by Gabi Moore
I said this last bit a little too quickly, and when his eyes flashed to meet mine, I smiled back a little too awkwardly. I laughed, to show I was only joking, but this also came out awkwardly, and I looked away again. Typical. This ugly pair of panties couldn’t just exist. Oh no, it had to lead me here, to this strange guy’s apartment, where he’d probably murder me and chop me into bits or something. Or discover what a completely awkward idiot I am, which is worse.
There was nothing left in the room for me to pretend I was casually looking at. He handed me a cup of chamomile tea, fumbling for something to say, but as I reached for the cup, the tips of his fingers grazed mine and my eyes caught the flicker of a gold wedding band. All in the space of one giddy heartbeat, I knocked the tea from his hands, where it flew up, dumping its contents directly onto me. The pain was unbearable. A dark, chamomile scented wet patch was spreading down over the front of my jeans and legs, searing the skin underneath it.
“Shit!” I screamed, and began doing a little dance from one leg to the other. His eyes were wide and he stared slack jawed at my crotch.
“Oh god, oh god, I’m so sorry!” he said, panicking and looking around for a cloth to mop up the mess. By this point, I’m sure I could feel the top layers of my epidermis peeling off. I was nearly bent double – the pain didn’t seem to be stopping. My eyes prickled with hot tears.
He was dabbing helplessly now at me with a tea towel, which did precisely nothing, and I was sobbing, mentally running through a future in which I didn’t have the use of my legs anymore, when he snapped his fingers and said, “Aha! I have some ice in the freezer…”
He turned his back to me again and then, possessed by God-knows-what and unable to bear the torture anymore, I unbuttoned my jeans and tore them off my body, flinging them away. A rush of cold air came to the rescue. He turned around again, staring straight at my now pink, parboiled thighs.
“Oh,” he said.
We both stared at the pink blotch, while he nervously tried to find a place to put down the ice cubes and then figure out what to do with himself.
“Is this where I make a joke about making you wet?” he said, followed with a look of instant regret on his face.
Thank God, someone slightly more awkward than myself.
“You’re married,” I blurted out. Nope, turns out I was still the reigning queen of awkward.
He looked at his ring as though he was surprised to see it there and shrugged.
“Divorced,” he said.
I slowly took my knickers off, the rapidly cooling chamomile tea on them giving me goose bumps all over my belly. I had no idea what I was doing.
“So what do you think of these knickers then, do they meet your exacting standards?”
Where the hell did that come from? What was I thinking?
He was quiet, not looking at me or the pile of clothes I had tossed to the floor. Was I really doing this? Was I really standing half naked in some stranger’s house at 10 in the morning? Something in his face darkened. My eyes focused on a single quivering water droplet on the pad of one of his fingertips. For a moment everything was silent except for my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
“So, you’re just a little slut who goes to people’s houses and strips down?” His face was hard, serious. A flutter of panic rose in my chest. I suddenly started visualizing a future where I was cut into bits and stored in Tupperware containers, my family searching for my missing body, my ugly school photo flashing on the evening news.
“I …think I’ll just go,” I muttered, feeling as though all the air had just left the room.
“No you won’t,” he said immediately.
Silence.
Was I scared? To my alarm, I felt a desperate twinging between my legs. Did he really used to be married? Did that change anything? I had never slept with an older guy before. They had always seemed so …intimidating.
“Turn around,” he said. The words seemed to be coming from deep inside his throat.
“But …I …”
“Do it.”
I turned around immediately, placing my shaking hands on a taped up box propped against the wall. The cardboard felt so rough against my fingertips. Was my body going into shock? Did I need to go to a hospital to get burn treatment? My mind fluttered furiously. I closed my eyes, and heard him moving around behind me. I heard a ruffle and the unmistakable clink of his metal belt buckle falling to the floor.
I shuddered.
He came close, and his hands, almost as rough as the cardboard, reached around and delicately touched the tender red skin on my thighs.
“Does it hurt?” he whispered into my ear.
I exhaled, my head spinning.
Before I knew it, something immensely cold slipped over the skin there, and I yelped out. The ice. He was gliding a cube over my burnt flesh, the hot skin melting it easily, making prickling drops that slid all the way down my bare legs and puddled onto the floor. An excruciating throb radiated out from between my legs. My skin smarted, but with each stroke of the ice cube, soothing waves washed over me. The entire surface of my body seemed to tighten up, every last hair standing on edge.
With his hot breath against my ear, and the rapidly disappearing ice cube licking all over my body, each of my senses seemed blissfully overwhelmed. I couldn’t tell what was pain or pleasure anymore, whether the icy hot thrills running up and down my body were too much for me, or whether I very much wanted more. I whimpered. His fingers moved closer, and as he gently touched the ice cube against my clit, I cried out again.
The ice cube moved deeper down, and he pressed it firmly between my lips. I was streaming wet now, melting along with the ice cube and sending sticky rivers of my own all down my legs. The ice cube gone, he seamlessly slid two fingers into me, and I swear I almost felt my entire body move and pull him in deeper.
It was electric.
