You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  But the first time he spurts into the sheets and all over me … he can’t seem to quite process it. His face stays red for the rest of the day, and occasionally I’ll see him with his hand over his eyes. I wonder if I’m going too far now.

  Until he does it again on the twenty-ninth, all wet and slippery and just ready to be rubbed into every bit of skin I’m exposing. ‘Go on,’ I tell him, ‘go on,’ only he doesn’t rub the stuff over my nipples, as I expect him to. He doesn’t urge the head of his still sticky cock over my belly or my thigh, hoping for more.

  He leans down and licks up the mess he’s just made instead. Face as red as it was yesterday – but with a different meaning now. He likes the humiliation, clearly. He craves it, in the same way I crave this strange, mute animal I’ve made, and it’s for this that I reward him.

  I lick him clean, in return – from the thick base of his cock to the still swollen head, in one long lap. While he turns to stone, on the bed. His mouth makes an O of surprise and his hands make fists at his sides, but none of that is what impresses me.

  It’s the way he keeps his hips on the bed. I can feel him straining to do it, and I know how much he wants to … but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do anything but watch, stunned, in a way that nearly sets me alight – though I can’t say why.

  Until I realise what it reminds me of. That expression of his; his trembling, near-rigid body; the tentative but rude way I’m licking him … it’s like a sort of mad first time. Somehow we’ve managed to turn the clock back ten years, and now we’re slumped in the backseat of my father’s Ford.

  And he’s gonna get it sooooo bad.

  * * *

  Especially after he’s told me, in this sweet sort of wavering tone, ‘It’s not thirty days yet.’

  And he’s right. It isn’t. But that’s not really the point, is it? No, the point is that despite all my idle thoughts about going too far – all of my musings and misgivings, tangling together one after the other – I’ve actually not gone quite far enough. I’m the one who’s holding back. He’s the one who’s pushing forward.

  I want twenty-nine days. He wants thirty.

  And, unfortunately for him, I just can’t give him that. I have to keep licking his slippery, still stiff cock until he moans for me and lets his eyes close, those thoughts of one more day slipping away from him as easily as a dream. And then, once that’s done, it’s a short trip to gasping and writhing, to his hands on the very outer edges of my hair – as though he can’t quite dare to hold me there.

  Not yet. Not yet.

  First he has to get permission. He has to wait and see what the new rules are for something as forbidden as sucking cock. Is he allowed to touch me while I do it? Can he lift his hips when I ease my mouth down over the swollen head of his prick? And more importantly: ‘Is it OK for me to come?’

  He gasps it out before I’ve even gotten to the good stuff – that kind of frantic, sloppy suck I love more than anything else – but I don’t mind. As much as I love the muteness, it’s good to hear him talk. Or beg, if I’m being more honest.

  Because that’s what he’s doing. His lips have set in one long mean line, and I can see him straining against the very thing he’s asking for. He’s five minutes away from his last orgasm, but he’s already on the cusp again, hovering, greedy, ready to spurt whenever I say.

  And I’ve no idea what’s more exciting: that he’s so quick off the trigger now, or that despite his overwhelming need to shoot he’s willing to wait for my permission. He’s more than willing to wait, in fact. He’s willing to dig his own fingernails into his upper thigh, to stop that feeling from taking over.

  Though I don’t think such small measures are going to help him for long. He tries biting into his lower lip – hard enough to show red, after a moment – but even that proves useless. He’s going to do it and I know it, which is why I suck at him harder. It’s why I rub his stiff shaft with one sticky hand, as I make slick circles around and around the head.

  I don’t want him to bite his lip, you see. I want him to just give in and fill my mouth with hot thick come – and, after a second more, he does. His hips jerk and his glorious groans fill the air, followed by the taste of him, oh that taste I’ve been missing, all this time.

  I won’t deny it. I milk him for all he’s worth. I keep going long past the point of his satisfaction, and right into the point where he’s embarrassed about what he’s done and oh so eager to make it up to me.

