by Anna Chillon
His hand slipped under the blanket and walked through the greedy search for a piece of flesh to explore. I curled up more, feeling totally defenseless against what I wanted with all my strength.
“I hurt you, but you hurt too me today, going off with another man, trusting him more than me. I couldn’t bear it again.” He squeezed my side, sinking his fingers in, then abandoned it to go down my arm to find the fist I was clenching around his friends’ handkerchief. He forced me to open it, released the moist cloth and entwined his fingers in mine.
I turned around and made myself look at him. His eyes were dark puddles, full of undecipherable secrets, from which I could have expected everything except what followed.
“I love you, Giada. I wanted to avoid saying it because sooner or later all this will end, but it’s pointless denying it, I love you anyway, you’re my angel.”
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
That was him: to say the worst and the most beautiful thing he could ever utter in the same breath.
The magic words every lover longs to hear thrown at full power against the little door I was trying to bar. They bought about their undeniable effect and were re-enforced by the kiss he gave me, with his scratchy beard, long and deep, opening me tenderly as only he knew how.
My heart exploded and my field of vision filled with light.
“Oh my God... me too... I love you too.” Before I could realize it, I’d already said it, not only to him, but to myself. Admitting it should’ve made me feel weak, instead it gave me more strength. I loved a man and he loved me, the rest of what he’d told me was just contradictory and I refused to accept it.
My fingers climbed up his shirt until I was gripping onto him. “Why do you say it will end?”
He took my hand to his lips and kissed it.
“I won’t steal your youth. I had mine taken from me, it will not happen to you. I may be a possessive scoundrel, but I'll let you go.”
Nice speech, that, however, went against everything I wanted at that moment. I suppose he thought a girl my age could easily get a crush on the first man who made her feel the joys and the pains of sex, confusing a bit of affection with love. But now I was sure it wasn’t my case. The feelings I had for him were conceived by an altruism that could hardly have belonged to a teenager. I loved Vincent, not only as a lover and a man able to please me, but as Vincent, with all his faults. And I loved him with a strength that made all other feelings implode.
Perhaps my way of expressing it was not very adult, but it was still real. Certainly no one could have imagined or believed it, even if I’d shouted into the wind. I couldn’t even know how real it was myself.
“Maybe I don’t want to be left alone.”
I hated the compassionate expression that his face took on, as if I were too young to be able to understand.
“Adele and Aaron will find out sooner or later,” he said.
“We'll explain it to them.”
“There is no explanation, Giada, and even if there was, they wouldn’t accept it. You’ll find yourself forced to make a choice that I don’t want you to have to make. You're young, you couldn’t adapt to my life and you still need your mother and father, believe me.”
I kicked him indignantly and let his hand go. “You just told me you love me, and now you're already leaving me?”
“I'm not leaving you, but at this point I want you to be aware that the longer we push for it, the harder it will be for you. For Aaron. For everyone.”
I felt ready to fight proudly for him and it made me crazy the idea that Vincent was ready to give carte blanche to anyone who got in the middle. There was nothing that mattered more to me in the world and I expected for it to be the same for him.
“Maybe you care for me, but you don’t really love me, otherwise you'd fight for me,” I contested, turning to stare at the ceiling, shuddering. “And you don’t lust after me enough.”
“Still with this idea in your head that I don’t desire you enough? You don’t know what you're saying.” He ripped the blanket off with a violence that made me feel naked even though I still had my clothes on. “I’ve fought, I was willing to use force to have you. And I am still willing to do so, to become despicable just to feel you’re mine again.”
I recognized that determination, which immediately caused me a lewd sense of danger. I sat up, but I was immediately pushed back down onto the bed by the violent pressure of a hand on my shoulder.
“Vince...” my breath was tiring. That was a part of him that I’d got to know quite well lately; his ability to be attentive, gentle or even jovial a moment before and then suddenly get overshadowed. The night dropped on him with the speed of a wind storm, making him as sweet as he was terrible.
He was different to me, my Mum, Dad and everybody I knew, and it was just in that shadow, that anyone else would’ve hated, that I found him special, different. His worst defect was what attracted me to him and that tells you what a messy situation I was in.
“I thought you knew how much I wanted you by now, baby.” He stroked the back of my hand, reaching my wrist he circled his fingers gently around it.
“Vince...”
“What is it?” He asked, stretching a leg to imprison mine.
“I have to go home for dinner. It's getting late.”
“I came up especially to take you home, the bus will take too long. I just want you to promise me something first.” He snuck under my jumper and into my bra. “Will you do it?”
“What?” I exhaled, my head already confused.
When he stroked my breasts I felt so horny I rubbed the seam of my jeans against his knee. I had a terrible need, even though it was shameful that I found it so necessary. He seemed to be pleased, and filled his palm with my arse massaging it.
Suddenly he pinched me, twisting my nipple so hard he made me scream. “Never again, baby. Don’t ever turn your back on me again like you did today.”
“It hurts!” I twisted, pleading.
“Yes, it hurt a lot to watch you trust a stranger more than me.”
