Date: 2015-05-28 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Romance; Erotica; Contemporary Romance; Bdsm; Contemporary; Fiction; Erotic Romance; Dark; Adult; M F Romance
Description: New job, new boss, and he’s cold, strict, but terribly attractive. Does Molly Parker stay or does she go? Because beneath Cyrian’s chilly front, there may be a heat that’ll burn her up.Giving in was vicious bliss.The live-in position is an opportunity for Molly to earn and escape a problematic family. There’s just one drawback. Her employer is the most eccentric, aloof and closed off man she's ever encountered. His rules are bizarre and his needs even more so, and caring for his ramshackle Dickensian home is far more than she ever bargained for. Only their increasingly intense conversations st
Rights: All Rights Reserved

Sweet Agony

CHARLOTTE STEIN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF
www.mischiefbooks.com

Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2015

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007579518

Version: 2015–04–21

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

More from Mischief

About Mischief

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The advert says ‘Seeking Housekeeper’, which I guess sounds innocent enough. Even the other stuff underneath is only pretty weird, rather than very. It just asks for excellent tea-making skills, and no social huggers, and an enthusiasm for order, and to me all of those things sound reasonable. They don’t ring alarm bells in my head.

But the house does.

I sit for around ten minutes across the street from it, in my battered little Beetle with the red vinyl seats. Part of me really, really wanting to go in and save my own skin. But most of me too scared to do anything but stare in horror. Honestly, if you looked up Dickensian in the dictionary you would find this place. It looks as though someone called Mrs Migglethwump lives here, after her husband ran off with the maid on their wedding day.

The front of it is the kind of grey you only get after natural disasters. Some apocalypse happened to this place and this place alone, and now it sits like a bad tooth in a mouth of pristine white ones. It even seems vaguely crooked, in a way that should be impossible. The other houses are ramrod-straight. There is no space for it to slant to the side – it just looks as though it does.

Malevolence is probably making it happen. I think malevolence might be making a lot of things happen. All the windows are blank, black eyes, and each one seems to follow me wherever I go. I glance away for a second and can almost feel them, pressing into my body. Then I turn back and they pretend to be all innocent again. They never watched me reach for the newspaper on the seat beside me. They are just windows, busy minding their own business. There is nothing to worry about here.

Apart from the garden that time forgot.

Lord, the garden that time forgot. I get out of the car feeling strong and brave, almost proud of myself for getting so far in the face of this hideousness. And then I see the garden, and falter. My feet seem suddenly lined with lead. I think of what I will have to do to get across what is really only a small square at the front of the house, and have to wonder if this is all worth it. Those nettles alone look positively ravenous. Somewhere in amongst all the rubble and rambling weeds, I can see what looks like a bike.

I put one foot in there and I’m going to be eaten alive. They will probably find me three years later, with seven-foot dandelions sprouting out of my eye sockets. One false move and the hidden portal down to hell might swallow me whole – and that isn’t even the worst of the problems here. No, that comes when I attempt to get into the garden anyway.

And realise the gate is rusted shut.

If I want to get in, I am going to have to climb over the thing. I am going to have to hike my skirt up and lift my leg like a dog doing a wee, and when I do my underwear will be on display. Every eye in that evil house will see the two holes near the sagging elastic and the faded image of Spiderman on the bottom, then most likely curse me for all eternity.

All of which seems pretty silly, until I actually start my attempt. I bunch my skirt up into my fists and begin to step over, and just as I do I hear the person who lives here. They make a sound like someone moaning from inside some terrible abyss, so cold and alien that for a second I barely recognise it for what it really is.

Then it rushes over me in a hot flood: laughter. The person inside is laughing at me, in the bitterest, haughtiest way possible. You could stick that awful noise in the House of Lords and have it shout at the Prime Minister. It could attend a swanky soirée entirely independent of the person it comes out of, and no one would blink an eye.

But I do my best not to care. I grit my teeth and keep going, no matter what he does to throw me off. I think he actually snorts when I almost lose a shoe to a particularly vicious patch of brambles, and I know he laughs again at the state of my tights after a fight with the lost bike. This time it rings out as clear as a bell, if bells were super haughty and filthy rich.

Yet somehow I still make it to the door.

Only to be told:

‘Not today, thank you.’

He even sounds delighted to get the opportunity to say it. I can hear it in the back of his voice, buried beneath what can only be described as the most cultured accent the world has ever known. I swear my social standing plummets seventeen levels just listening to it. I feel as though I need to bow, and not just because of the sheer wealthy weight behind each of his words.

There is also the fact that he sounds amazing.

Oh, my Lord, no one in the history of the world has ever sounded as amazing as he does. For a second I actually overlook the ludicrous rudeness and just drown in that rolling, velvet-lined tone. He could probably read the news, if the news was specifically designed to make women come on command. Every syllable seems dipped in smoke, so deep and rich I stand there speechless for a second.

And it may well be a good thing that I do.

I think I would probably have gushed over that voice, if he’d given me another second. The words holy crap you could sear skin with that thing are on the tip of my tongue, and only stay there because he goes first.

‘You must be aware that you are completely inappropriate for the position,’ he says, at which point I realise that I’m supposed to be angry. He might sound like sin itself, but he is also quite clearly an enormous arse. I mean, I know that my tights are laddered and my clothes have holes in and I have the broad, plain features of a person not fit to shine his shoes.

But he need not have pointed that out so bluntly.

He could have pretended to be polite, like a normal person.

‘I had no idea dusting a shelf was such an advanced science these days,’ I say, and it comes out so dry it startles me. I had no idea that tone of voice was in me. Most of the time I back away from an argument, and it seems like that should go double here. I am standing on the expensive doorstep of a man with a voice like cigar smoke, trying to get a job that might possibly save me from starvation.

I should really feel more fear – and most likely would.

If I had anything in the world left to lose.

‘If you were appropriate you would be fully aware that it was.’

‘I was just testing you. Really I know how to use the lasers.’

‘You intend to use lasers to remove dust from my shelves?’

‘All the most professional dusters are doing it these days.’

‘I get the distinct impression you believe you are amusing. Therefore I feel I should inform you that I find amusing people tedious in the extreme.’

‘Oh, you need never worry. This is a shocking amount of amusing for me.’

‘Why do I suspect that is supposed to be a joke too?’

‘Possibly because you’ve never heard anyone being funny before? I bet most people just bow and scrape and tell you about their time at Eton.’

‘Yes, and they were all wildly inappropriate too,’ he says, and I’m ready to answer back. In fact, I think I might even be enjoying answering back. It makes my bones rattle and my dad’s words ring in my ears – ‘why do you have to be so clever?’ – yet somehow I don’t want to stop. I want to see what he says next. I want to be free to say silly things about lasers, and somehow his pomposity lets me.

I would probably keep poking and poking it for ever, if it were not for the sudden realisation that sinks into me, after those words of his. He said ‘all’, I think, as though it might not just be me and my awful coat and my Yorkshire accent.

‘How many people have you turned away, exactly?’

‘I hardly see how that is any concern of yours.’

‘You hardly see how it might be a concern of mine that I drove all the way here with my last drop of gas to get a job I desperately need only to discover that the person hiring might be completely unwilling to ever hire anyone?’ I ask, and then there is a sullen-seeming silence. Clearly, I hit on the right thing here – but he refuses to admit it.

‘I will have you know I let in many, many applicants. And despite her numerous flaws I almost hired the girl from Sweden.’

‘I feel like you are making up the girl from Sweden.’

‘That is a frankly outrageous charge.’

‘But you did though, right?’ I try, expecting further failure.

Yet I get this wonderful reply instead:

‘Yes, and I would appreciate you explaining how you managed to discern such a thing through a door while being harangued by a man who expects you to use lasers to dust.’

I just love that he takes the laser thing and runs with it. I feel as though I lobbed a ball of insanity at him and he just caught it and lobbed it back. No one has ever lobbed my ball of insanity before. I barely dared reveal I had one in my possession, prior to this discussion. Usually I keep it hidden, beneath seventeen layers of pretend ignorance.

But why pretend with him? He clearly values smartness.

I even hear the eagerness in his voice, after I tell him that it was a fairly obvious guess to make. ‘Tell me all the ways in which it was obvious,’ he says, like some word vampire starved of sentences by boring girls from Sweden. And, luckily for him, I am almost bursting with every letter in the English language. I’ve spent my whole life feasting on books and books and books, with no one to talk to about what I’ve found there.

He can have it all. Right now, right here on this doorstep.

Here are my guns blazing. Here is me going out in a blaze of glory.

‘If you intended to hire someone you would not be enjoying haranguing me quite so much. And you might have cleared your path. And you definitely would never have laughed when I stepped over the gate, or told me I was inappropriate before I spoke a word, or made up a girl from Sweden. Also you probably would have opened the door,’ I say, and for just a second I feel sure I’ve blown it. I spent too long being too smart. Now I’m no longer smart enough. I failed at the final hurdle, and will have to go away and starve in my car.

I even start to turn, but then I hear his voice. It’s like heavenly shades of cigar smoke falling. Like the trumpeting of a dozen angels, come to save me from this abyss.

‘I have no hope that you will succeed,’ he says.

I guess he has no idea that I already have.

Chapter Two

I try to respond in a normal manner to all of this. But the trouble is, everything just gets more fascinating from there on in. For a start, he somehow disappears before I can get through the door and see his face. I find myself in a narrow, slightly slanting hallway, so utterly alone I could have stepped through a portal to the netherworld.

And the room past the open door to my right does nothing to dispel this impression. I am ready to gasp when I see it, and probably not in the right way. Most people, I expect, faced with this, would be appalled or amused or feel some other emotion that I apparently don’t possess. Instead I think I reach something like giddiness. A grin immediately tries to smear itself all over my face, and only the sense that he must be watching somewhere hauls it back.

He must be behind some secret wall, spying.

Because that is what the room looks like – as though it has secret walls that someone could spy behind. It seems to have around twenty-seven corners, even though I could swear that twenty-seven corners are not possible for a fairly small rectangle. There should be no more than four, I think, yet, when I take a step in, twelve more jump out at me. I could swear the sides of the fireplace are that illusion where you step closer and a passageway is revealed.

I suppose the wallpaper helps. It looks at first glance to be made up of a million skulls, and it is no relief to realise they are just ornate black flowers repeated over and over. My eyes still cross when I look at it. I have to glance at other things, only to find that other things are just as brilliant and terrifying.

He has an old-fashioned street lamp in one corner, complete with a flickering candle behind the dusty glass panels. In fact, the street lamp is the only thing lighting the room. The sun has no chance of filtering through the closed and extremely heavy purple curtains, and where a ceiling light should be there is just a blank space.

But that only makes everything seem stranger and even more mysterious. It’s like looking through syrup at a scene from the nineteenth century. There are thick rugs on the floor and the fireplace is real and as I stand there I realise the sound I’m hearing is the somnolent tick of a grand old clock on the mantel.

By the time he speaks I think my limbs have gone a little weak. I want to sink into this heaven, and his voice does nothing to assuage that. It rolls into the room in one long ribbon, so deep and sinuous I could almost overlook his instructions. I could, if they were not completely bizarre and insane.

Oh, God, I think he might be insane.

‘Turn the chair beside you around, so that it faces the window. Once you have, you may be seated,’ he says, which I suppose is not that bad really. However, when you put it together with him speaking those words through a door, it all gets a lot stranger.

They suggest only one thing: he does not want me to look at him. He disappeared on purpose, so I could not catch so much as a glimpse – an idea that sounds bonkers but is pretty much borne out by all the evidence. I mean, what other explanation could there be? I thought he just wanted to leave me fumbling and unsure, then make some grand entrance. He seemed the type to make a grand entrance.

But now I feel less certain.

Maybe he has a problem, I think, a terrible and awful problem that he can never let anyone see. I read the other day about a man with a foot for a hand, and although I feel fairly confident that this was a lie it’s about all I can imagine now. He will come in with shoes on the ends of his arms and gloves on the ends of his legs, then scream in agony when he sees I ignored his instructions.

All of which is utter nonsense, I know, but I just go ahead and sit facing the window anyway. It seems best, considering all the real problems that he might actually have. He could have had his face blown off in the war, or some form of agoraphobia that means he can’t cope with people looking, and despite the high probability that he is just a haughty arsehole I want to respect these possible issues.

Though I will admit that it gets hard when I hear the door open. I want to turn so badly I can feel it in my teeth. I have to clench everything just to keep myself contained, but parts of me still do their best to escape. My heart almost lunges out of my chest at the sound of him drawing up his own chair. All the hair on my head seems to be prickling and bristling, as though he had taken a handful of it without me knowing.

And then just yanked.

‘I can see you fidgeting, you know.’

‘I would probably be doing it less if we were having an ordinary interview.’

‘And what would you consider an ordinary interview?’

‘Both of us occasionally making awkward eye contact.’

‘Sounds ghastly, if you ask me.’

‘I doubt I ever would.’

‘Would what?’

‘Ask you. You seem like the very last person to discuss the possible merits of eye contact with, considering our current positions.’

‘I have very good reason for this request.’

‘And that reason would be?’ I try, even though I know it will fail. I understand it will before he even emits his little snort of derision.

‘You ask too many questions.’

‘Well, I just thought if I was your housekeeper…’

‘If you were my housekeeper, what? You will feel the need to ask me irrelevant things in a constant and ever more intrusive manner?’