  And that’s fine by me. In fact, I think it’s a little more than fine. By the time he’s between my legs I’m fairly certain I’m shivering all over, in just the way he was only a few days before. And when he pushes his face between my legs, blindly, eagerly, I’m reminded of the way he bit through his own lip.

  Because I do it too. I do all the things he did – I moan before I’m supposed to, and writhe beneath the slow, slippery lick of his tongue on my clit – even though I don’t have a contract. I didn’t agree. I’m meant to be aloof, I think, I’m meant to be cool and collected and not this, not this … anything but this.

  I can’t be coming already, after barely more than a flick over my stiff little bud. But I am. I can feel it surging up through me, fierce and unchecked, and when it gets to my mouth I scream.

  Or at least I try to scream. I try to get out the noise that’s been building inside me all of this time, but when it comes to the crunch I’m wordless, soundless … I’m mute. I’m made mute by pleasure so intense it’s unbearable. I think I actually fight against it, as though my orgasm is an armed assailant who needs to be put down before he can do worse.

  Oh, I’ve got the feeling there’s going to be worse.

  After all, I’ve let it slip now. And I can see it on his face, too, once he’s done cleaning my slick folds. Once he’s up on his knees over me, smug smile on his too handsome face. He knows, I think. He knows what I haven’t, until this very moment.

  He’s not the slave at all.

  I am.

  New Dress

  Charlotte Stein

  I know I’ve said the wrong thing when everything goes deathly silent behind the bathroom door. But really, I can’t be blamed, can I? I mean, surely anyone else would have done the same thing, in my position. It sounded like he’d fallen down and seriously injured himself in there. It sounded like someone had snuck in through the bathroom window and decided to kill him.

  But now that everything’s quiet, and thrumming with a kind of mortification, I know that’s not the case. Those sounds I heard, of flesh hitting flesh and then the gasps and strange cries.

  Yeah. He was doing something sexual in there.

  A fool would know it, but apparently I’m a fool because I didn’t know. And now I’m just frozen to the spot outside the bathroom door, breathlessly anticipating his next move. Is he going to try to hedge it, and act as though nothing was going on? Laugh it off, and bluster his way out of there with his head held high?

  He’s not really that sort of guy, but I can imagine him at least trying.

  So it’s a shock when he doesn’t. In answer to my little ridiculous query – ‘Are you OK in there, Brad?’ – he just puts it right out there. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I need to finish. Can you give me a second?’

  All I can think is: dear God, finish what? Because I swear, if he’s jerking off in there, it’s the most violent masturbation session in the history of masturbation sessions. He’s in serious danger of amputating something if he carries on that way, but then … maybe he’s not doing anything like that.

  ‘Finish’ could mean anything. Could be that he’s in there doing some latest exercise craze, and if he doesn’t do all four hundred reps he’s going to lose that amazing muscle definition he so often flaunts about the house. There I am, reading my morning paper, and there he is, half-naked across the dining table we share, pyjama bottoms slung way too low on his solid hips.

  Everything about him screaming, Come for it, then.

  But I never do come for it, b
ecause what if I’m wrong? He’s just my flatmate. My strange, goofy and utterly handsome flatmate, who is currently in the bathroom, finishing a thousand sink pull-ups.

  ‘OK, well, I’ll just be in the living room,’ I say, which seems like a reasonable thing to go with. Or at least it does, until I consider another rather troubling possibility. One that sounds stupid coming out, but needs to be voiced anyway. ‘You’re not doing anything bad in there, are you?’

  Of course, I’m thinking of some pretty serious stuff. Razorblades cutting into his milk-pale skin, rivulets of blood running dark and red into the sink. Those little sounds bursting out of him whenever he slices a little too deep, and skirts close to the emergency room.

  I mean, I’m the one who’ll have to get him off the bathroom floor and drag him out. And though I have total faith in my ambulance-calling abilities, I’m not so sure if I have enough upper-body strength to get him into some sort of recovery position. He’s the size of a bus.

