‘I hate you swearing, Michael.’
‘Tough shit! I’ll do what I fucking like.’
She jumped up to her feet, stalked off through the trees, tripping on a root, almost crying with frustration. How could he ruin such a perfect day? – or maybe it was her fault. Had she really been a bitch, foul-tempered and unfair, or was he just a moody type forever throwing tantrums? She should have stayed with Rob – straightforward stodgy Rob, who always made her feel she was in control of the relationship.
She heard footsteps crashing after her, quickened her pace, running blindly over the rough uneven ground. It was a race again, a battle: Michael determined to catch her; she determined to evade him. He was so close now she could hear his gasping breathing, then a sudden muttered curse as he, too, stumbled, broke the pounding rhythm of his feet. She made one last violent effort, heart thumping in her chest, breasts bouncing and uncomfortable; clothes hampering her, confining; silly shoes slipping at the heel.
He clutched out at her skirt, forced her to the ground, used his mouth to hold her down, his lips a padlock, clamped around her own; his weight and bulk preventing her from moving, though she tried desperately to knee him off, while he kissed her through the protests. No – kiss was the wrong word. It was more of an invasion, as he forced her mouth to open wider, lashed her tongue with his. Her own mouth was fighting back, yelling out abuse; abuse without the words. It was impossible to speak, since her tongue was grappling with his, and he was snicking it with sharp and dangerous teeth. She could bite as well – scored his lips, nipped his tongue, heard him yelp with pain. She was astonished at herself. She had never known a kiss could be so savage, and now it was a kiss, terrifying, violent, as he probed still deeper, explored the widening cavern of her mouth. She ought to stop him, not cravenly submit, but if she unlatched her mouth from his, it would become small again and innocent, the sort of naive and childish mouth which Rob had pecked so tamely.
She could feel herself actually changing as he kissed her, becoming wilder, messy, wet; a stickiness between her legs; large damp patches seeping from her underarms, staining her chic blouse. Her whole body was too hot – with excitement and with anger – anger at Michael’s bullying, the way he’d overpowered her. Her face was stinging, slimy, her saliva drooling out with his, so that she was losing any sense of what belonged to her and what to him. His leg was hooked around her leg, her hair trapped beneath his arm; his heavy, urgent breathing meshed with hers, so that they were breathing with one pair of lungs, together and in time. Even her anger was now shared, fusing with his to become a feverish impatience.
His hot hand moved towards her chest, started fumbling with the buttons of her blouse, seemed frustrated by them, baffled, until it simply slipped inside and found bare flesh. She tensed. The thumb was circling her nipple; feathering it so stealthily she could hardly bear its gentle teasing pressure; feared she would explode from the maddening contrast between languid hand and frantic mouth.
‘Wait!’ She dragged the blouse off, not bothering with the fastenings, but yanking it over her head. Immediately, his mouth was on her breast, his tongue licking a slow path from her nipple to her throat, then dawdling back and down again, sucking, grazing with his teeth, but still leisurely, unhurried. He was spinning out his pleasure with the lazy afternoon, turning anger into indolence. Extraordinary the way he knew what nipples liked: the gentle steady tugging, the tongue-tip flicking back and forth. The nipple swelled and stiffened; her own mouth opening wider, demanding him again. If only he had two mouths – one to kiss her, one to suck her breasts; or one to kiss her while he used his second pair of lips to nuzzle down her belly. His tongue had reached her navel, was gliding slowly past it, then prowling lower still.
‘No,’ she whispered suddenly, struggling to sit up.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I … think we ought to stop.’
‘But we’ve only just begun.’
‘I know, but …’ She glanced around her. At least the place was private. They hadn’t seen a soul since they arrived, and the trees were like their private guard, arms spread to keep intruders out.
‘If you’re worried about contraception …’
‘I’m not. I’m on the pill. But …’
Michael was tugging off his shirt, unbuckling his stiff belt. ‘Look, you want it, Tessa, I know you do. I adore your greed, the way you’re really dying for it. You’re a great rutting wide-thighed whore, and you can hardly wait for me to get it in and fuck the daylights out of you.’