His other hand was resting on my clit, tracing tiny circles, while his fingers slipped silently in and out. I squirmed all around him, shuddering from cold and heat and some far more delicious feeling swirling in the centre of my belly. It was a new sensation, one that scared me a little, one that I hadn’t felt ever before.
“I have to go,” I said weakly, not meaning it for a second.
“I’m not done with you yet,” he said in the same growling voice as before, and as he did, he plunged a little deeper, pressing me open. It felt as though my entire lower body had melted into hot goo, and that I was pouring all over his hands, unable to contain myself.
The wind outside had grown stronger and was rattling at the windows.
His fingers pumped more aggressively now, and he anchored my body with his other hand. I couldn’t speak, even if I had had something to say, but I mumbled some vague protest to the wall, not really believing that his fingers could do what they were clearly doing to me.
“I’ve never done this before…” I sputtered, and it was true. I had never felt so hot, so wet and so completely at someone’s mercy.
To my surprise he spoke softly and firmly into my ear in a new voice; a gentle, caring voice, “Just relax. It’s OK. Trust me. You’re going to come soon. And when you do, I’m going to make you squirt. But you’re not going to do that just yet, ok? Not until I say.” I was so delirious with pleasure I could only nod mutely at his instruction. I relaxed deeper into the sensation. Something wet and full and luscious was growing inside me, sending shivering twitches all up and down my legs. I badly wanted to come, right there and then all over this stranger’s fingers, but I held back, and he patiently edged me closer and closer, holding my quaking body with one hand and ratcheting up my pleasure with the other.
“I want to come now,” I begged, my body about to burst.
“No. Not yet. Stay here with me. Don’t come yet.”
“Please,” I said and felt my body shuddering with the effort.
Before the word was completely out my mouth I felt his fingers pull out of me and in a split second he rammed his cock w
here they had been. It was so astonishingly quick, that I gasped silently and arched my back. My body clenched around him, and the growing ache reached fever pitch. A cascade of pleasure rushed over me. I felt as though I was unimaginably high on the apex of a roller coaster, pausing there for a second to gaze down at the long, long way I was going to fall… my heart stopped and stars twinkled and buzzed behind my eyelids. He breathed hard into my neck.
“Come for me,” he said.
I didn’t need any more encouragement.
With a single, very deep thrust he plunged me over the abyss, and everything that I had been holding onto slipped away in one rushing, blissful flood. He yanked his cock out and gripped my body firmly as I shook. To my amazement, torrents of liquid were gushing out from me, spraying him, my legs, the floor… I held onto him tightly, all of my body convulsing from its very core, the liquid never seeming to end. Every muscle cried out and pulsed, and my body rocked with an orgasm that threatened to break me apart.
I stood with his arms wrapped around me, panting. I felt emptied out; my entire body limp with the release of the most thrilling tension. He held me there, still pinned to the wall. I glanced behind me and saw his stiff cock, doused in a thick sheen of the same liquid, the flat of his belly glistening.
“Good girl” he said playfully, and slapped my ass.
I nearly laughed out loud. We both collapsed onto the floor, me more exhausted than I had ever been in my life.
“Wow …I’ve never …I didn’t know …I …” I stammered, trying to compose myself, to make sense of what had just happened.
“Shh!” he said, kissing me sweetly and smiling. “I bet you’ve forgotten about your burn, haven’t you?”
I lay back and closed my eyes, body still buzzing. It was though some new corridor of pleasure had opened up inside me, and I had come with every last atom of my body, hard, from the top of my head to my now wet toes. Floods of peaceful bliss washed over me. The wind outside sounded rough and dangerous, but inside I was warm and gooey and happy. I giggled.
“Looks like we’ll need another towel” I said.
He jumped up, looking for one, careful to avoid the previous puddle of chamomile tea.
“This place is a mess. Can I, uh, make you a proper cup of tea now? And where are those horrible knickers of yours?” he said.
“That’s weird. I swear I just saw them over here …it seems we’ve lost them…”
- THE END -
Doing It Faster - A Bad Boy Romance
Chapter 1 - Michelle
“Oh, Michelle, could you please see me after class today?” he said.
Words, they taught us in my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class for Adults, have meaning. Sometimes, some words can even have many meanings, and when you’re anxious like me, you learn how to read every possible meaning of every possible word.
I know everything there is to know about words. I know how to tell people off for using future perfect continuous tense incorrectly, I know the etymology of the word “mutilate”, and I know how to spell bureaucracy without cheating. I know that “I’m sorry” can sometimes mean “I hate you”, and “marry me” can sometimes mean “I give up.” It’s all in the context, you see, which is another thing my Beginner’s Creative Writing Class tells me.
“You’re reading too much into things” my exasperated friends tell me almost daily, but no, you can never read too much, into things or out of them, and when Mr. Cain asked to see me after class, well, there’s a whole universe of things that that could mean.
“Sure, no problem.” I said.
Mr. Cain smiled and nodded once, then continued nagging the corner of an old book that was resting in his lap.
If you look closely enough, there are words in everything. Take Mr. Cain for instance. His bleached white collared shirt says “yes sir” but his hairy forearms and five-day stubble say, “I’m a modern-day Hemingway, stand back while I engage in ennui and self-inflicted but romantic alcoholism.”
