But I’m even having the fantasies now. This is something new – I’ve just had sex, and I want more. I never want more. I’m lucky if I want it the first time.
Even so, I expect him just to drive me back to town. Kick me out of the truck. I don’t expect him to pull up outside his house, and come around to my door, and fish me out of there. Maybe I seem really out of it – though not so out of it that he’s against pulling me down into his arms and sticking his tongue in my mouth.
He pushes me up against the truck and I think he’s going to fuck me again right there, in the street, but he obviously has other ideas. We make it as far as his kitchen, and then he fucks me over the table. Facing away from him again, obviously, but I don’t care because my body is still going nuts. Apparently that last little thing just revved me up like an engine, and I writhe around with my tits pressed into the kitchen table, saying filthy things to urge him on.
He doesn’t need urging on. This time he’s even dirtier, too, as if I’ve given him permission, and of course it goes on forever because he’s already had one release of tension.
I think about how old he must be. Thirty-five? Maybe he’s younger but just looks older – which twice in the space of twenty minutes would seem to bear out. Or maybe he’s just really, really horny, which all of this dirty fucking would seem to bear out.
I come twice. Once because I don’t know why, because he’s almost constantly groaning and telling me how tight and hot my sweet little pussy is, how much he likes it creaming for him, how once he’s done filling me with his jizz he’s going to lick me out, he’s going to make me taste it all, and it’s just too good.
The second time I come really loudly and obviously, and because he’s frigging my clit as he fucks me. He says, ‘Do you like that, baby, huh, you like that?’ and I grunt and claw at him and go completely rigid. My feet leave the floor. He presses me hard into the kitchen table.
‘Yeah, you liked that, didn’t you?’ he says, in almost a soothing sort of voice.
But I can’t answer him, because he’s an asshole. He’s a dirty rednecked grease-monkey asshole. However, he then says, ‘Oh, fuck, baby, fuck, I can’t get enough of your sweet pussy,’ so I partly forgive him for being such an arrogant awful jerk.
And then he comes hard against me and inside me, and when he pulls out it feels like I’ve got an ocean between my thighs. I’ve never had a guy come inside me before, and now I can feel it all warm and slippery just about everywhere. I stand up and it’s even worse.
I feel as if he can hear all of that wetness, though he’d be lucky to hear anything over all that heavy breathing he’s doing. I hardly dare look at him, or at least at his eyes. I can look all I like at his gorgeous arms, which are ropey and shiny with sweat, as if he’s been working. Because of course he has. He’s been working in me.
I can’t say anything. I just walk to wherever his bathroom might be on trembling legs with the back of my skirt all wet, wondering how ashamed I should be. Very, oh, very. What a dirty little whore I am.
I can’t be sorry, though. I’m not sorry in the slightest about the things I want. And maybe, yeah, maybe sometimes I want sweet. But sometimes nasty is just as nice. Even if it is so exhausting that I come out of the bathroom and collapse on the bed.
It used to just be a mattress on the floor. Lawn furniture in his living room. No TV, no home comforts, nothing but existing and the garage, existing and the garage. But I guess things are different now. I don’t know why things are different. Every time we screw, things seem to get a little more different, and it’s the same thing this time.
While I’m on his bed, fading in and out of sleep, I feel him lean over me. He does it as though he knows he has to be careful, so as not to wake me up. And then he kisses me on the forehead, soft and sweet.
It’s not the first time. Though I really think it’s getting to be one time too many. Kissing my neck, taking me back to his place – I keep falling asleep on his new nice furniture, and then he kisses me and touches me as if I’m his sweetheart. Next thing you know we’ll be boyfriend and girlfriend, and all of the filthy, dirty nastiness will drift away on a sea of dinner dates and suburbia and romantic comedies.
I can’t have that. I’ll really have to talk to him about it, sometime soon.
