Irresistible

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Catherine decided not to share any of this with Leon, particularly not the details of her own, spectacularly unfulfilling three-day fling with Danny. She stared up with unfocused eyes at the Stone Roses poster he’d Blu-Tacked to the ceiling of his room. She was going to be sick as a dog in the morning, and the party hadn’t even been worth the impending hangover.

  “I really don’t think your Aunty Cat is the best person to be giving you relationship advice,” she said. “I mean, I’m just as likely to end up on my own as you are.”

  And those words, words she didn’t actually believe at the time but which had come to seem more and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy over the years, had somehow triggered the making of the pact. They hadn’t sealed it in blood, neither of them able to trust themselves near a sharp object at that moment. Instead, they had shaken hands as though completing a business deal, unable to stop themselves from giggling as they did, then Catherine had staggered back to her own room, with its too-thin mattress and random gurgling from the pipes in the block bathroom next door.

  A thin, squally rain had started to fall, its cold caress bringing her sharply back to the present. There was a man slouching against the black-painted iron railing, dressed in a shabby camouflage coat and with a black woolen hat pulled down low on his brow. He straightened at her approach, and she realized it was Leon.

  How long was it since she’d last seen him in the flesh? There was the party, of course, about eighteen months after they had both graduated. It had been thrown by Guy Sheen, who’d been in her History of Art tutorial group. He lived in a damp-ridden squat in Clapham and was playing at being an anarchist in the way only someone with a trust fund behind him can. That was the night Leon told her he was packing in his job and joining the army, desperate to do something that would make a difference. After that, they had only corresponded by letter and, later, email. He told her plenty about army life, the friends he’d made there, his postings to West Germany and Cyprus. Her own job, working in a small art gallery in Clerkenwell, seemed mundane and unnecessary in comparison.

  When he was sent to Iraq, contact between them became more sporadic, partly because of the physical realities of his tour of duty, partly because she was in the process of separating from David, whom she’d met, married and come to realize she had absolutely nothing in common with within the space of seventeen months.

  Beneath the daily grind of work and dealing with divorce lawyers, a low-level anxiety about Leon’s safety nagged away at her. He sent her a photo of himself and half a dozen of the lads in his battalion, all slightly blurred, posing against a tank in Basra. She couldn’t help but think how young some of them of were—the age her own sons would have been if she’d settled down after leaving school as so many of her classmates had done, rather than pursuing a university education. So young, but already showing more courage than she would ever possess.

  She shivered whenever she heard on the news of British casualties, offering up a silent prayer that it wouldn’t be Leon who was coming home limbless or dead. It never was, but reading between the lines of his emails she sensed he’d come close enough to realize he was too old for this game. At the end of his second tour of Iraq, he wrote to tell her he was resigning his commission and coming back to England for good.

  And now he was here, smiling at her as she came nearer. He held out his arms and invited her into a hug. “Cat, it’s so good to see you again,” he murmured into her ear.

  She stepped back so she could look at him properly, registering how the years had changed him. Some people thickened, sagged and faded into themselves as they approached middle age. Leon had matured, filling out and gaining a composure that suited him as much as his newly steel-gray hair. The phrase “silver fox” popped into her head from nowhere, but she dismissed it, anxious to know how she appeared to him.

  “You look fantastic,” he said, eying her up and down. She blushed at the compliment. She wasn’t like some women she knew, who exercised obsessively and lived on lettuce leaves and fresh air, trying to retain the figure they’d had when they were eighteen. She had thickened a little around her hips and belly, and her breasts were so full she could no longer get away with not wearing a bra, but she knew men—or the men who were worth bothering about, anyway—preferred that to the half-starved look. Leon certainly seemed to like it, from the way he was looking at her, and she felt a sudden, unexpected fluttering in her pussy. It shocked her. Of all the emotions she had expected to feel on seeing Leon again, sexual desire was not one of them. Yet she couldn’t deny something deep inside her was responding to the innate masculinity years of army life seemed to have honed in him.

  “So why did you decide to move here?” she asked, as they walked back down the pier toward the promenade. “Why not come back to London?”

  “I used to spend all my holidays here when I was a kid,” Leon replied. “It gave me a soft spot for the place. And it’s quiet here. London would be too much for me now.”

  He didn’t need to say any more. She was aware how hard it was for men to adjust to everyday life after the strict, regimented routine of the forces. Too many ended up homeless and broken, dependent on drink or drugs to get them through the day. At least Leon seemed sorted, comfortable in this new environment.

  He was living in a flat five minutes’ walk from the seafront, above an office supplies shop. Catherine gazed at the window display, box upon box of photocopier paper, as Leon unlocked the side door. She followed him up the stairs, waiting as he let them both inside.

  Telling her to make herself at home, he went to put the kettle on. As he bustled about the tiny kitchen, she studied the room for personal touches. She was surprised to see that among the photos he had tacked up on the wall was one taken the day they had graduated. Arms around each other, they beamed into the lens, she with the curly perm that had somehow become the height of fashion in the early nineties, he with an inexpertly dyed blond fringe falling into his eyes. They looked so young, so innocent, she thought, neither of them knowing the twists and disappointments life had in store for them.

