by Lee, Corri
"Not when I was seventeen, Blaze. What do you take me for?"
"You're only twenty-two?" He stared at me, surprised. "Well that explains the baby face but you seem much older. More mature." He frowned. "Too mature."
I considered probing into yet another asinine assessment of my personality, but decided against it when he shoved the first fork full of food into his mouth. That seemed to be a good indication that the conversation was over for now, but would probably crop up again somewhere down the road. Regardless, the reprieve was welcome, unlike the food, which I picked at unenthusiastically. It almost certainly tasted divine, but that was something I preferred not to find out.
Blaze, however, had no qualms about eating to excess. He ate like a man starved though he clearly wasn't, evident from the tightly packed muscles I'd felt on the few occasions I'd been close enough. There would be none of that if he didn't eat well and work for it, though I imagined him being the type who was lucky enough to be blessed with a hot body regardless of his holistic decisions. I still wanted to see that body, almost as much as I wanted to see Mr Money Clip out of his suit.
I watched Blaze with utmost fascination as he savoured every morsel like the meal had been prepared by gods. Food wasn't just a necessity to him, it seemed like a passion he enjoyed almost as much as he enjoyed causing trouble. And he was looking right at me. "Come on, Emmeline, I can hear your stomach rumbling from here. It's not a lunch date if I'm eating alone." Lunch date? The dirty D word was news to me.
"Sorry, I'm just a little calorie conscious," I picked one of small olives from the pizza topping, held it up between my fingers and grimaced, "I can feel myself expanding just thinking about the trans fats."
"Calorie conscious!" He snorted the words and wiped his face on a paper napkin, then his hands on his trouser leg before he folded his fingers under his chin and seemed to size me up. I suddenly felt more self-conscious than before, if that was even physically possible, and shrank down a few inches. "I don't know why you're bothered with nutritional value. You could stand to gain a few pounds. You're in a what? A size eight?" The raging insecurity got worse with his estimate.
"I'm a size twelve. A big twelve," I muttered quietly, discretely discarding the olive in a napkin, "I'm honestly a little chunky."
I'd come to expect any number of reactions to those five words over time. Laughter was the overruling response, followed by eye rolling and a failure to acknowledge. By no stretch of the imagination did I imagine he'd be angry.
"Chunky? You think you're chunky?" If I'd told him I thought I was the Antichrist he might have looked less annoyed. "I thought you had at least half a brain. Come with me."
Before I could say anything, his long fingers had wrapped around mine and I was on my feet, away from the busy dining room, in a vacant side room left open for customers waiting for taxis. Momentarily mesmerised by how fast we'd seemed to have moved, I barely noticed that Blaze was urgently tugging at the hem of my shirt. "Hey!"
"What is this?" He jabbed at the buckle fastened at my middle.
"A belt and a gross violation of my personal space? Are you not familiar with the saying 'noblesse oblige'? You're supposed to be a celebrity, a role model or... something." He ignored the complaint and pressed on, brow creased into three deep lines. "And why might you need to wear a belt? To stop your trousers falling down around your ankles? Might that suggest your clothes are too big?" He continued to mutter his rhetorical questions in a grumble as he foraged around for the size label in my linen trousers. I batted at his hands pointlessly and tried to pull my shirt down further than it could possibly cover. "You put extra holes in this belt...? My god, Emmeline..." And then he stopped completely still in his tracks and lifted my shirt an extra inch or two. The moment I realised what had caught his eye, I tried to twist away, but he snapped my name in a way I couldn't even imagine disobeying.
His fingers traced over the faded silver lines set into my skin from my left hip up, then followed the prominent ridges of my ribcage. Every touch felt like gentle and well-meaning torture, like slapping a child's hands for playing with knives, and it was the shame that paralysed me into place. What would he think when he saw my damage? Would he scold me like so many others and offer an endless stream of pity and bullshit encouragement? Would that be the end of our friendship, because I was just too much of a liability? Or was I now a pet project for him to 'cure'?
