The man watched, and watched, and then one day it was just too much. He had to have my Ivan, and he does. He pins him down one-handed, while Ivan gasps soundlessly and squeezes his eyes tight shut, wanting this and not wanting it all at the same time, I’m sure.
And then the man simply spits between the cheeks of his arse, as rude as a raised finger at a garden party. Ruder, in fact. I clutch something else when he does it. I clutch between my legs.
Because if I don’t I’m going to pass out. I’m already passing out. I’m watching my Serial Killer getting fondled and spread and stroked, right between the cheeks of his arse. He’s even put the camera at such an angle that it can be seen clearly – that tightly clenched hole being slowly eased open by this fat-fingered man.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I’m sat right on the edge of oh-no-please-don’t, with only the shameful thud thud thud between my legs to pull me back in. He meant this to be arousing, I know. I can tell he’s watched it a thousand times by the crackles that flicker over the image and the general state of the tape.
And yet I hover between anxiety and pleasure. I lean forwards and draw back. What must it be like, to actually engineer such a scenario? To be so in control and so not at the same time? I suppose that’s the appeal of it, really, though that isn’t what I’m thinking when he finally forces a finger into Ivan’s ass.
I’m not thinking of anything now. I watch him work Ivan open, slow and so deliberate. And of course I know he likes it, so really watching such a thing can’t be anything but arousing. I mean, he enjoyed it the other night when I watched him do it to himself. So it’s not such a big deal when I clutch at my swollen mound, like a reflex. Like I’m divorced from myself, the way he so clearly is …
He doesn’t have to think about anything either, I realise, and then I go ahead and do it for real. I slide my hand inside my panties, and find my stiff bud, too sensitive to touch directly but easy enough to circle.
While Ivan surrenders on-screen.
Go on, I think, go on, and the man does. He spits again so I can see it glistening between Ivan’s arse cheeks, and, once everything’s nice and wet, he works a second finger in, a third. Only this time I’m not on the edge of anything. I don’t wince. I want him to go further, push harder, fuck him in a way that makes his hips jerk back and his body shudder.
And the man on-screen obeys.
He pumps him roughly, testing for a response. Waiting for Ivan to press his open mouth into the table and moan in a way I wish I could hear, before wrestling around inside his own grease-streaked jeans for his cock, flustered for the first time, it seems, and showing his overexcited true colours.
He wants to fuck him, badly. It’s obvious. But it gets more so once he’s freed his rigid prick. It’s as hard and swollen as I’ve ever seen Ivan’s, so slick and ready to fuck I’m uncertain for a second.
Was this really Ivan’s idea? Or am I just imagining that because he seems like the puppet master? Maybe he’s just my puppet master, and not this guy’s.
Only then I see it. The guy hesitates, just as he’s putting the condom on. His lips move around words that I have to rewind and see again. I have to fit the shapes his lips make to actual words, and on the third try I do.
You sure? The guy says, but of course Ivan isn’t grateful for that. I wouldn’t be either, if I’d orchestrated a dance and had to tell someone how to move halfway in. What would be the point, then? How would I find any relief in the charade, if it edged too much into fakery?
I couldn’t.
And neither can he. His jaw clenches; he hisses a word. And, once he has, the guy just goes ahead and does it. Brutally. No holding back. One hand on Ivan’s ass, that thick cock shoving in. I can’t even imagine how it must feel, but I’m moaning and shivering in sympathy anyway.
The bliss on his face is enough to put me there. He looks like the weight of the world has been lifted off his shoulders briefly. He doesn’t have to think – the way I don’t have to think, once I’m aroused past the point of caring – he doesn’t have to worry. Everything is designed and yet not, real and yet not.
And all of it centres around that slick, thick thing fucking into him, that big beast over him, grunting and sweating and taking him to a place that I kind of want to go to, too. What must it be like to be so filled, to feel so used and yet know it’s really you doing the using?
I can’t imagine, but I do know this: he’s close to coming before they’ve even really begun. His body is shuddering; his mouth is practically kissing the table. I can see the whites of his knuckles as he hangs on to its edges, through this impossibly hard fuck.
Because it is hard. Once the guy gets going, he doesn’t hold back. He works up a lather, sliding that cock in and out of Ivan’s ass. He does all of the things I would do if I were allowed to be so close to him: spreading everything wider, so he can watch his thick shaft filling that tight little hole. One hand running over Ivan’s back, his arms, savouring every inch of him.
You’re not going to get to do this twice, I think, and at the end of the tape I’m proved right. The guy fucks into him in a sudden frenzy, clearly coming hard and too quickly – the way I do a second later. My clit jerks against my pressing, sliding fingers, pleasure swamping me just as I see what Ivan has definitely re-watched a million times:
The guy ripping off the condom to spurt thickly all over that perfect golden back. He couldn’t help himself, I think, and something about that is so viscerally exciting that I keep going, just as Ivan had forced me to the night before. I push one eager finger into my warm, wet hole, and then I stroke myself just beneath my clit. Just where it isn’t too sensitive to take a second go.
And then I watch as Ivan stands up. He straightens, mechanically, as though sexual activity never took place.
