You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  But I think of all of these things now, because when I put my mouth on him all of them are reframed entirely. It’s not just a hint. It’s right there in my face—that his hands make me so swollen and slippery, between my legs. That the feel of his body against mine stiffens my nipples, whether I want it to, or not.

  And it’s not just because he’s a man, underneath it all. It’s because his name is Merrith, I think. It’s because he stares and stares at me as though I’ve suddenly become some entirely different sort of creature, and the longer he does the stronger that feeling gets between my legs. Usually it’s just this syrupy sort of thing, borne of the pulling sensation and the laxness and some sort of internal confusion.

  But now I can actually make it out, distinctly, and put a name to it, without shame. I’m aroused. I’m aroused because of the things he does to me, and because of that sense of an absent need in him. He doesn’t even know what sex is, anymore—but that’s all right.

  I do.

  ‘It’s like this,’ I tell him, and then I take his hand just as the music cycles back up again. I slip my fingers around his waist, and lead him into a different sort of dance.

  One that ends up on the bed.

  Of course, he doesn’t do any of the things you’re supposed to, once we’re there. He doesn’t tear my clothes off, or tear his clothes off, or rut against me frantically—though it doesn’t matter, really. There’s at least one of us doing all of those things, as greedily as I’ve ever felt myself be.

  In fact, I’m not even sure if I have ever been this greedy. My fingers feel oddly numb and fumbly, unable to do something as simple as make my body naked. And when I try to do the same thing to him, the effect is tripled. Quadrupled. I’m practically paralysed by the sight of so much of him, so pale he’s almost translucent. Every muscle and line in the exact right place, even though I’d kind of expected to uncover something strange.

  Like maybe he’d turn out to be a satyr or worse, underneath his clothes. There’d be fur in all the places I haven’t yet seen, and hooves where his feet should be—but of course there’s none of that. He’s perfectly formed, perfectly man-shaped, and more than this … he’s remembering fast, for someone who seems so dazed.

  Between his legs he’s thick, and stiff. And though I suppose it should be this that frightens me, it isn’t. It’s the other thing, it’s the crunch, it’s the bitter bleakness of having that hole in my gas line and seeing the night come down, down, down. Whereas this, by comparison …

  This is something I’m asking for. It’s the first thing I’ve asked for. And it seems the moment I do, he’s willing to give it. He even runs one cool hand over the length of my spread body, in an echo of the thing I do to him, the moment I have the chance. I just reach up and feel every inch of his skin, feel his cock all perfectly right and normal, and in response he touches me there, too.

  Between my legs, I mean.

  And when he does, it’s so soft, so soft it’s almost too much. It’s the reverse again of everything that’s come before—or at least I think it is, until I go back over it all. I think about his mouth again, and his teeth, and the way he held me, as he slides one finger through my slippery slit in the exact same manner.

  Steadily, slowly, with deliberation, I think. I’m an animal he needs to calm and make still, before he can stroke it. Before he can map it out, with curious fingers—because God, that’s what it feels like.

  I’m being mapped out. He needs to rediscover everything, like the exact shape of my stiff clit. He just follows all the grooves and folds surrounding it, everything getting steadily slicker until I know I should be embarrassed.

  But I’m not. I’m not even embarrassed when he finds my greedy cunt and eases just one finger in, all slow and slippery, working back and forth before I’ve had the chance to really consider—and when I do, they aren’t normal thoughts. Yeah, I think, when he twists those digits inside me and finds some good good place. Fuck my tight little pussy.

  Whereas his responses are the innocent ones, for once. The expression on his face is near-startled, almost curious—as though he hadn’t realised a woman could be all slick there, like this. And he absolutely didn’t know that I could squirm for him and moan for him and urge him to do it harder.

  ‘Is this what you are asking me for?’ he says, but it isn’t in the voice I’ve come to know. There’s an accent there now, somewhere behind the false façade of his American one. A thick one, a guttural one, that runs right out of his mouth and all over my body, a second before his hand follows it.