‘I would have thought it was necessary. I mean, what if you have a foot for a hand? I might accidentally kneel down to put on your shoes, only to find fingers where your feet should be. That seems at best like an embarrassment we could avoid,’ I say, then almost marvel at myself for doing it. That thing is happening again. That thing at the door where I got to say all the things I was never able to before. All of these insane leaps in logic just bound right out of me, so utterly ridiculous that he is rendered speechless.

God, I love rendering him speechless.

‘Did you really just accuse me of having a foot for a hand?’

‘I think “accuse” is a little strong. I have nothing but sympathy for your plight.’

‘There is no plight, you ridiculous creature. My hands and feet are where they are supposed to be, I can assure you.’

‘So the problem is your face.’

‘I see what you are clumsily attempting.’

‘I thought I was attempting it quite well, actually.’

‘Then allow me to disillusion you immediately. Your technique is that of a sixteen-year-old boy fumbling at the underwear of my mind.’

‘I could try harder. Probe more deeply.’

‘You believe I wish to be probed? No, dear me, no, that won’t do at all. See, it is exactly as I predicted: you are in every way unsuitable for this position. I cannot possibly have some snooping reprobate rummaging through my life,’ he says, at which point I know I should be insulted or annoyed. He said I was a teenage boy. He called me clumsy. He thinks I am some criminal who snoops.

Yet somehow all I can think is:

He said ‘reprobate’.

He said ‘disillusion’.

He uses the sorts of words I’ve waited all my life to hear spoken aloud – words I barely know how to pronounce because the only time I’ve ever encountered them has been in books. I had no idea that ‘reprobate’ curled that way, or that ‘disillusion’ sounded so small to begin with and then so big at the end. Though, granted, part of that might be down to the way he talks. His tongue practically makes love to each syllable.

I feel like his sentence should smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop.

I think I might need to smoke a cigarette, directly after the full stop. Something is sure happening to me. I seem to be sweating just about everywhere and my breaths are coming hard and high, like he is a hill and I just ran up him.

Only that sounds agonising, and this is the opposite.

This is so sweet I would do anything for another taste.

‘Do you think you could say that word again?’

‘You honestly want me to repeat one of the things I just said, despite the fact that most of them were sneering insults?’

‘Are you kidding? The sneering insults were the best parts.’

‘Well, that settles it. I can’t hire you. You are quite mad.’

‘You cannot possibly decide that, based on me enjoying you saying the word “reprobate”. You turned the letter R into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. People will probably be playing that letter O at funerals. There is nothing unreasonable about enjoying how the whole thing sounded – not to mention the fact that you said it at all. I mean, who says “reprobate” these days?’ I ask, and again there follows a silence. A big one, that he seems very bitter about once he finally responds. How dare I make him momentarily speechless, I think, and what he says bears that out.

‘People who have read these things called books – you might have heard of them, papery things with lots of squiggles inside,’ he says, and I attempt to hate him here, I really do. I stiffen at the implication, and when I speak my voice is cold.

‘Oh, you mean the things I used to hide under my floorboards so no one would take them away from me?’ I tell him.

But then he goes and says this:

‘Are you suggesting that you had books stolen from you? That these books were somehow forbidden you? By whom? Tell me at once who this monstrous individual is so that I can immediately have them arrested,’ he says.

And I think he actually means it. There isn’t so much as a whiff of facetiousness about his words. He honestly thinks my parents were monstrous, just because they hated me reading. No one has ever thought they were monstrous because they hated me reading. A teacher once shouted at them for forcing me into shoes three sizes too small, and occasionally an official-looking person would come around and write things down about my bruises and the spoiled food and the constant cans of Carling everywhere.

But that was about it, when it came to outrage over their behaviour.

A fact that I then point out to him, in a roundabout way.

‘You can’t have someone arrested for flushing books down a toilet.’

‘Well, that just speaks volumes about our current justice system. If I had my way I would not only arrest this miscreant but have them flogged in the town square,’ he says, and I feel sure he means that too. So much so that the urge to look at him again is suddenly too keen to withstand. I have to take deep breaths just to stop myself doing it.

Then sublimate it into something else.

‘Tell me honestly: did you time-travel here from 1865?’

‘I wish I had. And possessed the means to travel back.’

‘Even though people bathed a lot less then.’

‘I could accept body odour in exchange for a bit of peace.’

‘You think being alive in 1865 would give you peace?’

‘I think at the very least I would fit in more than I do here,’ he says, though I don’t think he means to. At least I don’t think he means to sound so despairing about it. After the words pop out he seems to make a little tutting noise, and it isn’t aimed at me. It’s aimed at himself. He let out some dark hint of who he is, and it irritates him.

It irritates him so much that he immediately tries to get rid of me in what may be the most ludicrous way possible. ‘Well, it was nice meeting you, farewell,’ he says, as though we just finished on a pleasant note and he is now up and shaking my hand.

Despite the fact that we are both still seated.

And he hasn’t asked me a damned thing.

‘But you haven’t even interviewed me yet.’

‘Of course I have – I enquired about your reading habits.’

‘That hardly constitutes an interview.’

‘Very well then, tell me what you would expect of an interview.’

‘You should ask me my name.’

‘Assume that I have.’

‘Molly Parker.’

‘I see. And then…?’ he asks, and here’s the best thing:

I think he genuinely has no idea.

He needs me to tell him.

‘Then you tell me yours.’

‘Why? I’m not interviewing for any position.’

‘So you want me to go around your house calling you something I just made up,’ I suggest, and practically hear him shudder. It almost makes me want to do it anyway – think up ridiculous monikers and have him be disgusted by all of them.

Snooty McBogtrot, I could call him, then I have to suppress a laugh.

Twenty-two years of never having anything to laugh about, and suddenly it overwhelms me to the point where I have to hold it off. I have to use both hands.

‘That sounds like the very worst thing I can imagine. You may call me Mr Harcroft.’

‘Seems rather unfriendly and impersonal.’

‘I think you will find that I am a rather unfriendly and impersonal man. You will also shortly discover that I am singularly exacting, ruthless in my attention to detail and completely without regard for any and all emotional whims. I brook no challenges to my authority and expect to be deferred to without exception when it comes to the precise system I use to govern my household,’ he says, then quite obviously waits for me to be horrified. The problem is, though, that if he is, he will be waiting for ever. I don’t know how to be horrified by all of this. It seems so strange and fantastical that all I can do is marvel at all of it, from the seating arrangements to his furniture right the way through to his every odd word.

He governs his household, I think.

Is it any wonder I say what I then do?

‘So I got the job then?’ I ask.

After which there is a silence so delicious I could grab it in my hands and eat it alive. He honestly thought I would balk at that, I can tell. He even tries to go one better a moment later, with his directions as to what I should do next. ‘You will be sleeping in the attic,’ he says, as though the attic is his version of the top of a terrible tower. He wants to be the evil wizard who has somehow imprisoned a princess.

But he has to know he can never be. My life before was the prison: this is the escape. And it continues to be, no matter what he says or does. ‘Go there directly and remain until your duties begin in the morning,’ he tells me, and the very last thing I feel is fear. I fizz with the idea of finally seeing his face instead. I wonder and wonder about how a man who uses the word ‘miscreant’ will look, and am actually disappointed when I turn and find he has already disappeared.

Though even that soon fades.

There are other delights to uncover – like the pictures on the walls on the way up the narrow staircase, each one creepier than the one before it. I think they might even deserve the label gothic, which sounded so exciting to me when I first read about it that I secretly dyed a net curtain black and wore it as a headdress in the middle of the night. Now I get to live amidst it, in the form of faded photographs of old bearded men who could well be his ancestors.

He has ancestors.

And if that were not exciting enough, there is the room I am supposed to stay in. Does he understand how exciting this room is to me? I imagine he could never do so, since this is his ordinary and everyday life. But to me none of this is ordinary and everyday. The very presence of a brass double bed is enough to place it outside those boundaries. Even the mattress crosses the line, because at home I used to sleep on folded-over towels and two sleeping bags.

Certainly I’ve never had anything like this.

Nor have I had experience of a room that just belongs to me. I have no concept of drawers that I can just stuff with my things – to the point where I can barely fill one of them, and then only because of my two big jumpers. And though the window is more of a skylight, it lets in the dying glow of the day like nothing I’ve ever seen. I stand on the bed just to look through it, and see all of London spread out before me.

I see my life, as it could really be.

Chapter Three

I try not to feel too excited when I wake up. It seems best to keep my expectations low, considering some of the things he said and did the day before. I mean, no one could possibly call him a pleasant person – he confirmed that much with his laughter and his insults alone and even if he hadn’t there have been other signs.

Like the uniform he has hung up in the bathroom for me, swaddled in plastic and so ominous-looking that I take a step back when I see it. For a second I think someone is standing in there waiting for me, and want to scream. Then I realise the someone waiting for me is the person I am supposed to be, and almost do it anyway. Somehow, I suspect I’m going to fail very badly at this. The stockings are silk, which I am almost certainly going to snag, and the shoes have the sort of heels I can never walk in.

Plus, he has to know that the whole thing is never going to fit me. The skirt portion of the dress is way too narrow around the hips, and that bodice will never contain my enormous bust. All those buttons down the front are going to pop open the moment I move – but maybe that was his intention. He wants to see me thoroughly humiliated, after failing to put me in my place yesterday. I was much too amused by him and far too talkative, and this is the lesson I get in return.

Or at least it would be usually, I think.

But then I forget that he is not usual at all. I judge him by the standard my family set, instead of the alien one he actually operates under. I think of my mum telling me to stop wearing short sleeves and my brothers jeering at my jiggly parts, rather than understanding that this is never going to be like that.

For a start, I have to speak to him through the parlour door. I knock on it and he tells me to stay where I am, rather than do anything normal like asking me in. Then, once I tell him that the uniform is never going to fit me, he lets out the most derisive little snort. I can practically see the eye-roll that goes with it, shortly followed by a sentence I could never have expected in a million years.

Though he seems to think I should have.

‘Of course it will fit you. I had it made to your exact measurements,’ he says, as though there could be no other explanation. He even seems somewhat offended that I could imagine anything else, despite how insane that is. He only met me yesterday. He must have seen me for all of two minutes. There is no way he could have done what he claims.

And I make the mistake of telling him so.

‘How could you possibly know what my measurements are?’ I ask, and receive an answer that damn near makes my hair stand on end. As he goes on, my eyes almost roll out of my head, but I cannot blame them. Who could, in light of this?

‘If you recall, I observed you walking up to my front door. It was not exactly difficult to extrapolate based on the variables at hand. You only managed to step over my gate by standing on tiptoe, which tells me that you are no more than five foot three, and once you had traversed it I could clearly see the distance in inches between each of your hips and the edges of said gate. As I know the exact width it was fairly easy from there to surmise your lower measurements, and only a little more difficult to ascertain what sort of bodice you might require. As you quite clearly wear a bra two sizes too small for you, it took me a little longer to absolutely be sure, but, judging by your relative self-consciousness, the way you hold your arms when you walk and the other parameters of your body, I believe I have the right of it,’ he says, after which I want to be appalled, I do. I probably should be, all things considered. He examined me so minutely I am surprised my skin isn’t trying to walk off my body.

But I understand why it stays on. Everything he says is so lacking in sexual intention that even my keen senses cannot detect it. No part of me suspects he is lying in order to cover up some transgression. I don’t imagine he secretly snuck into a room and measured me with a ruler, and even if I did I am not sure I would mind much. There is something so calm and clinical and clever about everything he just said that all I feel is awe.

And the awe makes me do some frantic and ill-advised things. It just builds inside me to the point where I can no longer contain it, and suddenly I seem to be tearing at the plastic around the dress. I have to see for myself if he is right, but the problem is that seeing is apparently not enough. Once I have the material in my hands – that liquid silk all lined and smartly stitched just for me – I go one step further. I start pulling off my clothes right there in the hall, so eager to have it against my skin that I barely stop to think about being naked ten feet from where he is. I do not care that he is calling through the door at me. ‘Ms Parker, I insist you answer me at once,’ he says, but I just keep going.

I even take my bra off – though, in my defence, I sort of have to. The dress has this whole support structure actually built into it, and oh, my sainted aunts, when I put it on…how can I regret stripping to nothing when I put that thing on? He was absolutely right about the ‘two sizes too small’, because after I do up some of the buttons I want to break down and cry.

I think my body breathes out for the first time. Everything feels gently held rather than squeezed, yet when I move nothing wobbles or jiggles or tries to escape. There are no unsightly lumps or bumps, and every part of it ends exactly where it’s supposed to. Even the sleeves are the right length. Even the flare of the skirt is perfect, to the point where I want to ask again how he did this.

Though I appreciate that part of it is just a desire to hear him say so. To hear him tell me all those tiny details a second time, in that voice of his like liquid intelligence. Just the thought of it makes my heart beat long and slow in my chest, in a way that seems insane. No one should feel like this over something so small. People need more than cleverness to start breathing hard and having illicit thoughts. At the very least you should have seen a face or a body or even a hand or two.

None of which is the case here.

He could be hideous, I think.

He probably is hideous, all things considered. What other reason can there be for him to keep himself hidden from me? None, I think, none, and even if there is one, his manner suggests something grotesque. He is still barking orders at me through the door. I tell him I’m just trying on the shoes and he keeps on going. He has to be an eight-hundred-year-old hobgoblin – an idea that should probably calm me down somewhat.

It should, yet somehow that is not the case at all.

Partly because I think the missing key to my excitement might be a brilliant mind.