I still had no answer when he lifted the fabric further to see more of my ribs and sucked in his breath between his teeth. "Oh Emmeline, who made you feel this way?" It was another unusual reaction and made no way to dragging me from my stupor. The question everyone had failed to ask when it mattered came from a man who didn't know me from Adam, but yet seemed to know me better than anyone.
He regrouped far more quickly than I did, diverting his search for the label to a search for the fabric of my underwear and taking a quick peek under my shirt to check out my bra. "Hey!"
"Relax, I'm just checking they match. I'm taking you shopping."
"I can't affo—" The lie wouldn't come. If I swallowed my pride, I had enough money in a separate bank account to buy a fairly large and needlessly luxurious townhouse. Allowing Henry to siphon some of his wealth into an allowance was one of the few concessions I'd made to get him to agree to me moving out without torturing my mother over my financial situation on a daily basis. He'd gone over the top, obviously, and the account was bound to have accumulated interest. I might not have wanted to touch his blood money, but I couldn't deny that I had it. Not to Blaze. "I really hate shopping."
"Well tough." He grabbed my hand again and pulled me back to our table, pushing me down by the shoulders into my seat. "But first you're going to eat. You're not even a size eight. If I see you calculating calories, I'm just going to pin you down and feed you that way."
I was damned if I was going back down that path.
Five
I MUST HAVE eaten my body weight in garlic bread before Blaze let me leave the table of the pizzeria, feeling sleepy, overstuffed and greasy. As I'd expected, the food was delicious, but there were enough people in that dining room to stop me losing myself in the flavours. It felt like I had a captive audience as ever, watching each bite eagerly with their fingers gripping into the wooden table tops, wondering if this mouthful would make the girl so slight erupt like an emetic volcano. They knew that much was inevitable— I was positively green when we slumped back out into the big, wide, crowded world.
Blaze had at least had the decency to exercise his pushy concern in a way that didn't make me feel observed. Even though I knew he was considering all the reasons why I might have such a dire appetite and a torso like road kill, his insistence that I ate what he'd served onto my plate was gentle, unlike the army drill sergeant attitudes that had been utilised by just about everyone else. What he'd laid out hadn't been excessive, but enough for me to struggle. Like a child, he enticed and bribed me to keep eating until he could tell that it would do more harm than good. I didn't clear the plate, but I'd eaten. That seemed to be good enough for him.
And I'd eaten for no reason other than to wipe the anxiety off his face. I'd never cared before, why did I care now? For him? Not even Hunter's 'encouragement' had worked as well as Blaze's.
A part of me had dared to hope that he was joking about shopping, but the looming buildings of Oxford Street slipping back into view squashed any of that fruitless optimism right down into the ground. Blaze ignored my audible groan and pulled me into a department store that was too bright and too frantically loud. Finely-polished women wearing too much make-up swirled around us dressed in fine black tunics. As soon as they spotted him, they gushed with almost disgusting streams of salesmanship jargon and far too obvious lust for him. Like I had when Jonathan had joked about roping him into their gay soiree, I began to feel unjustifiably territorial. My grip tightened around our already linked fingers— a way in which Blaze preferred to walk with me. I wouldn't lose him to one of those super sleek
jezebels, even if he wasn't really mine to lose.
Our pace didn't slow until we found the women's department, full of svelte housewives and rubbernecking teenagers who pointed and whispered between themselves. Don't worry, they're not interested in you, the fat girl whispered next to me, pointing incredulously at scrap of material that barely qualified as a skirt, nobody is ever really interested in you. My pace stalled, though not enough to deter Blaze from an energised trawl of the shop floor, picking up garments at random and slinging them over the arm that joined with mine. They were all so small and in sizes that surely wouldn't fit. The styles were all super urbane like the stranger in the suit or daringly low cut and revealing, so far removed from the comfort zone of my linen trousers and work shirts.
After a ten minute surge of power shopping, I found myself shoved into a dressing room. In fact, I found myself shoved into several dressing rooms in several shops that provided less than complimentary lighting and mirror combinations, and pumped loud obnoxious music into the building via loud speakers that always seemed to be right over wherever I stood. Sensory overload.