‘I’m not! I don’t. I …’
‘Liar!’
She couldn’t answer back. His mouth had stoppered hers again, and his naked body was glued against her own, a sweaty body whorled with dark coarse hair. The hair felt rough against her breasts, echoed by the roughness of his chin, and the scratchy tickling bracken they were lying on. He was too big to be resisted – big in bulk, big in sheer crude dominance; pressing on her, crushing her, yet kissing so phenomenally, she had to open her mouth, let him eat and drink from it. They were devouring one another, tasting all the foods again – garlic wine and crab-tinged Brie, as they guzzled from each other’s tongues. She was only half aware of what his hands were doing – easing down her zip, pulling at her skirt – knew she ought to stop him, groped down with her own hand.
‘Don’t fight me, Tessa. Right?’
‘No, it’s not right. I still don’t really know you. I’d rather …’
‘If you want to get to know me, this is the perfect way, okay? Just relax.’
‘No, stop, I …’
He had somehow peeled her skirt off, and was now clawing at her pants, and as she jerked up to object, he moved faster still, thrust his head between her legs, used mouth and lips and teeth and tongue to distract her, overwhelm her. She chewed her fingers to stop herself from crying out. The bristles which had pricked her face were like tiny needles lower down, piercing her and stabbing, stabbing, with an exquisite white-hot pain.
She was still trying to protest, one part of her alarmed that they were going far too far too fast, doing something wildly private in a stretch of common woodland, but her fears were swamped by the incredible sensations – the barbed-wire chin, the swooping probing tongue. She was aware of his whole head, huge between her legs, burrowing between them; two voracious mouths in contact with each other. And Michael’s mouth had tentacles and pincers; kept changing as she bucked and threshed below it; now a clamp, now a scoop, now the lightest of antennae. She was no longer saying no, but whimpering and clamouring, as if her restraining mind had disappeared, and her body ruled her voice-box. She shut her eyes, so that she could focus on his tongue – its deep insistent circling forcing her to move in time, arch her spine, pivot with her hips.
When she opened them again, his wet face was right above her; lips moving down to kiss her as he slid slowly slowly in – pausing, teasing, pretending to withdraw, before thrusting back, then stalling; continually altering his rhythm. She was suddenly annoyed that he wouldn’t keep it steady, attune it to her own rhythm, which was building up, building up, becoming faster and more urgent. Her mouth was joining in, repeating the frenzy of her body, trying to tell him in great shuddering gasps that he was miraculous, amazing, and that this was the first time she’d made love, the only time that mattered, and that if he went on any longer, she’d scream, she’d die, she’d overflow, and she was furious with him, furious, for compelling her and bossing her – furious and worshipping, furious and ecstatic …
‘Ssh, Tessa! Someone’s coming.’
‘No, no! Don’t stop – not now.’
‘Tessa, you’ll get us both locked up!’ He gagged her with his hand, but she bit the hand, kept crying out, even through the muzzle.
‘For Christ’s sake, woman, hush!’
She tried to stifle her cries, heard crunching bracken, snapping twigs, a sudden gasping ‘Sorry!’ as two figures loomed above her, two appalled embarrassed faces staring into hers.
&
nbsp; She shut her eyes, didn’t care. They were only stupid trespassers in Michael Edwards’ wood. He owned it, owned her body, and there was no way she could stop. She could feel him slowing, feel his bursting tension as he fought to hold it back, the slamming rhythm now wavering and limp. She ground herself against him, desperate to continue; more aroused than ever by the thought of people watching; strangers’ eyes on Michael’s unsheathed prick; on her own pale breasts, dark thatch. ‘Please go on,’ she begged him. ‘Go on, go on, go on!’
And suddenly he did go on, stiffening now inside her, until he was fiercer than before; not kissing her, but shouting, ‘You randy little bitch – you great brazen shameless hussy,’ and the words weren’t insults any more, but an electrifying challenge which was working on her, freeing her, and she realized she was coming, and she didn’t give a damn whether the whole of Oxford was standing gawping as she heaved and thrust against him, and when she screamed, ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael!’ she could hear scandalized but wild applause thundering through the startled reeling wood.