But also because at that moment he decides to march to the door and fling it open, and when he does I think my insides plummet around seventeen floors. They wind up somewhere just north of hell, thanks to a face he should not have. No one should have a face like that. It has to be a crime against womankind for someone to walk around wearing that weapon of mass destruction, and anyone doing so needs to be immediately jailed. Someone call the police, I think.

Though I have no idea how they might help me. I suppose they could close my mouth or maybe stop me gasping, but even if they did there are still my eyes to contend with – my enormous and no doubt wild-looking eyes that will not stop staring at him. For a second I actually consider poking them out, to spare me further embarrassment.

But I fear it may be too late. He is quite possibly the cleverest person I have ever met. There is no doubt he already knows why I am gawping at him like a drowned fish. No one could look like that and not understand – though oddly he does an excellent job of pretending. The longer this agonising moment goes on, the more disconcerted he seems, until finally I want to glance away, just to erase that hint of a frown between his elegant eyebrows.

It only makes him more beautiful.

God, I had no idea a man could be beautiful. I thought that was just something people said in stories, yet here it is in a thousand different ways. His eyes are lovelier than a lonely ocean in winter, so cold and still and pale I can feel them freezing me where I stand. I want to check my fingers for frostbite, until I realise that the idea is mad. I’m not actually cold.

In fact I’m blazing hot. I thank God I only did up three of the buttons, because the air on my back is a glorious blessing. I think it saves me from sweating, and for that I am very grateful. He already knows my eyes have been hypnotised. I would rather he stayed in the dark about my over-heating body – though somehow I doubt he will for much longer. I mean, most of his face is bad.

But his mouth is worse.

His lips have almost no outline at all, as though they were made when someone kissed against the glass of his face. Give it a moment and they would probably disappear altogether – though most of me hopes they will stay a little longer. I haven’t quite finished looking at them yet. I need a second to marvel over the middle of his upper lip, which seems to be unlike every other lip on the planet. Most people have those soft hills, one after the other. They have a bow.

He has two sharp peaks, barely visible but still definitely there.

It makes his lips seem both cruel and at the same time so utterly soft that I would give almost anything to feel them against my skin. I consider smacking my face into his, as if by accident, despite how intrusive that would be. Most likely he would fire me.

But I think it might be worth it.

Christ, am I really thinking that? I have to pull myself together – and not just because I seem to be having ludicrous thoughts. He is looking at me now as if he would probably murder me where I stood if he thought he could get away with it. His hands are twitching a little, in a way that suggests his preferred method would be strangulation.

And to my horror the only response I can come up with is: what a way to go. He has long but fine fingers, and I find myself wondering what they would feel like around my throat. Probably heaven until you began to run out of air, I reckon, and then I really have to change the subject in my head.

Though it’s a shame I do it by blurting out:

‘Sorry, I just wanted to see.’

It sounds so feeble he flinches.

Or is it more the content that makes him mad?

‘You wanted to see if I was lying.’

‘Well, not lying exactly.’

‘Then what?’

‘Maybe making things up.’

‘There is no appreciable difference between that and telling a falsehood, Ms Parker – a fact I am sure you are aware of, considering that almost keen mind of yours.’

‘Could be the “almost” part that stops me short,’ I say, then wish I hadn’t.

Now does not seem like the best time to get funny with him, no matter how much it makes my heart sing to do it. At the very least I should probably wait for him to forget I ogled him – though somehow I doubt that will ever happen. He still looks disgusted about it, halfway through this conversation about something else altogether. Or, at least, I think he does.

His expressions are nearly impossible to read.

He could be offended by my suspicions.

He might wonder how I dare to be amused.

All seems possible, when he speaks.

‘Well, as you can see, it does indeed fit, despite your every effort at putting it on incorrectly. It may come as a surprise to you, but buttons are supposed to go in their corresponding holes rather than bizarre diagonals of your choosing. Honestly it seems a wonder to me that you ever manage to get dressed at all.’

‘There are a million of them and you only gave me a minute.’

‘Of course I only gave you a minute. I had no idea you had decided to strip off and yank everything on in my hallway. You are aware you are in my hallway, are you not?’

‘In the excitement I forgot,’ I tell him, and know immediately that I used the wrong word. His eyebrow flickers the moment I say it, and I can’t stop my face heating. Most likely he sees right through me. He probably knows where my thoughts are going, and even if he has no clue his next demand seals my fate.

‘Turn around,’ he says abruptly. So abruptly I can only blurt out a startled ‘what?’

And then he says it again.

‘Turn around, Ms Parker.’

This time I obey. I go slowly, of course, most of me nervous about what he might be going to do. I’m so used to rough treatment that I think of him manhandling me out of the hall first, rather than anything sweeter or finer. I don’t imagine for a moment that this is going to feel like someone stroking a hand over my cheek as I sleep. I don’t think it will make my body buzz, but oh, God, it does.

The very second I feel him touching the buttons I slide away on a wave of something strange. Bliss, I think, but how can I know for sure? No one has ever fastened me up like this before, and even if they had I doubt they would have done it like this. I have the barest sense of unbelievably deft fingers arranging and rearranging without making contact.

He doesn’t brush my skin. There is no real sense of him.

So it seems outrageous that the non-existent contact should flood my body with heat. That it should leave my cheeks flushed and other parts of me burning. All the funny things I want to say suddenly die on my lips. I can’t tell him that he’s a supercilious control freak, when my nipples are tightening inside this infernal dress. I can’t accuse him of wanting to cop a feel, when this was the furthest thing from that.

He steps away as though he barely did a thing – and why not? He did barely do a thing. Any excitement I may feel comes from me and my apparently insane libido. Once the door closes behind me, I have to take deep breaths, and even afterwards the currents of sensation do not ebb away.

Only my dignity does that, despite my best efforts to hold on to it.

Chapter Four

I tell myself that I am not going to react in an inappropriate way to him again. He gives me no reason to, after all. He may be extremely clever and very attractive and always wear ridiculously sexy things like cravats and velvet jackets, but that is no reason to lose my head. I have to be better than that. I am better than that. I am practical and level-headed. I know that life is not a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and even if it was I would probably hate it.

I bet it was cold all the time back then, and miserable, and when you think about it Rochester seems like a complete arsehole. He abandons his first wife and sluts his way around Europe, then has the nerve to complain about it all as though the world did him wrong. Is that really the kind of man I like?

Because that is undoubtedly the kind of man Harcroft is. No one could be that gorgeous and not have treated at least one woman really badly. I bet she writes him sad letters all the time and he just laughs and tells his haughty friends at the Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club about it, even though he doesn’t go to a Smoking-Leather-Whiskey club. In truth, I’m starting to suspect he never goes anywhere or does anything. He seems to have no real job, though that could be explained by an enormous inheritance.

That he never leaves the house, however, is slightly harder to explain.

And especially when he seems so uncomfortable around me.

Sometimes he stops in the hall when he sees me coming, then goes in the opposite direction. When he wants to say anything to me he usually writes notes, some of which I suspect come by carrier pigeon. They just appear on my windowsill at the oddest times, on the sort of stationery I feel should be reserved for writing to the Queen. In fact, it’s probably too good for the likes of her.

He uses tiny envelopes, and writes my name on them in narrow but elegant handwriting – as though there could be anyone else he might want to write to in his own house. And, in case that’s not spectacular enough, he seals the envelopes with wax. Honest to God, that is what he does. Each one has a little red circle of the stuff, with what I assume is his family crest pressed into the centre.

I have to crack the seals to get at the contents, the way Anne Boleyn probably did when Henry wrote to say he was chopping her head off. In truth, when I open the first one, I almost expect it to say something similar, like ‘Due to the weird moment we had in the hall I expect you to report to the parlour promptly for your beheading,’ and I’m not far wrong. ‘I insist you refrain from making eye contact with me,’ it says, and the second one isn’t much better. That comes after I’ve just finished sweeping the hallway with one of his many brooms – so many, in fact, that I suspect he may be a witch – and it has just three words printed on card that probably cost more than my car, in ink that looks like unicorn blood.

‘You swept wrong,’ it says.

At which point I get a little bit annoyed. Not as annoyed as Anne Boleyn probably was when she realised Henry was a serial killer, but not far off. I start planning what I would say back to him, if only he would stop disappearing behind doors and bookcases and that probably fake wall in the parlour. More than planning really – my mind damn near overflows with clever comebacks and silly leaps in logic. It’s as though our previous conversations turned some faucet on inside me, and now the water is flooding everything. It gets under my guard and makes a mess of my thoughts, until finally I just have to let it out somehow.

The third note practically forces me. ‘Do you understand what sweeping is?’ it says, and then there is nothing else I can do. ‘It’s the thing I’m going to do to your face if you send me one more note about it,’ I write, in the most careful cursive I’ve ever used. I even fashion an envelope, and blob a little wax on it from the candle in the lamp. Of course I have no family crest, but somehow I feel a swirly M carved into the seal says enough. It certainly gives me a great deal of satisfaction to set my little makeshift letter on the table by his favourite chair – and even more so when he responds.

Oh, my God, when he responds.

I think it’s then that I fully understand what we are doing here. It just comes over me the second I see the first words, so willing to just go with this absurd idea. As though he was just waiting for this all along, and now finally he has me, he has me, he has me so damned hard. ‘If you can explain to me how a face might be swept I will concede the point,’ he writes, and I almost run to the desk in my room. I sit down at it with sweating palms and shivering insides and my heart nearly bursting out of my chest. He never meant to just insult you, my giddy mind yelps, and my giddy mind is right. He wants me to write back. He wants to correspond with me.

Holy mother of fuck, we are corresponding.

‘First I lift the broom from the floor,’ I write, and I could swear my insides sing when I do. My pen flies across the page, no longer concerned with creating some fancy swirling script. I just want to get the words down and send them back, so I can see what he has to say next. No doubt he will point out that ‘swirling the bristles until his eyebrows come off’ is not possible. He may even suggest I look up ‘broom’ in the dictionary to improve my sweeping knowledge.

All of which sounds very exciting to me.

But not as exciting as what he actually says.

‘If your object is to remove my eyebrows, wax applied while I am sleeping would obviously make a good deal more sense. However, as I never sleep there is a very slim chance of this ever happening,’ he writes, now so hasty all of his words are starting to slant to the left. He forgot to cross half of his Ts and is pressing down much too hard. When I hold the paper in my hands I can feel each word like a strange Braille beneath, spelling out for me what I can already see.

He is passionate about whatever this is.

It fires him up, in a way I can tell he is not used to. He can’t quite handle it, as evidenced by the typos and the pressure but most importantly by how wide open he leaves himself. Seriously, I could drive a bus through those sentences. I have to reverse a little and just nudge into them, because, God, if I said what I really wanted to…He can never know what I would say if I really wanted to. He gets the edited version, and even that goes a step too far. ‘You should probably refrain from tempting me into random acts of waxing you in the middle of the night,’ I write, then add in a fit of madness, ‘I might not stop with your eyebrows.’

As soon as I leave the letter for him I want to take it back. I keep cringing over it as I spray the bathrooms on the second floor with Flash, so sure that this is the thing that will get me fired. Or if not fired, then at least a long, long silence. I even prepare myself for it, by not going back to my room for hours and hours. I pretend I barely care whether there’s a letter there, and plan on shrugging when I find nothing. Maybe I won’t even look towards the windowsill, where one always sits.

That way, I pre-empt my own disappointment.

I get it, before it can get me – which sounds insane but has worked for me so many times in the past. I never really wanted to go to the library anyway; I wasn’t actually interested in that notebook for Christmas; I don’t even know what Christmas is. Christmas is just like any other day, so macaroni cheese alone in the bathroom is fine. All of my life is fine, everything is fine, I swear it is, it really is…until I get to my room and the letter is there.

Until I open it and find the following:

‘Are you threatening me with theft of my chest hair, Ms Parker? If so you should know I barely have enough to make such an enterprise worthwhile. You could probably remove it all simply by blowing in my general direction, though doing so will earn you as much admonition as if you had snuck into my room and plucked each one with a pair of tweezers.’

And then I finally understand what I was really doing all along. I wasn’t fine at all; I was just settling. I didn’t stave off disappointment by opening the door for it; I just let it into the room with me sooner. I pulled up a chair for it and pretended we were friends, even though it spat in my face and stole everything I had.

It took the joy out of my life, and I know that now because when I read those ridiculous words all of it comes flooding back into me in one long glorious gush. My body fills with a delirious happiness – and all over something so simple and small. He just plays along with me. That’s all he does and yet that is all it takes.

Just someone to write insanely overblown letters about hair thievery with. Someone who is so into it that when I go to take out a pen and paper to reply I find stationery, the same sort as he has been using. I find beautiful envelopes and little cream cards and a pen, oh, God, a fountain pen. Does he know how often I sat in my diseased mess of a high school and dreamed of using a fountain pen? How I would close my eyes and will away the biro in my hand and replace it with something so like this I could cry?

I do cry, when I come across the wax and the seal.

He has even gone to the trouble of making a seal for me. It has my initials linked in a regal-looking loop, as though when he time-travelled to another century he took me with him. Now we get to live out this nineteenth-century fantasy together, and, oh, it is bliss. So much so that the next note I send almost tells him that very thing.

‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me’, I think of writing, and even though I manage to contain myself I do a lot of other inadvisable things. I step too jauntily and search for him without meaning to and, most ridiculously and unexpectedly, I catch myself singing. I have never sung in my life.

