My real book is right now, trying to read the hidden messages behind Cameron’s veiled gaze.
“I’m fine,” I say, because I am. But I’m maybe not so AC/DC when I realize a tense sort of silence has descended over the kitchen. Both Wade and Kitty have forkfuls of food poised in front of their mouths, as though they went to eat then forgot how midway.
Or more likely: they saw something much more interesting than eggs, and started paying avid attention to that, instead. I mean, I can practically feel their avid attention crawling all over me. It’s dense and sticky, and it’s also a lot like being accosted by Wade in the dark, in just my underwear.
Come on, he had said. Show me where that little secret room is, under the stairs.
And of course I had wondered if he’d heard us. If he’d known I’d go to that place, and followed me there, and heard me doing something with someone who is not him.
Good, I think, suddenly and surprisingly vicious in my own head. Good.
“Something you want to tell us?” Kitty says, and she has this absolutely wicked look on her face. So wicked, in fact, that it matches the good my mind spat out only moments earlier.
“No,” I say, but I can feel the heat spreading across my face. The only thing that halts its advance is how prickly Cameron looks, suddenly, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t and needs to rein himself in.
It makes me want to grab said reins and cut them. Or maybe yank on them. I can’t decide which and, even if I could, I’m far more concerned with how much this might make him pull away. Do I get ten less kisses for every humiliation he has to endure? Will he refuse to talk to me for another week if I let Kitty or Wade embarrass him over a blowjob in a cupboard?
I can tell he hates it, you know—the idea of being a joke. Of being exposed, somehow.
“Great breakfast, Cam,” I say, and when he looks up this time his gaze isn’t stuffed full of hidden sensuous meaning or longing or anything else so delicious.
But it is full of gratitude, at the subject change I just initiated—and somehow that’s even sweeter.
Yeah, it’s even sweeter by a million miles.
***
I think it’s the sense of trust or the hint of his smile or the feel of his fists at his side that gives me a long stretch of freedom. Whereas before I felt nervous about going to him and demanding he talk to me, it’s easy now.
Or at least, it’s easier. My heart’s still beating a little high and fast when I finally catch up to him, by the lake. And though I know he slowed down to a barely-jog in order to let me catch up, I can’t really pull off casual as I pick my way through the long grass and the sudden flood of wildflowers to the place where he is.
He watches me coming in fits and starts. Picks up a pebble or two and skims them across the glossy surface of the water, as he waits.
God he looks like a Gap model, when he sends the pebbles out. Like one of those outdoorsy sorts of pictures with a cagoule-clad hunk in them, doing outdoorsy sorts of things. Arm whipping out, eyes scanning the horizon, all the copper highlights in his hair suddenly flashing bright and beautiful in the early morning light.
“Hey,” he says, and the way he does so is just completely at odds with the way he looks. His words bristle. They have thorns all over them and they’re so unsure, as they creep out of his mouth.
The contrast is unsettling for a moment. Mind-bending. Why didn’t it so impress itself upon me before? All I can remember thinking is how funny it was, to be so handsome and so awkward, at the same time.
“You wanna toss one?” he asks, and all I can think is No, you idiot. I want to kiss you. Don’t try to hand me a pebble. I want to kiss you.
“Sure,” I say, then just as I take it from him and he turns to throw another, he goes for it. Just like that. Right into awkward conversation. No awkward pause.
“Did you tell them?”
So maybe he doesn’t trust me, after all, worse luck. He thinks I’m a blabbermouth instead.
“No,” I say, and intend to leave at that. I do. But then other stuff blurts out with it. “Though they’ve probably figured it out. It’s not as though you were really quiet and discreet.”
In truth, I’m sure he thinks of himself as the very soul of quiet discretion. In truth, I do too. But I say it anyway and once it’s out he blushes, of course, and does that little eye flicker thing. The one I found so charming in his bedroom, and the one I can’t get out of my head. It’s like he thinks he’s a disaster in some way, and can’t disentangle himself from that feeling.
I want to rob him of it, before he struggles himself into an even deeper mess.
“I don’t know whether I’m happy about that or not,” he says, then seems to consider. “Though it would have been nice to have you as my secret, for a little while.”
“Then spring it on Wade, right out of the blue,” I suggest, and am honestly not sure how I dare. I mean, it implies all kinds of things about myself that I almost never believe in—that I’m worthy of jealousy and deception and intrigue.
Only then he says: “God, yeah.” And gets very close to grinning, as he does so.
Though it only makes me want to dig deeper, to see this pleasure written all over his face. To see him reveling in the demise of someone I’d always thought of as his friend.
“Why do you hate him so much?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer for a long while. And when he finally does, he looks…conflicted.
“I don’t,” he says, which is an absolute lie and we both know it. “I don’t…hate him. I have…mixed feelings about him.”
Another pause, and this time when he speaks it’s flatter. More honest, I think—or at least, he believes it is.
“He’s not worthy of every second you spent pining for him.”
