Sweet Agony

by Charlotte Stein

  Much to his irritation.

  ‘You could have been killed,’ he says, but I can’t help noticing something odd in his voice when he does. A lightness that wasn’t there before. An amusement that matches my own perfectly, and becomes sweeter as he carries on speaking. ‘There could have been a pitchfork in there somewhere – I might have been forced to watch you die with it stuck through your middle. Honestly, you never think reasonably about anything, and you do the most insufferable things, and you are an eternal source of exasperation to me.’

  Yet he does it all as he climbs the ladder, at my suggestion.

  ‘Try it,’ I tell him, then watch in breathless wonder while he does just that. He even takes a running jump off the edge, far more athletic about it than I was. It makes me think that I should ask him about that body of his, and whether he rowed or boxed or did some other vigorous thing. But then he lands almost on top of me, and I forget whatever I want to say. Mainly because for a second he actually bursts into laughter.

  But also because once he’s done he turns to me. He looks at me through the dim light that I would dearly love to call gloaming, his expression slowly sinking into the warmth he probably should be incapable of. He should be, but I know he isn’t now. And even if I was unsure, even if I had no idea and could hardly guess, after one lovely moment filled with all the affection in the world he does this:

  He leans across to me slowly, haltingly, raising his arms so stiffly that I don’t recognise what he’s doing right away. I just lie there looking at him, unmoving, and only after his hands pat over my arms and his body brushes mine do I get it. Though to be honest, getting it still leaves me somewhat stupefied. ‘What is this?’ I find myself asking, in a slightly scared and wondering tone.

  And in the end I’m glad I do.

  It means I get to hear him say: ‘I’m hugging you. This is me hugging – am I doing hugging wrong? Molly, tell me, am I doing it wrong? It feels awkward and awful so I have to imagine this is not right, but would appreciate some sort of confirmation’. I get to feel him trying to correct his technique, in wholly ridiculous and unnecessary ways. He shifts one hand down and the other up, and tries bending his elbows instead of holding them stiff. And he does all this even though having my face almost pressed to his chest is enough for me. Just knowing that his hand is on my back gives me everything I need.

  I know it does, because I burst out with words I shouldn’t tell him.

  ‘I love you,’ I say, and strangely I don’t regret it in the least. Not even when he answers with silence and stillness, as though it shocked him out of his skin. Not even when he finally responds, and it’s with something frantic and physical and not like him at all. Hell, if anything the latter is a bonus – his hand suddenly slides to the hem of my skirt and I go weak almost immediately.

  Then even weaker when I realise he really is ruffling the whole thing up. I feel the air on my bare thighs and my partially clad backside, and all my muscles melt.

  And that’s before he pulls my knickers down. He almost yanks them, as though he can’t wait more than a second to get at what he wants. Me, I think, he wants to get at me, though such a slight sentence doesn’t quite cover what he does. It seems too small to contain the way he attacks the buttons on my blouse, so roughly that I hear some of them skittering across the floor. The cold air hits my bare breasts before I’ve had a chance to think: But anyone could walk in.

  And by the time I get round to it I don’t really care.

  How can I, when his next move is to kiss me there? He puts his mouth on my nakedness, as though he hardly worries about anything of the kind. Hungrily, I think, sloppily, so far past caring that I doubt he could stop if he tried. He just wants to bury his face in my tits, and once there his only thought seems to be to taste every tiny scrap of skin he can reach.

  It’s like he’s been starved. Like he’s just stumbled out of a long and arduous famine, and now he gets to feast. He gets to lick and suck and grope with both hands, in a way that probably should feel awful. It should, but, Christ, it doesn’t at all. Just watching him is enough to make me plump and wet between my legs. I see him make an incredibly lewd circle around one stiff nipple, and feel a rush of arousal like nothing I’ve ever known before. It seems to flick at my already swollen clit, and sink deep into the pit of my stomach. For a second I can barely breathe beneath it.

  But I battle through.

  I have to. If I don’t I’m going to miss the rest – because oh, Lord in heaven, there’s more there’s a million times more. He doesn’t wait for me to catch up with him. Whatever waiting he had in him is done. He just eases two fingers into my slippery cunt, stroking and feeling me out until I realise in a great gush of excitement what he’s doing. He’s preparing me. He’s making me ready for that big fat cock, and he’s doing it so thoroughly I think I might come first like this.

  In fact, I suspect that’s his goal. I know that’s his goal, because after a second of those delightfully long and utterly flexible fingers fucking into me, he goes one step further. He finds my clit with his thumb, and works me so slowly and so well I can feel my thighs starting to shudder. I can feel my belly tightening, and I have an urge to bury my face in that threadbare jumper.

  But I’m glad I hold off. I’m glad I keep looking at his face, because oh, God, the way he holds my gaze.

  And the things he says. ‘Come for me, come for me like a good girl,’ he tells me, and though I try my best to let it last a little longer I have almost no chance at all. He practically forces it out of my body. He does this insane thing where it feels like he’s pincering me, those fingers inside me pulling forward while the meat of his thumb almost pushes down. And the second he does, the very second he does, I almost die. Everything seems to clench all at once, too hard to really be good.