  He’s caressing me, now, I think, but of course doing so makes answering him hard. All I want to focus on is how his hands feel—the one that’s stroking over my breasts as though he’s actually and gradually coming to know what this all means, and the one that remains between my legs, rubbing and rubbing in that maddening way.

  Until I say:

  ‘Yes.’

  And then after he just leans down, as slow as syrup. That curious, questioning look so clear on his face, a moment before he does something that makes me cover my eyes with my hands. I can’t watch, I just can’t—though of course I realise a moment later what those words mean.

  They’re what the heroine of a horror movie would say, just before she sees a loved one getting eaten by the creature from beyond. It’s what I should have said, when he first stalked towards me, teeth bared.

  But I didn’t. Instead I do it now, as he licks one long stripe through my spread sex. I cover my eyes and imagine running up the stairs rather than going out the front door, while he tastes me in the same way he recently tasted my blood. Greedily, so greedily, and with just enough finesse to make me twist on the bed.

  It won’t take long, I think. I’m even further out onto that edge than I imagined I was, though I swear I didn’t imagine much of it at all. I never pictured him rubbing that red, red tongue back and forth, over my swollen clit. I didn’t think he’d ever want me to cry out in something other than fear or pain—but I do.

  ‘Merrith,’ I say, and I don’t do it quietly. It rings out over the ever-repeating song, so loud and so obvious that I’m sure he’s going to stop now. He’s going to take it away from me again, and go back to the way things were. He’s tried this and found it wanting, even if his grasping hands and his hungry, generous mouth suggest otherwise.

  He’s almost eating at me, now. I can feel the glancing edge of his teeth, whenever he insinuates his mouth through my folds. I can feel his hot breath rushing over me, when he licks and licks over the entrance to my cunt—as though he can’t wait for more, now. He has to stuff it all into his mouth, quick, before it comes to the only kind of ending it can.

  I’m going to die of pleasure, I know it. I’m too weak to resist, too weak to do anything but lie here and feel this bloom of sensation in my sex, working its way up through my body until it has me around the throat. And when it finally does come, and I arch my back for it and cry his name again, I’m almost stunned to find I’m still conscious, at the end.

  My eyes are closed and I’m barely breathing, but I’m here, I’m here. I’m alive and I remain so, in those arms that go around me. He doesn’t try to bite me again, or force me into some strange perverted memory he has, of what sex is supposed to be.

  He just takes me like that, on my back, slow and almost languorous. Each thrust like rolling thunder, while the needle scratches and scratches on the record and the crooner tells the tale for me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, he says, just as I dig my nails into Merrith’s back. They make a little popping sound as they pierce his flesh, so faint you could almost miss it.

  Though of course my vampire doesn’t. He hisses for me, instead, and bares his teeth, but now they’re blunt and harmless—not so scary, anymore. And when I bare my own teeth back at him he retreats, just a little, even as my body keeps him right where he is.

  I’ve drawn blood, now. I’ve held him tight inside my slick heat, and though he makes a show of resisting I can hear
that sigh in the back of his throat. I know what the expression on his face means—I’ve seen it a hundred times before.

  ‘Please,’ he says to me, like the last little dot on the final i of the contract.

  And then I roll my hips, just so. I work myself on his cock, over and over, until the pleasure swells through me as fiercely as it did a moment ago—only better, this time. Sweeter. I feel him cling to me as it takes me down, because he’s drowning, too.

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ he tells me, in his new voice—as the pleasure makes him arch his back and jerk his hips too hard, against my still swollen sex. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  But he doesn’t have to tell me about that. I know what forgetting is.

  I used to be human, after all.

  But now I don’t even remember what that is.

  I Am

  Charlotte Stein

  On the first day, he’s cocky and confident, full of vim. He kisses me on the cheek over breakfast, and mentions something interesting from his newspaper. Life is good, he thinks. Happiness is still total. How safe we feel, at moments like these.

