by Coote, Cathy
I was acting. I must have been. But something choked me, too, just slightly. Something felt faintly like real outrage; as though I really had been falsely accused.
You apologised, of course. It was pretty good. You kissed me all over, up and down my body, right down to my feet. You had tears in your eyes.
I played you like an instrument.
I spun it out for hours. I made the tears come rolling out down your cheeks. You knelt before me, your head bent in submission. You swore never, ever again to say anything to hurt me. You promised to take me shopping and buy me anything, anything at all that I wanted. There was a drawn, hunted look on your face as you said sorry and called me Angel.
I went to sleep in your arms, with you regarding my face anxiously, your eyes wide and worried. You clutched me so tightly that your hands sweated, and you smelled, most satisfyingly, of semen.
I may well have been dreaming. I couldn't tell, even at the time, if I was awake or asleep. But I thought you said something, long after I'd closed my eyes.
The voice was breathy, heavy with something. I couldn't tell whether it was tears or another, more violent passion.
I thought you said: ‘I hate you, sometimes.’
I am afraid of my imagination. It's too powerful a force. It swamps me. It sweeps other people up and carries them away. There's a strange magic in me. If I think a thing hard enough, I can impose it upon the world.
It doesn't matter whether I want the thing to come true or not. My imagination didn't care that you're a good man, that you meant well. It needed you to harm me. Effortlessly, it made you a monster.
The predatory creature I'd made of you began to hunt me.
Your eyes became narrow and luminous, like a cat's. I woke one night to go to the toilet and, coming back, I found you standing outside the door.
I was slightly startled. Never one to let an opportunity slip by, I pretended to be very startled.
‘What are you …?’ I asked blearily, wiping imaginary sleep from my eyes with my fists. The combination of the childlike gesture and my complete nakedness was a powerful one.
You looked guilty, covetous, hungry. ‘I just wondered where you were,’ you mumbled. Then you took my hand and led me back to bed.
On the couch, remember?
Hot and wilted from my walk home, I'd stretched myself out to sleep there. The light was purple and the air was heavy.
I woke to find your hand down my jeans.
‘Hey!’ I cried. In that first instant of awareness, I was genuinely shocked.
‘It's okay. It's okay,’ you said. ‘I'm just.’
And you kissed me, hard.
Stroking my lips with one finger, you told me, ‘They're so red.’
I wasn't wearing make-up. I never did. My blood just ran closer to the surface, these days.
I made no reply. I simply sat there trying to look cute and half-awake. I was glad I hadn't brushed my hair. The tousled, angelic effect was a good prop.
With your nose, you nuzzled between my legs.
It wasn't just a matter of giving me pleasure. It was dirtier than that.
You found little spurts of moisture and mumbled with triumph. The liquids of my body were prizes, now.
I'd made them so.
You thrust your hand beneath my nose. You watched to make sure I inhaled. The cloying smell stuck in my nose. It reeked of sweat and arousal. This was a new kind of violation. It was a kind of trophy, too: Look what I caught! Look what I made you do!
I lay flat, submissive. You swallowed the bait whole. Leaping onto the couch, a pirate onto a conquered ship, you pushed my legs apart as though they were inanimate, as though I was dead or unconscious.
You entered me without looking at my face. It was forceful and it hurt.
I dug into your back with my fingernails. No real passion spurred me on. It was a calculated action, like a bullfight attendant makes, tossing his darts scientifically into the back of the bull to enrage it at the right moment.
You gasped, wincing at your own guttural noise.
‘Hey!’ I said. I made you look at me, just briefly. I wasn't going to let you keep all those emotions, all that turmoil I'd worked so hard to create, to yourself. I needed to see them.
Your cheeks were dark purple, as though you'd been holding your breath.
