Christ.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, but he’s lying. And though his next words are caring and sharing and they go some way to make up for that, the lie sticks in the back of my mind. ‘But this is the only time I’ve ever done anything like this. I’ve never done any of those things with someone I didn’t pay first, and, when I have done it in the past, I paid them to force me into it.’
‘Is that what it takes then? Force?’
‘Not when it’s you, no. You persuade me. You erase everything that holds me back, and replace it with something else.’
‘I do? Seems like a tall order for someone as nothing as me.’
‘You think you’re nothing, Abbie?’ He’s not playing with my hair anymore. He’s stroking the side of my face, in that same slow, wondering sort of way. ‘You, who didn’t look away? You’re still looking now, though I’ve done my best to stop you. Nothing I’ve said has put you off, even though there’s a hole in your body where your trust used to be. Who wouldn’t love you, Abbie, knowing that?’
I don’t know if he expects me to answer. He should know that I can’t.
‘Don’t cry, my lovely girl. Don’t cry,’ he says, and then he kisses my face. He kisses me close up, with my eyes on him and his eyes on me, and suddenly I don’t need to cry anymore.
I’m halfway to OK.
* * *
He doesn’t stop there. Somehow I think I expected him to – that, when I returned from this dreamland of sex and satisfaction and long low talks about feelings, everything would just flip back to the way it was. Cold nights, the store, occasional glimpses of him through my window.
But he exceeds my wildest hopes in every way. He sends me a note the next day: splinters of poems, the sorts of things I thought only existed in fairytales. He makes a game of it, where I have to guess the source of such lovely words: I can only be complete when I am with you, he sends me, and I uncover it quickly, avidly.
My reward is another inch of his body, another island on the map of him. He lets me kiss his chest for guessing Shakespeare, and lick the length of his cock for Rossetti. No more blindfolds, but he’s skittish, and he hides said skittishness beneath a kind of hunger for me that I can’t easily fight.
I’m not prepared for it. I’m used to tepid, or cruel, indifference.
He gives me long, slow kisses all over my body, from the innocuous curve at the nape of my neck, all the way down to things I didn’t even know existed. There’s a place just between my thigh and my pussy, and when he licks me there I can’t control myself. I fist my hands in his short hair, I beg him to stop, I beg him to carry on.
And the same goes double when he buries his face somewhere very rude indeed.
He cares if I touch his shoulder in a slightly filthy way. But apparently he doesn’t care about something as lewd as licking me between the cheeks of my arse. He just does it, like it means nothing. I shouldn’t be startled, or try to escape up the bed.
I should just enjoy him rimming me.
‘OK,’ I think I say. ‘OK.’
But it’s not OK. I’m trapped between a fizzing, giddy sort of pleasure and absolute shame – though I’m not sure which is turning me on more. The heat from my face seems to have slid down my body, and is now between my legs. All I can feel is the slipperiness of his tongue wriggling and squirming against my tightly clenched hole, igniting nerve endings I didn’t know existed. Most of them spark and send direct messages to my clit. Some of them make me go rigid all over and try to resist.
But I can’t, I can’t.
‘Ohhhh God, yeah,’ I say, because really what else can I do? If I say no he might stop. He stopped the other day when I begged him not to push me into a second orgasm, right after the first.
And then he made me tell him a safe word, just in case no doesn’t really mean yes.
He gives me a lot of things like that, when I really think about it. Caring things, loving things … crazy sex acts that make me insane.
‘That good?’ he asks me, in between those long wet licks. I’m so slippery back there, he could probably ease a finger into that tight passage, if he really wanted to, but I’m not going to suggest it.
I’ll just let him know he’s on the right path, and see where it goes.
‘Yeah.’
‘You want me to do more?’
He’s a fucking genius, seriously. And a mind reader. And, ohhh, I love him I love him I love him, just say it. I almost did it on the phone the other night when he signed off that way, so casual and without expectation. I love you, my one.