  But of course by day three the cracks are starting to show. There’s no kiss for me over breakfast, and he can’t seem to concentrate on his newspaper long enough to share a tidbit.

  He’s biting his nails again, I see.

  And by day seven, they’re down to the quick. ‘Look at the mess I’m making,’ he says to me. ‘Look at what you’re doing to me.’

  But of course it’s not really what I’m doing to him at all. He was the one who wanted this. He named the number of days, face as pink and excited as a sex organ I didn’t know he possessed.

  ‘Thirty,’ he’d said, and after he’d named the number he’d listed the possible tricks he’d use to wheedle out of it. ‘Guilt,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll try to guilt you.’

  And bitten nails definitely count as such. They count so much I almost waver, but at the last second I remember. I fold the paper I’ve started reading, and cross my legs in the way he used to do, back when he was strong and brave and still himself. And then I tell him, ‘I’m sure you can weather a little tension.’ In a way that suggests I’ve learned my lessons well.

  ‘Don’t show me any mercy,’ he’d said. ‘Be glacial, be aloof. Make me believe it.’ And I think I’m getting there, I really do. His face sinks and those bitten fingers drop to his sides, as though he’s already abandoned all hope.

  I’m the keeper of such things now. I am in charge of what he thinks and feels, and by day nineteen what he’s thinking and feeling seems to centre around a kind of tremulous desperation.

  I see him going about his usual tasks – shaving, eating dinner, preparing for work – but it’s like he’s a different person doing them all. Someone else has taken over his insides, and, though he can smile and nod and play the part of a normal guy, he no longer really is.

  He’s mine. He’s my raw, trembling creature. He can’t move an inch without feeling my cool eyes on him; he can’t feel my hand on his shoulder without shuddering. ‘Don’t,’ he tells me, ‘don’t.’

  But it’s day twenty-one now. It’s time for the next stage of things, just like he asked. ‘The first ten days are all about acclimatisation,’ he’d said, ‘when I’m still fresh and vital and sure of myself. The second set of ten days, I’ll start to falter, to wheedle, to beg. I’ll test you for cracks.

  ‘And finally … the last ten days.

  ‘Where you test me for cracks.’

  And I do. I lie on our bed in barely anything at all, and then I wait, for him to notice all the things he doesn’t want to – like the hint of stiff nipple beneath a fold of material, or the glimmer of something that isn’t glitter on my inner thigh. They all say in various ways that I’m as aroused as he is, with a few minor differences.

  His face is always flushed now. Mine is not. His eyes are glazed, and they claw at me whenever I’m in the same room as him. Whereas my gaze is detached, calm – I swear I barely care.

  And, of course, there’s one particularly unfair sign that I never have to wear, and he always does.

  He’s almost constantly hard, now. He goes to work with a stiff cock pushed under something suitably restraining, and comes to bed with the evidence like a fist beneath his pyjamas. I can see it everywhere, all the time – even in the smallest things, like the way he walks.

  But he can’t have the same from me. He can only tell when I let him, when my arousal will give him the most discomfort, the most cause to break. It’s bedtime now, his expression seems to say. Can’t we just … can’t I just … why are you dressed like that if we can’t just …?

  But even if I wanted to, I don’t think I would, at this point. He could tear the terms of our agreement up right in front of me, say a safe word, beg me to give in … and I’m not even sure it would matter.

  I don’t want to give in. I’m as lost as he is now. He’s buried me deep beneath the causeway of his own desires, and I have no will to dig myself out. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘please,’ but he might as well be talking another language.

  I’m too far beneath the earth to hear him. Too ready for the next part of the game – the thought of which is almost enough to make me orgasm, all on its own. I simply stand somewhere innocuous – the shower, the break room at work, anywhere at all, really – and the idea comes on me like a thief.

  And then steals all of my senses. I’m left breathless before we’ve even begun, aching in every part of my body. I want you, I think, I want you.

