You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  ‘You know what else she likes? When you gasp for her, nice and high. As though her pussy is the sweetest, hottest, wettest bliss you’ve ever felt around your cock. As though she caught you j-u-ust right, and now you’re thinking of every boring thing you can to hold off that almighty orgasm.’

  I can’t stop looking at him. I don’t think Sean can stop himself, either.

  ‘And you’re the authority,’ he says, in his best man-of-science voice, but Ryan seems unfazed. He doesn’t even look away from me to meet what I’m sure is Sean’s accusatory stare.

  ‘No, not the authority. It’d take years and years to puzzle someone like Tia out. But I’ll give you one more free tip.’ He leans in close, so close that he almost puts Sean off his stride. ‘If you get her as she’s about to come, and she’s shaking in just that way she is now, and you cover her mouth with yours – she’ll give it up, just like that. Right … into … your mouth.’

  And then he kisses me, he kisses me, he kisses me.

  Of course, he’s right. I come so hard that my body arches up off the bed, and he has to hold me down. Not Sean – Ryan. Ryan puts his big hands over my shoulders and I buck against them, long waves of sensation rolling up my body and out of my mouth, to pour into him.

  Always into him.

  And I think: you knew. You always knew. You let me fly away to far and different distant shores, just so that I could turn around again, and fly right back to you.

  I Have You

  Charlotte Stein

  I don’t react when he slides his hand down over my bare back. I’m used to not reacting. A hand can mean a million things, after all – a sign of solidarity, a touch of comfort, a suggestion that someone comes with you to the place you’re meant to be going. And for a second I’m sure his hand is all three of these things together, because really it can’t be anything else.

  I don’t know him, in that other way. The one where people tangle together and press their mouths to each other’s and feel that thing … What’s it called again? Pleasure, I think it is, but pleasure is so far away from me it might as well be on Mars.

  All I can do is dissect the various elements of his hand on my back: the way my skin almost seems to part beneath the press of his thumb. The way his knuckles feel when he turns his hand over and drags them down over me.

  They feel heavy, I think. The backs of his hands are heavy, though I can’t remember how I know this. When I close my eyes it’s as though I can hardly picture his face, but then he leans in quite unexpectedly and touches his mouth to the nape of my neck and suddenly I can see it all clear.

  He has brows that draw together too often, I’m sure, and eyes that are too often worried, and when the kiss on the back of my neck suddenly becomes hot and wet I think of his mouth. Soft, so soft, and promising so little.

  But it promises a lot, here. I can hear him breathing in between those kisses, ragged and not quite in control of himself and, though such a thing should make me nervous, I find I feel nothing instead. Nothing at all, except for the minutiae of what being kissed is actually like.

  I think I’m physically reacting to it, too. It’s sort of like cracking through an ice-covered pond, only to find hot lava underneath. My skin catches fire, my heart starts pounding thickly, sluggishly – though it doesn’t do so in my chest. It does so between my legs, where I’m somehow already wet even though this isn’t anything at all, really.

  I mean, it’s rude that my back is bare. And though I’ve crossed my arms over my chest in a big X, my breasts are bare too. I somehow never got around to putting my top on, and so here I sit on my bed, staring out of the window over the windy rain-slicked hills, in just a skirt.

  I must look like someone who’s lost all of their sense of self. Like I’m vacant, though as soon as I think the word my mind changes it to vacated. I’ve been vacated. Something has left me and I’m just a limp thing staring at a grey world in half my clothes.

  Aroused, but not really connected to my own arousal. In truth, I can hardly recall what arousal is – no more than I can remember the man behind me and his face of many parts – and I think so right up until he gets two hands on my hips and pushes me into a clumsy standing position, then begins ruffling up the skirt I don’t remember putting on.

  I think I know what he’s going to do. It’s obvious. But it’s still something of a shock when I feel his mouth searching blindly between my legs – shoving me when he can’t get at what he clearly needs to, the sounds he makes all desperate and somehow brutal at the same time.