Your eyes met mine with the full force of your challenge—lust, aggression, anger, all gathered together and thrust at me, like the point of a sword. But as I stared back, expressionless, they clouded with misery. Your pupils darted from side to side. They were schizophrenic eyes, which cannot trust the walls to retain their shape from one moment to another. You seemed every moment to fear a surprise attack.
I was hot on your trail now. The feelings of power, of lust, contracted my stomach. ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked sweetly, nearly choking on raw desire.
But you were beyond conversation. You panted loudly, and the sweat ran in little streams down your face. Your hair was all plastered down flat. Your eyes glazed over and you fixed your gaze on my shoulder.
All the tendons on your legs stood out. Your feet strained against the armrests. The whole couch shook and shuddered.
Staring at your incoherent animal eyes, I had a strange, prophetic feeling of apprehension.
I felt we were on a creaking boat, in the middle of a storm.
I felt we must capsize at any moment.
Over the next few days, I seemed to drift further away from the world with every moment. Suddenly there was only one tableau sucking me in.
I stopped talking almost entirely. In class, at school, I simply folded my arms and stared at the desk, waiting for it to be time to go home to you.
I found myself prey to strange nervousnesses brought about by still weather. I remember coming to absolute halts just standing at the side of the road, saturated with throttling, alien passions by a sudden lack of traffic noise.
Unexpected stillnesses—when the birds stop calling and you can't hear any traffic—filled me.
*
As I walked up the front path, I heard the telephone ringing. My hands trembled as I unlocked the door. They wanted me to hurry, hurry, hurry. I forced myself to be slow and calm.
Inside, I stood by the shrill screeching thing. I counted to ten. It stopped ringing. I thought I'd have a heart attack. But the telephone was just pausing to gather itself for another assault, like a baby breathing between screams.
A long time seemed to pass. I held myself still, sitting upright in the big armchair. That stillness was to make the time pass instantly, make it pass by without me, outside me. Deep within myself, I went into hibernation, waiting for you.
I heard your car turn into the driveway. I didn't move a muscle, but I was completely altered, as though I had been tuned into another frequency. You'd be watching me soon, infusing me with the strange energy of your awareness.
Outside, the car door slammed. Your keys clinked abruptly as you unlocked the door.
I waited in the wings. Only when you were in the hallway did I move. I timed everything perfectly. Just as you appeared in the doorway, I let you see me disappearing up the stairs.
‘Hey!’ you called.
I hardly saw the lines and angles of the stairs before me. I was choreographing the backs of my bare legs for you, willing them slimmer and more irresistible than ever.
I was beyond planning things. I was in the grip of the force that makes birds dance and stags fight and cats stalk about with their tails in the air.
I stripped quickly. I heard you mounting the stairs clumsily, unevenly, taking one, then two. Then one too heavily.
My clothes on the floor seemed too scrappy and diminished ever to have held me, like shed snakeskin. I rushed to take up the correct pose. Flinging the curtains back, I leant on the window ledge so that the slanting sunlight sheeted over me. The sun caught in the wisps of hair around my face and I saw glitterings like mica.
I stilled my whole body like a held breath,
not wanting to waste an instant of consciousness that you wouldn't see.
Then with a whoosh you were there, you were present behind me, and I was properly alive again.
I felt you watching me. Your eyes slid all over my back, down my spine, down my legs.
You shuffled uncomfortably.
An intense heat swelled in my stomach and under my nipples. I was perfectly in control of my body, perfectly aware of how I must look from where you stood. White shoulder-blades, delicate hollows, little dancing ripples of light and shade. I stood still as a flower.
I overpowered you in an instant. You crossed the floor and pressed yourself into my back, gripping my arms below the shoulders. I didn't move or respond, but stood passive, half-limpid.
I felt your erection, defenceless against my back, through the scratchy surface of your trousers. I swelled inside, feeling it.
Your fingers dug into the soft skin on my arms. I hoped you wouldn't spoil things by speaking. I didn't want to be reduced from nymph to raconteur. You caught your breath and I knew you were trying to frame questions: Where've you been? Who were you with?