  Yet somehow it is good. So good I think I grunt like an animal, and I know I make a mess of his hand. More than that, really. Embarrassingly more than that. I gush all over him, though that doesn’t feel as shameful as it probably should. Partly because nothing that incredible could ever be shameful, but also because I know beyond any doubt that he wanted me to do it.

  That’s why he fucked me like that – so I would make a slippery mess. So I would go all trembly and boneless and barely offer any resistance when he eased his cock into my slick cunt. And it’s true, I don’t. I take him so easily I think he goes faster than he was really ready for – but that’s OK. Oh, yeah that’s just awesome, because, holy mother of fuck, the look on his face when he feels me surrounding him.

  His mouth actually drops open. I think his pupils dilate – or at least his eyes go wide and blank. He stares at me without really seeing, every inch of his willpower clearly devoted to keeping him there and present and not liable to run. Or does he just need the time to process the sensation? It seems so, because after a moment of rigid shock a sound comes out of him. A sigh, like someone warming themselves by the fire after a long, long time out in the cold.

  And then his eyes drift closed.

  Ahhhh, yes, the way his eyes drift closed. It reminds me of everything I’ve been able to feel since he first took that cane to my backside, so simple I took it for granted. I found it easy, but I see in this one look how hard it has been for him. I understand in a way I never fully did before, always assuming that he not only couldn’t but didn’t really want to. Not completely, not wholly – maybe not even on the train or in his bed.

  But I get it now.

  All this time, and he was just longing for this. Everything was theory, nothing was lived. None of it known the way he clearly knows it now, so blissful that his face fills with warm contentment.

  But there’s something more than that there. I see it underneath, deep and warm and sweet. I feel it when he raises a shaking hand and touches my cheek. Wonder, I think it is, at the idea that something he feared so deeply could be so easy and feel so good. Because it is, and it does, oh, it does. Even before he moves I want to call out his name. He fills m
e so completely I can spark sensation through my belly just by tightening around him – and apparently it’s the same for him.

  I do it and he jerks as though slapped.

  ‘Stop, no,’ he says, and oh, it’s the best to hear him do it. It’s the best because he doesn’t mean it in the bad way. He means it in the good way, the I’m-going-to-come way and the second I register that, I just can’t help clenching again. It almost happens on its own, like an involuntary spasm.

  And it has the greatest effect. He punches the hay by the side of my head, his gasp so loud and heated it sends me insane. I buck as soon as I hear it, and after that things just snowball. He grabs my arse and takes me hard, pounding relentlessly until I can hardly stand it. I just have to hold on as the pleasure builds up and up and up to some unbearable point, so unaware of anything else that I don’t realise what he’s doing.

  Until the very last second, I don’t see how close his face is to mine. I don’t think anything of it, until the thing is almost happening. He’s going to kiss me, I realise, and when I do it hits me harder than all the rest of this. I forget the thick pulses of sensation wavering outwards from my cunt or his cock or whatever is making it happen.

  And I focus on his lips. I feel them graze mine, so barely there I could almost believe they weren’t. I could almost believe it, if it wasn’t for what follows that bright and brilliant touch: his orgasm like a barrelling freight train, bearing down until it takes us both alive.

  I don’t think anything of it when I wake and he isn’t there. He was quiet on the walk back to the cottage, but he was also quiet when he fucked me up against the wall in the kitchen and then again halfway up the stairs. I still have bruises lining my backside from that last vigorous rutting, as a testament to his eagerness. Not that I really needed them, because he woke me in the night with his face between my thighs. If he was fucked up about it all he probably wouldn’t have licked me with quite so much enthusiasm, considering how sticky and slippery I still was with about ten gallons of his come.

  I let it run down my thighs and make a mess of my fur, in part because I was too boneless to do anything else but also because it was a filthy turn-on. It still is a turn-on. I get up and can feel the evidence of his pleasure just about everywhere, and I love it, I love it, I want to masturbate just thinking about it.

  But I resist. I go downstairs in search of him, and still don’t feel the slightest concern that he’s not in the kitchen or the garden. He couldn’t possibly have freaked out, I tell myself, and I’m right to. I’m just slightly wrong about some other things. Actually, I’m massively wrong about some other things, and I see by how much when I decide to pull on his old wellies and go and find out where he is.

  I wish I hadn’t. If I’d just stayed inside I might never have known, but like a fool I pass the empty barn and keep going. I head in the direction of a great cliff-like outcrop that seems to rise out of nowhere, and discover there’s a huge valley on the other side. Or at least I think it’s a valley. I stand at the top of the outcrop with my back to a sheer drop, and realise that all this green is the grounds of a house.

  A great and grand house, so large it still seems so even when seen at a distance. It sprawls on endlessly, covered in turrets and fancy spirals with swirls of green in between. I have no name for its architecture and no words for the way it makes me feel. I just stand there in boots too big for me, my nightie fluttering beneath an old jumper of mine, hair like a ragged streamer in the wind.

  And then I know.

  I get it.