"You know what really frustrates me about you?" Blaze called to me through a curtain that barely covered the gap into the small vestibule with mirrors on all three solid sides. I pulled it across and waved a hand at the outfit I was wearing— a denim skirt that showed far too much leg and some kind of chiffon sleeveless shirt, both in a minuscule size six. I was being forced to seriously reconsider how I dressed myself.
"Everything I imagine."
"Other than everything." He grinned and gave a thumbs up to the outfit, just as he had for nearly every other outfit he'd forced me to try on. The stack of bags behind his feet was embarrassing, and we'd never stopped to pay for anything. It had all materialised, already packed and ready to walk out with when I re-emerged from the dressing rooms wearing my own trash-sack clothing. I would undoubtedly analyse the hell out the situation at Esme's that night. "I never know what you're thinking. You must be a real nightmare to date."
"I thought you had me pegged?" We caught each other in a sceptical eye lock for a moment before I pulled the curtain back across. "I wouldn't know, I've never dated."
"Never? Why the hell not?"
"I just don't. And nobody has ever tried to convince me to do so." Not that I'd given anyone half the chance. Blaze already knew that I couldn't get attached, and if he hadn't guessed by now that it was nigh on impossible to convince me to change my habits, he'd been walking with his eyes closed.
"You know why that is? Nobody knows where they stand with you. You treat your family like your enemies, your enemies like your friends and your friends like your family. God knows how you treat lovers... Wait, you're a not a vi—"
Not really caring that I was wearing nothing but my underwear, I whipped the curtain back fast enough to shock him. "No! What do you take me for? I've probably had more sex this year than you have in your lifetime. You'd be hard pushed to find someone I haven't... you know." Embarrassingly, most of the faces I'd seen in that particular shop had been underneath me at some point. In open air, the scathing expressions were all generic and the same. In smaller, more intimate areas, I recognised every single face and they recognised me too.
Blaze's eyes flittered across my mostly naked form for a brief moment, purposely avoiding the scars on my left side, then settled back at my face. "When was the last time you left Esme's alone?" My mouth twisted ruefully. I couldn't give an accurate answer so I preferred to give none. "The night we met?"
"Esme." His jaw dropped, eyes flooding with the same look I'd seen on Chris' face when I caught him watching lesbian pornography at a LAN party.
"You're bisexual?"
"No, I'm just not fussy. I don't put any emotional value in sex. It's just something I enjoy and it feels the same whoever does it. Well, better if one of my friends does it because they obviously they know my sweet spots."
"The gay couple?" I flushed scarlet. Even Daniel and Jonathan found themselves curious on occasion, and after all Daniel had done for me when I was younger, I was only too happy to offer my 'services'. "The big nerdy guy?"
"Chris," I raised a finger to Blaze's face severely, "would surprise you."
"It's not emotionally significant to you at all?" His baffled eyes darkened and smouldered, shifting into a look that made my insides clench. Dear god... Is he turned on? "You have sex with your friends, then go on like nothing ever happened? You don't just throw everyone onto the discard heap?"
"There are loopholes..." My voice muted to a whisper, unsure of his reaction. It would have been a great time to call me a whore and leave me stranded, but I didn't think he had it in him to do something like that.
"Loopholes?" His voice took on a low growl that sent a frisson of static through the small space between us. It was the same growl from when he'd unpinned my hair at Hyde Park, and again, I felt like I was about to get eaten alive. "Why the hell didn't you say so before?"
Before I could respond, he grabbed me by the waist and pushed me back into the dressing room until my back crushed against the mirror. His hands moved into my hair and his mouth met mine, teeth clashing at the ferocity with which he kissed me. He ate me like he ate his food— ravenous and mad for it.