One hand was imprisoned by his grip, I used the free one to claw his forearm; I felt it unmovable, contracted by the tense muscle.
“Promise,” he said impassively. “Then we can go.”
I squeezed my lips closed, engaging in a meaningless fight.
“I’ve got all the time in the world.” He squeezed harder, a wave of pain fogged my vision, I couldn’t even hold his arm back and I let it go, leaving little red half moon marks. I wanted to tell him that he was the only one for me, that I really wanted to tear away from Niccolò's hand to run into his arms but I lacked the force to speak.
“Promise me.” His eyes were looking at me intensely, spectators of my torture. They waited for my surrender, but they were in no rush to get it.
“I pro...” I squeezed my eyelids shut, wrinkling my nose to resist, “I promise.”
“Good girl.” He didn’t let my breasts go straight away. He did it gradually as his mouth approached mine, breathing deeply and licking my lips fleetingly with his tongue.
He massaged the sore spot, pushed his knee between my legs, and the pain diminished, turning into a chasm needing to be filled.
That was how Niccolò found us when he came in. Me with glassy eyes, wrist still imprisoned, and Vincent's hand still under my shirt making me arch under his touch.
We noticed him when he put a paper bag on the table and smiled. “Don’t mind me, carry on as if I wasn’t here.”
Vincent didn’t move a muscle, almost as if he was considering the idea. He just turned his head a bit. “What time is it?” He asked placidly, titillating the nipple he’d abused.
I shuddered, blushing as if he’d found me red handed and turned my head towards the wall. I must’ve been really pathetic. Before I ran away from him and immediately afterwards here I am letting him do anything he liked to me.
“It must be more or less six o’clock.” Strange that the one without a watch was the one to
tell us the time.
“We're still in time.” Vincent stroked my cheek with his knuckles and stood up with a very obvious protrusion in the pubic area. “Sort yourself out, I'll take you home.”
With a free hand, I couldn’t avoid touching my sore breast, intercepting one of Niccolò's glances that found me even more embarrassed. He watched me bend to the ground in an attempt to escape his gaze and pick up the head band to put back on.
He was smiling.
“I’d like her as a subject for a painting,” he wasn’t ashamed to ask, pulling some colored tubes out of the paper bag.
At first Vincent ignored him, crossing the room to get my abandoned rucksack from the corner.
“You’ll have her,” he ruled, approaching the canvas in progress on the stand. He took a photograph out of the clamp attached to the chassis. “I'll give you all the shots you need, but you’ll just paint it for me.”
I looked at him through grainy eyes, expecting him to ask my opinion, but he didn’t.
“You’re very demanding,” said the artist.
“Take it or leave it,” he put the photograph down.
Niccolò took it between his fingers, once more observing his skill in being able to enclose every nuance of emotion in one instant. “First I must show a photo to Lia. I don’t paint subjects that she’s not mad about.”
Vincent raised an eyebrow and put my bag on his shoulder. “I thought that you were the boss in your relationship.”
“And I thought that you were the adult in yours,” he said promptly.
“It's just an impression. I thought it was OK to stop growing up at eighteen.”
“Excuse me.” I intervened, waving my hands to show my presence. “No one wants my opinion? Maybe I don’t like being photographed. I’m not photogenic.” Above all I didn’t want to be naked in the photo and know that Niccolò would be studying every shadow of imperfection.
“I've already photographed you once and you've came out pretty well,” Vincent explained.
“What? When?”
“Let's go down and I'll show you.” He pushed me to go out ahead of him.
But before I went I wanted to say goodbye. “Thanks, Niccolò, and sorry to have taken up your time.”
It seemed a bit odd to thank him as he’d captured me and convinced me to go up by force.
“Time is never lost, in one way or another it has always been lived. It's up to you to decide how sweetie. He winked at me. He sat on his stool and put his hands together, looking at a white canvas on which only he could know which figures he was projecting. I just hoped it wasn’t a nymph with a blue hair band and a big nosed ogre with two authoritarian eyes, and his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
In his studio, Vincent made me sit down on the baroque chez longue while I watched him fiddling about in a small but full safe. He pulled out two yellow envelopes. One was marked in black marker with an “A” and the other with a “G.” He replaced the first and handed me the second.
I opened it and took out about twenty photographs, mostly in black and white: I was the subject of all of them. ‘G’ was for Giada.
I’d never noticed him taking photos of me. Yet he’d taken them in my house and in my garden a few months ago, judging by my appearance. In one picture I was in pyjamas in front of the fireplace, with teddy bear slippers and my legs gathered up on the couch. In another I was leaning on the kitchen island, leaning over to grab I don’t know what, my top had ridden up exposing my waist. In a third I was laughing coming down the stairs, my eyes seemed to shimmer. They were magnificent shots, I was impressed.
In one of them I recognized the decorations I’d festooned the house with.
“I remember that day: it was your birthday eight months ago. We celebrated it all together.”
He sat next to me. “Your parents had given me a new lens, I’d pretended to test it out.”