But I do. There I am, minding my own business, when suddenly it just bursts out of me. And, true, his dusty old record collection is probably partly to blame. I saw the title of one of them only seconds before, and it was a song I happened to know. Yet, even so, it kind of shocks me – and not just because it’s me trilling away.

There is also the line I choose to sing.

‘When you kiss me heaven sighs,’ I sing, so full of feeling that I want to stop before it gets any worse. Before he hears me, and thinks I mean that he is the kisser I’m imagining, when I promise he absolutely is not. He is not my ‘La Vie En Rose’, all right?

Not even when I hear a sound from the other side of the house.

One that falters and fails and fumbles into something, when I sing the next line of the song. ‘Give your heart and soul to me,’ I sing, and there it is again. First one note, fine and high, and then another and another, each clearer than the last, until I have to accept the stone-cold truth: that is him playing the piano. Somewhere in the house he is tentatively accompanying my painful singing, and so beautifully that I could never mistake it for anything but what it is.

He is saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting.

Good God, is he really saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting? It seems impossible, but, no matter how hard I sing, he keeps up. I practically reach for the sky with the line about ‘angels singing from above’, and still he responds in kind. By the time I get to the last ‘La Vie En Rose’ he is adding chords to other chords and running them together one after another in a way the song doesn’t even call for.

My voice dies away, and his is left behind.

And, by God, his is heart-shakingly good. No, more than heart-shakingly good, much more. He is so good it roots me to the spot, as though he has unleashed a musical storm and I have to take shelter. It comes pouring out of some unseen room in a great gush, all of it so incredible that even I can identify what he is. I have only a slight knowledge of the pieces he plays or how they should sound, but I still know it.

He is obviously a virtuoso.

This is what he must do for a living, I think. He must make recordings of the amazingly elastic sounds he seems to effortlessly squeeze out of the piano, and probably performs them too. He has to perform them, because seeing him do it is even more amazing than hearing it. I follow the sound until I find him in an oddly spare and quite depressing little room on the second floor, so engrossed in playing that I’m able to watch unobserved for several minutes.

I see those long fingers almost seeming to tangle with each other, rolling and flowing over the keys. Even more amazing, at one point in this intense and obviously passionate playing, he does the strangest thing. He leans down and rests his cheek on the top of the piano, eyes closed as though to savour the sound of that great and glossy beast breathing.

Not that I can blame him.

I can feel the music from here. God knows what it must be like for him. I bet he can sense Brahms pulsing through his bones. I bet he aches with it the same way I do – so strongly that I find myself crossing the bare floorboards to be nearer to him. And when I get there, the feeling only becomes stronger.

He’s so lost he doesn’t even sense my approach. His eyes stay closed and his fingers keep rolling over the keys, Brahms giving way to something I think might be Liszt and Liszt giving way to what I know is Chopin. He picks out the final heartbreaking notes of Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, and after that I just have to do it.

I have to put a hand on his shoulder. I think I want to partly just to alert him to my presence, but as soon as I touch him I can tell that was a lie. Oh, the things we tell ourselves, just to get by. I should have known that I am doing it purely out of greed. We spent the last week only talking through notes, and now he is so close.

What else could it be but my own desire?

Though, God knows, I wish it wasn’t. As soon as I make contact I want to take it back, because his reaction is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I might as well have shot ten thousand volts into him. He stands up so quickly that the piano stool flies backwards, though I could have sworn the thing was seven foot across and made of lead. When it hits the floor it makes a sound like thunder trapped in a tin, and the whole house seems to shake.

I know I shake – though that might be because of his anger more than anything else. He looks like he would kill me with his eyes if he could. His face is suddenly all lines and angles, and when he finally manages to spit out words his voice is not the rich roll I know. It seems to splinter and break over each syllable, half in fury, half in despair.

‘How dare you intrude in this manner?’ he says, and at that moment it comes to me in one long, embarrassing rush: the intimacy I thought we had created with those notes was all in my imagination, all an illusion, brought on by my hunger for the barest sign of human interaction or affection.

He was just being mean, I think, and I want to slide through the floorboards.

‘I just thought that you –’ I start to say.

But he cuts me dead.

‘You thought what? That I would welcome you flouncing in here to run your filthy fingers all over me? I told you clearly that you are to knock before entering a room. I explained the rules and you have broken them. You have flaunted your insubordination in my face and yet the first words out of your mouth are not an apology,’ he says.

Though maybe ‘says’ is the wrong word. ‘Snarls’ would be more appropriate. He is so fierce that I have to obey.

‘I’m sorry, all right, I’m sorry, I had no idea you –’

‘You had no idea that I wish to have privacy to play?’

‘You can hear it all through the house! You were playing what I was singing so I just assumed that you –’

‘I haven’t the faintest clue what you are talking about. Do you honestly think I would perform a duet with my housekeeper? That seems at best a ridiculous leap and at worst the delusions of a diseased mind.’

‘You really don’t have to be so horrible about it.’

‘I am horrible. I told you clearly when I hired you – I am cruel and hateful and ill- tempered, and if you find any of that objectionable then you should leave now. In fact I believe it would be better if you did, considering your consistent inability to maintain boundaries,’ he says, in a way that to me seems pretty unfair. He can have the delusions-of-a-diseased-mind thing – that’s fine. But how can I fail consistently to maintain boundaries when we’ve hardly ever been in the same room together?

‘I’ve barely spoken to you for days and days,’ I say, half-sure already that my protests are only going to make things worse. Yet somehow, I still don’t fully understand by how much. I imagine him just telling me to go, and instead receive something so awful that I am wincing before he even finishes.

‘And that is precisely the way I like it. If I never saw your moonish face again I would be deliriously happy. If you were to refrain from placing your greedy hands on me again I could live something resembling a contented life. But instead you force your presence upon me – worse, you touch me on the shoulder as though that is something I could ever wish for,’ he says. And at that point I have to get out of there. If I stay he will probably say something even more diabolical than ‘moonish’, and that was bad enough. The second he said it I just wanted to crush myself into a tiny cube and mail myself far away from here. I am still feeling that as I stand out in the hall, legs slightly wobbly and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Why did I do that?

Why did I touch him?

I should have been able to tell how that would go down. Just because we shared those letters does not mean we are bosom buddies, and the idea that I thought so makes me want to kill myself. At the very least I want to peel off my own skin, before it can finish roasting me alive.

And things stay that way for a long time. I will be dusting a shelf or making some dinner or drifting off to sleep, and suddenly there it will be: a searing flash of mortification to remind me. You saw a friendship or connection that was not really there, my mind will kindly explain, and of course I cannot argue. It seems sound to me, this theory. It has no holes.

Or at least I think so until I see him some time later. He stops at the end of the hall when he notices me coming from the other direction. And the second he does he goes to turn around, but not before I see his hand go to his shoulder, just as it did in that room. As though protecting the place I touched, I think.

From a wound I never intended to give.

Chapter Five

I consider writing him a note of apology but have almost no idea where to begin. I’m still not sure what happened. I want to believe that he is just an awful nightmare of a man, driven mad by a deep desire to insult me. But the more I think about it, the less it looks that way. I keep seeing my hand on his shoulder, as though I was giving him an injury. He was just defending himself, in a way I would probably understand better, if the imaginary intimacy argument was not so good.

But unfortunately it is. It sounds like something I would do. I could probably build a castle in the sky out of nothing more than stones, given half the chance. And God knows I want to, considering the state of my life to date. I grew up in a two-bedroom house with four brothers, all my feelings crammed down to nothing to avoid pain. In truth, before I came here I thought my feelings had died. I thought giddiness and singing were for rich girls.

I had no idea I could be happy.

And happiness, once felt, is hard to get rid of. It stays with me even as I try to dismiss it as unreal. I get down on my hands and knees and scrub his floors, and when they are all gleaming I do them over again. I fight with his frightening garden, clearing away the weeds and debris inch by inch until my hands are sore and sometimes bleeding.

But even as I do, even as I do my best not to tell myself over and over that he just thinks I am gross, or that some transgression of mine has driven him mad, it creeps up on me just the same. How else could it be when the very house I’m living in is him? Everything in it represents some aspect of his personality, and all of it is so fascinating that I can’t help looking and touching and exploring. I can’t help being interested in him all over again.

And especially when I find his study.

Oh, God, his study. Why did he have to leave the door unlocked? He never has before, but for some reason on Wednesday morning I find it standing ajar. Like a beckoning finger, I think, then quash that image. He probably just wants me to clean there, I tell myself, though I can see the problem with that rationale the second I let it out.

It still means I end up in the room, looking at his things. Though really, can I blame myself? The room is a million times more intense than his parlour. It belongs to my dreams of dark towers owned by witches. Every shelf is heaving with extraordinary items, from antique pocket watches to stoppered bottles to actual honest-to-God glass eyeball collections. The latter I find behind a bust of some bearded old dude while I’m dusting.

Not that I am really dusting at all.

After a while I can admit that I’m just rifling through his things, like a thief in the temple of him. I mean, I barely know how to dust. Mostly I just move layers of it around, sneezing. More of it ends up on me than on the duster, and the room doesn’t look any better for my being in there. If anything it looks worse, because now all the stuff has been moved around. There’d been a certain order to it all – and now that I can see that, I wonder what his reaction will be.

Death by firing squad for touching his things, I think.

Yet even that doesn’t put me off. It has almost no chance of doing so, once I’ve noticed the book on his desk. A book that he is most likely reading? There’s no way I can resist that. I was beginning to think his love of literature was exaggerated. Twice I’ve found myself searching cupboards for all those words that must be waiting for me somewhere, and now here they are.

The mere idea of restraining myself is ludicrous.

But God knows, I try. With the end of my duster I try to push the book further under the newspaper he has folded over it. And when that doesn’t work, I do my best to imagine his reaction. I conjure up that apoplectic face and that voice filled with vitriol, then wait for it to subdue. I wait, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be holding me back. I always thought my thirst for literature would one day kill me, and this is pretty much proof.

Though I swear, I only intend to take a peek. Just a little peek, but of course a little one leads to a bigger one, and a bigger one leads to me sitting down, and me sitting down leads to me greedily devouring the whole thing. Partly because Charles Dickens is ten times better than anyone says, and he drags me along despite my best intentions.

But mostly because his is not the only writing in the book. There are other words, written in the margins. Harcroft’s words, written in the margins. I know they are his – I recognize the cramped, narrow writing from his notes. It always makes me think the strain of talking to me makes him press too hard on the paper, but now I can see it’s just how he is.

I can see everything about how he is.

His character is in every line, so that I can almost hear his voice in my head when I read. ‘I would possibly give your heartfelt opinions on the poor a little more credence if you had not divorced your wife for a teenager via a letter in the newspaper,’ one of the notes says, because apparently even Dickens does not escape his contempt.

Or his withering analysis.

His seven-paragraph screed on the final scene between Little Dorrit and Arthur is so excruciating that I think I have secondhand embarrassment for a fictional couple. My face gets hot, not just because he is more or less right but because this is what he thinks of two people having intimate contact. He thinks it seems like two birds squabbling over a wet crust. He thinks it an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story.

God, he probably thinks my hand on his shoulder was an inexplicable turn in an otherwise just about passable story. I bet he thought I was ruled by sloppy, inconvenient emotions that he has no use for. Hell, I think I might have to agree. Here I am practically licking the words he wrote in a book, when I should be dusting or cleaning or bringing him a cup of tea. At the very least I need to be doing something other than snooping in this desperate manner.

If only to spare me the expression on his face when he catches me.

He looks even worse than last time. His lip curl is so exquisite it hardly seems like one. You could probably call it a pout and paint a fancy picture of it, though it would need a rather ominous title. And Now the Hour Cometh, I think. But then I want to explain my heinous actions – really quickly. Before he decides to murder me.

Is he going to murder me?

It certainly appears that way when he just stands there staring, without speaking, for what feels like half an hour. By the time he does say something my insides are practically in a knot. I have to wrench them apart before I can do what he asks me to, though most of me would rather not. ‘I think you had better follow me,’ he says, and all I can think is: oh, my God, now I’m going to meet my doom for repeatedly daring to transgress against him in a bird-squabbling-over-a-crust manner.

It even seems that way, as I mimic his long, slow pace. Like I’m taking part in my own funeral march, I think, then want to stop and run in the other direction.

Doubly so when we get to the door.

For some reason the wood is painted red, which never bodes well in this situation. Not when every other door in the house is a normal, natural colour. Behind this one he probably has a room full of whips and chains – or maybe the bodies of his former wives. Why else would it be locked? He has to take out a big bunch of keys to open it, and they are not the kind to reassure someone like me. They are heavy and rusty-looking, on a big ring that he has to turn and turn to get to the right one.

And the right one is a curling knot of wrought iron. It makes me think of spooky stories about haunted mansions, and even more so when he fits it into the lock. It screeches when he turns it, as though no one has been in this room for a thousand years. He only ever has sex with the ghost of his long-lost love once a millennium, because the rest of the time she is as mad as hell. I bet she’s going to bite my head off for daring to have lustful thoughts about her husband.

A thought that seems silly, I know.

But it still makes my heart thunder in my chest when he tells me to go in, and at first all I can do is put my head around the door, with my eyes closed. I want an extra second to gather myself before I have to face whatever this is. One more moment before I get eaten by God knows what. Most likely his terrible proclivities, I know.

Then I open my eyes, and see the most beautiful thing in all the world.

