You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  Seriously – where has this genius been my whole life? Why have I settled for less, when I could have had this? I mean, for God’s sake – I nodded my head at him, over the copy machine. Which now seems like a crime punishable only by death.

  From incredible orgasms.

  ‘Stop,’ I tell him. ‘Stop.’

  But of course he doesn’t. He’s on a mission, now, to make me collapse – and I know it is a mission. I can feel his fingers really digging into my ass, to keep me where I am. And when I manage to wriggle my hips he stays with me. He keeps his tongue on my clit, pressing now in this rhythmic, unsettling way that sets my nerves jangling.

  It’s not going to be long, I know. I can feel a different sort of orgasm building at that point of connection, so intense it’s like burning. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to take it, but when it finally starts to break he keeps me rooted to him – like some unsteady tree that’s somehow grown right out of his face.

  I’m more connected to him, I realise, than to my last three boyfriends. There’s nothing between us. No whisper of material, no veil of propriety or personal space. He’s right up against me, right there with me, and, once he’s done, that feeling doesn’t go. He stands and steps back, but I can still see me all over his face.

  And I can feel that hunger for me burning right out of him, too raw and real. This is what sex is, I think, but of course I can’t actually say. It would seem like the kid who wasn’t paying attention in class suddenly raising their hand to tell everyone that maths is about numbers.

  It seems obvious, now. But I’ve been in the slow sexual group for far too long to actually say so. Instead I let him kiss me with his glossy mouth, stunned by the taste of myself but unable to say that, too. Other girls … they’ve probably tasted themselves a million times. They’ve kissed like this: open-mouthed and ravenous, the rhythm of it so much like sex that I have to stop and check we’re not actually doing it.

  And they probably have men turn them around all the time, to bend them over things.

  ‘Put your hands on the table,’ he says, and, God help me, I do, I do. I can hear him unbuckling and unzipping, and even that doesn’t make me hesitate. I just want to feel him unleash some of that hunger, in something other than my direction.

  I want to see what it’s like when it’s turned around on him. Will he moan the way I did, grunt the way I did – will he pull me back onto his cock in a desperate sort of way? I don’t know, I don’t know, and that’s the kicker.

  I’m fumbling blind through a forest of him, unearthing each delight along the way. Never sure if it’s going to be something thrilling or frightening, right on the edge that’s now as sharp as a knife.

  And then I feel him, condom-covered but still somehow dangerous and dirty and oh so good, sliding and sliding through my slit. And I hear him, too – oh, the sound he makes when I spread my legs wider in this agitated sort of way, wanting more but not sure how to say it. How do you ask for more from someone you’ve barely spoken to?

  By rubbing yourself against him like a rutting animal, it seems.

  He doesn’t even have to say anything in response. He gets the message loud and clear, and rubs right back against me. I’ve practically mapped every inch of his cock with my tender, swollen lips by the time he finally eases his way inside, though it’s different once he’s there. Bigger, thicker, forcing and spreading me open in a way that makes me gasp.

  ‘OK?’ he asks, but that’s all I get. That one chance to tell him I can’t take it, a second before he fucks into me again. And then again, hard enough to almost sprawl me over the table. Hard enough to send a deep, heavy sensation through my belly and out of my open mouth.

  I have to wonder: did he really think I was going to say no to this? Oh, God, I can’t even say no to it when he jolts into me over and over, hands so tight on my hips I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I’m going to come again, I know, but I can’t accept it.

  It’s just too easy.

  He makes it too easy. He moans my name, breathlessly, and pounds that gloriously thick cock into me, and right when he’s on the brink, right when he’s shuddering and losing himself the way I already have, I lose it too.

  I draw patterns in the wood of his table with my fingernails. I shout the name I’m only partially sure is the right one, and strain to get more of what he’s giving – this intense, pulsing sensation, so unrelenting it’s almost like pain. It makes me want to struggle against it, as much as it makes me want more.

  And then it’s over, and the choice is made.