It crackles in my blood, to hear him say something like that. It really does. But I think he’s being hard on himself, in all honesty—painting his animosity toward Wade as simple jealousy. As a fault of his own, and not of Wade’s.
And this idea goes through me especially hard, when I remember a little glimmer of what he’d said the night before.
“So…nothing to do with the thing you said he did to you,” I say, and though I’m certain it means nothing when I set out to bring it up, he flinches.
His shoulders go back, the way I’ve seen them do a thousand times. Thorns around his words, I think, but he answers more honestly than I expect.
“I wondered if you’d get back to that.”
“I’m like an elephant. A shameful secret–remembering elephant.”
“It’s not that shameful.”
“Really? It sounded shameful.”
“Everything I say sounds shameful.”
Oh God, yeah. That one sentence sums him up so perfectly it’s like cracking open his psyche and getting a peek inside. Which is no mean feat, I have to say, because he’s sewn himself up so tight you can barely see the seams.
“Sounds like heaven to me,” I say, and he flashes such a look at me then! I think I burn alive. I think he melts me on the spot.
Christ I need to fuck him.
“Haven’t you guessed yet, what he did?” he asks, instead of saying all the lovely dirty things I can see, simmering behind his cool gaze.
Of course I try to think and go over everything we were talking about. The story, I think, he was mad about the story, and me reading it out, and the idea I might have used it as a taunt or a tease, just the way I’d kind of known he might do. As though I knew him so well already, and just didn’t have any faith in my own “interpreting Cameron” abilities.
But in all honesty, I think my abilities have improved since then.
“The story Wade read out, that first night,” I start, slow, slow. Man, it feels like an age ago now, though in reality it’s only been a couple of weeks. A couple of we
eks of packing away Professor Warren’s things—his shirts smelled of pipe tobacco, oh they did, they did—and re-plastering the study and avoiding all the things we all long to say but can’t, God we just can’t.
“Yeah,” Cam says, and boy howdy does he sound bitter.
“Was it yours?” I ask, because that’s the most logical conclusion. Wade found a story of Cameron’s, and read it aloud. I mean, it didn’t sound like Cameron’s style—or at least, the style I discovered in his green book of magical sex stories—but I’m not expert enough on things like that to know for sure.
And what Cam says next only confirms my blundering ineptitude in the field of style matching.
“No,” he says.
Which is a relief. Or it is, until he follows it with: “It really happened to me.”
And then he keeps talking.
“I confided in Wade, and he took it, and put it in a story.” I think maybe that tight seam just bust.
“He’s so…smooth. He makes it easy to tell him things but then, by God, you wish you hadn’t.”
Oh, how familiar that sounds. How silent I used to keep myself, for fear of that wishing I hadn’t. It was like torture, it was like madness, but I knew—or thought I did—that he should never know the way I felt about him. Back then he would have laughed if he’d known, I’m sure, and now…well. Now it’s a different kind of agony, as he does his best to tangle me in the mess of himself.
I’ve never felt so chased as I did last night, running down endless corridors away from him. I’ve never felt so crazy, knowing I was running away from something I once wanted so bad.
“You watched a girl,” I say, and mean it to come out matter-of-factly. But somehow it comes out full of wonder instead.
“Yes.”
He tosses another pebble, true and strong.
“She didn’t know,” I say.
“Yes,” he tells me. “But she knows now.”
It’s obvious he doesn’t want to say that. It shows on his face, and in the color that spreads up over his neck, and in the way he whips the last pebble he has, so hard it simply shoots right through the glassy surface and into the depths beneath.
But he goes with it anyway, as though he can’t help himself. Like maybe I’ve got hold of a thread inside him, and I’m pulling and pulling.
“Jesus,” I say, but only because it’s shocking. Not because I’m appalled, or anything—quite the contrary.
“I never meant—” he starts, but I cut him off.
“Did he get it right?”
“What?”
“Did he get it right? Did you really want me that much?”
He breathes out through his nose, just once. Harsh, like an out-of-breath pant.
“Some things were…a little strong,” he ventures.
I think of the view he got of my pussy. My pussy, for God’s sake! Good Lord, he’s a maze of secrets.
“But you spied on me?”
I feel like I’m accusing him. Like he’s on trial. But I can’t help the words slipping out. They just need to be aired, to find fresh pastures, they’re jostling for attention in the heated mess my brain has become.
“Don’t say spied,” he says. He’s squirming, and that’s even more delicious and intriguing than this whole new revelation.
Or maybe not quite.
“And then you masturbated.”
“Oh…fuck. No. Yes. Sort of,” he says, all in a rush. Then after a moment he sets his shoulders, and continues in a more orderly fashion. “It wasn’t exactly the way he described—I don’t even really like to…do…that. On my own. With no one else around.”
Is it weird that even a fact like the one he’s just uttered sends a flush of heat through me? What does he mean I don’t even really like to? Like—never? He never likes to masturbate? My God, how horny is he?
“So why did you?” I ask, even though there are a million other things I want to ask more. Do it for me, I think. Jerk off right in front of me, so I can see the glorious sight you denied me all those years ago.
