The Things That Make Me Give In

by Charlotte Stein

  Phoned In

  THEY TALK ABOUT everything. She knows they do. She knows whether he’d pick green, or maybe blue. She knows how his day has been. What he’s about to eat for dinner and all the bits in between.

  They are in each other’s life completely. There isn’t anything they can’t talk about – and maybe that’s because they’re the best of friends.

  Or maybe it’s because most of this is done over the phone.

  There are no rolled eyes over the phone. No awkward touches that shouldn’t have been, no need to hug or shake hands or any of that nonsense. She likes the strange tunnel of mere noise, almost as though he’s pouring words into her, stripped of everything that could make them uncomfortable or painful.

  She can make up her own version of him. If he doesn’t talk for a moment, he hasn’t lost interest. He’s just dropped the phone, or taken a sip of tea, or turned his bath on. There’s no glancing at some other person, bored. Everything is concentrated, tunnelled, focused on each other.

  And then, of course, there is his voice. That almost flat tone, in which every slight emphasis sounds electric. That dark metallic taste, as though he’s secretly an evil robot. He’s HAL, telling her that he doesn’t want to do this, but it’s for her own good.

  She has no idea what might be for her own good, but the phone calls do help. They help with seemingly inconsequential things, like not letting your social skills atrophy.

  That’s what he says to her as they make potted-beef sandwiches in tandem, thirty miles apart. She can’t remember the last time they made potted-beef sandwiches while not apart. Or any kind of sandwiches, really.

  That’s what she says to him, as they watch old episodes of Poirot together and try to guess who did it first. While also thirty miles apart.

  And then when it’s finished, they listen to each other getting into bed, and sighing contentedly, or at least in a way that seems contented. At which point Roy will say to Olive, ‘Good night, Ol.’ And Ol will say to Roy, ‘Good night, Roy.’

  And both of them will think, just before they go to sleep: thirty miles isn’t really that far.

  But thirty miles is far. It’s so far that Olive has forgotten what Roy looks like.

  Of course, she remembers that he has a very expressive face – sort of like a silent-movie star – but maybe that’s because she’s recently watched a lot of silent movies. Undoubtedly he will be picturing a lot of naked film stars instead of her, because he’s been watching a lot of faintly rude movies.

  It’s research for a movie sex-scene website he’s building for someone. Not because he’s unbearably horny, or anything. She’s not about to read anything into that slight hitch in his voice when he describes sex scene three in that movie about lots of people artfully fucking.

  They both have busy lives, doing busy jobs that keep them very busy. Busy, and at home. Thirty miles apart.

  Roy designs websites. Olive writes articles on knitting and other such nonsense. Knitting and websites keep people very busy, or so she’s heard. None of this has anything to do with any issues she or anyone else might have.

  Just because Roy has barely taken his hands out of his pockets in public for ten years doesn’t mean he has problems. As he tells her, one evening. And lots of people wear gloves constantly. Miss Marple, for example.

  And it isn’t so strange that she hasn’t made eye contact with a man for almost the same amount of time as he’s gone without touching skin to skin. She has reasons, she tells him. They go way, way back to when seemingly every man in college couldn’t stop staring at her slightly-smaller-than-the-other-one eye. And her huge breasts.

  He tells her that one of her eyes is not slightly smaller than the other. But he always tells her things like that. He’s her warmth, her reassurance. He’s very convincing, even though he hasn’t seen her in so long that she’s sure he must have forgotten what she looks like.

  But that’s OK, because she’s forgotten his face, too. They’re both shrouded in the same mystery, even as they share every living thing about themselves. He asks her to let him hear the sound of her shaver drawing its way up her slippery-with-foam legs. She listens to him wash between his toes.

  It’s a natural progression, what they come to. It is. But even so it startles her enough to make her almost knock her laptop off the bed.

  She feels that they are honest in all areas of their lives, so it’s important to be just as honest in this one. Why should she lie about what she’s recently been writing for Scandalous magazine? It isn’t any different from the article she read him on good sweater-knitting practice.

