there?’ I ask, though I don’t really feel like I need to. It’s obvious he likes it down there. His cock is still hard and, even if it wasn’t, there are other things that point the way. Things that shouldn’t seem familiar to me – Miss Vanilla – but somehow are anyway.
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  Like the way he shudders when I walk around him. Like the way his head drops between his shoulders the second I toe the ripe curve of his perfect ass with the point of one shoe.

  Of course, I realise then the appeal of footwear like this. They had seemed skyscraper high and uncomfortable before – a nuisance, more than anything. But now they’re weapons. My shoe is a tool, like the one I imagined him having. And all I have to do is shove said tool between the cheeks of his ass, to get his armour off.

  ‘No,’ he says, but something unexpected happens when he does. I don’t automatically think of what I should – that it’s time to be nervous, now, and back off before he tells on me. Before there are consequences.

  Instead, I imagine just how far I could go.

  From here, it looks like a million miles spread out before me.

  ‘No?’ I ask, and there’s something new in my voice, now. I’d call it resentment, but it isn’t exactly. It’s crisp and cold and almost mocking, instead – and he seems to know it.

  That shuddering gets worse. One of his hands jerks beneath him, like a reflex, but I can’t allow that any more than I could allow him to tell me no. Who does he think he is, telling me no?

  Doesn’t he realise I’m a professional?

  ‘Get your hand away from your cock, boy,’ I say, and then it’s my turn to shudder. Because, of course, I’m not a professional. I’m not anything. I don’t even know what this thing is that seems to be growing inside me.

  I only know that it made me say ‘boy’ and it made me say ‘cock’, and both things pound hard on that door inside me. The one that’s closed, currently, but clearly labelled: You like this. You like this you like this it’s making you wet.

  I swear, it isn’t. I can’t feel it, sliding slick and slippery between the lips of my cunt, as I circle him. I can’t feel it soaking into the expensive panties I was given to wear, until they’re near ruined.

  I’m insensible, a professional, I’m stone.

  Even when he plants one shaking hand back on the carpet, I’m stone.

  ‘Touch it again and it won’t just be the toe of my shoe you’ll feel,’ I say, though I have to admit – I don’t know what it is he will feel. The stiletto heel? My fingers? The cock I don’t have?

  All three seem crazy, but then so is this. It’s crazy, that he seems so shaken up, by so little. There’s actual sweat gleaming on his broad back now, and all I have to do to make him shiver and moan is just hint at touching him. Just ghost my heel over his side until he squirms and actually begs.

  ‘Please,’ he says, in a tone I never thought someone like him could get to. ‘Please.’

  But for what? What’s he pleading for me to do? I can’t imagine it’s just a straightforward fuck, now – though the thought flashes in me far brighter than it had before. I mean, it’s possible that he’d let me pin him down, while I did it. It’s likely he wants me to tie him to something, while I use his cock for my own greedy pleasure.

  And if those are just my own desires coming to me, unbidden, well … is that really a problem? He doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem when I put my foot on his back, and dig that heel in until he lies flat to the carpet.

  Quite the contrary. He seems to think it’s the best thing anyone could ever do to someone else, and I know this because he tells me so. He moans and babbles incoherently, until real words finally manage to spill out of him.

  ‘Oh, that’s perfection,’ he says, though I’m not sure how it can be. Doesn’t it hurt to be abused like this? Isn’t he dying inside to feel someone doing this to him? And if he is, why don’t I care?

  I should care, I think, as I reach down to grab a fistful of his hair. I should be better, I think, as I wrench his head up – one foot still in the small of his back, like someone starting a heavy piece of machinery. Bracing themselves to get every ounce of strength into it that they can.

  ‘Is this perfection, boy?’ I ask, and he tells me yes. He tells me to do a million things I shouldn’t want to, things that involve the throat I’ve just bared to a knife I don’t have, and when I do them … God. God.

  When I close my hands around his neck and choke him, just a little … I don’t know what that feeling is. I can’t name it. It’s like he’s got that rusty thing beneath my armour anyway, without me knowing it, and suddenly I’m bare and bleeding.

  ‘Take it,’ I tell him as I press my face into his sweet-smelling hair, one hand on him, squeezing and squeezing. I could kill him, now, I think, but that’s not the worst thing about all of this. No – the worst thing is the thought that comes afterwards.

  He’d let me.

  I pull away then. I have to. All of this is far, far too much, in the opposite way I expected it to be. I thought I’d be crying, by now, and I suppose I am, but they’re not tears of pain. They’re something else instead.