“I think you could make me do just about anything,” he replies, right in the middle of my already hot thoughts. I’m suddenly boiling with the idea of him with his hand on his cock, watching me make myself come—God knows where.
God knows when.
And then he goes and says something like that too. It’s like a match, striking—I don’t mind admitting. It’s like my insides are suddenly alight, even in the cold mist of early morning.
“Good,” I say, and I say it fiercely. “Because I want to make you do anything. Right. Now.”
***
It’s weird, climbing the stairs together. Like we’re going to our deaths, or something—only in reverse. I suppose it’s because I’ve never done anything like this before, never come in after a date and led the guy I’m with upstairs. Tentatively taken our clothes off, you know.
All the kinds of stuff that happens on TV, but never in real life. In real life my dates are like miniature battles with my own inability to make conversation, and once they’re done and I’m sweaty and raw and bloodied from the fight, the guy will occasionally smash his mouth onto mine.
Somehow, I don’t think Cameron’s going to smash his mouth onto mine. I see him looking behind us instead, listening for the sound of the radio blaring in the study. The sound of Wade, being nowhere near us.
And then once we’re in his room, he shuts the door so carefully. Like he’s not sure if he should or not. Like he’s not sure if this is really going to happen, and is door shutting acceptable? Will I think he’s presumptuous?
I want to tell him he’s not presumptuous enough. He’s so big—he could just rip my clothes right off me. He could do anything he fucking liked, though maybe that’s the point. Why should he need to prove he can, when he’s so clearly and easily capable of it?
“What do we do now?” he goes with.
I swear, he couldn’t have asked a better question if he’d lived to be a thousand. It sounds so much like the words I would say that for a moment I’m sure there’s an echo. And I’m also sure that he makes me utterly giddy.
“Wanna get on the bed and roll around?” I ask, and oh he gets very close to grinning. Very close.
“Just like that, huh?” he says, but he’s a bit behind. I’m already clambering onto the big blue four poster, and for once I’m not in the least bit concerned about how my skirt is rucking up to show my enormous ass, or whether it’s cool or not that I’m wearing non-matching underwear.
It’s hard to do any of that normal stuff, when he looks like his seams are bursting. When he does something awesome like going to yank off his sweatshirt, before pausing mid-material wrestle.
“Do you…want me to take my clothes off? Or is that…too fast?”
I think about his cock in my mouth, the night before.
“We’re a little past too fast, don’t you reckon?”
He swallows visibly. Lets his gaze wander over my breasts, my almost spread legs, my face—before reining it back in.
“I don’t know. I’ve never gone too fast in my entire life. Usually I’m still at dinner and dancing at this point.”
I can’t help asking. He still has his elbow stuck in his sweatshirt.
“You take girls out to dinner and dancing? Do you visit the drive-thru afterward?” He flinches then, but I think I’ve hit the nail on the head. He’s not just like a politician. He’s like a politician from the 1950s. “Are you courtly? Do you give them courtly kisses on the wrist?”
Of course, as I say this I reach forward and put a hand between his legs. So I feel it takes some of the mocking sting out of it, you know? And if it doesn’t, well. He can have my other hand pushing up underneath his sweatshirt, just for good measure.
“Fuck,” he says, and I’m again reminded of how lewd it is, to hear Cam sw
ear. To see his face sagging as I stroke him, nice and slow—in a way I’d never usually dare to. I can feel almost everything through the loose material of his sweatpants, and all of it weighs heavy and solid in my hand. The swollen outline of his tight-as-anything balls, the curve of his cock, and then just to be extra rude—I push two fingers down, down between his legs, and right over that strip of skin there.
Of course, he jerks. In fact, I think he starts jerking on an almost continuous loop. And he makes a little noise too, so that I just have to look up at him.
I’m not disappointed, when I do. He has one hand in his hair, and he’s watching what I’m doing avidly. Mouth open, cheeks flushed, chest rising and falling—the works.
“Sensitive, there?” I ask, then stroke again. Just once, nice and firm.
He moans in reply.
“You’re so easy,” I tell him, and his eyelids sink lower over his eyes. His hips are rocking, just a touch.
Only then he says: “I didn’t used to be.”
“No?” I ask, as I roll the heel of my palm over his balls.
I like the little hitching sound he makes, the best. The one that’s almost a little ah, but not quite. His lips move around it, and his chest rises to push the necessary air to his vocal chords, but no real sound comes out.
It makes a flood of warmth go through me. It makes me squirm against the bed until my panties feel soaked and my clit feels as stiff as his prick looks, and I’m just waiting for more. I need more.
“I mean, I’m not. When I’m not around you. I barely even thought about sex, until I met you.”
“And then after you met me?”
“I started…masturbating too often.”
“How often?”
“I don’t know. Twice a day?”
“That doesn’t sound like a lot.”
He presses his lips together tight, then grinds the words out.
“OK. Maybe…maybe more like three or four times a day.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing here?”
This time, his frustration gets the better of him.
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