  Both are about processes. It’s just that one is more about bodily function-y processes. The good kind. Not the going-to-the-toilet kind.

  But after she’s read him the first fake reader’s-wives-type tale, he is very quiet. More quiet than he was for ‘Knitting Through The Ages’ and ‘Knitting: It’s Not Just For Grannies’. She actually agonises for a moment. The tunnel is about to be closed. No one wants to know that Scandalous magazine doesn’t print true-life tales of debauchery – that in fact they’re made up by hopeless shut-ins with one eye slightly smaller than the other.

  And their friendship is built on potted beef, knitting, Poirot. Elderly things. Not sex.

  Though it’s unfair of him to assume the elderly never have sex, she feels.

  But then he says, ‘Wow.’ She can tell he means the ‘wow’, too, because half the word seems to disappear into a crackle of near-sound. W–w. And then he tells her that he’s seen a whole other side of her. A good side. A fascinating side! Why, she’s practically a pentagon of sides. An octagon.

  This is very much like that time she confessed that she preferred sardine spread to potted beef.

  When he tells her good night at the end of that day’s phone call, she suspects that his voice sounds warmer than usual. They’ve opened up whole new sides. The tunnel is still thirty miles long, but now it’s at least ten miles wider.

  She goes to sleep trying, really trying, to remember what his face looks like.

  The laptop hasn’t quite almost fallen off the bed. First, he says something completely unexpected just as she’s about to switch on Poirot. He says, ‘Have you written anything else for Scandalous magazine? Read me it before we get to Poirot. We can always watch it . . . you know . . . later.’

  She wonders why the words you know are in there. They seem to almost have sinister connotations, like the dead body she should have been aware of in the cellar. Not that either of them has a cellar or there’s anything actually sinister about you know.

  It’s probably just his tone of voice. Suddenly low and crafty.

  ‘Are you sure? Because this is the one with Damian Lewis in and –’

  ‘I’m sure Damian can wait. Damian would probably want to listen to your fake-true tales if he was given the choice. He’s fine about you forgoing him. He’s probably got his ear pressed up against the wall right . . . now.’

  ‘His life is probably like one of these stories.’

  ‘Well, then, don’t deny the rest of us. Our lives aren’t like Y Tu Mama Tambien, with lots of older women suddenly wanting to have sex with us.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been watching for the website?’ she asks, but really she thinks: he said ‘deny’. As though I have the keys to some magical kingdom.

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  She thinks she can hear him smiling through the phone. Sometimes it’s like that. Like his physical self is almost upon her.

  ‘OK, so this one is about two strangers on a beach.’

  ‘Does it start off, “Dear Scandalous”?’ he asks.

  ‘It does. They all do. Listen.

  ‘“Dear Scandalous. I’ve been an avid reader of your magazine for five years, and finally decided that I should write in and tell you about this rather filthy thing that happened to me.”’

  ‘I like that you used the word “rather”.’

&nb
sp; ‘Thank you. So anyway, back to Mrs X from Brighton.’

  ‘Oh, Brighton is a really perverted place.’

  ‘It totally is.’

  ‘And Mrs X is a great name for a completely non-fictional person.’

  ‘I’ve often thought of changing my name to just that.’

  ‘Can I marry you and be Mr X?’

  ‘Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way. Too bad, sorry. If we married I’d just be Olive Meadows. You’d steal my delicious X.’

  ‘I’d never take your X. On pain of death.’

  ‘OK, so this isn’t sexy at all. Death is only sexy when you’re offering to fuck someone to it.’

  ‘Does someone get fucked to death in this story?’

  But before she answers, this time, an odd feeling bristles through her. She tries to think if she has ever heard him say ‘fucked’ before, and is alarmed to find that she hasn’t. He never swears. In truth, he never says anything even remotely . . . naughty. The closest she thinks he’s ever got is innuendo and euphemism-laden descriptions of the sex scenes he’s just finished cataloguing. And then he does his business all over her hoo-has, that sort of thing.