Despite the fact that he’s still hard. He’s still hugely, massively hard, frustrated, too, by the look of him. His face is pink. There’s an odd light in his eyes that’s usually hidden by the veil. And when he hands the guy something – money, it’s money – he shakes his head once.
No.
The guy asks again, and it’s the same.
No. No more.
That’s all you get with Ivan. One chance to give him the illusion he needs. Fail and you can never return, I guess, which is an awful theory to have in my head. I just don’t know if I can give him this detached sort of passion forever, if I can be so far and yet so close. I’m already wanting to close the gap, and that urge gets stronger as I watch to the end of the tape.
I see my Serial Killer going about his business, putting his clothes back on. Ordering the table into the exact position it was in before, eyeing it this way and that until it’s perfect.
And all the while I’m still masturbating. Even his meticulousness turns me on, it seems, though I know I’m about to give up by the time he comes to the camera. I don’t want to get off like this, watching him slip back into his neat little shell. I don’t want to do anything, anything at all.
And then he stares directly into the camera as he goes to turn it off. Those eyes of his like fire under water, burning through the lens and through his little routines and all the way over to me. They find me.
They beg me.
I know it then: this is what he wanted me to see. Not the fuck, the obvious organisation, his need to keep everything controlled and precise. It was that gaze he wanted me to see, and I do.
I see it as I roll into orgasm, with my hand still pressed against the screen.
* * *
I write the note a dozen times, then start again. And again. I waste a whole notepad, on words I can’t say to him; I go through an entire box of cream cards I can’t afford.
Nothing seems right. The device is too clumsy for someone like him. He needs a better key to fit his lock, as good as the one he used for me. A chance encounter, a beautiful gift, a question mark … that’s how he got me.
Only I don’t know what his question mark is. I can’t fathom it
out. I think he knows what happened to me – I can feel it in his deliberation and the slow patience of his approach. But what do I know about him? There are only clues: his rigid habits, his need to get fucked into oblivion. The sense of isolation that settles all around him, wherever he is or whatever he’s doing.
I can’t make out anything distinct from them. I can’t even find out anything particular about him online, apart from: Ivan Orlinsky obtained his Master’s degree in computer science from Eldridge University. He is the owner and founder of Desinik.
And that’s it.
That’s all.
Which is probably why I end up going with this for my first note. My first contact, through the glass, the gifts, the lens:
Tell me about yourself.
No question mark. At the very least I know this about him, after all: he doesn’t crave choice as much as I do. He didn’t crave a choice from that musclehead, and I don’t think he’s going to want it here.
Until I’ve posted the note and spent three days pacing my apartment … and then I’m right back to having no idea. Maybe he absolutely loves choice. Who the fuck knows? He might like forcing a kangaroo up his left nostril – it’s all Greek to me. I’m still in the beginner’s pool of sexual … things. I’m not ready for this level of emotional alienation and kinky tricks, and I know I should just tell him so.
Keep my curtains shut in the future.
Never speak of this again.
Never. Never. I swear it’s going to be never. Better to have rarely loved and hardly lost, than ever to have loved at all. Better to be safe than sorry, better to stay out of the kitchen if you don’t want to get burned. And I don’t, so I promise this to myself. I promise that I’m going to end my weird association with Ivan right now.
Shame, really, that the toughest resolution of my entire life is so easily broken by a phone call. I pick up, expecting my manager from the store, and instead get this:
‘What do you want to know?’
My heart stops. Mainly because it’s forgotten how to go on beating. Of course I can’t blame it under these conditions: I thought we were stalled at strange encounters through glass, and now he’s calling me up. He doesn’t even say hello or offer any kind of introduction.
It’s just straight down to business.
Not that it bothers me. It doesn’t even bother me that he sounds like an insurance salesman, following up on my query. In fact, that somehow makes this sweeter. More intense. His voice is so tightly drawn, so cool and collected, that all I can think is this:
Do I have the power to heat it up?
I guess in one way I already have. He doesn’t strike me as the type who gives words away freely, but he’s giving them to me right at this moment. Now all I have to do is think about what I want him to tell me. What do I most want him to say?
The design company, I think, ask him about the graphic design company he owns. Keep things light, and then gradually work towards darker stuff. Find out about his hobbies, his favourite books. Tell him yours in return!
Oh, my mind is full of truly excellent ideas. My mind should go speed dating some time, and have fun conversations with bland people that the rest of me doesn’t actually care about. While this rest of me asks Ivan the only thing I want to know.
‘Was he your lover?’
I just blurt it out, breathlessly, running on instinct and adrenaline.
‘That’s a rather provincial question, don’t you think?’
I barely even care about his response, because, oh God, I can hear he has an accent. I couldn’t hear it before but I hear it now, buried beneath his words. He sounds almost American, until he gets to the ends of his sentences. Until his glassy tone rises, at the hint of a question mark.
And then I come back to reality, and focus on the words he actually used.
‘Provincial?’
‘Well, what you’re really asking me is: am I gay?’