  Leon wandered out with a mug in each hand and caught her studying the photo. “I can’t believe I ever thought that hairstyle suited me,” she said with a rueful laugh.

  He handed her a mug. She took a sip, startled yet pleased to discover that even after all these years, he remembered how she liked her tea: strong but milky, the color of caramel.

  As they began to talk, it was as though they were picking up exactly where they had left off, at the party in Guy Sheen’s squalid flat. She brought him up to date with the gossip about the few members of their university circle with whom she was still in contact. Most of those friendships had fallen by the wayside over the years, and even with so many social networking websites available to her, she felt no temptation to try to rekindle them. The people who were important to her were still in her life—and that most definitely included Leon.

  She couldn’t help feeling that all the conversation, all the seizing on private jokes and completing each other’s sentences, was simply leading to the moment when they ended up in bed together. It was that inevitable. Under the excuse of looking at old photographs, they were sitting so close his leg was resting tight beside hers. Neither of them had moved away when the initial contact was made, and the steady pressure of his strong, solid thigh against her own was causing her to grow increasingly wet.

  Once or twice, she caught herself casting sneaky glimpses at his crotch. He was sitting in the way men so often do, legs sprawled wide to claim as much space for themselves as they can, and her eyes were drawn to where his cock bulged against his trouser zip. Twenty years ago, she would have been embarrassed to look at such a blatant display—he was her best friend, after all—but now she was anxious to see more. What did he look like when his pants came off? How big was he? Was he circumcised? Did he stick straight up when he was hard, or bend a little to one side, as David had done?

  Flustered by the strength of her lust
for him, she reached for her mug once more and only succeeded in spilling it down herself. Tea splashed over her sweater, staining the white wool. She pulled a tissue from her bag and began dabbing at it, apologizing for her clumsiness.

  “You need to soak that, or you’ll never get the mark out,” he said. “Take it off, and I’ll stick it in the sink.”

  She stared at him. He might only be thinking of the practicalities, but she couldn’t start taking her clothes off in front of him, not when she’d been mentally stripping him down just moments before.

  He took her silence for reticence. “Come on, Cat. Don’t be shy. All those times we used to sunbathe round the back of South Block, it’s not like I haven’t seen you half-undressed before.”

  That was true, but she’d never sunned herself in anything quite like what she was wearing now, a seamless nylon bra so sheer her nipples would be clearly visible through it. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice. No, that was stupid. Of course he would notice—and a small, overheated part of her so badly wanted him to.

  He was holding out an impatient hand. She took a deep breath and pulled the sweater over her head. He said nothing, just dashed into the kitchen. She heard the sound of running water, then he was back.

  He smiled when he saw how she was sitting, hands crossed over her chest so her breasts were covered. “Should I take my shirt off, too? Even things up a bit?”

  She couldn’t tell him things would only be even when they were both lying naked, bodies twined together. She wanted him so much, but she was afraid to say the words. Sex ruined friendships, everyone knew that. Perhaps that had something to do with why they’d never hooked up at university, when they’d had so many opportunities. Deep down there had always been a fear of spoiling what they already had. And yet…

  Leon solved the dilemma for her, extending a hand for her to take. Helping her to her feet, he pulled her into his arms. Even in her three-inch heels, her head still barely reached his shoulders. He bent his head, kissing her for the first time since they’d said good night on leaving Guy Sheen’s party. Kissing her properly for the first time ever. Her mouth melted against his, his tongue pressing forcefully between her lips.

  Where did he learn to kiss like this? she wondered as he took teasing little bites of her lower lip, then decided she didn’t really care, not as long as he kept on doing it. Eyes closed, hands locked around the back of his neck, she barely registered that he was working on the catch of her bra until he had it undone and his calloused hands were cupping her bare tits. She pressed a little closer to his big body, feeling the solid bulk of his cock against her belly.

  “Come on, let’s take this to the bedroom,” Leon suggested.

  “Just a moment,” she said, unzipping her skirt and shimmying out of it. She stood before him in only her flesh-colored hold-up stockings and a pair of knickers as sheer as the bra. They were so wet they clung to her shaved pussy lips, hiding nothing from him.

  “Fuck me, that’s nice,” Leon exclaimed. “Thinking about that would have got me through a few night patrols, I can tell you.”

  The bedroom was barely big enough for the double bed and the wardrobe, which was all the furniture it contained. In contrast to Leon’s old room in South Block, which had always had a pile of dirty laundry festering in a corner and clutter on every surface, it was almost clinically tidy, the legacy of his army days, she supposed. She lay back on the navy-striped duvet, watching as he stripped off his shirt and trousers. In his white T-shirt and dark-green shorts, he cut an impressive figure, the muscles in his chest and arms sharply defined. He’d told her he was working as a personal trainer, even though it was a waste of all his paper qualifications; she thought he looked like a pretty good advert for his own services.