  My nipples are stiff, now. I don’t even try to cover them. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, but I suppose someone could walk by and see me like this – expressionless, trembling, my breasts exposed for anyone to look at. And yet I don’t care. I don’t care about anything.

  And I have to confess, something about this intense sort of detachment excites me thoroughly. He’s licking me in a really dirty way, now – right between the cheeks of my arse – but I don’t give a damn. I just want to burn in that lava. I want to plunge right through the ice and boil alive.

  I come close, when he slides two fingers into my cunt.

  Of course I’m sure it should hurt. The position I’m in isn’t great – legs barely parted, stood as straight as an arrow – and I haven’t been fucked in an age. I should be locked tight, resistant somehow.

  And yet he just eases in as though I’ve turned to syrup, which I suppose in one way I have. I’m so wet I can feel it on my thighs, I can feel it sliding slickly around his fingers, and even if I couldn’t I’d know about it because of him.

  He makes a sound, a little moan of delight. My wetness stands in for my permission, and he fucks me roughly like that for a moment. Just in and out. Just good, firm thrusts that make me ache. And when I think I can’t bear it any more, he slides his fingers through my slit – backwards, everything’s backwards – and finds my embarrassingly swollen clit.

  ‘You like it,’ he says, in a tone that suggests he’s surprised. And then with more assuredness: ‘Oh yeah, you like it.’

  Who am I to deny him? I do like it. He knows exactly how to touch me – two fingertips just rubbing over the underside of my clit, back and forth, back and forth like a metronome – and it isn’t going to be long before I come.

  In fact, I think it’s going to happen in a short and rather humiliating amount of time. I’ve gone from trembling to shuddering and he keeps it up until I’m right on the precipice. I’m just about to do it, I’m really so very, gloriously close, and then he quite suddenly removes his hand.

  He bends me over at the waist, so that I’m almost leaning on the windowsill.

  He won’t actually fuck me, I think, frantically, but I’m wrong about that, too. I can feel something hot and smooth pressing between my legs, his hands on my thighs, urging and pushing them apart.

  It’s the only time the word don’t swells up in my mind, like an ancient artefact of the forgotten me. The woman I was knew how to say no, to stand up, to ask and demand and negotiate. But I am not that woman any more. I am this limp thing, bent over, something hot and solid sliding into my body as though I’m just a receptacle.

  Vacated, I think, and then he shoves into me again. Harder this time, but oh God, so much sweeter. I can hear him breathing again and this time it’s really rough. It’s bordering on a panting or a series of moans and I have to reach out and hold onto the windowsill just to keep myself steady. Just so that I have something to press my face against, the crook of my elbow, the soft turn of my forearm.

  I think I bite myself, when the actual and real pleasure builds to some terrible point. I’m going to come, I’m certain, even though hardly anything has happened and I’ve no more memory of orgasms than I do of any other pleasant thing.

  When it happens I’m still shocked. My entire body clenches against his now rapid and thrillingly forceful thrusts and I make a sound, a choking, half-sobbed sound, as my clit jerks and my cunt ripples around his cock.

>   When it’s done I realise that I really did sob. When I reach up and touch my face, my cheeks are wet with tears that I don’t remember crying.

  * * *

  The second time it happens I’m prepared. Or at least I think I am. I’m in the garden, fully dressed, so it’s hard to really expect something like his hands on my breasts, through my shirt.

  And he does it abruptly, too, like before. One second everything is normal: we’re talking about the gardenias and the old elm we’re stood by. Then the next he’s undoing my shirt right out in the open, fingers fumbling with the buttons, alternating between getting the material off me and fondling my bare breasts.

  Because of course I’m bare under the shirt. Maybe that’s what caught his notice – the shape of me beneath the thin cotton. The stiffness of my nipples in the cold, February air. It had started to mist a bit, so maybe the material had grown a little see-through.

