He’s right and wrong at the same time. Sometimes he speaks and my insides soar, but I always have an urge to punch him afterwards. I have an urge to punch him now, and it’s really only being eclipsed by the need to play this game until it reaches some probably nightmarish conclusion.
He’ll ask me if I’d like some anal sex, and I’ll lie and say no.
And then I’ll have to do it.
Oh, God, yes, I’ll have to do it.
‘All right. I haven’t the faintest clue how this is going to work, but all right.’
‘Excellent.’
He shrugs around inside his jacket, as though to make himself comfortable. And when he finally is – when he’s completely at ease and the master of his own domain – he speaks in this casual way.
It’s just a shame that the words themselves aren’t casual at all.
‘What are you waiting for, then? Take off your clothes.’
‘What? That’s not the game.’
‘Of course it is. You lied about not wanting to be naked, and I caught you. So now you have to remove every … little … thing.’
For a moment I’m too taken aback to speak. He’s like a wizard. He’s like the designer of terrible traps for foolish people, and somehow I’ve stumbled right into one without even realising it. My leg is caught and I’ve lost my map, and I’ve really got no one to blame but myself. I actually feel stupid for complaining, though I have to do it.
‘But we weren’t playing then.’
‘I don’t remember that being in the rules. You didn’t specify a starting point, as far as I can recall, though you can try to tell me otherwise if you like.’
I bet he’d let me, too. I bet he’d let me talk just to see how deeply I can tangle myself in him and all of his craziness. And the answer is, of course: very deeply indeed. Oh, so deeply I’m never going to get back out again.
‘I don’t want to tell you otherwise.’
‘So then,’ he says, and holds out a hand – like the conductor of a symphony, I think, awaiting a command performance. I can even hear the strings singing in the background, everything rising and rising to the point where I have to do this.
Doesn’t he realise I can’t do this? I’ve never learned; I don’t know how. The instrument is unfamiliar and clumsy and the notes are all wrong. I can’t I can’t I can’t, I think, about a second before he speaks again.
‘Begin,’ he tells me.
And somehow I can play.
Chapter Five
I start out quite simply, slipping out of my shoes and casually tossing my jacket aside. But after a moment I realise this is meant to be more than that. It’s meant to be a striptease, I can see. It was in his words, and that hand gesture he made, and now it’s in his expression. That near-smile is dancing around his lips, though it hasn’t quite reached his eyes.
Oh, no, his eyes are as dark as midnight and twice as intense. They glitter at me like onyx from all the way across the room, and they never waver. They don’t even flick to something else when I reveal the silly thing I’ve done.
I wore tights, instead of stockings. I wore big, clumsy, grey woollen tights, unthinkingly. All I considered was how good they’d look with the only expensive suit I own, and in truth they do. They look great when I’m fully dressed.
They just don’t when I’m not.
Why didn’t I think about not? I knew what I was coming here for. There weren’t any illusions, though I suppose I might have pretended otherwise. I erased our final phone conversation from my mind, and just focused on other things. His voice, the island, this room.
I’m such a fool, I think, but there is nothing for it now. I have to reach under my skirt and wriggle out of these ugly elasticated things, and I have to do it fast. I have to do it without glancing up, in case his gaze makes me lose my nerve.
When I accidentally do, however, the near-smile hasn’t spread. He’s not laughing. If anything he looks even more intense than he did before. He’s leaning forward a little now, with one hand on the arm of the chair, and as I slowly restart this clumsy strip, his eyes follow my hands.
He watches me slide the wool down over my knees, occasionally tilting his head this way or that – as though to get a better look, I think. He wants a better look at something so completely ridiculous.
And I don’t know what to think of that.
I know it makes my breath come in shaky bursts, however. I know it makes me even clumsier. For a long moment I can’t quite get the tights over my ankles, and I wrestle with them briefly before finally giving in.