  ‘Again,’ I tell him. ‘Do it again.’

  But he just laughs into my back – against the material I’ve soaked through, while surviving this ordeal – and asks me if I’m trying to kill him. ‘I knew you’d be the death of me, you dirty little minx,’ he says, though none of it’s unkind. The laughing, the comment that suggests he knows me better than I know him … it’s not cruel.

  It’s more familiar than anything else. This is the part where we’re supposed to relax and enjoy each other’s company, maybe lie on a bed together and while away some time. Only we’ve done it backwards, so now we’ll have to make introductions. Flirt, gently, until we’re comfortable with each other.

  And then hold hands, as we ascend the stairs.

  Luckily, he’s made a good start. We’re holding hands now, though I’m not sure when he took hold of mine. And I don’t know when he started talking, either, first in exhausted fits and starts, then a little more, as we straighten our clothes. ‘You’ve no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that to you,’ he says, and instead of being silent, this time, I respond with the things I’m thinking.

  ‘I didn’t know you were paying attention,’ I say, while he eyes me steadily.

  Of course I realise then that he’s not putting his clothes back together. He’s taking them off, while we do this thing in reverse.

  ‘Really?’ he asks, then does a little more than reverse things. He reframes it entirely, like piecing together a movie from someone else’s point of view. ‘All those heated glances over the copy machine? Asking me if I like sugar, lingering too long at my desk? What kind of person wouldn’t pay attention to things like that?’

  Me, apparently. I didn’t pay attention. I called those things mundane and ordinary, and all along they’ve been anything but. They were really signs I should have read, signals I should have been able to decode. When he said, ‘Would you like a drink?’ he really meant: ‘I’m going to talk about your clit to you in about five minutes.’

  I should have known.

  But out here on the edges it’s always hard to see things clear. Up is down, left is right. A dull little comment is actually an invitation; a glance in someone’s direction a promise.

  When I really think about it, we’ve probably been dating for months.

  Heat

  Charlotte Stein

  I come up from below expecting to be alone, but I’m not. Hunter is inexplicably there, sprawled on a sun lounger with his big feet trailing off the end, that stupid handsome hair of his gleaming in the glare.

  And all I can think is: I wish his name wasn’t Hunter. I’ve never in my life known anyone called anything like that, and I don’t feel like starting now. It’s just so … beefcake. It’s so … Abercrombie and Fitch, even though I’m British and barely know what Abercrombie and Fitch is.

  I don’t want to know. I just want to sit on the sun lounger he’s currently occupying and read my book, like a semi-normal person. I’m the sort who goes on sun-blistering holidays somewhere exotic, and then sits alone beneath a giant umbrella to shelter themselves from the heat – and I won’t apologise for that.

  But Hunter makes me apologise. He looks up the moment I’m on deck, and smiles his winning smile, and says something I don’t want to hear, like ‘I was wondering when you’d join me.’ As though there’s a possibility that we could actually join. The universe is making new glue as we speak, for bookworms who refuse to wear bathi
ng suits and giant jockish men called Hunter.

  He’s out of his mind – perhaps literally. Lily says he’s secretly weird, that he has trouble relating to people, that his parents died years ago and ever since he’s been some kind of hermit … but I don’t buy it. People like him aren’t hermits.

  They’re on the covers of catalogues, staring off at imaginary horizons. He doesn’t need this holiday. He doesn’t need to socialise. He needs to spend five thousand dollars on deck shoes, before insulting some waiter we don’t have.

  Hell, maybe I’m the waiter, in this scenario. I certainly feel like one as I edge around his most glorious self, in an attempt to reach the sun lounger on the other side of the deck.

  But then I see it, and suddenly I’m not a waiter at all. I’m trapped into being his holiday companion, by the presence of the seat he’s moved next to himself. He’s actually dragged it all the way across this bright-white deck to make a neat little pair, side by side.

  As though that’s perfectly reasonable.