  Now it’s completely see-through because he’s parted the two sides like wings, and before I can say or do anything he’s kissing me there. He’s kissing my breasts with that same hot, hungry mouth he had before.

  I don’t mind admitting that it feels good. I might have clung to some notion of restraint, before. Some remnant of what’s proper and right, in these circumstances – with everything that’s happened, you know – but I can’t any longer.

  He isn’t holding back. He licks over my nipples in the rudest way a person can, and I can’t help it. I have to bury my hands in his curly hair and hold tight to him as he does this to me. This thing, this thing – oh God, what is it again?

  I don’t know, but I moan to feel it.

  I moan to feel him shoving my skirt up, hands too desperate again. Everything about this is rough and jagged, like the feel of the tree bark pressing into my back. He’s going to take me against it, I think, but I don’t fully understand that concept until he does it.

  There’s too much to process. The way his cock feels, thrusting deeply inside me. His hair still in my hands and the smell of him when I press my face to the side of his neck, like soap and some distant memory I don’t want to unearth.

  I come embarrassingly quickly this time. So quickly I don’t even have a chance to think about it. The whole thing just swells up inside me and pours right out of my mouth in a way I didn’t let it before.

  ‘Oh just like that, yeah, like that, baby, do it, do it,’ I tell him. And then there is a whole host of pleasure sounds. Moans and groans and gasps of delight, as I do my best to work the last of it out on his still-solid cock.

  Of course he slows, as soon as I’m done. And then after a brief second to catch his breath he steps away from me. Buttons his trousers around his erection, tidies himself as though nothing happened. Like before, when I came around from the tears and the trembling to discover that he hadn’t finished but had left the scene of the crime anyway.

  Though it’s obvious why, I wish it wasn’t. I wish, I wish, I wish.

  But it remains so, all the same.

  * * *

  I don’t give him the chance this time. To surprise me, I mean. I strip off all my clothes, instead, and rather than waiting with my back turned I stand in the bedroom completely naked. I face him when he walks through the door.

  He looks surprised, the way I have felt surprised. Though I don’t think the two feelings are the same thing. One stems from the sight of me, so freely bared. The other is from the sense of some awakening, some pleasure I never thought I’d experience again.

  ‘Rebecca,’ he says, and his voice sounds so old and rusty. I think it’s because I can’t recall the last time he said my name. I’d started to think he’d forgotten it, but I can forgive him because I had forgotten his too.

  I remember it now. It’s hard to go to him and kiss him the way I used to. We used to tumble on to any available surface, tearing at each other’s clothes, hands so full of each other it felt like greed. But now I’m just so broken apart, I’m that ice, melted and shattered and torn up. And though the heat is back there’s still a flood of pain, too, when I kiss him.

  I take off his clothes, one item at a time. He lets me do it in the exact same way I let him do those things for me, only this time I won’t let it be detached, closed off, like a separate part of ourselves. I make him look me in the eye. I make him kiss me even though I can taste salt in his mouth and he’s shaking.

  He’s shaking the way I was, when he kissed my back and made me take that pleasure. He made me. I want to make him.

  ‘Rebecca, I –’ he starts, but I put a hand over his mouth. I tell him don’t, the way I probably should have by the window. But I didn’t, and now we’re almost back to life. We’re almost there.

  I don’t regret it. I can’t feel bad about wanting him. And I don’t think he feels bad, not exactly. He only holds out for a moment or two and then suddenly he’s pulling at his own clothes. His arms go around my middle and our naked bodies touch all the way down from chest to ankles, legs tangling briefly. The bed is waiting for us to spread ourselves all over it.

  I can feel how hard he is against my belly but it’s more than that. His teeth sink into my shoulder, his hands make bruises on my hips. And in return I give him as many marks, biting in places where I know it will show, then licking over every little sore spot I make.

  He used to love that. He loves it still. Before I’ve even gotten halfway down his body he’s moaning my name, hands in my mess of hair, hips rocking up against nothing. Just as he’s at that perfectly lost place, gaze untroubled, brow unrumpled, I take his thick cock into my mouth and suck so hard.