But instead I just went with a lame, weak: You’re my one, too.
‘Yes.’
‘Like this?’ he asks, and I hold my breath, waiting for it.
It’s almost a disappointment when he just eases a finger into my pussy, as slow and careful as he was the first time.
Though with the added bonus of his mouth against my arse, as he does it. Oh, that makes the sensation a little different, all right. I jerk a little to feel it, and moan his name. Then again when he finds my clit, too, with the eight hundred fingers he shouldn’t actually have. Seriously, how does he manage to target every part of me all at once?
I can feel him doing this in my teeth. I have to grab a hold of his headboard, and hold on tight. No one could take this much sensation all at once. No one.
And yet when it crests, I’m there for it. I let it roll through my body and right out of my mouth: Ahhhh, yes, yes, I’m coming, I’m coming, I tell him, and he tells me things in response. Oh you’re so sensitive, baby, he tells me. You’re so easy to push over the edge. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Come all over my hand. Come all over my face.
It’s not hard to oblige him.
It’s never hard to oblige him. I don’t feel nervous anymore, getting out of my clothes. I tear them all off before I’m even through his door. I don’t mind if he wants to kiss me between my legs; I’m not ashamed of how hard and fast he makes me come.
But I am ashamed that I can’t do the same for him.
He won’t even let me cuddle him after he’s done, because by this point he knows where that’s going to go. I’ll try to leverage the hugging into a crafty slide down his body, for the blowjob he seems almost mortally afraid of getting.
‘You know I could pin you down if you wanted me to. Like he did?’ I say, to his retreating back. He disappears into the bathroom and, I’ve got to admit, it’s not really a comfort that he doesn’t shower immediately, like this is filthy.
Mainly because I wish that thought didn’t keep occurring to me.
‘Is that what you think I need?’
‘Well, since most of you is a guessing game it’s kind of hard to say what it is you need. And you did send me that tape. Maybe you were trying to give me a clue.’
‘Or maybe I just wanted to give you something that would make you feel less vulnerable. Less like I needed to be a big man with you.’
I think I’d kind of known that. But still, it’s lovely to hear him spell it out.
‘If that was your intention, that’s quite a gesture. I kind of think it’s more than that though.’
‘Yeah? What else do you think it is?’
‘I think you wanted to give me a part of yourself. A part you seem to find so hard to talk about you’re having this conversation with me from another room.’
‘I needed to piss.’
‘You’re not pissing.’
‘My teeth needed cleaning. My hair needed brushing. There’s a rug in here that’s not straight.’
‘See, you think you’re being funny. But all I’m wondering now is why the neatness, too? Why does everything have to be in its place, perfectly ordered? My ex-boyfriend liked things perfectly ordered, too, and it didn’t turn out so well for me.’
The silence that then stretches out has a pulse. It’s heavy and alive and I don’t like it at all. I wish I hadn’t said that, but it’s there and it’s out now.
‘Is that how you really feel? Th
at I’d hurt you like that?’
He comes and stands in the doorway and leans against the frame, which takes a bit of the sting out of this idea I’ve dragged us both into. And I try to alleviate it further by saying what I really feel: ‘No.’
But, oh, it’s still a fist around my heart, when he says: ‘I like things like this because once something happened to me that I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t control it. But I don’t want to be this way, Abbie. I want everything that this is not, that I am not. I don’t want that one thing to govern my life anymore, and that’s what you are. You’re anything but that. And I just want you to take my hand and help me out of this maze. I need out of this –’
I cut him off. I have to. This fist around my heart is killing me dead.
‘I got you,’ I tell him. ‘Any time you want me to help you out of this, I’m there. Because, God knows, you’ve helped me. I didn’t know people could be the way you are … you’re so careful with me. I don’t know why I said that about my ex-boyfriend, I don’t.’
‘Because you’re scared.’
‘I’m always scared.’