  But I don’t let him see.

  Instead, I change the landscape of the game. It becomes a kind of deception, everything designed to keep the focus on him and away from me. And by the twenty-fifth day I realise just what’s happening to the person I thought I was. I was sure I was kind, not cruel. Excitable, not cold.

  But it feels cold when I tell him he can no longer wear clothes in the house.

  ‘They interfere with my view,’ I tell him, as he looks at me with new eyes. They used to be placid, still eyes, but now they’re nothing but fever fever fever all the time. And, though he tries his best to contain that constant shaking, he can’t, once he’s bare.

  He can’t contain anything. He can’t hide anything.

  Just as I can no longer hide anything from myself.

  I like the cold, I know. I like it when it scythes its way down my back, as he turns around in front of me – slowly, slowly. It takes him some effort to do it – his legs no longer want to hold him up, it seems – but finally he gets there. He shows me the firm curve of his ass and those shoulders my libido goes mad for, like a model who’s been told that this is what she’s here for.

  To be my slut. To be my slave.

  ‘Now what do you want me to do?’ he asks, in a voice that is no longer his. He had a deep, sonorous voice, I remember. Now it’s like the wind whistling down an empty tunnel. He’s empty, and he’s just waiting for me to fill him up.

  ‘Why don’t you go get me a glass of lemonade?’ I say, even though that was never part of the deal. ‘I want the tease,’ he’d told me. ‘I want to learn patience.’ But this isn’t about patience any more.

  And I can see that he knows this, by the expression on his face.

  He looks like a skydiver on the verge of jumping.

  ‘OK,’ he tells me, and this time the whistling isn’t quite there. His voice is sturdy, suddenly, and almost the way it was before, as though he’s found a new sort of confidence at the bottom of himself.

  Unfortunate, really, that my next words strip it away again.

  ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘Not on your feet.’

  And then I wait, until he registers the words and turns, halfway to the kitchen. I watch him freeze in a way that shouldn’t thrill me but does anyway. He’s mine, you see. He’s mine he’s mine he’s mine, always.

  ‘On your knees.’

  ‘You want me to …’

  ‘I want you to get my lemonade, while on your knees,’ I repeat, and I swear for one lo
ng moment I’m sure he’s going to balk. He does have a safe word – he could use it if he wanted. Or maybe he could just remind me of the terms of our agreement, and point out that there’s nothing about knees in there.

  He could. In fact, it’s so plausible I’m holding my breath over it.

  Which only makes his obedience sweeter in the end. I watch him slide down to the floor, and with it goes all of the tension in me, all of the things I’m unsure of. This is how things are now, I see. He’s going to crawl to the kitchen and struggle to get me a glass of lemonade, and then I’m going to drink it, while doing something lewd.

  Like looking at his cock.

  Oh, his gorgeous cock. He’s so hard, by this point, that it’s almost impossible to resist. When he slinks across the floorboards he leaves a trail of pre-come, and even with him on all fours like that I can see it straining towards me. I can make out the swollen head, all glossy and red and just waiting for something good.

  A treat, I think, to reward him for his incredible behaviour.

  But I don’t give him one until the twenty-ninth night. By then he’s stopped shaving. He doesn’t seem capable of it any more, and he hardly ever speaks – I have to call his work for him, and tell them that he’s sick.

  While he eyes me in this wild sort of way, as though I’ve uncovered some new species of animal and let him free in our apartment. He bites, if I get my hand too close, and he growls if I hint at a touch I never actually get around to, and best of all, oh best of all …

  He’s started coming in his sleep.

  The first time he does it, he’s mortified – I can tell. I mean, he has almost no shame now. He’ll walk around naked for me and pose for me in various undignified positions, and, when I ask him to do worse, he does it without a flicker of resistance. He’ll finger his ass now, if I ask him to. He’ll soap his body in the shower for my delectation, and kiss my feet at the barest sign that I want him to.