  He joined her on the bed and they started kissing again, Leon holding her face in his cupped palms so he could stare into her eyes. She pushed her hands up under his T-shirt, wanting to feel his firm stomach. Instead, she found her fingers running over a puckered ridge of scar tissue. He tensed for a moment, then relaxed when she didn’t immediately recoil from what she could feel.

  “Let me see,” she murmured. He pulled the T-shirt over his head. The scar bisected his abdomen, stark white and giving the impression of being hastily stitched together. It must be a battlefield repair, she thought.

  She decided against asking him how he had received such a terrible injury. She sensed there were things he had seen and done that he didn’t want to talk about right now; might never want to talk about, though she wanted to be there for him when he did.

  Moving down his body, she placed a tender kiss on the wounded place. From there, it was a logical progression to easing down his shorts and freeing his cock. It wasn’t as long as she might have hoped, but it was thick, with a tapering head half hidden in a velvet sheath of skin. When she took hold of it, she heard his breath catch in his throat. Their eyes met.

  “You can’t know how long I’ve waited to feel you do that,” he said.

  “Have you waited for this, too?” she asked, and closed her lips around his cockhead. She could have done this twenty years ago, she knew. He’d been hers for the taking, but she had been too busy sharing her favors with the campus hunks. As she skillfully took him farther down her throat, she was glad she hadn’t tried this earlier. In those days, she would never have had the confidence to take control, to hold his shaft in such a way that he couldn’t thrust harder or deeper than felt comfortable to her. She would have done what she did with Danny Demetriou and all the other lads whose names she no longer recalled: gagged on his dick, giving pleasure and receiving none in return.

  She let Leon’s cock slip from her mouth, turning her attention to his balls, taut in their crinkled sac. Her fingertip skimmed the entrance to his ass, making him shudder in guilty pleasure. She would have eased her finger inside him, if she hadn’t been afraid he might come the second she did.

  “Let me lick you,” Leon urged. “I need to know how you taste.”

  They swapped places, so she was lying on her back and he was crouching between her legs. At first, he didn’t even remove her knickers, preferring to lick her through the already saturated fabric. It dulled the sensation just a little, making her wriggle her hips upward in search of more contact with his tongue. Just when she thought she might die if she didn’t feel his mouth on her bare cunt, he ripped the knickers from her and threw the ruined garment to the floor.

  The smile he flashed her was pure wickedness. “Sorry, but it’s so horny to think of you going back to London with your pussy bare.”

  As if to reinforce his words, he took the ragged petals of her sex between his lips, sucking and nibbling on them. His hands grasped her bumcheeks, pulling her hard onto his tongue. If she thought she’d learned some tricks over the years, she couldn’t quite believe the ones in Leon’s arsenal. He seemed to know just where to touch her, just how long to keep her dangling over the precipice before pushing a couple of fingers up inside her, pressing at her sweet spot and sending her free-falling into orgasm.

  She barely had time to catch her breath before he had rolled over and pulled her on top of him. Her lips stretched around his hefty girth, her juices trickling down his shaft to ease her path. Once he was lodged in her to the root, they took a moment to share more long, sloppy kisses. When they broke apart, pure delight shone in Leon’s soft hazel eyes, as though he couldn’t believe this was finally happening to him. Catherine suspected her own expression was very much the same.

  Eventually, she began to move, rocking lazily on the hard length buried within her. She didn’t expect to reach orgasm again—she very rarely came more than once—but as she rode Leon’s cock she felt the tension building in her belly once more. He played with her tits as they fucked, pinching her nipples until bolts of sensation shot down to her core. Nothing this good could last, and almost in the same moment as Leon grunted and pumped his spunk into her in short, sharp spurts, she felt her stomach doing giddy somersaults as her pussy clenche
d and clenched again around his cock.

  Deliciously spent, she rolled off him, resting her head on his chest as he wrapped a thick arm around her.

  “I wish we’d done that years ago,” Leon muttered.

  No, you don’t, she wanted to tell him, not really, because years ago it would have been awkward and messy and over in moments. Years ago, we wouldn’t have known how to make it special for each other.

  Instead, she asked, “But are you still going to hold me to the pact?”

  “If you’ll have me,” he replied. “We always said we’d marry each other if there was no one else, and for me, there never has been anyone else. Only you, Cat, the only woman I ever wanted.”

  “Oh, Leon, of course I’ll have you.” Their lips met in a lingering kiss. If she wanted to make her train back to London, she should be leaving in the next few minutes, but life there no longer seemed to hold any attraction for her. Everything she needed, she knew now, was here in this room, and the time was finally right to make it hers.

  EXPOSING CALVIN

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Let’s go to a strip club,” I say, my eyes lit up. I haven’t been to one in years, and certainly never with my husband. I can see right away from the way he looks at me that he doesn’t think we’re the type of people who go to strip clubs, all that judgment packed into one lift of his brow, a simple set of his jaw.

  “Honey, what? We are not too old. We’re forty-two and forty-five? I bet there’ll be guys in their seventies there!”