Not a torture room for disobedient employees who break the rules.

He has a library, a goddam library, a real honest-to-God library, right here in his house.

And not just any old library. This is a gigantic, amazing, brilliant repository of books, like nothing I’ve ever seen or even hoped to. It spans two fucking floors. Somehow, he has hollowed out two floors of his seemingly small house and made this cavernous room of wonder. And I know he did make it, too, because every part of it is so him that I could put this picture under his name in the dictionary. Every book in here is terrifying or beautiful or ancient-seeming or all three, and whatever order they might once have been in has long ago dissolved into chaos. There are tomes piled on pamphlets piled on paperbacks, and none of them at normal angles.

One shelf has been divided into triangles. Another is crammed so full I doubt anyone could ever pull anything out of it, though, by God, I am going to try. My very bones are already itching to do it. No force on earth could prevent me, not even him telling me that as punishment for my snooping I must spend all my days in here tidying up. After all, most of me knows what he really means.

It comes over me in a great relief-filled rush, telling me all the things the letters and the open doors and the left-behind Dickens tried to. This is not my imagination. I didn’t see something that wasn’t there. If I had, he would never do this in a million years, because he has to understand what it is to me.

I know he understands what this is to me.

He saw me reading.

And so gave me books.

He can pretend all he wants but anyone would understand that much. He even tells me he expects some improvement when he returns in a week’s time, then begins to leave me amidst all this glorious wonder. He is going to leave me for a week, as though that is going to seem like some awful punishment. But to someone like me it never could. He overplayed his hand, and now I can see.

Yet, when I thank him, he reacts almost strangely as he did before.

‘Why are you like this?’ he asks, voice so cold and faint I could almost believe I have it wrong. I say, ‘Like what?’ and brace myself for a blow. As it turns out, I was right to, just not in the way I thought. I expected a quick knife under the breastbone, bloody and brutal.

And instead I get something that swells my heart.

‘So utterly forgiving and endlessly kind,’ he says.

But here is the best part: he means it. He really and truly means it – I can see it all over his face. His expressions are usually so devoid of human feeling that any evidence of sincere emotion stands out like a stone in the middle of a field full of confetti. It takes everything I’ve got to pretend to be incredulous.

But, damn it, I do my best.

‘You think I am forgiving and kind.’

‘Yes, of course. What else could I possibly think?’

‘Judging by your reaction in the piano room: that I am an intrusive, delusional arsehole,’ I venture, still expecting him to nod and utter some dry quip.

‘Well, yes, you are that too, I imagine.’

But he refuses to give me even that much.

‘From the moment you walked up to my gate I have been nothing but a hideous nightmare to you, yet somehow you believe that you are the arsehole,’ he says, after which I have to do something. He honestly seems to think he is treating me so terribly that I should hate him – despite what I just realised and what he just did.

Does he think I don’t know what he just did?

I think he might not. I think I might have to explain.

‘I wouldn’t call you a hideous nightmare, exactly.’

‘Quite probably because you are utterly forgiving and endlessly kind.’

‘I was thinking more because you just gave me all of these books,’ I say, but I can tell he still doesn’t see it. Either that, or he believes he is extremely convincing in his cruelty. So convincing that I would carry on believing in it no matter how desperate he sounds – and he does sound desperate. He buries it deep beneath ten layers of sneering contempt, but I can still hear it. Somehow, I think I always could.

‘Ah, so that is the issue – you have selective hearing. I just confined you to the library that time forgot and told you to somehow tidy it up, did I not?’

‘Oh, yes, absolutely you did. But the real reason is to give me the books,’ I insist, and barely even balk at his answer. ‘That seems at best like wishful thinking,’ he says, but to my joy my confidence is undimmed. He is lying. I know he is lying. And as his edifice crumbles, so mine grows stronger.

I can even feel a smile beginning to bloom on my lips.

A teasing smile, followed by teasing words.

‘So were you going to stop me reading then?’

‘I might have done. I just might.’

‘You were going to force me not to.’

‘Yes, absolutely, I was. No question.’

‘Yank the books from my desperate hands and –’ I start, but I get no further than the gesture of clutching imaginary stories to my chest. He holds up one hand like a man about to hear that his wife has been murdered. He even closes his eyes, as though the rest is too unbearable to hear.

And his words back up that insane assessment.

They back it up, they back it up, oh, my God, they back it up.

‘Stop there. Damn you, stop. That is quite enough. No, I was not about to do such a despicable act. I would sooner pull out my own heart and put it on a pike. There, are you satisfied, you unbearable creature?’ he says, and all I can think is: how could I be anything but? He just confirmed what I only suspected. He confirmed it so hard that all I can say is ‘I am’, after which he just digs himself in deeper.

‘I have no idea why. It still does not explain why you remained here when I laughed as you struggled to climb a gate, and refused to show you my face, and said all manner of cruel things,’ he says, and after that it is all I can do to contain the bright burst of unmitigated joy and amusement and wonder that explodes inside me. I have to bite back a grin, because oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, I was right.

‘Yes, but you do all those things to deliberately drive people away, don’t you?’ I ask, then watch with a great and glorious glee as he fights to say no. He wants to so badly that he is practically drooling at the thought. He gropes for it blindly in the dark, and when he comes up short it maddens him. His jaw tightens until I think I hear the bones squeak. He has to squeeze out his words.

But he does, and it is marvellous.

‘Even if I do, you should have left long before now.’

I mean, he did just admit it, didn’t he?

And if he did, is it all right that I sound breathless when I reply?

‘If that was really what you wanted you’re going about it all the wrong way. You should be dumb as a rock and sneer at me whenever I am the least bit smart. Never play the piano because you hear me singing or write letters to me like we live in the nineteenth century or give me a library, and always make sure you are utterly predictable in every way. Then all of this would be just like my life up till now, and I could leave without a second glance,’ I say, and oh, my God, his expression when I do. It shifts from baffled and irritated to dawning comprehension to something like resignation, all in the flicker of an eyebrow.

And I know I’m reading it right.

I know I am, because he admits it.

‘I suppose I was doomed from the start. The very idea of trying to scare you off in such a manner is utterly abhorrent to me in every way.’

‘Then it seems you are stuck with me.’

‘Much to my regret and horror,’ he says, but even that doesn’t shake me.

Nothing could now. I am invincible. I am a towering steel door. I feel as though I made it to the castle beyond the goblin city, and then kept on going.

‘Does the horror have anything to do with my hand on your shoulder?’

‘You simply caught me off guard. I have no problem with being touched.’

‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Completely positive, I assure you.’

‘So if I just reach forward slowly and calmly and –’ I say, hating myself for doing it but still needing to see for sure. Most of his viciousness is for effect, true. But I think it stems from more than just not wanting to be around another person. I think he genuinely hates a hand on him, so much so that he’d go much further to stop it happening. He would insult me, and scorn my happiness, and make me believe it was all nothing.

And the seven-mile step back he takes here all but confirms it.

‘All right, all right. Enough, for the love of God. Honestly, I ask you not to look and you stare so hard your eyes almost fall out of your head. I tell you to knock and you barge in. I clearly have a problem with being manhandled and you just go ahead and do it anyway.’

‘I think “manhandle” is a little steep.’

‘And I suppose the staring was just a mere glance at my hideous visage before you quickly skipped away to more agreeable sights?’ he asks, and then I have to stop in the middle of whatever I was going to say. I had something planned, because this kind of conversation is so easy with him. For some reason, despite everything, it’s always easy. I think it might even be called flirting, though, by God, I’m not ready to call it that yet. I shy away at the last second, that ‘moonish’ still ringing in my head.

Though I must admit it gets fainter when he says ridiculous things like that.

‘Did you just call your visage hideous?’ I ask, and even manage to half-laugh. It takes some effort, because part of me would rather he did not know how gorgeous I find him. But another part is too staggered by that admission to do anything else – and doubly so, when he adds:

‘I can scarcely think what else you might call it.’

He doesn’t sound like he’s fishing for compliments. I think the concept would be beyond him. He always speaks the plain, unvarnished truth about things, no matter how unpalatable. And I know he expects me to do the same. I know he does.

So I do.

‘I think I would probably call it beautiful. I mean, I would rather not, considering what you might think of me when I do. But there really isn’t much else I can say. It’s just a fact, like the grass is green and the sky is blue.’

‘Sometimes the grass is yellow and the sky is red.’

‘Yeah, but you’re never not beautiful. You try a lot not to be, I’ll grant you that. You put a ton of effort into being an arse and you wear some of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen on a man. Right now you have your dressing gown on over a shirt and formal trousers. The trousers seem to be about three inches too short for your legs. And though you must be at least six foot three, you spend so much time hunching and scuttling around the house like a giant spider that it makes your height irrelevant.’ He has the nerve to nod as though all that is true. Which makes it all the more of a pleasure when I finish with: ‘But the fact remains, even so. You could probably model for Vogue without breaking much of a sweat.’

After which there is a long, long silence, of the sort I actually do expect. What I struggle a little more with, however, is the expression on his face. For just a second, a flicker of something dark crosses his features. And I believe I know what the dark thing is. Everything I just said bears it out.

He is afraid. He is afraid to be attractive to someone.

And that is why he says what he then does.

‘I knew it. You are quite, quite mad.’

‘No more than the man who thinks his gorgeous face is hideous. Is this why you hide behind doors and make people look at other things? Are you able to see your own face in a mirror? If you are by any chance a vampire I will give you a pass on this.’

‘I am not a vampire, you ridiculous person. I am, however, aware of the strange state of my own facial features, despite any claims you might make about their supposed beauty. I mean, my eyes are almost on opposite sides of my head. I have the nose of an upper-class albatross and an upper lip that could probably slice bread. You just put the loaf in the middle and those two weird peaks do the rest.’

‘Your eyes, nose and mouth are the best things about you. Apart from maybe your opinion of Dickens, your ridiculous efforts at driving me away, your amazing home and your strange way of making it feel OK to talk like this. I should be frightened, but I rarely feel it. And when I do, it is delicious. Like the kind of fear I guess only important people have. The kind of fear my dull little life never offered.’ I utter the words before I even know I think them. Everything is just spewing out of me now, as it is for him.

Though he tries to put a stop to it.

‘Perhaps that is why you accept such meagre crumbs from me. Because you’ve never had anything but stale bread served dry, and have no way of appreciating anything better. Or believing you deserve it.’ He seems very satisfied with himself. He has me now, he probably imagines – but he really doesn’t.

‘Do you believe I deserve it, Mr Harcroft? Did you believe it when you opened that door for me? Did it make you secretly pleased that I wrote back with such eagerness or sang “La Vie En Rose” with all that passion or carried on liking you despite the fact that you called me ugly?’

‘I never called you ugly.’

‘You said that very quickly.’

‘Did I? It seemed slow to me, Ms Parker,’ he says, so airily I could almost think he was telling the truth. He didn’t rush to correct my assertion. He didn’t panic slightly at the idea that I could go away believing he thinks I’m ugly. It was just a trick of the light or a shift in atmospheric pressure.

Like the way he stiffens when I soften my voice.

Or looks so lost when I say: ‘I think you should call me Molly.’

I think his face almost caves in. He begins to answer me, and for a second nothing comes out. Then, when it does, the ‘yes’ he most likely wanted to say is gone. It disappears back down inside him, along with the rest of his emotions.

‘That seems like the very worst idea I can think of.’

‘I can hardly imagine why. People do it all the time.’

‘Yes, and people are generally idiots. They form attachments and have feelings, none of which is the least bit palatable to me. I would far sooner we simply continue addressing each other in a more formal manner, and not just because doing otherwise encourages a worrying surfeit of sentimentality,’ he says, then pauses as though reluctant to continue. When he does, I can see why he hesitated. ‘There is also the fact that I would rather not tell you what my Christian name actually is.’

‘Is it because you are the son of some peer of the realm?’

‘No, it’s because my name is ludicrous.’

‘I want to hear it even more now. Is it somewhere amongst all of these tomes? Is there one from your childhood, saying, “Property of little Rupert Ignatius Sebastian Harcroft”?’

He makes the irritated sound he did when we had our little interview.

He behaves just as I thought he would, down to the hand wave and the frustration.

‘I hate you for thinking it might be Rupert.’

‘But not for Ignatius.’

‘I wish it were Ignatius. At least that has the honour of being a real name.’

‘So your name is so posh it sounds made-up.’

‘I am not about to indulge in a guessing game with you, Molly.’

‘You called me Molly. I think a guessing game is on the table,’ I say, and this time he breaks. He really, really breaks. ‘Damn you,’ he says, and actually brings a frustrated fist up to his mouth. Apparently, whatever this game is, I am winning it.

And by quite a wide margin.

‘Tell me. You’ve told me everything else.’

‘Have I? I feel as though I barely said a word.’

‘Apparently you didn’t need to.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ he says, with just the barest hint of bitterness. It soon fades, however, and gives way to something so cool it makes my heart thump. ‘You are very good, you know. Not as good as me but then few people are. Honestly, you have no idea how many people I turned away – it must have been hundreds.’

He sounds like he might be marvelling a little.

Marvelling over someone as small and insignificant as me.

‘They had no idea what they were missing, Augustus.’

‘Your guesses are terrible – which leads me to think you are making them terrible on purpose. A sloppy tactic that somewhat belies the praise I just lavished on you.’

‘Was that lavishing? Crikey, what are you like when you really let go?’

‘I never really let go. Or had you missed that fault in my personality, my little Sherlock? Perhaps I should downgrade you again to Watson.’