“You weren’t pretending.” I sifted through the photos faster, feeling stranger and stranger: was that how he saw me? Even I was struggling to recognize myself. “I thought you found me unbearable.”
“You were.” He took my hand and put his precious loot back into the yellow envelope. “You were more and more unbearable. Day after day your shape became more sinuous and then you started to move almost like a woman, making those gestures... jesus, you could see a mile away what was going on in your head. The moment I took these photos was also the one in which I realized the effect you had on me.”
Eight months in which Vincent had been attracted to me and in which I’d thought he’d treated me like a head louse. Eight months in which he’d pretended in front or everyone so as not to be found out.
I never stopped discovering new things. But the best one of that day by far was that he loved me.
* * *
[1] ‘How old are you tonight
How old do you think I am... little girl.
So many things you don’t tell me anymore
Maybe you prefer not to understand...’
[2] ‘Where are you going later tonight
You know I don’t know, baby
Sure that you’re not, not the first
And certainly not, you aren’t the most serene.’
Chapter 12
On Saturday morning my parents left early, and Vincent caught me as I was leaving to go to school. He told me to skip classes that day because he had to take me somewhere.
I didn’t know where he wanted to go, but it seemed to me a good idea to take advantage of every moment we could spend together.
That was the fourth weekend, all for us.
Despite my insistence, he kept our destination a secret until it was impossible to hide it. When I saw the signposts with the directions that caught my attention, and he started to follow them one by one, I knew he’d planned the day out only thinking of me, from the time I’d talked about wanting to go. I jumped up and down in the seat before I even got out of the car and found myself in front of ‘Cinecittà.’
I didn’t stop. I jumped the whole time, holding Vincent’s hand and dragging him euphorically from one set to the other, while he held me as he would a helium balloon too inflated to stay on the ground. For me, who’d dreamed of being a stage technician, walking around that place with him was like living one dream after another.
I watched everything with avid wide open eyes. Vincent watched only me, drinking in happiness that appeared from time to time on his lips, with a smile.
It was an unforgettable, perfect morning. As luck had it I only started to feel unwell on the journey home.
My period arrived punctually, on one hand making me feel relieved, debilitated and suffering on the other.
I thought this would exclude any sexual activity. Well, I was wrong big time about that. I managed to prevent Vincent from penetrating me only because I struggled hard to stop him I told him I found the idea disgusting. I worried that he would have been disgusted by me and my body; he assured me that I could be no further from the truth and that it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d done it under those circumstances. He had no way of convincing me and had to abandon the urge to creep into belly, at least I managed to win that one.
Since I was indisposed, we had long hot baths at his home where he sat behind me brushing my hair. Then he invited me to stretch out against his vast chest while he occupied himself by drawing circles with foam on my breasts as he asked me about school and my friends. Despite the subject matter, I couldn’t avoid feeling his swollen penis against the bottom of my back. However, he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything about it, he was happy to wait for me to show interest of my own accord.
I was fascinated by everything that was in him that was the complete opposite to me: the thick goatee that was becoming grey in parts, coarse skin, dark hair, thin mouth with protruding cheekbones. Severe eyes, prominent cock and the strength of his muscles. Dry warm hands, with long, tenacious fingers, only one was needed to hold both wrists. Then there was the just visible grid patter
n on his face, a map of years of experience that I still lacked. I liked it when he squinted his eyes and it noticed more. It wasn’t normal for me to be like that, but I couldn’t do anything about the fact that lived in skin attracted me more than youth, scarred more than silky skin.
I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t know how to so I told him. So, after one of our baths we went to bed. Seated against the headboard he took my hand and guided me explaining what I should do, his teachers voice remained controlled, as if the rigid and dripping member didn’t even belong to him. And then suddenly the tight pull on my hair to indicate my success. He was a good teacher and I was a willing student.
We spend most of our time in the bedroom and bathroom, first at his house then at mine. My favorite pastime was to stay nestled against his side and listen to his voice rumbling through his chest.
As he held me like that, he tested me by browsing an album of my tags and asking the origin of each of them. He pinched my legs and bottom every time I struggled to remember, so I started inventing stupid answers that he didn’t believe, but enjoyed none the less. A hypothetical three Euro anal stimulator, labelled as ‘Anafin,’ was the one that made him laugh the most. He said that they couldn’t be so cheap and that anyway, according to what he had heard at the show, I wouldn’t have got much use out of it.
He also came into possession of my school diary and certainly not because I delivered it to him willingly. He found me getting worse in the last two weeks and frowned. He knew he was the cause. But now the game was up, the school year had almost expired and the average of my marks was more than sufficient.
I didn’t care about my marks, I was satisfied, I felt special and cared for. My whole life focused on the weekends when it was just the two of us, interrupted briefly by Mum and Dad’s calls, or the messages we received on our cell phones. More mine than his to tell the truth.
Continuing to browse through my diary, Vincent found an old photograph of him and Aaron, which I’d got to have his photo nearby without arousing suspicion. In the shot, they both had troubled and rebellious expressions, they looked like a couple of gang members. It was strange for me to imagine Dad at that time, dressed so differently from how I knew him.