But at that moment, at the zenith of my powers, I could silence you with a thought. I made the tiniest, most delicate movement. I shifted position, rested my weight on the other leg. It was a disdainful movement. It meant: Oh, so you're going to keep holding me, are you?
This enchantment was impossible to resist. It brought you closer. It made you crush your chest into my back, link your hands around my chest, binding my arms to my sides. I could feel your anxiety in the unsmooth breath that blew over my neck, in the trembling of your knees and the white-knuckled tightness of your two hands.
I was the puppeteer and the puppet too. I slithered my hips from side to side, just gently, shifting my weight again. I turned my face further from you, tucking it into my chest. I let my hair fall between us like a curtain. Such a posture could have seemed frightened, vulnerable, but I infected it with slight, provocative boredom.
Your poor, powerless erection jumped and jolted. You made a little inarticulate noise of distress.
Every inch of my skin, every nerve of mine you touched, filled with blood and expanded. I saw your hands and they squeezed at me furiously, purple with the power of your grasp, but shaking from deep within, and with a desperate whiteness round the knuckles.
I couldn't titillate myself any longer. Turning, twisting round—but careful not to let you loosen your hold on me—I looked at your face. You were fierce, your brows all thundered together—but fierce like a boy who is frightened and embarrassed by his rage, a boy who cries when he is angry. You breathed between your teeth and seemed as usual to be trying to frame normal words, trying to think of some correct and proper sentence to set things right.
My heart beat faster. All my body seemed anaesthetised and swollen, fuzzily. You made some noise like ‘Jhhh!’ and seemed to be pleading, while you duelled. Your top buttons were undone. There was a little fluffy something in your hair. Oh, you were ridiculous, my angel.
I struggled against you. It was sensuous and calculated. You held my hands up above my head and I twisted from side to side, my face framed between the insides of my arms. I felt my wrists turning inside your hands. It was invigorating, like a massage. All my muscles warmed and tingled, as though I had been exercising.
You were shaking. You bared your teeth, resolute.
And now you bore down on me, turned me round, holding me by the wrists so that my toes just barely swept over the floor. I swooned as soon as I felt the bed behind my knees. I just fell, and took you with me, so that I lay below and you lay above, still holding my hands in that desperate vice.
I felt my lips pulsing as though swollen. I knew how red they must be. I let them part, and regarded you through my parted lips and my big eyes.
You couldn't help but kiss me. I lay as though in a faint and because I didn't respond you had to kiss me harder. Because I didn't part my lips wide for you, you had to force them open.
It was pure energy, to have you invade me like that. It was like entering the ocean or a storm, and lying limp in the grip of the elements.
Through my eyelashes I glimpsed wonders: the curve of your arm above my face, all muscles standing stiff, the skin glowing damp. You still held one of my wrists, up above my head.
I moved my free hand close to the captured one. I rubbed my wrists together.
You stilled completely. I heard the air pass between your lips with a rush.
You said with false, dangerous calm, ‘Is that what you want?’
I lay mute beneath you, allowing your weight to squash the air out of my lungs.
Even then, you must have been willing me to say no, to scream, to end the game somehow. ‘Is it?’ you demanded.
I said nothing.
‘Right,’ you said. You were brisk and adamant.
Then you moved and lay half-off the bed, though still with your fingers circled round my wrist, and I saw you fumbling on the floor among my clothes for stockings.
Then you sat astride my midriff, your knees pinning my arms. ‘Right,’ you murmured to yourself.
Each breath I took only seemed to skim the surface of my lungs. There passed across your face the most exquisitely transparent parade of emotions. I seemed to see them all distinctly, one after another.
Your nose seemed aquiline, your eyes haughty, your expression superior, businesslike. You twisted the stockings into ropes, pulling them sharply, testing. That efficiency, that interest in details, was alien, mesmerising.