Different On The Inside
SHE’S SURPRISED THAT everyone suddenly decides on some mad version of hide and seek. Usually it’s Scrabble. Usually it’s worse than Scrabble: stilted dinner-party conversation about who’s been promoted and who should be promoted and whether the economy will rise/fall/start World War III.
It’s time to be older and wiser and dull. You get to thirty, and this is who you’re supposed to be. Well put together and pleasant board-game playing. Able to cook something slightly fancy, like beef Wellington. In possession of a pension and a portfolio and life insurance.
Soon, she knows, it will be time to start a family. They’re all talking about little Jonathan – whom they left with the nanny – and putting names down for good schools and all sorts of things that are appropriate. They just want her to find someone too, and settle down, and then they’ll all have so much in common and be able to arrange play dates and all sorts of lovely, lovely things.
Even if some people aren’t so sure about the validity of things like that.
She’s pretty sure that Gabe rolled his eyes when Lucinda chirruped on about such things in the car on the way here. She saw him on the periphery of her vision, sloping against the passenger-side door, pushing himself further and further outside the confines of the group.
But then as Lucinda had said even earlier than that, ‘Why did he even want to come? I just don’t understand why Marcus would even invite him! There’s a pity invite if ever there was one. Have you seen his shoes?’
Una has seen his shoes. They’re not really shoes at all. They’re slippers that have disguised themselves as shoes and she cannot for the life of her imagine where he got them. What sort of shop sells slippers with grips on them like a shoe? What sort of shop can’t make its mind up about whether something is a shoe or a slipper?
But then she was paralysed, briefly, by the imagined scene in the shoe shop. His flashing, bizarre delight at finally finding footwear that is neither one nor the other! She can even hear him saying, ‘By God, that’s genius!’
And then he caught her looking at him as if he was some other brand of human. Maybe not even human at all – maybe an alien. Who can say, really, when he turned away smiling his stupid, secretive smile? He’s still smiling it now, as they get ready to do something ‘exciting’.
He clearly didn’t think that she caught those air quotes he put around the word Lucinda used to describe her version of hide and seek, but, oh, in that he is wrong wrong wrong. She caught him, and tried her best to say with her glare that, if he didn’t like it, he could just stay in and be weird.
But then Marcus slapped him on the back and was his usual blustery, friends-with-everybody self, and her glare slid off to the side somewhere. She wonders, not for the first time, if Marcus invited Gabe because they have designs on each other.
The thought is accompanied by odd little shivers and inexplicable anger, so she shakes it off quickly and tries to think of the game. The game, in which the object is to find someone and take their little paper tag. Whoever comes back with the most paper tags wins.
She’s pretty sure the game doesn’t work, but it’s certainly the perfect place to play a variation on hide and seek. Lots of trees to hide behind, a cabin of many rustic-by-MFI rooms, a woodshed, an honest-to-goodness barn. Though Hayley has her allergies and Alan abhors animals, so it’s unlikely they’re going to hide anywhere but in the sauna, with a bottle of red and more conversation about Marks and Spencer.
They’re all very giggly about it, however, so Una has to wonder just how daring this is going to get. Will someone strip down to their underwear and go swimming in the lake? Will Lucinda break a heel off one of her secretly-from-Oas
is shoes? Who can say? Who can say how she ever became friends with these people?
Especially Gabe. Poor, weird Gabe from the IT department, who was only brought here as part of Marcus’s outreach programme: Help The Nerd.
Even if he isn’t exactly a nerd. Really he’s just dark all over – inside and out, she suspects – and oddly reserved in a way she can’t peg, always seeming to say something with his eyes that his quirking mouth doesn’t want to own up to. He only ever smiles with the very edges of his upper lip, which suggests something . . . interesting. Which is astonishing, really, when she considers that they all work for an insurance company.
She wonders what he does down there, in the IT department. Probably very boring things, really. Probably things like setting up systems and inputting data. He probably gets mad the way Stuart does, when people don’t know how to set their emails to what-have-you.