"Looking at you in all those tiny outfits— Shit!" He ducked down to divest us both of our lower garments, grabbed my legs and pulled them around his waist, impaling me in one swift movement. My fingers clawed into the back of his neck, then grabbed for the indiscreetly left open curtain. My legs tightened around him, pulling him closer to me, and I clung to him while he fucked me until I was rigid. It was the realisation of what I'd wanted for the past nine days and better than the fantasy. My hands slipped under the fabric of his t-shirt to discover whether his body was what I'd imagined.
It was. Toned slabs of hard but not overly pronounced muscle tensing intermittently in my hands as he moved. His back was just as firm, and tightened when I dug my nails into the sinew in response to a particularly tactical thrust. Sweat started to bead on his skin, so he paused to rid himself of his t-shirt.
"Holy shit, Blaze!" I leered appreciatively, tongue trapped between my canines. Seeing it was better than feeling it, all the finely shaped bronze flesh of him, hot and pressed against me. He smirked wolfishly and leaned in to clamp his teeth around my bottom lip.
"Why, Miss White," he purred, flexing back into a steady rhythm, "are you objectifying me?"
"Objectifying the shit out of you. And I don't even know your surname."
"Vixen."
We laughed for a moment before need and lust took over and drove us into a fast, desperate plea to find our release in each other. We mingled together, heavy breathed, in tune, nose to nose, eye to eye and trapped in the moment, until my head fell back against the mirror and my body went lax, awash with satisfaction and a hot blast of relief. And something else. Something stronger than I'd ever felt before. Affection and gratitude— not for the orgasm but for the man who'd provoked it. For the sheer fact I'd found him.
IN that moment, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a train track staring directly into the rapidly approaching headlights. Something that I'd kept so separate from my emotions for so long had opened a floodgate I'd only ever hoped to be unlocked by one person. I'd fantasised about the same kind of needy, charged sex before, and it had always been a fantasy involving Hunter. That was always how I'd imagined it would be when two kindred spirits opened up to each other intimately. My universe shifted and centred around Blaze, a man I barely knew but knew me better than anyone else. I was cut wide open and weak for him to see, vulnerable and feeling like a liar.
I didn't delude myself into thinking that he didn't see the cataclysm of emotions that coursed through me as I hung limp against him, desperately trying to gather my scattered wits. Neither would I insult him by denying it if he broached the subject. For the sake of my own sanity, I was prepared to be honest and cut him off completely. He'd been lured in only by the prom
ise of my detachment and I'd failed to provide that— he'd wanted the connection even less than I had.
But when I looked up, I could see in his eyes that he was on those train tracks with me. His face said exactly what we were both too afraid to put into words; this wasn't supposed to happen. After such a short period of association, my confession to being loose and his fucking me senseless had thrown the flame on the kindling we had no idea we'd set out. Lust had become something almost too painful to bear and led us down a path neither of us wanted to tread for any number of reasons. We both had fallen, hard and fast, into a dangerous place that would undoubtedly make us do crazy things to each other.
When our breathing steadied, we stood in an awkward silence, him still semi-hard inside me and both of us mostly stripped naked. The buzzing voices outside reminded me where we were and pure panic set in. Any normal couple engaging in a danger fuck in a changing room would be big news, but something like this would have me identified. A fast exit was necessary if we stood any chance of escaping without our names sprawled out across gossip columns— my name well known even if the face wasn't. Like this situation wasn't stressful enough.
Without looking at him, I separated our bodies and grabbed my scruffy shirt from the hook stuck to one of the mirrors. When my arm twisted around him, he caught it by the elbow and squeezed gently. "Emmeline." A silent agreement passed between us that our ugly feelings would go undiscussed but frequently indulged— the craziness would be allowed to happen even though we'd deny it existed out loud. Whatever it was we thought we felt wouldn't be given a name or taken too seriously. If we talked about it, that made it real. It was enough that we secretly knew it was there, knew that the other was aware, and would consider it a guilty pleasure.
He burned with covert passion for me, and only me, and I was right there with him. Caught in his flame and scorching, he was the distraction I dreamed of. How long that would last remained a mystery, but whether or not it was temporary, there was no way I'd walk away from him with anything less than third degree burns.