You Already Know

by Charlotte Stein

  Of the kind Hunter then lifts.

  I can feel him doing it, somewhere behind me. And I say somewhere, because it’s like the whole thing is not attached to me at all. I’m not wearing this sundress. I’m three hundred feet away from myself, drinking a made-up daiquiri.

  While a man exposes my almost bare backside, and strokes his big hands over whatever flesh he finds there.

  God only knows what he’s going to do next. I can’t imagine, because I’ve got no frame of reference for this. Usually men say things like ‘Would you perhaps want to move over to the bed?’ or similar, and even those sorts of fellows are in short supply, for a girl of my type. This kind of thing … this kind of silent thievery, heavy with assumption …

  I don’t know what to do with this.

  So I just stand there and take it instead. I let him rub over my ass until he works up to something bolder – both hands under the elastic of my knickers, fondling and fondling me before finally pulling the whole lot down. And then once I’m completely bare under there, he gets hold of me in a tamer sort of place.

  Like the hollows of my hips – which only seems tame until he tugs me back. After that, it doesn’t seem tame at all. I’m now somehow bent over the bar with my ass bared, and though I don’t remember doing it my legs are apart.

  They’re really, embarrassingly wide apart. I bet he can see everything in between, when he glances down. I bet he can see how wet I am, how swollen my pussy is – though I’ve no idea why that’s the case. He hasn’t touched me anywhere in particular. He hasn’t said anything filthy, to fire me up.

  He just breathes hard and manoeuvres me into position, while my heart thunders between my legs and perspiration gets me in its cloying grip. I’m so hot, I think, so boiling boiling hot, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  It’s him who has to put the fire out. He has to do something, even though I’m afraid of what that something might be. If he fucks me, I might die. The dam will definitely crumble and my face will never recover from this kind of burn, and that’s how it will be until the end of time.

  Only it isn’t like that at all. When he puts one heavy hand on my shoulder and one heavier hand on my hip, I don’t flinch. I’m crying, but I don’t want to tell him to stop. I want him to use me up like this, to be that guy who thinks he can have whatever he wants – because God knows he can.

  Go on, I think, go on, and then I feel him sliding something thick and solid into my unbearably tight little cunt and ohhhh I can hardly believe it. I can’t believe he’s actually going to fuck me; I can’t believe his cock feels this impossibly big – or that I’m slick enough to take him.

  But most of all I can’t believe that he moans, as he takes me.

  He gets about halfway in and then he just lets it out, low and guttural, thick with frustration. Like he actually wants this, somehow, like he actually needs it, and if he doesn’t get it soon he’s going to go insane. He’s going to shove into me, hard, and fuck me like a savage.

  And I don’t know whether I’m unhappy about that or not. It sure doesn’t feel like unhappiness. It feels like I want to spread my legs wider and take him deeper, and when he finally eases all the way in and groans hot and heavy against the nape of my neck, I do it anyway.

  I arch back against him, and spread myself for him, and let him get a handful of my breasts – first one, then the other. Though even that’s not enough. I have to fumble with the front of my sundress until the whole thing is open and he can get his hand inside, and once it is it’s like a relief. He can get at all of me, now. He can play with my tight nipples as he eases back and forth in my slick cunt – slow and easy at first, but soon it’s fast. Soon it’s hard and reckless and I’m clutching at the arm he’s got across my belly, as he fucks into me. I’m urging him on, without words.

  Dear God, there can’t be any words for this. There are just moans and guttural grunts and the occasional gasp, when he hits my G-spot just right or I clench a little too tightly around his thick cock. And they get louder, too, the longer this goes on. By the time he’s almost got me off the floor and over the bar – pounding me hard with one hand on my hip and the other on my throat – we’re like animals.

  I’m so wet it’s running down my thighs; so turned on I might actually come just from the feel of him fucking into me. And then he gets a hand between my legs and slithers a finger over my swollen, slippery clit – and that’s it. I do come. I come shamelessly, unlike the day before. I cry out and let myself shake through it, without an ounce of caring in me.