  The cottage – it isn’t his. It must have belonged to the groundsman or the gamekeeper or some other posh servant. Of course it did, I should have known it did, because he would never have carved those keys into a table where his parents could see. How could I have ever imagined otherwise? He wasn’t a fool. He told me he hid it from his father, yet somehow I let it all slide by until suddenly here we are:

  Me hardly able to breathe as I take in the real world he came from.

  He must be a lord, I think, or a sir, or a marquis or a count. He will have a title, as I thought he did, though if he does it must be under a different name. I searched Harcroft and came up with nothing, so it has to be made up. It has to be, yet still I hope otherwise. I tell myself I might have got the wrong idea, as I make my way down towards the house. I imagine it’s some stately manor museum, filled with a thousand glass cases stuffed with spectacles and pipes and pretty ornaments.

  Because if it isn’t then he not only lied.

  He did it so the two worlds wouldn’t collide. That was what the phone call was about, I feel sure. The one where he spoke of not exposing something to someone. He didn’t want Lord and Lady God Knows What seeing me, in my jumpers and my wellies – an idea that seems a touch paranoid, a touch silly, just a bit unreal.

  Until I remember the clothes. He bought me the clothes too, didn’t he? All those tweeds and pretty shoes and hats, so generous-seeming before but less so when I see him. I reach the grand old entrance, surrounded on all sides by enormous columns, the great doors standing open enough that I can look inside. I can take in the marble floor and the gigantic double staircase, of the sort I’ve only ever seen in period dramas.

  And then finally there is someone-who-is-not-really-Cyrian, standing talking to people.

  Three important people, and all of them looking just like I did in that fancy suit. Better than I did in that fancy suit, in fact. So much better and so in keeping with him and how he currently seems. They all stand the same way and wear their expensive stuff the same way and when they laugh they look like reflections of each other. It’s amazing, really.

  Or hard to take, depending on your point of view.

  ‘Oh, darling, you must visit more often,’ an incredibly coiffed lady says, and then I just have to walk away. If I don’t I might end up doing or saying something awkward. Something stupid like ‘Well, he would if he didn’t have his clumsy gauche whore to tend to.’ And I know it is stupid, too. I get that this life is not something he takes pleasure in. I understand that he stays in the cottage not because of me but because that is his real home. The real place he grew up, where he did all the things he loved.

  But even so I can’t help the sting of it.

  He could have said. I could have pretended. Put on those fancy clothes, and kept my mouth closed. I would have even stomached his embarrassment, and as I wait for him to come back I slowly come to understand why. It’s because I am embarrassing. He’s right, I am. He should be ashamed of me really – I can’t even pronounce fancy words correctly, because I’ve only ever read them and never heard them aloud. I don’t know what fork to use at dinner, and can’t discuss the finer points of world economics. I find his massive newspapers dry and dull and last time we ate dinner I did so with a spoon.

  And where those thoughts once barely bothered me, I find they do now. I know they do, because when he returns, the smile I attempt won’t stick. My face heats at the idea of what he might really think. It’s a small difficulty, and I can suppress it most of the time. But when he has to be the Lord of the Manor I know it will rise.

  It’s there inside, just waiting to tear us apart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I do my best not to think about it. Or at least I do my best not to let it show. If it shows he’ll spot it, and the second he does I’ll have to explain. I’ll say that we are from two different worlds, and then he will be practical about it. Too practical about it. I don’t want to hear him be practical about it. I don’t want to hear him say, ‘Well, of course we are’ or ‘What does it matter if you’re embarrassing when I live like a virtual recluse?’

  Once he has I can’t pretend he doesn’t care.

  And I want to. I would like to, for just a little longer. More than that: I would like to be a different person. A prettier, smarter, more refined person, who knows how to navigate some elegant world without fucking everything up. Who doesn’t have to force herself not to care who’s staring, beca
use no one ever actually is. And if they are, they do it for the very best reasons.

  What must it be like to be stared at for the very best reasons? To never worry about holes in your clothes or airs and graces you don’t have? I can’t imagine – but the worst part is, I didn’t want to before. I was strong somehow, defiant in the face of his snooty facade.

  Only now it’s not really a facade, is it?

  It’s not a game that we can just go on playing for ever.

  This is real, this is real life, and real life is almost never what people claim it is in stories. It seems like it might be when you’re a kid, and first read Jane Eyre under cover of darkness. But then you grow up and see it all through a different prism – a glass darkly, only the other way around. I look through and see the fantasy as it would really be, so small and mean in ways I do not want to see.

  I would rather never know that he locked away a perfectly sane woman and married Jane because no one else would take him. I make jokes about him being an arsehole, but oh, how much better life would be if that were not true. How much better life would be if the truth did not exist, and we could all just pretend for ever without having to face it at all.

  I would do it, I think.

  In fact I know I would, because when he finds me looking out over the glorious scenery from that rocky outcrop, I smile. And when he says he was worried, I tell him he had no reason to be. I just went for a long walk, and now we can go back. We can return to his Dickensian home and play at being a perfect couple.

  While inside I look out from the attic, and wonder if this is really me.