I’m going to have to sit down to do it, though God knows what kind of striptease that is. The truth is, I suppose, it isn’t any kind of striptease at all. It’s just me removing my clothes, in blundering fits and starts. First the shoes, then the tights, and now my shirt. Oh God, my shirt. Why is it so much harder with the shirt?
I guess it was just easy to pretend, with the other things. But I can’t with something that covers most of my upper body. Once the material is off he’ll be able to see secret parts of me that usually stay covered up, and the idea makes my hands tremble. I fumble my way through the buttons, random thoughts flitting through my mind as I do: what will he think of my frayed bra? What will he think of my weird breasts?
But in one way, he answers all of my silly worries.
He still isn’t wavering. He doesn’t look away when I slide the material off. He just keeps staring and staring, until it almost becomes a kind of challenge for me. Go on, go on, I think at him. Glance at something else. Here I am, with my tights and my worn underwear and my mannish shoulders.
Be bored. Be disgusted.
And when he refuses to obey I go faster. I get a little braver. I fumble the zipper down on my skirt and let it pool around my ankles, and once I’ve made a fist of my nerves my bra follows. It’s really quite easy with him looking at me like that, because his look makes it abundantly clear.
He likes what he’s seeing. Somehow, impossibly, he does. His eyes are almost fondling me, and when I finally bare my breasts that feeling gets stronger. I get that same spark of sensation thrumming down from my taut nipples as I did when he was actually touching me. My back arches and my shoulders straighten – like I’m proud, I think, like I’m proud to look like this and as confident as he said I could be.
And I am, really. In that moment, I am.
I feel all raw and ripe, and so aroused. My sex is a swollen fist between my legs, just aching for me to take that final step. The material of my panties is practically a prison by this point, and it only gets worse as time ticks on. I think he’s looking now. I think he can see my wetness seeping through the cotton, and after a while I know he can.
He gives me this hooded look, near feverish and so greedy. You’re making a mess, you bad girl, that look says, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before he tells me to take them off. I can almost hear him ordering me, in fact.
‘Just remove them before you sully the material any further,’ he’ll say, while I come close to collapsing on the quicksand carpet. Or maybe he’ll simply tear them off with his teeth, as I swoon dead away. He certainly looks like he wants to do that.
He’s baring those pearly whites right now. And he keeps licking his lips in this lovely, lascivious manner, like he’s thinking what I’m thinking even though I haven’t the slightest clue about anything in my head. I’m too busy enjoying the sensation of someone not actually touching me to get as far as what it might be like if he did.
Will it be as good as him watching me awkwardly easing my panties down my legs? I doubt it. He seems to flash fierce when I snap the elastic and softer when I get things right, and everything is so backwards I can’t bear it. Why does he like it when I blunder? Because it’s clear now that he does.
I almost trip when I get to the last hurdle, vacillating wildly between sureness and a fumbling lack of grace, and it’s then that he moves. I hardly even hear him, or see him. I’m too busy tutting at myself for be
ing clumsy, and then suddenly his hand is on my shoulder. His big, broad hand, as firm as I imagined it.
Only this is more than my mind could offer. My mind is thin, compared to him. It suggested a poised and professional man intent on a particular goal, but that isn’t what I get. I get a man possessed by a raging demon. He pushes me back onto the bed without saying a word, all questions and answers and truth and lies forgotten.
This is the truth:
His hand making a hot stripe right down the centre of my naked body. My body arching to meet that sizzling touch. I feel as though I’ve waited for ever, and yet somehow it’s no time at all. It’s too soon, it’s … wrong. He didn’t mean to do this, I think, though, God, I’m glad he does.
It’s like getting early parole.
No more languishing in a prison of my body, afraid to be seen and touched and handled. There’s just him and his hands on my thighs, and then the electric sense of him kneeling down somewhere just past the edge of the bed.
So he can look, I think.