  A bus who then replies, ‘What do you mean by bad?’

  And though the words aren’t exactly inflammatory, there’s definitely something about his tone. Something I can’t place. Something far away and yet so close at the same time, like a hummingbird buzzing between us. Reach out for it, and it flits away.

  ‘I mean … you know. You’re not hurting yourself, are you?’

  Again, there’s this pause. One that I suppose sounds like it means something more, even though I don’t know what that something more is. It feels practised, that pause. It feels pregnant, despite the fact that I’ve never really thought a pause could actually be filled with gestating children.

  ‘No,’ he says, after a while.

  But it sounds like he’s lying.

  ‘Because you know, if you were, that’s OK. And you can talk to me about it, if you need to.’

  Another long, long pause. This one seems filled with more than babies.

  ‘You want me to talk about this?’

  He sounds incredulous. Like I just suggested he poke a hole in himself and let all of his guts spill out. Though, when I really think about it, that’s kind of what I have done. I’ve invited him to share something with me – something I don’t think I’m going to be prepared for.

  ‘Yeah. Why not? That’s what friends are for, right?’

  I honestly don’t think they’re for this, but hey. I’m knee-deep in his secrets now. I might as well continue into the swamp, to see what turns up. I mean, he’s a good guy. He deserves that much from me.

  ‘I guess. Though I don’t think you’re really going to want to hear about this.’

  My mind tries to go to a million weird things he could possibly be doing, but none of them seems possible. Instead, I’m just left with a pounding heart and this odd watery feeling running through me, as though a year of patient friendship with the guy behind the door has been leading to this … whatever this is.

  ‘Try me,’ I say, and then I hold my breath. He’s not really going to do it, is he? It’s entirely possible he won’t. It was only yesterday I found out that he has a brother and used to live in Maryland – it’s unlikely that he’s going to share intimate secrets through a bathroom door.

  ‘Maybe you should just come in, and see.’

  Well, I guess I was right on that front. He doesn’t want to share through a bathroom door. He wants me to come in, and for a moment I can’t. My heart has started pounding in my eyeballs. Those weird possibilities are beginning to take on some sort of form and shape in my mind, though things still aren’t exactly as I expect when I finally get the door open.

  He has his pants tugged down, for a start. And, although I know that should seem silly, somehow, there’s something about the sight of him like that … something I don’t quite anticipate. He looks rude, I think, rude and bad and filthy, trousers yanked to mid-thigh as though some mysterious intruder did it to him.

  And his flesh seems just so … exposed. At the best of times he’s the colour of a January sky, but right here and now his skin seems almost tenderly pale. I can see a thin tracery of veins here and there, faint and yet somehow vivid at the same time, and when he turns a little there’s something almost hypnotic about the muscles shifting in his thighs.

  For a second, I think I forgot he’s a big guy. But now that I’m really staring I can’t help but uncover a variety of little pleasures. Like the solid line of his legs, as they slide up into the curve of his ass. The hint of muscle twisting just above the line of his pubic hair and … oh my God, I’m looking at his pubic hair.

  Those dark curls – they’re … you know. His rude parts. And they get ruder the further down you go, because he’s not really trying to show what’s between his legs but he’s not really trying to hide it, either. I glance up at his face, briefly, and he just looks bashful and sort of mildly embarrassed, like maybe he wants me to look but isn’t sure how to properly go about it.

  Properly is dates and holding hands and do-you-want-to-come-ups. It isn’t this, and he obviously knows it.

  But I’m looking at his stiff cock, anyway. Because of course he’s stiff. How could he not be? He’s doing something rude in the bathroom and I just caught him, and now I’m stood here staring at him with a probably heated gaze.

  I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t look horrified by this. I can’t look horrified, because his cock is thick and curving and delicious, and at the tip I can see a lazy strand of fluid easing its way down, down over his shaft.