  No – it’s only afterwards that I care. That I realise what I’ve done, what I’ve let myself become. If I was an easy, quick-to-orgasm little slut yesterday, what must I seem like now? I didn’t even care whether he wore a condom or not. He could be creaming into my filthy little whore’s pussy as I realise all of this – and the thought isn’t half as awful as it should be.

  In fact, it excites me. I hear him coming, I feel him coming – all jerky and as uncontrolled as I was, a moment before – and I thrill with the idea of him filling me up.

  And then it’s over, and we’re back in the land of condom-wearing and shame-experiencing. I mean, of course he wore a rubber. He wouldn’t fuck a thing like me without one and even if he did, there’s still that expression on his face that I’m just waiting for. I’ll turn around and it’ll be there, that mix of disdain and incredulity.

  Only when I actually do, his face is not as I remember it. The crease is between his brows, true enough – and that perfect upper lip is curled. But I can’t quite make the expression fit into the box marked Magazine Model. It doesn’t go with this season’s version of Ripe Contempt.

  Instead, I see it anew. I feel it anew, as hot as the sun on my skin, as bright as its light in the sky.

  He’s not disgusted that I would do something like this. He’s amazed that I would let him. That’s what this is: amazement. I just misread it, because of all the years I’ve spent studying the covers, instead of the contents.

  I don’t think he saw daylight for the better part of a year, Lily says, in my head. And then I speak, to make up for all the things I didn’t say before. For all the things he obviously can’t.

  ‘More,’ I tell him. ‘Make me feel it. Make me burn.’

  Thief

  Charlotte Stein

  The first time I watch, I don’t mean to. It’s an accident, like reading a letter that’s not intended for you or going down a road you weren’t supposed to. I’m going down this road, and, though it’s clearly marked watching your flatmate masturbate, I don’t turn around and walk the other way.

  I stay like this instead. Poised in his closet, the laundry mistake still in my hand. Everything in me saying leave leave leave, despite one very real and very unavoidable problem.

  It’s too late, now.

  It was too late thirty seconds ago. Too late after ten. The moment I stepped into his closet and searched for a place to put his T-shirt, my time was up. Because, apparently, Drew isn’t the sort to wait around for a while before taking all of his clothes off.

  He takes them off the minute his bedroom door is shut. And, when I turn around, that’s the first thing I see through the slats in the closet door: my cool, collected, unfathomable flatmate Drew, without anything on.

  Though, really, I know that’s not the right way to put it. Without anything on is the manner in which people describe their elderly relatives, just before they help them into the bathtub. It’s almost a joke punchline; it’s without a hint of anything sexual.

  Whereas this thing in front of me – this thing I can see so clearly in spite of the stripes of wood over this bit or that – it’s so … fleshy. It’s so real somehow, as though all the other naked bodies I’ve seen in my short life were fakes.

  This is what a naked body should be like. This thing, with its broad back and its curving thighs. Even the tiniest detail calls to me, on a man like him – the way his collarbone stands out so heavily against the honey-col
oured skin, like dinosaur bones beneath the earth. The way his biceps curve outwards almost delicately, when he reaches up to rub some spot on the nape of his neck.

  Though maybe delicate is the wrong word. There’s nothing delicate about him. It’s just the way his skin looks there, drawn taut over the thick muscle beneath. And he’s so pale in places like those, too – on the insides of his arms and below the line where his jeans once rode.

  Then down, down, to the thing I absolutely should not be looking at. The one that didn’t really exist for me until right now, as though prior to this I thought of him like a Ken doll. Smooth, and completely featureless between his legs.

  Instead of how he actually is.

  There’s nothing about him that I’d call featureless. I’m not even sure I’d call it smooth either, because I can see the thick ridge around the head of his cock, beneath the skin. I can see the veins that rope his shaft, so obviously more pronounced than they were a second ago.