Shit. I didn’t intend it that way at all. But when he frames my question like that, that’s how I sound. I’m a small-minded prude, shocked by his ability to take a cock up his ass.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I wasn’t … I just … I just wondered if you paid him at the end.’
‘And that put you off?’
I can’t even hate him for dogging me like this. He sounds too genuinely curious about someone as simple as me.
‘No.’
‘What could put you off then?’ he asks, and I get that same feeling I got when I first saw the question mark, only stronger. He just seems so full of this odd sort of tease, suddenly, so eager to hear.
I didn’t expect that. Aren’t things supposed to be going the other way, into the land of closed-off-ness? He’s meant to be as silent as the grave, maybe a little resentful that I made him call me up. Though really, when I think about it, I didn’t force his hand.
He called me all on his own, and now he’s asking me all on his own.
‘I think you already know.’
He makes a little sighing sound, half contented, half not.
‘Probably. But we’re not talking about my keen powers of observation now. We’re talking about what you’d actually like to share.’
‘Keen powers of observation? What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean I took photos of you with a long-range lens and then made a giant shrine-like collage of your entire life.’
I think it says something about me that I believe him. I stare wide-eyed at nothing for a long moment, utterly paralysed.
Until he adds: ‘I’m joking, Abbie. That was a joke.’
It’s so hard to tell with him.
‘I only use binoculars and a notepad.’
See? He’s fucking stone cold deadpan. His pan is so dead he could lay it in a casket and bury it at Bellevue. They made a movie about him once: Dawn of Ivan’s Pan.
‘You birdwatched me?’
He laughs, and I swear to God my heart jumps in my chest. I didn’t know he was capable of something as basic and human as laughter.
‘I didn’t really do that either.’
‘Then what did you do?’
‘I did this thing called seeing you around occasionally.’
By this point, he’s so different to what I expected I hardly know how to get words out. I definitely don’t know what I’m saying. Stuff just spills out of me in a rush, most of it blindly groping for the Ivan he really is.
‘And that’s all it takes? That’s all it takes for you to … know things about me?’
He pauses then, and I find myself doing something very embarrassing. I’m straining, it seems, to hear every little detail of what he might be doing. It sounds like he’s removing an item of clothing as he talks, clenching the phone between jaw and shoulder as he does so, but how can I be sure?
And more importantly:
Does this make me the same as him? Haven’t I watched him, wheedled details out of him? Aren’t I on the edge of my seat right now for more of this almost human contact? I am, I am, and yet …
Nothing can match what he then says to me.
‘On Thursdays, you pick up dumplings from the Red Dragon. I know this, because you can never resist eating one before you get into the building. You walk by my window licking your fingers, or, if I’m really lucky, you’re still eating one.
‘You wear the same sorts of clothes no matter what the weather, come rain or shine, sleet or snow. Jumpers that trail over your hands as though you’re afraid to let anyone know you have the ability to touch, take, hold. Skirts that graze the floor, because even that much would be too much, right, Abbie? Showing an ankle would be too much.
‘You cut your own hair, because a salon would be vanity; you don’t look anyone in the eyes, because that would be inviting someone in, wouldn’t it? See, I know that last one because it’s the way I am, too. Carefully judging people in tiny stages, through snatched glances … just waiting … waiting for someone to look up and make me look too
.’
I think of that time in the hallway when we’d locked gazes. That feeling like a gun going off, like a hand squeezing in my chest. And then he speaks, and the gun goes off again.
‘You know, nobody ever leaves their curtains open, except for you? I used to tell myself I wouldn’t look, but sometimes I do. Just to see if you’re looking, too.’
‘I’m looking. I have looked, I mean. I did … before.’
Before I saw you touching yourself.
‘Yeah? And what did you see?’
‘I’m not as good at it as you are.’
‘As good at what?’
‘Seeing.’
He pauses then, but not for long.
‘Give me your best guess.’
I swallow hard, thinking. I can’t say Serial Killer, because that was Mrs Hoffman’s term. It’s not mine. Or at least, it’s not mine anymore. I’m disowning it before it makes me feel any worse about all the assumptions I had, while he was busy admiring my dumpling eating from afar.
‘You like routine, like me. Oranges on Thursdays. Mail at the same time every two days. I managed to see …’ I stop there, embarrassed. But he urges me to go on. ‘I managed to run into you by working out when you’d be there, and being there too.’
Lord, how do I sound like more of a stalker than he does? My face heats just thinking of my little plots and schemes, of my dreams of seeing his amazing eyes and how many times I’ve played him helping me up in my head.
But I plunge on, regardless. If he can share, I can too.
‘You wear the same outfit every day … but more rigorously than I do.’ The image of a dozen identical jackets swinging silently in his closet comes to me, and I voice it. ‘I think you have several of the exact same uniform: the duffel coat, the leather boots, the white shirt underneath.’
There’s a silence then, taut as a bowstring. And when he speaks again, his voice is rough.
‘Very good. That’s very good.’
‘Is it?’ I ask, because in truth he sounds more pissed than anything else. I’ve said the wrong thing, and now he’s going to tell me off or hang up the phone – only he doesn’t. I should have known; of course he doesn’t.
Deep Desires Page 4