‘That might have been my boss, Tessa – Sir Thomas Thornton, Professor of Surgery, strolling in the woods with his prudish lady-wife.’
‘Yes, I expect it was.’ She was smiling to herself. Gavin wouldn’t recognize her – the modest schoolgirl who’d done it with her skirt still on, in the alley by the boilerhouse. But she mustn’t think of Gavin. She had left her school behind now, her cramped suburban home and confining childish standards, and become her adult self – shameless greedy Tessa, whom Michael Edwards loved.
‘I love you,’ he’d yelled out, when he’d come himself, just afterwards – a great roaring gutsy cataclysm, in which he’d poured out everything: his sperm, his sweat, his desire – a million miles from Gavin’s feeble twitch. It had been her matriculation – not the formal ceremony she’d endured in her first term, which had made her an official member of Oxford University – but a more vital rite of passage, which had transformed her into a mature official woman, a woman who had orgasms, stupendous shattering comes. Even Michael was astonished by them, astonished and admiring. He no longer seemed seven whole years older. She had caught up with him at last – his partner, his beloved.
She reached out to pick a crozier of new green sappy fern, stroked it down his chest. Both of them were only partly dressed – he with just his trousers on, she naked beneath her skirt; blouse draped across her breasts, sweaty hair in tangles. She was too bushed to find a comb or fasten buttons, too contented to get up. She lay, unmoving, watching the thin clouds wisp and fray above; the twitch of birds in branches. All her senses seemed sharper, more acute. She could hear the sigh of leaf on leaf; feel each separate bracken frond tingling underneath her back, still taste Michael’s mouth. An insect was crawling up her leg. She didn’t brush it off, wanted every smallest creature to express itself, enjoy itself, with no hindrance or restrictions. All the usual barriers between her own skin and the world’s had somehow disappeared, so that she was now the sky, the tree, the cloud – living their huge lives, yet also sharing the perspective of that tiny humble insect, gaping at each pore and freckle as it clambered up the mountain of her thigh.
She was sore between the legs from the chafe of Michael’s bristles, relished the sensation, wore it as a trophy. Her body was still sweltering, yet the fine hairs on her arms were standing up on end, as if they, too, were intoxicated, unable to return to boring flat normality.
Michael had dozed off. She wondered how he could, with the birds so brash and raucous; one boaster in particular stabbing out its mating-song, repeating and repeating it, like a record which had jammed. She envied it its voice, longed to flute and whistle back, have wings to swoop and soar. She was already composing poetry in her head, love-poetry, like Abelard’s, which – tragically – had all been lost. Maybe hers would last for ever, Michael’s name immortalized in the songs she’d write for him to play. She nudged him gently in the ribs. ‘Hey, Michael …’
‘What?’
‘I love you.’
‘‘Course you don’t.’ He yawned and scratched his belly, peered down at his watch. ‘Good God! It’s ten to five – way past tea-time.’
Chapter Five
‘I very much fear that I may become a nuisance by daring to besiege your already distracted ears with my repeated petitions. But what else can I do? If I fear to offend you with my many letters, how much more ought I not to fear …’
Tessa laid the book down. She couldn’t concentrate. And every line she read, despite the fact that it had been written by Saint Bernard in 1126, seemed to have relevance to Michael, who tyrannized her mind as much as Bernard had dominated Europe through most of the twelfth century with his charismatic force. She, too, had written endless letters, but, unlike braver Bernard, had torn them into shreds, continually trying to convince herself that there was no need to pester Michael or remind him she existed. She would hear from him eventually, mustn’t be a drag, the sort of girl who couldn’t wait a week or two. Or three. It was Saturday tomorrow – three weeks to the day since they’d last met. Okay, so he was busy – overworked, exploited – all the words he’d used himself, but he still had evenings free, enough time off to phone her college and leave a message with the porter. She’d made every possible excuse for him: he was ill, he’d had a crisis – some emergency at home, or problems at the hospital; he was attending important interviews to fix up his next job – but none of those contingencies would actually have prevented him from sending a brief note or picking up the phone.