  He even makes it sound reasonable.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he says, which of course gives me no choice. If I say no, I’ll look anti-social and awful. And if I say yes … if I say yes …

  I’ll have to sit next to him, right next to him, with the heat of the sun blasting me on one side and the heat from him blasting me on the other. In fact, I can practically feel it before I’ve even taken the lounger next to him. He’s so bright, so big, so winning – he makes the sun look like a speck on the face of a giant.

  He’s the giant in question.

  He’s so big that I feel crowded the second I arrange myself on the lounger, even though he’s set them a decent way apart. I can get my whole hand between them without any trouble at all, but that’s not the point when your companion is eight foot eleven. His arms span that tiny gap with very little effort, and any time he shifts a tad I can just feel him.

  I can feel the heat coming off him, in waves. I can smell his suntan lotion, light and summery, and the febrile scent of his skin beneath. Sunshine skin, my mother would have called it – and it is. You can tell the kind of tan he has just from drinking in that scent: a golden honey hovering over the blush underneath.

  But of course I have to confirm how it looks, anyway. I pretend I’m engrossed in my book, when really I can’t stop flicking my gaze to his immense hands – pale on the inside, caramel on the out. He’s fiddling with the tie on his shorts, which only makes the show more compelling.

  Those long fingers, those heavy knuckles … and then further down the endless stretch of his solid legs. I confess, I follow them all the way to his feet, which aren’t clad in the five-thousand-dollar deck shoes. They’re bare, instead, completely bare, and somehow that’s much worse.

  His feet are even more gigantic than his hands, and knuckly like them, too. They’re a real man’s feet – different to Patrick’s, all neat and clean. They make me think that he’s not an airbrushed-catalogue-model Hunter, at all, but a real one instead.

  He goes into the forest, at night, and runs down a hapless deer. And then when the moon is at its fullest, he tears the thing apart, with his teeth. He tears me apart, with his teeth. He makes me want to look at his face, but I can’t, I can’t.

  Why isn’t he saying anything now?

  He wanted me to sit, didn’t he? He wanted me to join him, in that tiring way most middle-class people with yachts seem to demand. Patrick needs it all the time, and so does Lily, and so does Gregory – though I know there’s something different between the time they want from me and the time Hunter does.

  I can feel it prickling in the air, now, between the words he thought he should say and the silence he now allows. He doesn’t want idle chitchat, I think. He wants to sit here and make me bake in his heat, until I’m so uncomfortable I could die.

  And then he abruptly puts a hand on my thigh, and I think I do die. I stop breathing, at the very least, because he’s not low down, towards my knee. He’s really, really high up – almost under my sundress, in fact.

  And when I don’t move away or slap him or any of the things I should do, he slides that hand higher, casually. Like he’s just turning the pages of a book he’s not all that interested in. It could even be the book I’ve just discarded, which is now lying on the floor by my lounger.

  Either way – I could almost pretend he isn’t doing this at all. I don’t look at him. He doesn’t speak. There are no questions, no answers. Just his hand working further and further up my thigh, until finally he’s clasping me in a very rude place indeed.

  I can feel the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, pressing tight against the taut mound of my pussy. And after a second of this, I can make out that finger rubbing in slow circles, right between my legs.

  It makes me very, very aware of my greedy little hole. It’s like he’s feeling for the right spot, or maybe suggesting where it might be, through the material of my panties – and he’s right too. That is where my cunt resides, and further up oh further up … yesss. That’s where my clit is.

  But he doesn’t linger there for long, either. He alternates back and forth, stroking over my hole and then back over my clit, as though testing which one I like best. I can’t decide, however. The former is so rude, so … humiliating, somehow, while the latter simply sparks pleasure up the length of my spine.

  Both sensations are utterly, deliriously delicious. I want to spread my legs wider just to get more of them, but of course I restrain myself. It’s bad enough that I’m letting him rub me like this, without saying a word – as though he’s so handsome and magnificent that he just has a right to my helpless body.