‘That makes two of us then,’ he says, as he crosses to the bed. I’ve drawn up my knees to my chest, but he eases them back down again.
And then he takes my hands in his and puts them over his heart.
‘Anything you want, I’ll give you,’ he says. ‘That’s how I climb out of this. I think about you, and all of the things you could ask me to do. Just ask me, Abbie.’
‘Can I kiss you?’
‘Yes,’ he tells me, so I do. I touch my lips to his, as chaste as a new maid on her wedding night. And when I ask him if I can hold his face in my hands, he lets me do that too. He lets me run them down from there over his back, stopping just short of something ruder.
‘Can I touch you like this?’ I ask, and there’s some resistance then. Some, but not much. And less of it once I’ve squeezed that fantastic ass between my greedy fingers.
‘Yes,’ he tells me, but the word is long and drawn out and he ends his sentence with this: ‘Yes, yes, just like that.’
‘And what about this?’
I kiss his throat, then thrill to hear more than just an affirmative.
‘Bite me,’ he says. ‘I love being bitten.’
‘You do?’ I ask, but only because I’m so surprised. I’m surprised he would offer the information; I’m surprised he likes something so physical. You can’t get much more into someone than half an inch deep with your teeth.
But he just nods, eyes reduced to smoky slits. And there’s more, too.
‘I like to bite, too, but I didn’t want to scare you away with something like that,’ he says, and this is the point, I know. This is the part where I can show him how full he’s made that hole through me, where trust once was.
‘You can,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t mind.’
And I do it as casually as he had seemed, stood in that doorway. Though he looks very far from it now. His body has gone all tense, and his face has gone all tense, and he doesn’t seem certain when he answers.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll say the word if you don’t like it?’
‘I’ll say the word if you don’t do it soon,’ I say, and that’s the thing that gets him going. Just a little humour laid over the top of everything, to make it lighter. To make it sweeter. He’s not going to hurt me, I think, he’s not going to at all.
And he doesn’t. He makes it feel sooooo good.
It’s more than good in fact. His teeth just graze my skin, close to some sensitive spot where my shoulder and neck meet, and I gasp over the sensation. The hint of pain, the burst of pleasure … and most of all, oh most of all, the sense of the care he’s taking …
I love him for all of those things.
I love him.
‘I love you,’ I say, but he doesn’t make me feel raw or wrong about it. He just presses me tighter, tighter, until there really is no space between us. He’s biting and kissing at my neck, and I’m biting and kissing at his. I can feel his erection rubbing against my belly and in a little while, I know …
We’re going to have sex.
That’s what we’re building towards right now. That’s how things happen when you’re normal: you let someone else touch you, and that same someone else touches you. And then finally, finally, you both lie down together, bodies entwined.
He hasn’t even got his eyes closed anymore. We’re looking at each other as he eases me open with those clever fingers. And we continue to do so as I cup his stiff cock, rubbing and rubbing at him until he’s beyond ready. He’s all the way over into ravenous, though it’s not because of the sensation I know.
It’s because I hold his face in my hands and tell him he’s my one.
‘You’re mine,’ he says. ‘You’re mine.’
And I am. I spread my legs around his body, barely able to wait for him to put the condom on. I don’t even know where he’s gotten one from, in all honesty, but the thought only urges my arousal on. He must have known things were coming to this, I think. He hasn’t shied away from it. He’s letting me run my hands all over his body and his body is right over mine, and then I feel it.
I feel the head of his cock, stroking through my slick folds.
‘Are you sure?’ he says, but not because he really thinks I’m not. I know why he says it: because I feel suddenly very small, and he feels suddenly very big. His cock nudges against my entrance and then he hesitates, he hesitates.
But I don’t.
I don’t even think about past pain or that kind of gritted-teeth discomfort. I just arch up against him, and feel that long, solid weight slide inside me. All in one good glide, until I’m full of him, I’m overwhelmed with him. Lord, I didn’t think such a thing could feel so freeing. I want to be overwhelmed, I think.