  I can’t deny it. There’s something almost unbearably arousing about that. It makes me think of words like shameless and whore, though God only knows who I’m applying them to. I mean, I’m swollen between my legs and far wetter than he is, but he doesn’t know it. I’m not yet worthy of a label as thrilling as slut.

  But he is.

  He looks like a slut. A bad, bad slut.

  ‘Are you disgusted?’ he asks, and my instinct is to say the strangest thing. I don’t find him disgusting – not in the slightest – and he’s so sweet that telling him something like that would probably hurt me in the same way that punching a kitten might. And yet, I kind of want to say it anyway.

  Yeah. Yeah, you’re disgusting, you little trollop.

  ‘No,’ I say, but it doesn’t sound as sure as I’d like it to. And when he turns just a little bit more, when he lets me see the curve of his ass more fully, I can’t stop my gasp escaping. I sound like a swooning maiden and he’s bound to think he really is being gross, but it’s just impossible to stop.

  Because he hasn’t just been jerking off in here. He’s been … hurting himself. Spanking himself, I guess, though the stark red marks on his flesh look like more than handprints. They’re so dark they’re almost bloody, burning hot close to the centre and then edging out into fans of mottled pink. In some places, I can see where the smacks have overlapped, lines almost like ridges crossing fainter ones – as though he had to up the stakes on every strike.

  And weirdly it’s this thought that makes me go all funny inside. He had to keep striving for harder, because a faint little love tap wasn’t enough. He needed more than that, craved more than that, and now this is the result.

  Him with his cock all swollen and rampant. Me with my nipples poking stiffly through the T-shirt I’m wearing.

  ‘Are you disgusted now?’ he asks, though I can’t for the life of me think what’s changed. Does he imagine that the stripes on his ass are going to be the thing that pushes me over the edge? I hate to disappoint him, but … I can’t say that’s the reaction I’m having.

  Instead, I think something intensely strange: the red looks so beautiful against the white. And those words, buzzing around my head and infiltrating things they shouldn’t, they make me want to ask a question.

  One that has no bearing on our relationship to date.

  ‘How did you make marks like that?’

  He glances at me – checking for evidence of disapproval, I think. But I don’t think it’s disapproval on my face. It feels like someth
ing else, something that’s sort of like telling someone off but maybe not in any real way.

  Maybe it’s more like a fantasy sort of way. You know, like when you play at being Batman as a kid, only, when you apprehend your friend who’s dressed up as the Joker, you’re not really apprehending him.

  You’re just sort of playing along. Slipping into a role. And, oh, this role feels like fine silk against my skin. It feels like a dress I’ve been wearing all my life, only it’s so sheer I can’t even see it when I look in the mirror.

  ‘I … uh …’ he starts, but I can’t let him carry on like that. He sounds pathetic and weak and small, and it’s simply not good enough.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say, and, although I don’t think I make my voice any different, something definitely happens to him when I do. His shoulders go back, his lips part. A new look comes into his eyes – one that I sort of recognise, but, oh God, not really.

  Oh, Lord, what am I doing?

  ‘I use this,’ he says, and then he shows me the little paddle in his hand.

  Of course, I have a very limited experience of stuff like that. I wouldn’t know one sex toy from another. But I understand this much: it has holes in it, which will almost certainly give a more painful blow. And it’s quite thin, too, so I imagine it stings when it hits.

  But, oh, he can’t possibly be getting a good swing on it. I think he’s making the marks by continually catching himself with the end of it, or maybe alternating between the paddle and one of his broad hands. But, of course, unless I see it for myself I’ve got no idea at all.

  ‘Show me,’ I say, and for a second he balks. His face reddens to the colour of his ass, and he plucks at the thing in his hand nervously. But then I settle my gaze on him – one that I intend as a kind of reminder of what I’ve already seen. Because, really, what does it matter now?

  But the thing is – I think it comes out harder than that. I think I feel cold, suddenly, behind my eyes. Like I should brook no refusal, even though I hardly know what something like that means.