But oh, it’s so much more than that. I was wrong about him and his restraint, his clinical approach, his ability to be aloof. In one sudden swoop he’s an animal, wanting me to spread for him, wanting to see, wanting to touch. I feel his thumbs press deeply into those sensitive spaces that surround my plump sex, and I know this is going to be too much.
He’s going to take me apart with his hands, clearly. He’s going to map out every part of me the way he mapped me out with his eyes, so he can use the information at a later date. He’ll probably put it in his little notebook of me: she likes having someone run a finger down through her wet slit, so everything is nice and exposed.
Only finger is the wrong word there.
He doesn’t do anything with his fingers, the way I imagine. I guess that would be too easy, really, to attribute to someone like him. You can clearly imagine him searching all over someone with those strong, forceful hands, maybe while wearing a pair of leather gloves.
But you can’t see him pushing his face between someone’s legs.
I can’t see it. I don’t expect it. I’m waiting for something else, and I get the sudden jolting press of his hungry mouth against my spread pussy. And when I try to sit up – more out of shock than anything else – he puts the finishing touches on this tableau.
He spreads a hand over my stomach, and pushes me back down.
I won’t lie: it’s possibly the most arousing thing to ever happen to me. Not the press of his lips, or the idea of him doing it. Just the feel of that hand on my stomach. The way it looks spread out of my skin, fingers splayed and arm tilted – like he’s about to exert some serious pressure, or at least wants the option of it.
He wants to keep you here, my mind whispers, but oddly my body doesn’t revolt at the thought. Far from it. My body revels in the idea of him wanting something so badly – and after something so pathetic, too. I offered him a striptease a clown could have done, and his response is this.
I can’t get over it. I’m still processing it when my body suddenly reminds me: someone is going down on you. That’s what this is: he’s licking your pussy, and you know what? You’re loving it.
And oh, I am. Ohhhh, man, just the long, slow stroke of his tongue through my slit. Just the feel of him kissing and rubbing and making a mess all over his face … it’s more than enough to make me crazy. I squirm beneath his hand and almost let out a sound, even though I’ve never made sounds before.
I suppose I’ve never needed to.
No one’s ever gone down on me before. Or at least no one’s ever gone down on me like this. I’ve had a couple of guys almost graze my thighs with their lips, and once I think someone got a little lost on his way to my belly button. But nothing so intimate and obvious and nerve-jangling. I can actually make out the shape of my own clit, just by the way he slides his tongue around it.
And I know why he’s urging my thighs wider with his free hand.
It’s so he can get at me. It’s so he can lick right into my hot, wet sex, while I pant and wriggle and half beg him not to. ‘I can’t bear it I can’t bear it,’ I tell him, and in response he goes after everything even harder. He devours my pussy, teeth grazing over skin so tender it could be made of tissue paper. I actually worry about it, until I realise how it feels.
Divine.
The spark of pain is like throwing a firework into a tank of gasoline. It shoves everything higher, makes everything sweeter, pushes the pleasure to new places. Once he’s made a faint mark he licks over it with that soothing, slippery tongue, and my body can hardly keep up with the switch.
I’m electric with sexual confusion. Wires cross and nerve-endings misfire, and though I want to be calm and cool and composed I can’t be. I’m going to come, and so quick it’s embarrassing. It’s barely been a minute, but my thighs are starting to tense. My breath is starting to catch in my throat.
I’m going to do it all over his face, and there’s just no way of stopping it. Not even the humiliation can hold me back – in fact I think the humiliation makes it worse. I imagine him telling me off for being a teenage boy, tumbling into orgasm while he’s still standing on the sidelines, and my clit actually jumps against his sliding tongue.
I’m so wet I can hear it, as he laps at me greedily. And everything is so hot down there, so swollen and soft and ready. He could fuck me with very little trouble – just keep me pinned like this and unzip, then slide right into me. And in the state he seems to be in, I think he could do it. He’s actually making noise into my slippery flesh, rough and close to grunting. It makes me wonder if he’d let me hear if I was doing the same for him, and it’s this thought that puts me over the edge.