Then I saw you with the mane of your hair all ruffled up behind your head, and your face seemed shadowed and bestial. I could see flecks of spittle glistening on your teeth as you tied the knots around my wrists, securing them above my head and then attaching them to the bedhead with a short lead. You were like a great ape bending over me.
As you bent your head to undo your zip, your cheeks seemed round and soft. You were lost again to childhood, to vulnerability, to the great concentration required of tasks performed for the very first time.
Then as you reared up, as you dug your arms under my stomach and rolled me over, you avoided my eyes, looking instead in that instant at my breasts, and there was that naked, crippling lust in your face, in the tip of your tongue between your teeth, in the loud breaths you allowed in between your teeth.
But in that moment, as your fingers beneath my stomach became ten hard points aimed at my soft belly, I became really afraid. As I rolled and the room around me rolled and disappeared, I caught my breath, feeling like a stone that's been turned over.
I didn't struggle. Like the condemned prisoner who accepts the proffered blindfold, spurning the last glimpse of sunlight on the leaves, I turned my face into the counterpane.
I could smell my hair on the pillow. The strawberry shampoo I'd chosen for its chemical, teenage scent seemed gritty, grainy, like strawberry pith.
My back was cold, now, without the counterpane against it.
Your hands all over my back were hot and damp. They seemed like cheap sensations; just pressures on my nerves; nothing more.
Sweat seemed to float on me like oil on a choppy ocean. I felt your teeth on the soft skin under my ear; and they were sharp and small and there seemed to be crocodile's rows of them, nipping away. I tried to shrug you off, but you just went lower, biting at my spine like a mosquito, impossible to swat.
Then I began to feel the real terror of confinement, whiteblinded by the counterpane. I shifted uncomfortably, thinking perhaps I'd ask you to stop.
Your rough fingers under my legs drew them apart and I felt you sucking like some faceless thing—an oyster—at the ridge that divided my two holes.
‘Yuck,’ I whinged, with an angry little kick, like a child.
I expected you to respond to that. I expected you to ask if I was all right.
Then you were behind me, and I felt the knuckles of your curled fingers against my leg and I knew you were holding your cock and that's wh
en I noticed that my wrists hurt. The stockings were too tight, I could sense a spreading blueness, a coldness, pins and needles, passing up the heel of my hand. I was pinned out like some amphibious creature about to be dissected.
Your fingers wormed around the edge of that hole, just tickling inside, and I was aware of a sudden urge to shit. Then you moved your hand away and I felt your fist around your cock against my arse and that's when I knew what you were going to do.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Don't do that!’
I felt the tip, all hot and surrounded by sudden stinging fissures.
‘I said don't do that!’ I wanted to shout it but that way I was tied meant I couldn't find the breath. The words came out shallow and panted. You might not even have been able to hear me, with my mouth muffled against the sheets
I kicked wildly, or tried to. I wormed and squirmed my body from side to side.
I was really panicking now.
‘Ow!’ I was close to tears. You weren't listening. I couldn't turn my head. I wanted to look at your face, to see how to make you stop.
You didn't move or retreat. Instead you grabbed me round the waist so that I couldn't move to frustrate your efforts. Your fingers on my hips were hard and grasping.
You must have felt me trying to get away. You must have seen my hands twisting frantically, scrabbling at the bindings. You must have noticed me kicking as hard as I could. But you didn't stop.
Desperation overwhelmed me. Surely you wouldn't really do it? Not now? Not when I'd made it clear I didn't want you to?
I tried to scream. But there wasn't the air—
You were inside.
I thought you were going to break some membrane. I thought my intestines would rupture. I thought my insides must have sprung endless tiny leaks. I swear I felt all the fluids of my body trickling out and running down my legs.
I felt horrible. I stopped trying to struggle. It only made it hurt more.
You pushed and pushed and your breathing through clenched teeth seemed as much a pushing action as the movement of your hips, in and out like waves but moving ever closer like the tide was coming in.