She stared down at her hands, the fingers stained with biro, an M scrawled on the palm. It was time she faced the brutal fact that he must have simply dropped her – one fantastic screw, and scat. Except ‘screw’ was the wrong word. She needed a new word to describe how she and Michael had amazed each other’s bodies. All the sexual terms she knew seemed so crude or twee – leg-over and bunk-up, nookie, cherry-pop. She’d even hunted through the dictionaries to try to come up with some foreign phrase, which might express the poetry as well as the gymnastics. She’d found swyve in Anglo-Saxon, which was at least a little better; could be spun out on the tongue, as she’d been spinning out the fantasies of her and Michael swyving – in rain-forests or deserts, on windswept beetling clifftops, sun-warmed sand, cool moss. Abelard and Heloïse had once made love in a convent refectory, so overcome by what Abelard called ‘the violent intensity of lust’, they couldn’t, didn’t wait. She had flicked back to the texts, re-reading all the relevant chunks of the Historia Calamitatum with new understanding, insight. ‘The newness of these joys served only to make us prolong them ecstatically … We gave ourselves unreservedly to love … In our eagerness, we went through all the phases of love; we exhausted every refinement that passion can devise.’
But as the days went by and she had heard no word from Michael, she began to worry that the ‘ecstatic joys’ had been mainly on her side. Perhaps he hadn’t felt a passion close to Abelard’s, but had found her selfish, greedy – grabbing all her own thrills without giving any back. Or did he see her as a slag – too easy, too available? Vicky would merely shrug and say you couldn’t win with men. If you played hard to get, they labelled you a prick-teaser, and if you pleased their pricks instead of cruelly teasing them, then they pushed off in disgust. But that was too simplistic. Michael had actually told her that he loved her – not once, but twice – the second time at the Blue Coyote, when they’d been sharing a bombe surprise: one dish, two spoons, and three brandy-based liqueurs poured over the ice-cream. Had the love been brandy-based, as well, fuelled only by the booze?
She forced her attention back to Saint Bernard’s letter, cursed the tiny print and greyish paper, which made it hard to read. ‘Deceitfully and not sincerely does he love you; falsely and not faithfully does he counsel you …’ She closed the book, sagged back in her chair. Michael had been false, hadn’t he, making all those empty promises about how he’d show her round his hospital, introduce her to his friends, even take her to
his parents’ home for a weekend in the country. She’d already wasted half the term, pining for him, waiting for his call, rebuffing other overtures from three separate boys in college. Tomorrow was the first of June and she’d hardly had a May yet. It had been grey and drizzly almost all the time. Only for their picnic had the sun shone. Michael had been right when he told her he played God, providing cloudless skies when they’d stripped off in the woods, then ordering heavy rain when she was cooped up in the library. She was sick of this damned library, especially loathed its name – the Radcliffe Camera – which jarred her back to Michael once again. She glanced up from her desk at the statue of its founder, Dr John Radcliffe, preening in his niche. She had been to the John Radcliffe – Michael’s hospital – panted up Headington Hill on her complaining ancient bike, cursing herself for being such a fool. And the minute she’d arrived there, she’d turned round and cycled back again, terrified of meeting him, arm in arm with some voluptuous nurse. And if he did sleep with half the nurses’ home, then she was an utter fool to have had sex with him herself without the protection of a condom. In the excitement of the moment she hadn’t given it a thought, but as each long day limped on, all those direful warnings about AIDS and HIV echoed louder, louder in her head.
Or perhaps she’d infected him; picked up some ghastly bug from Rob and passed it on unwittingly. Would that explain his silence, and why he’d missed her play? He’d promised her he’d come, noted the dates in his diary, assured her he could manage at least one of them. It had been a great success, in fact, but she’d had to continue acting at the raucous last-night party, concealing her despair behind a mask of bonhomie. Similarly, during Eights Week, she’d rollicked down to the boathouse with a group of carefree friends, downed her Pimm’s, cheered the college eights, even bought a crazy hat with ribbons on and flowers, but the flowers were artificial, like her smile. All the things which made the term exciting had turned out like damp squibs, because Dr Michael Edwards wasn’t there.
Michael, Michael Page 7