  ‘Someone might. Just listen.’

  And he does. She tells him the whole thing, including the bits that might be about his fog-covered face that she can’t quite remember. Though she didn’t intend it that way at all. She doesn’t think of him like that. They’re just friends. It just so happened that, after she’d described the man who fucks the intrepid heroine in the sand dunes, she had found the description somewhat familiar.

  When she finishes, he doesn’t say anything. All she can hear is his breathing, soft and slow.

  ‘Are you still there?’ she asks, and is sure she can hear him smiling again.

  ‘I’m still here, Ol.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I did. Hey, remember that time you and I went to the beach?’

  She does. They ate swirly ice-creams and built a sandman, eight million lifetimes ago.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘That was great. We should do that again sometime,’ he says, though she’s sure he knows they never will.

  ‘Sure, Roy,’ she replies, though she too knows they never will.

  ‘Good night, Olive.’

  ‘Good night, Roy.’

  It’s halfway through the third story. It’s just as she’s getting really comfortable with reading them aloud, these little pieces of herself. These burning bright secrets that grow in her heart and in . . . other places.

  It’s as she says the words ‘Oh, fill me with your hot come.’

  Of course, it isn’t really her saying the words. It’s the slutty next-door neighbour, getting ploughed by the boy next door. Every Sunday he comes around and gets her to point her legs skyward, so that he can dive between.

  He likes to stripe her with his love-juice. By the end of the story she’s covered in it, sticky with it. But she doesn’t get a chance to get to the sticky part because, just as the boy next door is pounding into her and she’s saying all sorts of filthy things, Roy says something, too.

  Though not in words.

  The laptop slides. The phone heats up and glues itself to her ear. When he pauses in the middle of all of that fluttery breathing and those suspicious slick noises and faint sounds that seem to spell out the words don’t stop, she finds that she has to.

  ‘Are you . . . are you still there, Ol?’

  He sounds nervous, though not half as nervous as he probably should be. She tries to think of an answer that would calm him and calm herself but all her words are devoured by three completely wrong ones: ‘Are you masturbating?’

  Thankfully, it comes out incredulous and funny, rather than incredulous and disgusted. It’s shocking that a man who never swears is jerking off while she reads him smut, but it isn’t disgusting. She feels as though someone has been pressing down on her shoulders, and suddenly the hands aren’t there any more. It’s as if she was actually walled up in that tunnel, and now there’s an escape hatch.

  The pause he spins out is the longest of her life.

  ‘I . . . might be. What of it?’

  ‘Nothing, I –’

  ‘It’s a perfectly healthy pastime. Ninety-nine per cent of all adult males partake of the activity seventeen times a day, and the other one per cent is lying. Though I accept that the seventeen times part may just be me.’

  ‘Seventeen times a day seems excessive.’

  ‘Said the girl who is reading me stroke material. Please continue, by the way.’

  She considers. She considers his prior silences. They were silences made by the stun of excitement. By sudden excitement, like the excitement that is warming her cheeks and threading through the rest of her body. Her body is happy to have it.

  She tries again to picture his face, and instead sees his hands. His big, strong hands. His long, long legs as he strode towards the ice-cream parlour. The way his dark jeans hugged his arse.

  What would it be like if he was the boy next door, and she was the slutty neighbour?

  ‘Are you imagining that you’re the boy next door?’

  His reply comes out in a frank sort of burst.

  ‘Yes.’

  She was wrong. They were never honest with each other. She knows, because that one word is what his real honesty sounds like. Quavering up and down and sad through the middle.

  ‘What does she feel like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The neighbour.’

  ‘Good. Soft. Like she really, really wants me.’

  ‘Are you jerking off again?’

  ‘I couldn’t stop now even if sudden paralysis descended. I’ve been doing myself every night after a story. I imagined I was the stranger on the beach, too.’