  ‘Get up,’ I tell him, once my back is turned to him. If I look when he stands, I’ll lose control of myself. I’ll be the guy with the shovel hands, wanting to take this as far as he’s willing to go.

  Though I suppose that’s the kicker, isn’t it? He’s willing.

  ‘Lie down on the bed, face up,’ I say, gentler now. Softer, though certainly more breathless. In truth, it kind of feels as though oxygen has made a fist halfway up my chest and every time I try to suck more in it just cycles back. It just gives me a quarter of what I really need.

  And that feeling gets worse when I allow myself to look at the shape he’s made on the bed. All of his limbs so heavy, sprawled out for my delectation. Wrists crossed one over the other, above his head – like a vague idea he’d once had, of what submission should look like.

  But that’s OK, though. That’s OK. I see the same formless pattern in my head the moment I close my eyes. I think I’ve been seeing it all my life and just hadn’t known it. I hadn’t listened.

  I’m listening now.

  ‘What are you going to do to me?’ he asks, and it’s like a song. It’s like a song inside me, playing just loud enough for me to hear.

  ‘I’m going to fuck you until you beg me for mercy,’ I say, as I climb onto the bed. ‘And if you come before I say you can, I don’t know what I might do. Is that what you want, boy?’

  Before, it was hard to meet his eyes. But it isn’t any more. I just lean right down and meet that foggy blue gaze directly, one hand cupping his chin – like I’ve pincered him, I think, like he’s mine – and murmur words against his lips.

  ‘Do you want me to not know?’

  His breath catches in his chest – I hear it. I almost feel it in the subtle shift of his body beneath mine. And then it comes right out of him, in that one perfect word I’ve so longed to hear. The one no one’s ever said to me; the one that makes me lean down and offer him something I swore I wouldn’t willingly.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, and I kiss him. I kiss him I kiss him I kiss him, through the dozens more he then gives to me. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, as though it’s the easiest thing in the world to just give in to someone.

  To let them do whatever they want.

  I want to tell him that it isn’t, but then again I’m the one putting the condom on him. I’m the one shoving my dress up around my waist, as frantic and flustered as I’ve ever felt myself. For a long embarrassing moment I can’t seem to get my panties off, and I just tangle over him, legs everywhere.

  But then it’s done and I’m naked there and he can see me, those eyes of his still full of the same thing they were before. Not God you’re clumsy but God, just take me, just fuck me, and when I do he says the name I haven’t told him.

  He pants it, into my open mouth – hands still linked above his head. Everything about him just so ready to be used, in a way that makes me wetter, hotter, more desperate for it. I can feel the evidence of my arousal coating more than the lips of my sex, now, and every time I move, every time I slide against him, my clit swells. Pleasure swells with it, sweet and thick.

  Though worse than all of this is how quickly he
becomes sensible of it. He knows, the second I ease myself down on his solid cock – because of course he can feel it. He can hear it, all slick and filthy.

  And though I can too, I think I hide my shame well. More than well, in fact. My voice still comes out as cool as a winter river, when I tell him what I want him to do.

  ‘Lie still,’ I say, though the moment I do that feeling courses through me. My clit becomes one long pulse between my legs, and more of my wetness coats him – because he’s just a doll, now. He’s a thing I’m using for my own pleasure, and he doesn’t even seem to mind.

  In fact, he does more than not mind. He gives me his utter obedience, through the tensing of the muscles in his shoulders. In the way his lips disappear into his mouth, as he struggles to hold himself motionless.

  It must be an almost impossible task, I know. How could it not be? He’s so aroused there’s a flush spreading over his chest, and everything I do makes those little shudders pass through him, minutely.

  And if I’m really honest, this thing we’re doing – this slow up and down I’ve got going, on the thick length of his glorious cock – it’s almost too much for me. It’s almost making me ache somewhere low down in my belly, so God only knows how it must feel for him.

  He wanted this. He paid for it. And now he’s just got to lie there and take it, as a hint of some kind of impossible orgasm just rubs ever so lightly over my clit.

  ‘Oh that’s good,’ he bursts out, after a moment of this agonising slide around the swollen head of his cock. I won’t deny – it feels best there, right up against the front wall of my clenching cunt.

  But I will deny that I want to say the same thing back to him. Instead, I do something very mean and very delicious, like maybe just grabbing a hold of his face again. And when he tells me, ‘Yes, yes, do it,’ I go one step further. There’s always one step further with this man whose name I don’t even know.

  Like slapping, for example. I hadn’t even thought about slapping, but the moment I do it – hard and sharp across his perfect face – he forgets he isn’t supposed to be moving. He bucks up, jerkily, into the absolute mess of my slippery pussy, and I can’t help it either.