‘You can if you want. But you will look silly when I finally make you crack and confess. As far as I know Watson never made anyone do that.’

‘Actually Watson was almost as clever as Sherlock in the original –’

‘Now you’re just trying to change the subject.’

‘I know but you are backing me into a corner,’ he says, and I don’t know what I like more. That he admits it, or that he speaks from behind gritted teeth.

‘I apologise, Bartholomew Huntley Harcroft the Third,’ I say, then delight when he rolls his eyes. He has great eyes to roll, despite what he thinks of them.

And he has a great name, despite what he thinks of that.

‘My name is Cyrian, for the love of God,’ he says finally, furious at finding himself trapped between my awful guesses and the truth, but almost relieved once the thing is out. Now, at least, he can lay down the ground rules. ‘But I swear if you ever call me it I will tell you tired old jokes about mother-in-laws while playing easy listening elevator music at full volume in a caravan at Butlins that has only a copy of Maxim in the toilet with the crossword puzzle solved…wrongly,’ he says, that one word on the end so packed with dark menace that I shiver. His voice could make the Teletubbies sound like an international terrorist ring.

‘That was a really vicious threat, even for you.’

‘I will take that as a compliment.’

‘It was intended as one,’ I say, but he just shakes his head.

‘You give me entirely too many of them.’

‘Now who is the one who thinks they’re undeserving?’

‘Some people genuinely are. You really have no idea about me,’ he says.

Though I can see I’ve caught him off-guard.

A little more, I think, and he could cave completely.

‘Then tell me all the things I should know.’

‘I can scarcely think of a worse way to pass the time.’

‘So maybe I should just come up with more things myself.’

‘Oh, no. Wait, I can think of something worse. Well done.’

‘I promise I will be gentle.’

‘That is the reason it is worse. Sympathy is for fools and morons and people who are unable to cope with the rigours of everyday life. I have no need of it.’

‘Then you want me to be harsh? You are a massive buffoon,’ I say, intending it as a joke yet somehow not expecting him to react to it as one. In fact I thought he might be incapable of displaying real amusement at anything – least of all my attempts at humour.

Yet he proves me wrong about that.

He proves me wrong in startling and glorious fashion. So startling and glorious, in fact, that at first I wonder what on earth he’s doing. A sound comes out of him and his features shift around and all of it is so completely not him that I just don’t recognise it for what it is.

It takes me a full minute, and even then I have to ask.

‘Did you just laugh?’

‘I know. I am as surprised as you are to discover I can do that.’

‘You get these lovely lines around your eyes,’ I burst out, but only because I want to say something else. It makes you look even more beautiful, I think. It makes you look warm and human and like one day you might let me be more to you than just a person you know, I think. Then thank God that I manage to keep it inside.

He barely accepts what I do say.

Lord knows what he would make of that.

‘That might be because I am ancient and decrepit.’

‘I somehow doubt you are more than thirty-five.’

‘Now I know you are just coddling me. I am thirty-four and appear forty-five, a fact that I am well aware of. My own fault, of course – I had a love affair with cigarettes until a year ago and it left me the ruin you see before you. To this day I still crave the sweet embrace of Benson and Hedges,’ he says and now it’s my turn to giggle – much to his irritation.

‘I fail to see how that is amusing. My lungs are most likely blacker than Hades.’

‘It’s amusing because of how you put it. God, I love the way you put things. I love the words you use and the way you put them together in sentences. You almost never speak like a normal person and it’s thrilling to me. Absolutely and in every way. I could listen to you talk all day,’ I say, and only realise at the end that I’ve gone way, way too far. I missed the bullet of telling him I want him to be warm and my friend and all of that other stuff, and shoot myself with this one instead.

Luckily for me, however, he doesn’t seem to notice.

Or not in any way that matters.

‘You are the strangest creature.’

‘Said the man who thinks his gorgeous face is ugly and tries to drive people away with duets and letters and books and magical dresses.’

‘I have good reasons for all of those things.’

‘And for the aversion to touch, too?’

‘It is not really what it appears,’ he says, but immediately seems to know he should not have. Now he has left a little door open, and I just have to casually step through.

‘Is it a germ thing?’

‘That guess was beneath you, Molly.’

‘You called me Molly again.’

‘Slip of the tongue.’

‘Or an attempt at distracting me.’

‘As though I would utilise such a feeble gambit.’

‘Then we can go on talking about it?’

‘I suppose so, if your tiny mind is so easily occupied.’

‘That was a good effort at stopping me before we can get to the good stuff.’

‘Thank you. It took quite a bit of effort to do it,’ he says, the words so throwaway I could almost miss the meaning behind them. Maybe if I were not his Sherlock Holmes I would have, but even I can see that I am. I have a talent for guessing the hidden parts of people – a talent I had no idea was so pronounced, until I applied it to him.

But now that I have, I can hardly deny it.

I see his suggestion as clear as if he had written it in the sky:

It pains me to insult you.

And that just about takes my breath away. I need a second to process, and then accept, and finally offer the only thing I can.

‘We can stop if you want.’

‘If I say yes you will only wonder.’

‘Quite possibly, but I would never ask again.’

‘Not really the point – I would know you were thinking about it.’

‘And that will drive you mad, then?’

‘It already is driving me mad,’ he says.

I almost turn back. I really don’t want to push him. If he wants his secrets he is entitled to them. I have no claim on him and even if I did I doubt I would act on it. I want him to be at peace. I want him to laugh again.

I hate the thought of him struggling with anything.

Yet at the same time I am suspicious of what he is really doing here. I have been for a while. After all, he is as sharp as anything. He has to see what result that last comment will produce. He wants me to ask almost as much as he doesn’t.

‘Do you hate all kinds of touching?’

‘Oh, Lord, this is a sex question.’

‘I was thinking more of shaking hands.’

‘Ah. Well. In that case I prefer not to. I prefer not to do anything that involves any bodily contact,’ he says, and then I have to come clean.

My face is red and I feel found out, but I need to be honest.

After all, I’m expecting him to be.

‘It was really a sex question.’

‘You are appalling. Honestly – why does everything have to be about that?’

‘Because everything is about that. Wars are fought over it. People sing songs and write books and make movies about it. Human beings need sex.’

‘Then I must be something else, for I find precious little use for the stuff,’ he says, and I don’t know what I like more: that he says ‘precious little’ or that he refers to sex as stuff. He even makes an odd little gesture in the air when he does, like his fingers are covered in something sticky.

And that just about drives me crazy.

It’s as much as I can do to keep my next enquiry PG-13.

‘So I guess you must be asexual or maybe –’

‘I am not about to lay claim to an identity I do not possess. The trappings of sexual congress have simply never appealed to me – I find them repugnant and irrational and against most of the principles I hold dear. The human mind was meant to be ruled by logic and reason, not a morass of sloppy hormones.’

‘It sounds like you have no idea what sex is, to be honest.’

‘I have a perfectly good idea of what sex is.’

‘If you did, you would never refer to it as a sloppy morass.’

‘I fail to see how my description is in any way inaccurate.’

‘How can you possibly know that if you’ve never?’ I ask, intending only an innocent question but understanding at the same time why I do it. I want to know. It could well be that I burn to know, in a way that seems strange even to me. I always thought I was the kind of girl to be fascinated by lotharios who fuck everything that walks, and yet somehow, as soon as I come across the idea of the opposite, I am greedy for details.

And even greedier after he supplies some.

‘There are these things called books. I believe we are currently surrounded by them.’

‘Yes, but I doubt Jane Eyre is explicit about irrational fucking.’

‘Ah, so you believe my only source of information is a Bildungsroman from the nineteenth century about an orphan girl who marries a gigantic arse.’

‘I believe all of your sources of information are Bildungsromans from the nineteenth century about orphan girls who marry gigantic arses,’ I say, then wait in an agony of anticipation for him to take the bait. He’s going to tell me more now, I feel sure of it. I feel so sure that I don’t even see the danger when he answers.

‘Then I would be delighted to give you an example of the kind of thorough research I have undertaken. Have a seat,’ he says, and all I feel is glee. I sit without thinking and say ‘yes’ like a fool, and only realise at the last second what a mistake I might have made. I see it in a flash. I can hardly believe I let this happen.

I asked a man I can never have to tell me all the things he knows about sex.

And now I have to sit here and listen.

Chapter Six

I know as soon as he sits down that I am in trouble. He crosses one leg over the other, in a way I would describe as louche if I could stand to. At the very least I have to admit it shows off how long his limbs are, and how much more muscular than they had initially seemed. At first glance, he always appears rail-thin.

But then you see something flex and tighten in his thigh, and all is lost.

There is no going back, after this. Whatever pretence I made of not fancying him dissolves, the moment he sits there and just looks at me. Then, just when I think it can’t get any more intense, he reaches inside his dressing gown.

And draws out a bloody book.

God, I should have known there would be a book involved. I should have stopped before I asked him a single thing about who he is sexually, because, however rough I thought this was going to be, it is almost definitely going to be rougher now. I love books more than people. His speaking voice sends me straight to sex hell. How am I supposed to cope with him reading stuff to me? I can barely stand to see him riffle through the pages.

Those long pianist’s fingers practically stroke each one. He pauses only to lick his forefinger, which just makes everything far worse. By the time he finds a passage he likes, I am on the edge of my seat. The only things that seem to be holding me there are the muscles in my shins, but even they are starting to tremble.

Another second of this and I will end up sprawled on the floor.

I’m almost there now. My knees feel very close to the ground. Every part of me seems to be sagging, and that’s before he says, ‘Here we are. This should do.’ Then reads aloud from the book, in an even more sonorous and sin-riddled voice than any he has used before. And if that was not bad enough, in case the sound didn’t do the trick, this is what he says to illustrate whatever fucking point he thinks he’s making:

‘Her cunt was as ripe and wet as a recently sliced peach.’

I swear, I think my heart stops. I almost pound on my chest to get it going again – but only because, dear God, I cannot die now. He just said ‘cunt’. He said ‘cunt’! Did he say ‘cunt’? There is no way he could have said ‘cunt’. I must have misheard him. After all, there was definitely the word ‘peach’ in there, which probably means he is reading to me from a cookbook. He knows how much I love food so he thought that telling me how to make a cobbler would set my senses on fire.

And he isn’t wrong.

My senses are on fire.

They are on fire because he definitely fucking did say ‘cunt’. He said it in the most glorious way anyone has ever said it. He made it beautiful, rather than something I’m used to hearing from a tattooed man as he throws a beercan at my head. His mouth almost worships it. The word seems to take his tongue by surprise. I can almost see how it would be if he were to lick that very thing in one long, glorious, heartbreaking stroke.

But that isn’t the best part.

No, the best part is what comes next.

The best part is that there is more.

‘And when she spread it for him he found he could hardly stop himself. He simply had to lick at that glistening slit, and the second he did so she reacted just as he had hoped. She stopped all pretence that she was a lady, and told him all the things she would most like him to do. In a fever she whispered that he should fuck her wet hole, and rub her swollen bud, and when he followed each of these deliriously filthy instructions she made sure to reward him in full,’ he says, in one great long rolling wave that nearly smashes me to pieces. I have to fight for breath and, when I finally manage to take one, it feels far too big and far too loud. It practically fills this enormous room.

To his credit, though, he makes no comment.

He just keeps on reading to me from the book from hell.

‘She came with a guttural groan of pleasure, her wetness running like a river over his chin and throat and chest. For a moment all he could taste was her – the soft, flushed folds pressed so tightly to his mouth and that glorious wash of her first orgasm. There would be many more for her that night, but before he could see to it she spoke the words he was bursting to hear. The ones he never thought she would say – too rude and yet so much the better for it. “Fuck my mouth,” she said. “Fill me there.” And though he wanted to hesitate, he found he could not. All that mattered was the tight velvet clasp of her lips around his cock, her lust-heavy eyes on him as he thrust slowly in and out.’

Seriously, what story is this? The cover makes it look like something important and old from a course on super-intelligent texts from the nineteenth century. I think it is bound in leather with embossed lettering, and the paper is thick and expensive.

Yet the words are filth itself. They are so filthy my cheeks are blazing. I think I might be just as embarrassed as I am electrified by it, though it’s a close thing. One emotion seems to bleed into another and then the other attacks the first with a hammer until finally I just have to accept it. He was right about knowing his stuff.

He knows his stuff just fine.

In fact he knows it so well I’m starting to suspect there may be some other motive in here somewhere. He seems calm, on the outside. And, when I react in any way, he barely appears to notice. Or so I think. But it must be hard for him to keep doing so, when I know there are so many signs of my excitement. My nipples are pressing against my dress, so stiff and spiky that not even a layer of lining and support can conceal them. And, though the room is as cold as a tomb, I can tell my cheeks are flushed. I can almost feel them blazing, like a neon beacon saying, ‘Molly is really fucking turned on.’

But even if they weren’t, the fact that I just started rocking in my chair would be something of a giveaway. He starts talking about working a slick finger into tight arseholes and coming in great, pulsing spurts, and I have to do something. I have to rub myself a little, and then maybe a little gives way to a lot, and finally I think I might be just humping the chair – so really he has to know something.

He must, and yet he keeps going.

Now he’s talking about some guy who just came in, as the first one finishes filling her mouth. And though I think I can safely say that one man makes for a simple story to illustrate his point, I’m not sure what to make of it when a second joins in. The second one fucks her pussy while the first licks her clit, and then, just in case that wasn’t bad enough, just in case I wasn’t almost wild with lust, he tells me in that gorgeous voice that ‘he slid out of her still shivering cunt, to spill all over the still lapping tongue of this handsome stranger.’