I think about him moaning as he takes me, and I just crumble completely. My body tightens like a fist, sensation ebbing and flowing through parts I barely knew existed. I feel it on the insides of my elbows and just under my ears, before it finally, finally gets to the hot spots. My clit pulses once, heavily, beneath his still working tongue, and I’m just gone. I fly away. I no longer exist.
The me I was prior to this sits on one side, watching me writhe and gasp and make a complete fool of myself. Surely he must think I’ve made a fool of myself. The second this fizzing, insane sensation dies away I have to check, only to find him staring up at me with those midnight eyes. He stares and stares like I just did all of this to him, instead of him doing it to me. I’ve made something happen that I didn’t even consider.
And I know what it is, too.
I made him want to do that. I somehow pushed him into this panting, slick-mouthed disaster, so fierce he doesn’t know how to check it, so greedy for me he can’t stop himself. And when I doubt myself on this he makes me believe.
He says:
‘You are more than I dared imagine you’d be.’
As though there was already a fantasy version of me in his head. There was already one, and apparently I just surpassed it. I stumbled and fumbled and spread myself out naked in front of him, and none of it was found wanting. In fact, he found all of that better, greater, more. Different, I think.
The way that he is different to me.
He’s assertive without being aggressive, sure of himself without arrogance, and kind in a way I could never have imagined. I thought he’d be sexually demanding, and instead he did something no one else has ever done before: he kissed my sex before I kissed his. He made me come before I did the same for him.
And for a moment all of those ideas are so overwhelming I just can’t help myself. I wait long enough for him to stand and then I just do it: I grab hold of his perfect, expensive shirt, only slightly rumpled and so soft to the touch. I grab it, and him, and I haul his mouth down onto mine.
I have to have his mouth on mine. He’s just done all of those things despite the fact that we’ve never actually kissed, so really I don’t even need to think about it. I don’t think about anything until I taste myself on his lips, and feel the amazing shape of them against mine – t
hough I wish I had.
I can already tell where I’ve gone wrong. I can sense the sudden stiffness in his body, and the lack of effort in his response. In fact, there isn’t any response to speak of. It’s like kissing a marble likeness, smooth and perfect but completely inert.
Or maybe inert is the wrong word. He isn’t still, after all. He’s vibrating just a little with a strange tension, and it’s this strange tension that finally makes me pull away.
I do it slowly, slowly, half-embarrassed and half-wondering. Is he really so averse to a kiss? Can it be possible, after everything we’ve just done? It doesn’t seem right somehow, and yet there it is. It’s in his expression, as flat and still as a glacial lake. And it’s in his eyes, as they ask me why, why did I have to spoil things?
But I can’t answer. How could I possibly? I filled my kiss with all the happiness in the world, and all the pleasure he gave me, given back.
And somehow poisoned him instead.
Chapter Six
I suppose I think it’s over. That’s how it seems, anyway – like something is done. He didn’t really want to do anything after the kiss, and I don’t blame him. I didn’t want to do anything either. I couldn’t even speak. The weight of his strange expression and his tensing body just sank me down, until it was time to leave.
Of course, he was a gentleman about it. He called me a taxi, and bid me a formal goodbye. It was all oddly respectful … but oh, it was the painful sort of respect. It was the excruciatingly polite kind that only served to remind me of the bad thing I did. I kissed him on the mouth like the cruel witch in a fairytale, and he duly fell down dead.
I just don’t know why. I don’t know why, damn it – but God, how I want to. I’d do anything to understand. I keep thinking about his stony face, and what it would take to get a chisel underneath the top layer. What question would work on him? What words could possibly unlock his hidden secrets?
I can hardly imagine.
And that’s probably my flaw. I’m not good enough for a puzzle like him. I don’t have his preternatural ability to ascertain every lie, or work out every problem. Instead I have to settle for answering the questions on this week’s edition of Mastermind, and I’ll be perfectly honest: it’s a very hollow substitute.
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