  He’s getting hard, I realise, though God knows why. He’s just sat there, on the edge of his neat bed, hands sort of loose on his bollard-like knees. He isn’t touching himself or flicking through a skin mag or any of the things I seem to associate with male arousal, so it’s understandable when fear suddenly grips me.

  He knows you’re there, this fear whispers. He knows you’re watching, and he likes it.

  Though I have to say this fear sounds a lot more like excitement, when I start sifting through its contents. Something happens in my body – a kind of twanging, ringing sort of thing – and then suddenly my nipples are stiff and pressing against the material of my shirt. My clit is a little thrum, between my legs.

  And I’m wet. I’m wet just at the sight of him, and the thought of him doing this on purpose.

  Though it gets decidedly worse, when I realise he’s watching something.

  I hear it first, before I see its backwash on his flawless face. Just the faintest little sound, like maybe he didn’t want to go all the way with it. It’s bad enough that he’s doing this. Doing it at full volume would be a sin, a crime, he can’t possibly.

  And then I hear it again – the unmistakable sound of a woman gasping in probable faux-pleasure – and I know for sure. He’s watching porn of some type, near silent and not what I’d expected. I always thought Drew was the kind of guy who didn’t need anything like this, who had girls falling all over him and no desire to spend lonely nights servicing himself.

  But I guess I was wrong. He is going to service himself and, even stranger than that, this doesn’t feel like something he did just by chance. It feels like a ritual, almost. Something he carefully plans and then enacts, which sounds crazy until I see his face.

  He’s caught, I think. Rapt. Something about the thing he’s watching makes him mindless, and, oh, I can relate to that. I feel mindless right now, just stood here taking him all in. I mean, I don’t particularly want to stare at his now solid and very stiff cock. I’m not proud of that fact in the slightest.

  But I’m doing it, anyway.

  And I carry on doing it, when he puts one big hand around himself.

  Slow, he does it, slow. Deliberate, I think, though I have to say there’s something about the move that seems almost … separate from the rest of him. His real self is somewhere far away but incredibly close, as he works his hand up and down that glorious shaft.

  Because it is glorious. Of course it is. The rest of him is so big and heavy. How could his cock not be the same? It’s gleaming wetly at the tip, leaking already, even though he’s barely done anything at all. And it curves so steeply, so beautifully. Oh, God, I shouldn’t be looking at him like this.

  I know the difference between the two: staring out of curiosity or mild fascination, and staring in a weird, fetishistic sort of way. This is the latter, and it’s disgusting, I know. I am disgusting, as I watch my oblivious flatmate masturbate slowly to the most arousing-sounding porn.

  But the strangest thing happens as I do. I find I don’t care. Not in the slightest. I’m not ashamed, the way any decent person would be. I just want to see him climax all over that big working fist. I want to see him arch up off the bed, eyes closed, body twisting into an almighty orgasm.

  And I want to see it quickly, brutally – dear God, I’m almost greedy for it. I don’t even have to run a hand over one stiff nipple to spark another wave of arousal, though I’m sorry to say I do it. I rub myself as he rubs himself, pleasure gushing through my now utterly soaked sex, everything in me on edge, for his big finish.

  It’s coming. I know it is. He’s trying to hold it off – to work himself slow and easy, in time with the rising action onscreen – but I can tell he’s not going to make it. He twists the palm of his hand over that swollen head and his face creases right down the middle. His teeth bite into his lower lip.

  Three feet away from him someone gasps, oh yeah, spill on my cock, and the effect gets worse.

  He likes this part, I think. It gets him hot to think of a woman coming all over someone’s stiff dick. Though more than that he seems to like her almost genuine moans of pleasure, the sounds of her possibly going over as he jerks himself harder and faster.

  Soon, I think, soon, and then for some unfathomable reason I’m almost stood on tiptoe. I’m leaning towards the door, watching and watching as he groans out his own pleasure. He has one hand clasped in the sheets by his side, and it’s the strangest thing.

  The sight of that is somehow more arousing than the slick slide of his fingers on his cock. I can see it pushing there, almost levering his body up off the bed, and then quite suddenly it happens.