  Egging him on is completely out of the question. I can’t even look at him.

  Until I do, and then … then I wish I hadn’t.

  He doesn’t seem like himself, any more. He’s not a composed cut-out from the cover of a magazine. His eyelids are so heavy it’s almost a burden on me to carry them, and his soft lips have parted in this really suggestive way. Even if he wasn’t currently stroking my swollen pussy, I’d know what’s going on here.

  It’s like he wants me to reach up and slide something into that open mouth of his, and if I was better at this – more sure of myself, sexier, an adventuress – I’d know what that something was. I’d take it out and fuck his face, until he begged me to stop.

  The way I beg him to stop, after a moment of this. I have to, after all. If he keeps going I’ll come all in an embarrassing rush, just because he’s got a finger on some material and is rubbing me through it.

  Too bad, really, that my protests come out wordlessly, soundlessly. I barely make it to a syllable. I just lie on the sun lounger and let him work my stiff clit to a shuddery, buckled-down sort of orgasm, while a thin breath takes the place of all the things I want to say.

  Stop, I think. Don’t, I think.

  But I can’t get either word out. I’m awash in this brutal kind of pleasure, of the sort that doesn’t take kindly to being restrained. It spills around the edges of my control and pushes through the boundaries I’ve long established, and once a bit of it’s free it goes on and on and on.

  It’s like letting a tidal wave flow through an opening the size of a little finger. And once it’s done, the dam wall isn’t in particularly good shape. It’s cracked and battered and crumbling at the seams, in a way that’s obvious to even the most casual of observers.

  I can see it in his face, as he draws away from me. His lip is faintly curled and there’s a crease between his brows, as though to say: that’s all it takes, to ruin someone like you? And then when he sits back in his lounger and picks up a magazine – as though nothing happened, nothing at all – I hear his final point loud and clear, even though he doesn’t say it out loud.

  How disappointing.

  * * *

  I know he’s up there. I can hear his big feet pounding around on the deck, but I’m not going to go up. Not this time. I don’t know why he keeps staying behind while they
go off and explore tourist spots, but in all honesty I don’t care.

  He can stew up there, alone. He can conjure up some other person to torment – some girl who’s more his speed. She’s the other half of that magazine cover, and when he puts a hand between her legs she doesn’t soak through her knickers immediately. She doesn’t twist and shiver beneath his barely-there touch, as though she’s just grateful for any human contact.

  Instead, she eyes him coldly, indifferently, while lying there like a statue. Later on they’ll make love on the bed behind me, in an elegant, poised sort of way. She’ll point her toes and arrange her hair just so on the pillow, and he’ll never look at her with that weird combination of incredulity and disdain.

  Or at least, that’s what I’m still hoping for when he appears in the doorway.

  He’s probably got her in tow now. I can practically smell her sunshine scent and hear her glassy voice – to the point where I actually start wondering if I should offer to make her a drink, too. I have all the accoutrements in front of me. The bar between the bed and the kitchenette is well stocked with all kinds of lovely things.

  And I know, because I’m currently putting all of them together, for myself. I’m calling the rainbow-coloured concoction before me a ‘Burn That Sex Thing From Your Memory’ daiquiri.

  Even though I don’t really know what a daiquiri is. It just sounds good, on the end of my imaginary cocktail. It legitimises fluorescent memory-loss in a glass, topped by a raft of candy-coloured cherries – one of which I devour, casually, as he strolls up behind me.

  Yeah, that’s right. He strolls. He’s as casual as I am, apparently, even though I’m nothing of the kind. I’m shivering just as I did before, only without the excuse of an orgasm. And as before, I can’t really seem to function beyond this. I can’t look at him. I just stare straight ahead at the picture on the far wall, of a fisherman who’s unaccountably shouldering a huge shotgun.

  Or maybe it’s not a fisherman, at all. It’s just a guy in a vest that looks like a fisherman’s, and really he’s out to bag himself a nice girl in a white sundress.