I want him to whisper in my ear the way he then does:
‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever done this with.’
And once he’s said it I hold him tighter. I rock against him when he can’t quite do it; I kiss him when he seems unsure. That hole through me is full up now, and I’m able to do all the things I couldn’t, for him. For all the things he can’t.
Though, after a while, can’t becomes can. He goes slow at first – testing out the sensation, I think. And when the sensation proves as glorious as I think it does – if his lust-slackened expression is anything to go by – he thrusts a little harder. He jerks his hips a little faster. The rolling fuck he started out with falls away, and I’m left with this:
A sudden franticness that takes my breath away.
‘God,’ he says. ‘God.’
And I agree. Prayers need to be said, for pleasure this thick and fast. I can feel his belly grinding against my clit, and every time he fucks into me – harder than he intends, I know – I have to just hold on. It’s like he’s forcing sensation through me with each jolting thrust.
I never thought I’d enjoy something like this. But I do. I think I could enjoy anything with him – soft and sweet, rough and hard. I could take him taking me over that table; I could love him telling me what to do. I even love it now, in the middle of this bliss.
‘That’s it, baby,’ he says to me. ‘Give it up.’
And I do. I groan his name as my cunt clenches around his cock, my orgasm slow and stuttering at first but then tighter, brighter. I have to dig my nails into his back for the finale – a kind of lowdown kick of pleasure to my gut that has me gasping.
But he doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t mind the gasp and, more importantly, he doesn’t mind the nails. Do it harder, he groans, which is even better than his last command, really. I get to do something for him instead of taking something for myself. I get to feel his flesh near breaking beneath my touch and, when it does, he arches his back.
He isn’t fucking me now. He’s rutting into me, eyes narrowed to slits, perspiration glowing all over him. His breath comes in pants, and it turns t
o something even sweeter when I bite him a little, on top of the nails.
Now he’s groaning almost constantly – all of these low ahhhs and uhhs that make me wild. And in between … words for me. Hot words that drive me on and on, until I realise what he’s doing.
He’s using the pain to get to a place he can’t quite reach. He can’t quite come, clearly, but every time I give him a little more he gets a little closer. He groans a little harder, he fucks me with a little more abandon, until finally he’s half mad with it. His eyes are tight shut and his fists are clenched in the sheets next to my head, but he can’t give in.
Emotions are easy, I think. Physical things are hard.
And then I let my nails break through his skin. I let him have something else to concentrate on instead of this panting, desperate pleasure. Instead of his cock inside me and his body pressed to mine and, ohhhh God, yes, then. Then he gives it up for me. I feel it happen the second he does – a kind of shudder goes through him, and then a stillness I can hardly stand.
‘Please,’ I tell him. ‘Please.’
But him obeying isn’t enough. He breaks like a dam bursting, mouth open around sounds he can’t make, eyes rolling up in his head. That glorious cock swells inside me, as his hips pump and his body shakes through the pleasure.
But still, it can’t ever be enough.
Because I know his body and what it needs. He’s let me feel him and understand what it takes to make him let go. To have him break over me and inside me, then rest, laughing, against my shoulder.
But I still don’t know why.
I don’t know why he needs to be bloody, before he gives me everything he’s got.
I know I shouldn’t need to know. But I do all the same. I think about it after we’ve had sex; I think about it during. He falls asleep right up against my body, uncaring about the lack of space between, but I still think about it.
And he still won’t tell me.
Or more: I broach the subject, and he changes it so deftly I forget what I was even saying. In my defence, it’s hard to remember with his face between my thighs. It’s hard to remember when he lets me blindfold him, before running my hand all over his body. He balks at the strangest things: a kiss on the insides of his elbows, a lick over the muscular length of his inner thigh, but not for a finger between the cheeks of his arse.
Deep Desires Page 9