After which, I feel it must be OK to go further. He just described a guy coming all over and inside another guy’s mouth. You just don’t do that unless you expect someone to get excited – though to be honest I’m way past that point. I’m so turned on that I could slip a hand into my knickers. I could tug at my stiff nipples and stroke my slippery pussy. And when he talks about them both kissing her come-soaked sex I get really close. One of my hands almost makes it to mid-thigh and the other is somewhere around the middle of my chest.

But, thank God, it stays there. Thank God, I hold on to some of my senses, because just as sexual certainty has me in its bright-red and burning hot grip, just as I think there’s no way this is anything but a come-on – that’s when he chooses to suddenly snap the book closed, so sharply that I know what’s coming, but all the same, by God, I will it not to.

Just give me some small sign that you meant it to feel so sweet, I think at him.

And then he glances up at me, as impassive and cool as a pane of glass, and tells me what I should have understood from the moment he started speaking. I should have done, but I didn’t, and oh, God, I will regret that until the day I die.

‘So you see it’s quite simple to be aware of sex,’ he says, swiftly followed by the crushing kicker: ‘Without ever feeling anything at all.’

Chapter Seven

I try to pretend none of it affected me in the least. The only trouble is, he makes pretending almost impossible. It would have been easy before, when he spent his days hiding behind doors and darting away into rooms whenever I was around. But, unfortunately for me, he doesn’t need to do any of that now. He no longer has anything to hide.

He can just fly around the house whenever he feels like it, suddenly barging into rooms when I least expect him to. There I am, minding my own business, fervently sweeping the ceiling in order to take my mind off things, and he has the effrontery to come in and be sexy and attractive and probably Byronic.

All of which sounds stupid, considering what he usually wears around the house. I swear to God, he spends most of his time in pyjamas and robes. On one occasion he sweeps in wearing a smoking jacket, with nothing on his feet. I see his bare toes, and that just makes this all the more hellish.

Somehow the skin on his feet is better than the skin on my face. It looks so smooth and pale and tender that someone should probably write a poem about it. An ode to his toes, I think, and I want to laugh and cry at the same time. It seems that even the smallest, strangest things about him turn me on.

I know they shouldn’t. After all, no one could really find a man perched in a chair like a great black bird the least bit enticing. There is nothing sexy about someone who forgets he dropped a stick of chalk into his tea and drinks it anyway, or a guy who craves cigarettes so much that one day I find him rubbing an empty packet of Benson and Hedges all over his face and body.

Those things are repellent.

I want them to be repellent.

I wish with all my might that they were repellent, but they almost never are. Take the last example. It probably would be unattractive if it were any other man, if he were just a friend of the family who had a ferocious need for cigarettes. But the problem is that this is Cyrian who has a ferocious need for cigarettes. This is sexless, passionless Cyrian letting me see that he has a ferocious need for cigarettes.

And oh, Christ, it’s hell.

I have to watch him smear the foil from inside the packet over his closed eyes and his open mouth, so desperate that he barely cares that I am standing in the doorway. I doubt he would care if the Queen was standing in the doorway. He just wants to lick every last trace of cigarettes from the wrapper, in a way I know is completely helpless. There is nothing sexual intended.

It just feels sexual to me, the hormonal morass.

As does the next thing he suggests to me, much to my horror and consternation. All he says is that my posture is a little poor. At best, it seems like concern, albeit with a skilful hint of insult. But then he suggests I let him correct it, and everything starts to slowly slide sideways.

I have no idea why I say yes. I am going to get myself into serious trouble again, and I see that even before he opens his study door for me. He moves with the same grace as when he sat down and took out that smutty story, that lesson-giving look all over his amazing face. And then he hands me a book and tells me to balance it on my head, and I immediately understand what is going to happen here.

I am going to walk up and down in front of the desk in his study.

And he is going to watch me in a way that makes me go out of my mind. Hell, I am already going out of my mind, and nothing has happened yet. I am just gingerly trying to balance the book and he is just sitting at his desk, hands neatly folded in his lap. No one could think this was a big deal.

But then no one would have had his eyes on them while they did it. They probably just played at this once when they were kids, or maybe the headmaster made them do it once, after they were caught slouching in class. A stern and forbidding figure, but even so – nothing like this.

His gaze feels like the sun on the side of my face. I want to stop right there before I get burned, but of course I can’t now. I’ve already agreed to it. If I back out he will know something is wrong, and I never want him to. Not if he has no idea what all this is doing to me. Not if he thinks it should never do anything to me at all. He is repelled by sex, I think, and will see me as disgusting if I try to force my feelings upon him.

So I walk when he tells me to. I take a tentative step in the glare of that unwavering stare, heart pounding somewhere around my forehead, every part of my body sweating. I’ve never sweated so much in my life. I think I feel it forming a slick on the insides of my thighs, but then I realise.

That is not perspiration.

Oh, my God, it’s not perspiration. Somehow the mere idea of this walking thing is making other stuff happen to me. I think of his eyes slowly following me as he sits there like a punter in some really strange strip club, and the space between my legs aches, and becomes full and fat and slick, despite my best efforts to suppress it.

I try thinking of wallpaper wrapped around my grandmother, or paint drying on the word ‘England’ that someone has hung on a tax-office door. Then, when that has no effect, I just go for broke. As clumsily as I can, I let the book slide off my head and fall to the floor. That should do the trick, I think.

Being a big awkward dork is never exciting.

But then he stands up and starts to move towards me, and oh, I know I’ve miscalculated.

I never thought he would come over here. Please, someone, stop him coming over here. It was bad enough when he just sat and watched. I felt like all my clothes were falling off every time I saw a flicker of his eyebrow. But now, with him so close – I don’t think I can cope. My senses are immediately assailed by his smell, smoky and expensive and sweet. And even more horrible: somewhere in the interim he has taken off his robe.

He’s wearing only shirt and trousers, and the trousers seem much tighter than they did before. When he stoops to retrieve the book – slowly, oh, so unbearably slowly – I see the frankly amazing curve of his arse, so high and tight that you could hang a bag full of cement off it. And of course he somehow turns to show it off at the best angle.

Does he know he is doing that? I want to say no, given his indifferent behaviour in the library. But it’s harder to believe that when he finally straightens. ‘Your book,’ he says, only he pronounces ‘book’ with a kick at the end instead of a K. He emphasises syllables that aren’t there, in a tone that would put the Sheriff of Nottingham to shame, and it damn near forces the bones out of my body.

How else to explain my inability to take the book back? He offers it, but my arms are so rubbery I can only manage a limp wave. I just stand there until he decides that the best thing to do is put it back himself, though, Lord knows, I wish I had thought that through. Getting a book put on your head by Cyrian Harcroft is about the worst thing a person can do.

For a start, he almost touches me when he does it. I think I feel his fingers brush some strands of my hair. My breath catches at the faint and tingly feel of it, every part of me so aware of his almost-touch that I could pick it out of a line-up. And how aware he seems. How careful he is to make sure everything is almost but not quite. How he positions his fingers in two steeples, either side of the book, so elegant and precise that it leaves me weak. The only thing that seems to be holding me up is my skin, and I can’t be sure of even that. It feels as though it might be on fire. My face is so hot I can almost see it glowing. I can even tell what colour it will be – a deep and embarrassing red, from the roots of my hair down to my neckline. I must look a sight, I think, but the truth is I have no idea what a sight is to him. I might be Sherlock Holmes when it comes to his subconscious, but I am Clouseau when it comes to sex. I almost go to pieces over a book on my head and a man bending over, and then I actually do so, just at the sight of his hands raised to my face. He’s going to put them on me, my mind yells, and it really seems like that. They come together around my chin, so close I could almost believe they were there.

And then they stop just shy, in a way that is brutally brilliant.

I had no idea the space between bodies could be so amazing. No clue that stopping just short was more intense than going over the edge. With other guys I always wanted to rush, fumbling frantically towards some finishing line I never quite reached. But this is different. This is exquisite, this is agony, this is everything all at once.

So much so that I think a tear rolls down my cheek.

In fact I know it does, when he carries on with whatever this is. How could it not, with the excruciating things he does? He strokes my body all over, without once laying a finger on me or going over any line. He doesn’t need to. Just feeling the air stir between his hand and my lower back is enough, and even more so when he adds instructions. ‘That’s right, shoulders a little further back,’ he says, while his hands hover around my upper arms.

And I die a thousand deaths.

Then a thousand more for ‘Legs a little further apart’. He just adds that to his other suggestions, as though somehow it’s the same. There is nothing the least bit lewd about it. He only wants to help me, you see. He just wants to make me stand straight, even though opening your legs doesn’t help with that.

If anything, it tilts me sideways. I lift one foot and try to move it one step to the right, and my whole body seems to lose its stability. Everything wobbles and cants at a weird angle, until my heel is firmly planted on the ground again. And even when it is, I feel unbalanced. I want to lean on something, at least.

But the only thing to lean on is him.

His desk is about a mile away. The nearest wall is even further. And, as the time ticks on, the distance between me and things to hold on to only increases. Everything is narrowing down to his eyes on me, so cool and steady I could never believe he meant anything by this. Not even when he makes another suggestion, even lewder than the last.

‘A little more,’ he says, as though I moved only a millimetre last time, instead of a Goddamn mile. I think I might be starting to stretch the limits of this dress, yet he persists. And the bloody tone he uses, so low and sinuous. He could ruin a nun with sounds like that. He could make tea and cake seem like the most deplorable criminal act.

It certainly feels as though I might get five to ten in Broadmoor, if I do one more thing he says. I can practically hear the sirens, as I try shakily to take that extra step. Some policeman is going to ask me why I thought it was OK to stand like a slut in his study, when all he wanted was to give me a lesson in how to be a lady.

And I will have no answers. I can barely explain to myself why I feel this way, let alone to an imaginary policeman. It should be easy to avoid. I should want to respect his boundaries. He never does anything to test my restraint, and yet I practically have to limp to the door once he’s done. He tells me that this will do for now and I hobble out, so breathless I have to stop and lean against the wall outside for a second.

I have to catch my breath and cool myself down, while he probably picks lint from his trousers and has a sip of tea. No doubt he thinks he did a wonderful job of making me a better person, and I just sullied it with my soaking vagina. My only consolation is that he never seemed to notice.

But next time I know I might not be so lucky. Next time he might accidentally do something worse, like eat a banana really slowly or run a brush through his tangle of curls. And though neither seems particularly likely, it still feels best to avoid him, just in case. Better safe than sorry, I think, and then I spend most of my days dodging him the way he once dodged me.

Now it’s my turn to hide behind doors and disappear into secret rooms – or at least I would if the secret rooms really existed. But, sadly for me, all I can find is a broom cupboard and a linen closet. At one point I hear him coming down the stairs and duck into the space underneath it, almost gleeful with relief when he passes me by. I skip to the first step, thinking that this might actually be possible. I can just keep away until my crush disappears.

And then I hear him call my name, and all is lost.

‘Molly,’ he says – not ‘Ms Parker’ or ‘hey, you’ or even an order of some kind. My first name, spoken with such familiarity that my heart starts immediately pounding. I freeze on the stairs, so close to escaping I can almost taste it. I even consider going ahead with that, as though I never heard him at all. Later I can send him a note that says, ‘Sorry I missed you.’

But just as I decide to do it he calls again.

‘Molly, I know you are there.’

There is no way I can avoid that. He can probably hear me standing here like a statue, and so any attempt at leaving will seem deeply suspicious. He might even guess my filthy lusts simply because I steer clear, and so I decide to go to my doom. I take a breath and double back to the parlour, where he is sitting as though without a care in the world. It doesn’t even seem important to him that I turned up.

He just studies the book in his hand, while I stand there in the doorway.

Eventually I have to prompt him, which goes very badly for me.

‘Did you want me for something, Mr Harcroft?’ I ask, and immediately want to kick myself for about a thousand reasons. I called him Mr Harcroft instead of Cyrian, for a start. Now it seems like I went back on my earlier insistence or lost some confidence along the way. I am smaller than I was, slighter, and he has to wonder why.

And then there are the words ‘want me’.

Why did I say ‘want me’?

I can tell it gets his attention. His head turns a fraction to the right, and his gaze shifts just enough for me to know what he is doing. Watching me with his peripheral vision, I think, then I want to disappear immediately. In fact, I get very close. I even come up with an excuse – ‘I need to make a trip to the dry cleaners’ – and only fail to deliver because he gets there before I can gather myself.

‘Yes, I do want you,’ he tells me.

Then all I can do is wish I had been quicker. If I had been quicker I wouldn’t have had to hear him say something men usually say in bed. I could have avoided the sudden weakness in my knees, and left without a second glance. Certainly I could have got away before he finished, which would have been far, far better for me.

The next part is even worse.

Oh, God, it is so, so much worse.

‘I was hoping you might offer me your opinion on a passage I seem to be struggling with. You know, from the book I read to you,’ he says, so casually I feel sure I must have misheard for a second. He barely looks up from the pages. The expression on his face remains so neutral he could be talking about some weighty text he is studying. He even has a pen poised over the margin, as though he intends to make notes as he did in the Dickens.

But when I catch a glimpse of the top line I wonder what he could possibly write. Somehow I doubt arse-fucking is a suitable topic for close analysis, but he seems intent on trying. Apparently he takes his porn just as seriously and logically as everything else.