  Hard enough to make him gasp in a way that almost seems pained. Hard enough to make him thrust up and beg for more.

  ‘Like this?’ I ask. I drag my teeth over the length of his prick, before ending on the most lascivious lick I can manage.

  His head goes back against the pillow. He’s so close that I could tug him over the edge with just a little more. Clearly he hasn’t allowed himself to do anything beyond the things he’s done to me. He hasn’t given himself up to it, the way I did. And though I want him to there’s something I need a little more.

  When he’s just at that point of mindlessness, bucking and moaning and covering his eyes, I stalk up the bed and cover his body with mine.

  It isn’t difficult to take him inside me. I think he tries to stop me about halfway through, just as I ease myself down, hands on his shoulders, body thrumming with that new sort of heat. But when I lean over and kiss him he can’t seem to hold onto that note of protest. His eyes stay open and on me, so blue and startling it seems insane that I had forgotten.

  I’d forgotten what it was like to be gazed at. To be filled and fucked by him, slow at first but then faster, hotter. I twist above him, leaning back until I get that sweet pressure I crave, and when it comes it’s like nothing else in the world.

  ‘Oh God, Rebecca, don’t,’ he says, and I suppose he does because I’m really taking it now. I’m working myself on his cock, hips jerking, that pleasure cresting so swift and sharp I know I should be ashamed.

  But I can’t be, and he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be full of don’ts, I shouldn’t be full of don’ts: we’ve had too many already and they’ve taken us to pieces. Don’t be happy, don’t carry on, don’t live your lives the way you did before.

  ‘I’m going to,’ I tell him. ‘I will.’

  And then he puts his head back again for me, back arching, and I know he’s doing the thing he couldn’t before. He’s coming inside me, hard and almost vicious, fingers digging into my sides as the pleasure pours out of him and into me.

  Because that’s what it feels like. It’s like he’s releasing something through me, and the moment he does I shake with that same blissful sensation. Cunt clenching hard around his cock, my orgasm like a tight fist unfurling in my belly.

  It’s unbelievable. I’m sobbing with it, again – only this time it’s the good sort of sob. It feels like a relief, when I spread myself over him. And when he
wraps his arms around me, I can feel his relief too.

  ‘I didn’t know if it was okay to love you like this any more,’ he says, and his voice is so raw. It wasn’t even like this on the day she died, which I suppose should make me feel worse somehow. But it doesn’t.

  I feel light, suddenly, as though a wound has been lanced and everything heavy in it flowed out of me the moment he spoke.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I tell him. ‘It’s OK now. We still have each other.’

  And we do. We do. I remember his name. I remember his face. He’s not a stranger to me any more, just another ghost floating through the life we thought we’d have with our daughter.

  He’s real again to me. He’s mine. My husband.

  ‘We still have each other,’ he echoes, and as he does he cups my face in his hands. Lifts me from the crook of his shoulder so that he can see me. I think he sees me. I don’t think it’s just her hair and her eyes, any more – I think I’m me again.

  ‘You don’t have to be afraid, you know,’ I say. ‘If we had another it’s –’

  He shakes his head. Cuts me off.

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ he tells me. ‘I have you.’

  Don’t I

  Charlotte Stein

  I don’t know what I expect when I first step into the room. A mean-eyed creature, I suppose, with too much hair on his face and hands like shovels. He’ll stand straight away and use said shovels to knock me around the room for a bit, most likely, though I’m not sure where that assumption comes from.

  Movies, I think. Movies, in which the heroine is always punished for doing something as desperate as selling her body for cash. Of course, in these movies the hero usually swoops in and saves her right before she’s gang-raped or worse, but somehow I suspect that isn’t going to happen here.

  It’s just this. It’s just me, in a dress made for a smaller woman and heels too high for my body to cope with, red lipstick shining incongruously on my plain as paper face. And when he looks at me – this client – I feel all of these things even more keenly than I thought I would.