  It’s like a dam breaking, or a pressure valve giving, or some other cliché about things letting go, that somehow seems very clear and almost perfect, right here and now. Something inside me lets go, as the first thick stripe of come spurts from the tip of his cock, all over his still working fist.

  He doesn’t even seem to care that he makes a mess. He just does it, spilling copiously on to the carpet, on to his big thighs, into his hand. And he moans loudly while he does it, too – even that one little trace of control lost.

  But I can’t blame him. It looks incredible, like he’s lost in pleasure, and, more than that, like he really doesn’t give a shit. For once, careful, composed Drew is not caring about anything but the pleasure coursing through his body, and the slick feel of his own come, and finally the little ebb of sensation at the end that makes him sprawl back over the bed.

  That makes him run one lazy hand over his big perfect body in a way that fills me with a strange sort of envy. I want to be the one stroking him, touching him, feeling him shudder with its aftershocks. I want to be that hand on him, though of course I can’t be.

  I’m only watching. I’m a thief. That’s what I’ve done here:

  I’ve made myself a thief.

  * * *

  The second time I watch, I’ll be perfectly honest, I do mean to. It’s not even a question, really. It’s just something there, lingering in the corner of me. The desire to watch him again, as he does things I never dreamed he would do.

  He’s just so stoic, that’s the thing. When I see him the next day, after the first time, he’s so different to the way he’d seemed in the bedroom. He says good morning to me, for God’s sake. He makes polite chit-chat and reads his crisp newspaper.

  While underneath there’s a guy who masturbates in some strange, almost ritualistic way to filthy pornography.

  The two ideas can’t match up in my head. Instead, I have to create two hims: one who seems like a pond of still water, and one who takes all his clothes off and sits on the end of the bed to start this thing all over again.

  Though I suspect right from the off that it’s different this time. In fact, I know it is. For a start, he doesn’t start rubbing himself, all slow and easy right away – even though his cock stiffens far quicker than it did a few days ago. And he doesn’t let himself linger over the action onscreen either.

  He just pushes back on
the bed until he’s almost sprawled over it, and then reaches for the bottle of oil on the cabinet by the pillow.

  Of course, I hold my breath. I can’t help it. I’ve no clue what he needs the oil for, but my head almost automatically floods with a million vague images. Some of them tame. Some of them bizarre – like maybe he’s going to spread it all over the sheets and then writhe around in it.

  Though it could just be me who wants that last one. In fact, I’m pretty sure all the images in my head are just me, wanting some very specific things. I want to see him gleaming, I think, and all golden in the low light, and I don’t really care how unlikely such a fantasy is.

  I mean, realistically, guys do not cover themselves in baby oil before they pleasure themselves. He’s just going to put a little bit in his palm and then slick his already heavy shaft, to make it all a bit sweeter – and that’s OK. That’s totally cool. He doesn’t have to do anything more than that for me to steal my piece of voyeuristic pleasure.

  Though, when he actually does do more than that, I have to admit, I go up on tiptoe again.

  I’m just not expecting it, that’s the thing. It’s so rude, and even more at odds with the person I thought I vaguely knew. The person I vaguely knew is reserved, conservative almost; he certainly doesn’t slide an oiled finger between the cheeks of his ass, and stroke over something I didn’t even think guys liked to acknowledge. Guys don’t have holes there. They’re smooth, like the Ken doll I thought he was. There’s nothing to rub over, nothing to fondle and certainly nothing to push into.

  Though I suspect he does all three. In fact, I can see him doing all three. After a moment, his head goes back against the pillow, and those long, long legs of his spread in the lewdest way possible, and then he just eases two fingers into his ass.

  Just like that. Like it’s nothing.

  I swear to God, it’s so far from nothing. My heart is rattling around inside my chest, and for the first time I really consider echoing some of the things he’s doing. I mean, I’m not sure I could actually touch myself where he’s touching himself. But then, it’s not like he’s just doing that alone.