Maybe you think I have a crush on Mr. Cain. Well, so what if I do? It’s practically unavoidable at this point. There’s fate, and then there’s something even stronger: narrative necessity. I simply had to have a crush on him, you see. I was the plucky but maladjusted loner and he was the brooding and artsy teacher-type who was going to seduce me and awaken my inner slut. Tale as old as time.
He was crinkling up his eyebrows at the book, as though this would help him squeeze out more insight from the words on their pages.
“What makes this passage so visceral, though? What really jumps out at you?” he asked the class.
Mousy Linda cleared her throat and said, “The author is speaking to all five of our senses. She talks about the smell of the soil, the feeling of the air …so it’s all about, like, the body…”
She trailed off as Mr. Cain turned his grizzled gaze to her. It was pretty clear to me that poor Linda was totally not the heroine of this story.
“Right…” he said, gesturing for her to continue. “But what else? Take that further. Let’s develop that idea.”
Linda withered a little more. Nobody raised their hands.
“I think,” I say into the quiet room, “that she wants to show in this piece that the body is speaking. That the conversation is carrying on, but the message is now transmitted through the body itself. Words can have lots of different meanings, but in this passage she’s not interested in words anymore, she wants to show the body, as it is.”
Mr. Cain stops nagging the corner of the page and looks at me. He nods just once.
“Yes, I like that. The body as text. Good.” He nods again and changes his tone, looking back into the pages. “It’s certainly a common interpretation, but thank you for that, Michelle.”
Common? I look down at my arm resting stupidly on my lap. Common. Somewhere around last year, I had decided not to cover up my scars anymore. Yes, I know, self-harm is very 1990, but I was doing Troubled Teenager long before anyone else, I promise, and now there was nothing to do but own the many pale scar lines climbing all the way up my arm …especially when it got as hot as it was today.
I traced a finger over them; they were old calibrations from a time past when I measured my pain in a very different way. When I had ratcheted up all the way to the end of my arm, and had no more room to go, I had had to change my instrument. These days, I tried to use words to cut, instead. Words are sharper, and the wounds they leave sometimes never heal. Though everyone is happy I am 10lbs heavier and significantly less cut up (ha ha!) than I was before. The truth is, nobody knew just how truly lacerating some of the words I used on myself every day were. My body also spoke, except it said “broken” and “dirty” most of the time.
When Mr. Cain said the words “common interpretation,” I had quietly felt the word “stupid” cut into me a little, like a tiny sword. I sat in silence for the rest of the lesson, smarting. The hour drew to a close and I thought about saying something nasty about Linda’s cardigan, then thought better of it.
What on earth did Mr. Cain want to talk to me about? Having a crush on him suddenly started to seem a little inconvenient.
Chapter 2 - Mr. Cain
If I had a dollar for every time some angsty child came into my class and tried to impress everyone with her Tumblr poetry …well, I wouldn’t have to teach some dead-end writing class for extra cash in the first place.
The trouble with students like Michelle is that they’re desperately immature – and completely unaware of the fact.
Michelle was a thoughtful, subtle writer and created strikingly refined characters in class …but she was also twenty one years old. And no amount of talent could change that fact.
I’ve been writing for years. The old Middle School style melodrama and overwrought dialogue? It was a good thing she was pretty, because there was no way I would put up with that shit if she were otherwise. Michelle played the disturbed waif particularly well, but to be honest it didn’t quite suit her. She was too voluptuous underneath
her ratty black clothes. Too robust. Her skin was a little too rosy looking, despite how bitchy she sometimes was to the other students, or how insulted she felt when I gave her a less than brilliant grade for one of her compositions.
I looked down at her assignment in my lap, and my “C” looped round with a big red ring. In hindsight, this wasn’t an entirely fair grade to give he. At the time, I thought it my duty, as an older man, to point out her haughtiness, bring her down a peg or two and truly help her with her writing. I had no idea that within a matter of a few months it would be her showing me a thing or two about writing …but I’ll get to that in a moment. At that point, was I inventing excuses to talk to her alone? I couldn’t say. But I was her senior (by a hell of a lot) and her teacher.
Did I have a crush on her? Well, that’s entirely beside the point. She dutifully stayed behind class and I noticed she was wearing, as usual, an outfit of only black and some junky Goth jewelry. She smelled like lilacs.
“Michelle, thanks for staying. I …wanted to discuss this short story you submitted last week,” I said, relishing the tension this seemed to create. I stroked my beard contemplatively, deciding this would heighten the drama a little, too.
“Oh?” she said.
“It’s an unusual choice …erotica,” I said, hating that she had made me say the word.
She looked out of the window. I was struck anew by how incredibly young she looked. The lower curve of a surprisingly full breast pulled at the cotton of her shirt, but she was sitting bunched up, tucking her body away. In all my years teaching this class, no student had had the guts to voluntarily submit something like this. It felt like a cry for help. Or a massive “fuck you” …I wasn’t sure which.
“It’s …well, it’s brave, I’ll say that much.”