  ‘Oh, I bet that was nice.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Did her pussy taste good?’

  ‘Oh, it did, it did. I can’t even remember what a wet pussy tastes like, so it was nice to revisit.’

  ‘I didn’t realise that the stranger on the beach liked it so much.’

  ‘He does. I did. I love eating out – you know that.’

  ‘Yes, but only in the non-euphemism sense.’

  He groans, but she knows it’s a frustrated sound rather than the other type.

  ‘Go back to the beach,’ he says.

  It’s very easy for her to. There are unanswered questions.

  ‘Would you have fucked her differently?’

  ‘Yes.’ The phone clacker-clacks, as though he’s shifting positions. ‘I would have . . . I want to have her in my lap.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that I can press myself right up against her. So that she can move against me.’

  ‘I bet . . . she’d like that.’

  Olive wants to swap the word ‘bet’ with a different one. ‘Know’, maybe. To wrap her legs around someone’s waist and press them to her and have them press back and be able to rock into lovely great thrusts . . . It makes her keep clutching at her pyjama top. She clutches at it until it’s a big sweaty mess.

  ‘Don’t say she,’ he says, in a voice now so hoarse it sandpapers against her skin. ‘Say I.’

  She presses her thighs together and manages to get it out: just that one word.

  ‘I . . .’

  It seems to be enough for him. He pants a yes and then another right into her ear. The panting makes her want to change the words completely.

  ‘I’d like that,’ she tries. ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘What else would you like?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Would you like me to stroke you as I fuck you?’

  ‘Are you fucking me right now?’

  ‘Imagine that I am. Tell me what it feels like.’

  ‘Hm. I . . . good. It feels so good. You feel good and . . . big.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the guys.’

  ‘I say it to you because you’re inside me, fucking me hard with yo
ur big thick cock.’

  Unintelligible sounds garble down the phone at her.

  ‘You are big everywhere, aren’t you?’

  ‘My dick feels like it’s strangling my hand.’

  ‘I bet I could hardly get my fingers around it.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to see you hardly get your fingers around it.’

  ‘Do you jerk it hard, or soft? Fast or slow?’

  ‘Both. One after the other. I’m doing it slow, now, really slow ’cause I don’t want to come while you’re talking to me like this.’

  ‘I thought that was the idea – to come while I’m talking like this.’

  ‘Not yet. I want you to touch yourself, first. I want us to come together. I’d like nothing better than fucking you into a great . . . big . . . orgasm.’

  ‘Say orgasm again.’

  And then he stretches the word out like taffy.

  ‘Your voice is so . . . so . . .’

  But her body finishes what her vocal cords can’t. Her hand moves all on its own to the material of her pyjama bottoms, pulled taut over her achingly plump sex. She presses down, and the pressing and the feeling that follows say enough about how his voice sounds, and what it does to her.

  Maybe it’s been doing it all along.

  ‘You like my voice?’

  She likes his voice so much that it’s always him who whispers in the ear of the salesgirl slut that he’d like to have her over the counter. It’s him who tells the girl on the bus to lift her skirt. Really, lift it. No one will see. And all her Scandalous story girls always obey, because his voice is just that compelling.

  ‘Ol, do you like my voice?’

  She can’t do anything but nod, helplessly. Of course, he can’t hear her nodding. But he continues, ‘I could tell you any number of things with this voice. I could tell you about how hard I am right now, just for you. How when I stroke myself with my hand all slick with spit I can just about imagine what your mouth would feel like sucking on me nice and slow. I want you to spread your legs over my face and suck me while I lick your clit, your pussy . . . tell me how your pussy feels.’

  She hesitates. Her fingers are already delving under her pyjama bottoms and her slit spreads easily beneath her greedy grasp. The words are there. But they’re getting clogged up by the pounding of her heart and the blooms of arousal that keep spreading through her. They begin at her clit and circle outward, over and over, until she’s dazed.