She has never seen him mad, though. Mostly he just looks as if he knows a massive secret that you’re going to guess any second.
But he isn’t anything like her, or like Marcus or Lucinda or Alan or Hayley, so she isn’t able to guess what his secret may be. It isn’t like cheating the expense accounts or having a slight drink problem. There is something distinctly not like other people about him, as though his centre is made out of dark, sordid things. His centre is made out of forbidden fruit, and he’s always looking at people as though he’s wondering if they want to take a bite.
He’s laughing at them, she guesses. He thinks her tweed M&S skirt is ridiculous. His weird shirts with pictures of boobs on them – they make it look as though he has boobs! Where in cripes’ name does he find these things? – mock the bun she puts her hair in. But then he’s wearing too-tight jeans while everyone else is still mostly in suits – why shouldn’t he laugh? They – herself included – don’t even know how to have a casual weekend away.
She’s sure they’re only playing hide and seek because he’s sitting in the corner, silently mocking their complete lack of coolness.
Not that he’s cool. It’s just that he’s different.
He’s different all over. He isn’t handsome like Alan, slim and arrogantly blond and always looking like someone who attends seminars on how to actualise your inner millionaire. He isn’t handsome like Marcus, square-jawed and square-haired and steely-eyed – though, if he does secretly want to sleep with Marcus, those things are probably the reason why.
And then she squirms inside, and hates him for making her squirm. She doesn’t even know why thoughts of him should have that effect, because unlike every other good-looking man in the office – perhaps every other good-looking man in the entire world – he isn’t handsome in a way a person could explain.
All his features are too big for his face. They’re too big for anyone’s face. His nose is strange and fat and too long all at the same time, and his lips are bigger than a man’s should be, so that he looks both very masculine and uncomfortably feminine. The masculine, she thinks, comes from all the hair. He’s roughly hairy in a way that suggests shaving is never enough. She’s betting he shaves at nine-thirty and is bestubbled by ten.
She doesn’t know why she’s making bets with herself about his shaving habits. Or why she can’t stop looking at his eyebrows, which devour his face. Not in a scruffy way, though, or a meeting-in-the-middle sort of way. They’re smooth as anything, blacker than pitch. They help him look as though he’s keeping secrets.
They mock her for attributing motivations to them.
She could just kick him. This was supposed to be a nice, normal weekend away – a pass into the land of polite dating and real estate and nannies and beef Wellingtons. Everyone knows that Alan is here and she is here because one and one make nice couples.
But now Gabe is here and staring at her and saying, ‘Where are you going to hide?’
And she just feels awkward and displaced. Her cheeks heat when he raises one of those insane eyebrows. His voice curls and curls and winds its way around some place on her – her upper arm, she thinks. Her waist.
It’s a fascinating voice though, so she can’t be blamed for the way it moves from her waist and runs a hand up her spine. Sardonism burrs at the back of his throat but, by the time he’s pushed his words out, they’re gentle, so gentle.
He smiles his small smile at her, but she doesn’t feel comforted. Instead she notes that he’s still wearing the boobie shirt.
She only goes into the barn because, while she’s standing forlornly between the two places, losing at a game she doesn’t even know how to play, it starts to rain. And even though she’s now sure everyone is hiding in the sauna, she chooses the barn.
There’s nothing in the place, however. It’s musty and secretive and abandoned, with stalls that promise probably feral animals rather than hiding friends. She goes to one and stands on tiptoe to look over the rotting door, but her only reward is not being terrified by something or someone.
She imagines Gabe lurking somewhere, ready to spring out at any second. He’s probably up in the hayloft, about to make spooky noises or shout suddenly at her – she even glances up, expecting just that. But instead she is just alone in a barn that smells like mouldering wood and old hot fur, only shadows and dust motes stirring when she turns.
Scrabble now seems interesting, by comparison, though she can’t say why, or what this rising sense of disappointment is about. Or what it says about her that the disappointment runs away when the sagging barn door opens again and Gabe blunders in, soaking wet.
Immediately her mind goes to a book she read as a girl. She can’t remember the last time she thought about it – it wasn’t a book she was allowed to read, and she spent the rest of her teenage years pretending she hadn’t – but it comes to her vividly now. It makes no sense that it does, but it comes on anyway.
There was a lady of the manor in it, she thinks, and some sort of rough-hewn stable lad. And they had come across one another in a barn, with her all wet from the rain and in some distress. Lots of purple-streaked gasps and declarations and heaving bosoms had followed, she seems to recall, though that doesn’t explain why it is intruding on her thoughts now.
It’s the barn, she thinks. And then with some reluctance: and the rain.
The heroine had been wet from the rain and then the gruff stable lad had said, ‘Here, take my coat.’ But the heroine had been too straitlaced and too proud, too proud by far, and –
And she has always wondered what the book would have been like if the heroine was not proud and straitlaced at all. She supposes it would be a bit like the way Gabe acts now, stripping off his boobie shirt and laughing and then standing there in just a tiny little vest.
She thinks, I should offer him my coat, and then blushes all over at the ridiculous idea. What would he do with her coat? His shoulders are much too big to go inside that little tweed thing. And it’s not as though he’s naked. It’s just that she can now see how hairy he is and how narrow his hips are – snake hips, she thinks absently.
She thinks all of this absently. She is absent from herself, the person who should be in the sauna with Hayley and Marcus and Alan and Lucinda. Of course, everyone would be much more naked then. But somehow that doesn’t seem to be the point.
There’s naked by design, and then there’s naked by accident.
Not that there’s going to be any such accident here, like all her clothes suddenly falling off, or all of his – maybe because lightning struck or the horses attacked them or the plot called for it to happen. The plot of her life isn’t like that. The plot of her life has a lot of focus on Scrabble.
‘It’s raining,’ he says, laughing at himself and other things that she’s sure she doesn’t know about. Somehow he manages to turn the simplest words into mockery.
‘I guessed.’
Scrabble, she thinks. Scrabble.
And then his voice dips and everything is even more upside-down than it was before.
‘I’m gonna get it from you now,’ he says, as thoug
h that is the most normal thing in the world to say to someone when trapped in a barn together.
Clearly, the Scrabble thoughts aren’t working. He has even lowered his eyebrows over his suddenly sparking eyes, just to make sure she doesn’t understand whatever odd intentions he has.
‘Get what?’ she asks, and doesn’t feel silly about doing so. He could mean anything. He could have all sorts of mad thoughts rattling around inside that mind of his. He could mean –
‘Your paper,’ he says, as though that was obvious all along. Didn’t she realise that? What on earth could he have meant besides the little bit of paper sticking out of the pocket of her skirt?
She’s pretty sure that he smirks to see her flustered.
‘Are you going to give it up quietly, or are we going to have a fight about it?’
His smirk makes her say, ‘Fight.’ Of course, she doesn’t say it out loud. But she’s sure he gets the picture when he lunges forward to snatch the bit of paper and she kicks him in the shin.
This time he grins with all of his teeth. He does it even as he complains that she doesn’t play fair, and hops around the barn, and tries to get at her from a different angle. She thinks they’re circling each other, though it’s hard to tell when her tweed suit is boiling her alive and closing in on her so treacherously.
She thinks about unbuttoning the coat, but that would mean undressing. As the lady of the manor did. Or as the stable lad did later on, after overcoming all of her obstacles.
I’ll show him an obstacle all right, she thinks, though she is sure she isn’t going to do anything of the kind – until he grabs the bit of paper and suddenly he’s at an advantage. Then it’s war and anything is fair game, so when he laughs and leans back against a post, she does what she has to in order to make sure he will never win.
She lashes him to the post with whatever comes to hand first.
The Things That Make Me Give In Page 17