And, worse, he expects me to as well.

He gestures to the chair and imagines I will sit down, even though I can’t, I fucking can’t, oh, God, I could never. I already feel as though I’ve been on an escalator to arousal for the past two weeks, and that was over nothing. There is no way I can cope with more. I have to say no.

So why do I say yes?

Apart from the fact that he has trapped me, in the same way as he did before. If I refuse it will tell him everything, as surely as if I had lifted up my skirt and shown him my ladyparts. I will look guilty of things I haven’t done and wicked without even trying, and so here I am: forced to fake indifference under the most appalling of circumstances. And this time they are the most appalling. There is no gently easing me with peach cunts and pussy licking.

Instead he begins with:

‘She groaned as they filled every hole she had.’

And everything just goes downhill from there. He doesn’t pause, to give me a chance to catch my breath. He just keeps going, until I start to lose my self-control. I feel it slipping away from me as he flicks to the next page, then further away when he reaches the next. In a second it will just be a thread – some tiny, flimsy thing barely tethering me to my dignity. One more word and it will snap, and after that I don’t know what will happen.

I might jump on him.

I could conceivably tear off all his clothes.

But thankfully I only put a hand between my legs. It seems bad, but considering the alternatives it’s not such a big deal. It’s almost freeing to finally give in to it. Like I have an itch under some stitches, and finally get to scratch.

He can hardly blame me for that.

But oh, God, he does.

He does.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he says, so suddenly it almost takes me by surprise. I think I was just sinking into it and must have closed my eyes – lost for a second in something like relief – and then he spoke and everything turned to shit.

Now I have to answer.

Even though my answer is terrible.

‘I just had to readjust myself,’ I say, like some teenage boy on a bus trying to get out of a sexual harassment charge. He never meant to let his penis pop out. His fly was just pressing into his testicles. He is completely innocent, honest, your honour.

Not that your honour buys it.

‘And you expect me to believe that?’

‘I would really appreciate it if you would.’

‘Then I am afraid I must disappoint you. I saw it clearly and quite frankly I am appalled that you would think that appropriate behaviour for the parlour. And in the middle of the morning too – could you not even wait for a more fitting time like, say, never ever on pain of death? At the very least you could have done it furtively, in the bathroom, like a decent person,’ he says, then obviously waits for me to be thoroughly mortified.

And I am, I really and truly am.

I find myself thinking about certain things he said there. My mind drifts over the words ‘furtively’ and ‘in the bathroom’, almost against my will. Half of me wonders if that is what he does, even as the other half is fucking appalled that I could even ask the question. He must be right, I think. I really am indecent.

So much so that I say this in my defence:

‘But you just read that filthy thing out loud.’

‘So you compound your error by blaming me.’

‘No, no, not blame exactly, not blame,’ I say, but I can hear myself starting to panic now. There are no angles I can play here. Nothing witty I can say when I just essentially became that teenage boy on the bus.

When he responds, I feel like a serious predator.

‘But you believe I am in some way responsible for this? I asked for your opinion, Molly. Never once did I suggest that you should give it by sticking your hand up your skirt,’ he says, by which point I am starting to sweat. My hands flap and my voice is very high and very tight. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘sorry, I really am sorry,’ but I can already tell, before he even speaks, it’s going to be too little too late.

And then he does and oh, Lord help me.

‘You think an apology will make up for such lewd behaviour?’

That leaves me almost no room to manoeuvre. If he won’t accept an apology, the next step is my untimely firing. I can see that, yet I still want to try.

‘Well, how else can I possibly make amends?’ I ask, and I really mean it too. There must be something, I think, and, thank God, there is. Though I am not sure God deserves gratitude here. I think Satan might, instead.

In fact I know Satan does, because he’s sitting right in fucking front of me.

‘Typically, I think, women who behave badly get spanked,’ he says.

The room seems to lose cabin pressure, even though we are not on a plane. At any rate, something seems to drop. Possibly the penny, but if so it must be the size of a small planet.

It all but crushes me in its path. All I can do is sit there for a second with my mouth probably hanging open, because oh, my God, he is doing this on purpose. He is doing this on purpose. How could I not have known he was doing this on purpose? He loves disguising one thing as another. He practically spent the first month of me living here carefully hiding any friendly feelings he had for me behind a lot of things he thought I would hate.

I should have known it was the same thing here. He can spot an emotion from seventy paces. He probably saw excitement on my face before I even knew it was there.

And he knew just how to torture me. He knew to suggest without really saying, to imply without ever crossing the line into the unequivocal. He played on the very problem I had before, the very thing he probably learned from our conversation in the library: I worry about imagining something is there when it isn’t. And oh, he did it so well I want to applaud. In fact, I most likely would.

If he hadn’t just completely overplayed his hand.

He just did the equivalent of throwing everything in on a pair of jacks, so sure I would back down that he barely saw the straight flush lurking in the river. He was too explicit, too rude, too eager to say that word: spanked. He should never have said ‘spanked’. Maybe he could have to someone else, someone who cares only a little, someone less like him. But I am not nearly so closed off, nor so silly.

And when he pushes, I push back.

I push back so hard it makes my heart thunder. When I look down I can see my chest shivering slightly, as that storm rages inside. My legs buckle a little when I slowly stand, but none of that matters. He can see me looking nervous. He can think I am suddenly weak. It won’t make any difference.

Not when I turn around with exquisite, deliberate care and put my hands on the back of the couch. Just enough so that I bend a little in the middle. So that I can stand with my legs a little way apart, in a position anyone in the world would understand. But just in case he doesn’t – just in case he is more talk and no trousers than I thought – I glance over my shoulder. I meet his gaze. His face is so pale it could pass for a fainting lady’s.

And I say with the most relish I can muster:

‘Would you like me to leave my dress down, or do you prefer a bare work surface?’

Followed by the longest silence the world has ever known. It goes on and on and on, and the longer it does, the worse it gets. If nothing happens in the next thirty seconds I am almost definitely going to die. I think I might just burst like a balloon with too much air crammed into it, yet still he says nothing. He does nothing. I’m starting to think it might be better to just turn around and sit down again.

But, by God, I’m glad I do nothing of the sort.

If I had I would have missed him standing, so slowly and deliberately it makes me tingle from head to toe. My sex seems to clench around nothing and my nipples immediately go tight and stiff – and that’s before he speaks. Oh, God, when he speaks. He seems to wait for just the right moment – when I’m dying to turn and see his expression but not quite daring to do it – and then he just cuts through the air with that cool, low voice. ‘Lift your dress,’ he says.

Though that’s not the best part.

The best part is how calmly he goes about it. He could be talking about the best way to bake a pie, for all the passion he puts into it. Not a word wavers, not a breath is taken out of place. I almost ask him to say it again, just so I can be sure it was as filthy as I thought. It feels as though it couldn’t possibly be. I must be mistaken, I tell myself.

Until he insists.

‘I was not aware I had all day for you to obey a simple instruction,’ he says, and despite my best intentions I practically fall all over myself to do it. I snag my tights in my haste and somehow almost lose a shoe, shame heating my cheeks as I go. Now he’s going to see just how eager I am, I think, and I want to disappear through a door in the floor.

But I know why I don’t.

It feels too good to cut out on. Even the humiliation turns me inside out, as I am certain he well knows. He actually tuts at me, once the dress is around my hips, and tells me off for wearing tights. ‘Did I not provide you with stockings, Molly?’ he asks, while I squirm and writhe and wish I had figured out those fucking suspenders. I spent forty minutes with them clipped so wrongly it made me walk doubled over, and after that I refused to try again.

Though that seems a pity now, with him looking at my woolly things from Marks and Spencer’s. I was so proud of them too – bought with my first real and quite fabulous wages, courtesy of my current employer – but now I can never be. They probably look dreadful over my frankly enormous bottom. He might even decide to stop everything right here, in sheer horror at the thought of touching such a nightmarish mess. It’s no wonder I start to shove them down.

But when I do, they’re so clingy that something else comes off too.

I want to call it my underwear, but my brain is afraid to admit that. If my underwear came down too, that means he can now see my completely naked arse, and I’m nowhere near ready for that. I was only just getting used to the other stuff. My bare bottom is a step too far – not to mention how much it’s going to hurt me if he actually does this. I mean, before I had the protection of seven feet of woollen underthings. Now there’s nothing between me and his hand.

Oh, God, is he going to use his hand?

I don’t know. I don’t know. It seems not, considering how little he likes bodily contact. But who can say for sure, after the silence that follows my sudden strip? It goes on for so long that I glance over my shoulder to see what he’s doing, and all I see shows me how bad this is going to be. His face is a picture. A great and glorious picture of someone simultaneously shocked by a naked backside and so fascinated they do not look away.

For a moment I feel studied, in that intense way he usually employs for everything but me. His eyes almost ease over my skin, so far from any scornful judgement that I come close to saying thank you. I flush from head to toe, under the kind of scrutiny I cannot fail to understand. He likes what he’s seeing, I think. He likes the shock of it, the daring, and the shape. Oh, he definitely likes the shape.

I know that because he tells me. Cyrian Harcroft, sentient robot from our dystopian future, says one word that sets my soul on fire. ‘Glorious,’ he says, and I just sort of sag against the couch. It takes almost everything I have to haul myself back to something like a standing position, and even then I need his help. He has to tell me no in this delicious, almost outraged tone – and then I feel something across my belly.

For a second, I swear to God, I think it’s his hands. I come very close to screaming or sobbing or at least being stunned, until I realise what he actually did – which in a way is worse. If he was going to punish me, then hands would be the obvious choice. But a cane…oh, God, a cane…yeah, I think that is definitely a cane. The thin one, I believe, from the stand by the door. The one that barely seems like it would hold a person up, because it bends when you lean on it.

I think I see now why it does.

I mean, it might be terrible as a walking aid. But as something that presses into my stomach until I stand up properly? Then it’s pretty great. It doesn’t press too hard, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, and, even better, when he takes it away it swishes through the air. He has a swishy thing, like in my daydreams of dastardly headmasters, and now he’s going to use it. Lord, I can hardly wait for him to use it. The only thing that stops my right leg jiggling with impatience is the idea of how it would look.

Like something that doesn’t fit in this scene, I think. This incredibly sexy and intense scene, of the sort I never thought I’d be a part of. There is the crushed red velvet of a fancy couch under my clenching fingers, and I have heels on my neatly held apart feet. Somewhere in the distance a clock slowly chimes the hour and if I strain I can hear my own breathing.

It is sublime.

And then he strikes me, and I lose my mind.

It’s nothing like what I expected. Some part of me thought it would just be painful, and that people were lying when they talked about how exciting it is. But I see now that I am an idiot. The cane paints a searing stripe across my flesh, and when it does I try to climb up the nearest wall. The breath I was about to take sticks in my throat. Everything stops.

Swiftly followed by a sensation so intense I can hardly stand it. It seems to flood my body, filling me to the brim. I feel incapable of containing it, and even when I manage to cram it in there is more, hot on its heels. He doesn’t wait for me to take it in. He just does it again, this time so sharply it brings tears to my eyes. I come very close to sobbing, but, good God, I know why I hold it in.

If I let it out he may stop.

In fact, I know he will. He hesitates when I let out a harsh breath, and again when my knees buckle. Anything more and he’ll pull back, and I cannot have that. Just a little more, and I think I could actually come. The sore throb of each stroke is starting to filter through my body to some very pleasant places. It has my clit in its grip, and my nipples feel so stiff they’re painful. Every time my body jolts under the pressure they rub too much against the inside of my dress.

And oh, God, I am so wet. It’s as if there’s a river bursting its banks between my legs. I’ve never experienced so much slickness there – it seems to announce itself whenever I move. Something slippery slides against another slippery thing and suddenly everything is even more arousing than before. Hot, thick pulses roll outwards from my swollen centre, and then he does it again and I don’t know what to do. I have to jam my hand over my mouth.

But even that doesn’t stop the sensation that follows. It doesn’t stop me creaming myself like an adolescent boy, barely able to stand another touch in case it pulls my trigger. I’m going to go off, I think. I’m going to do it in one big gush. Who could blame me? This whole thing has been building up too long. I suppressed too much and failed to diddle myself when I needed to do it, and now I’m in real trouble.

Another second, I think.

One more stroke, I think. I’m so close to the brink I can almost taste it.

And then, of course, he steps back. Of course he does. He times it so perfectly I could have set my watch by it. I should have known it was coming, and yet somehow I didn’t. If I had, I probably would have fought harder for my orgasm. Given in faster, let it flow over me without a second thought. Now I have to wait – or, even worse, perhaps he won’t continue now. He seems to quite like teasing me into a tangle. Maybe he’ll do so again.

But what happens is even more monstrous. He takes his sweet time doing God only knows what, eyes no doubt all over my striped backside. Then, just when I think I might have to beg for the slightest thing, he does something so awful I can scarcely comprehend it. I expect him to make me make do with nothing, and instead I get the slow, inexorable slide of that cane.

I get it right between my legs.

Not over my new red lines or even the backs of my thighs. Between, he does it between, he just eases through my sex like a thin, tormenting finger. And when I say through, I mean through. I mean it spreads my swollen lips and strokes through all the sticky folds, triggering a million sensations. My clit can barely take him spanking me. Feeling the instrument of my torture slide over that stiff little bud is something I can’t deal with at all.

I don’t even care if he hears me.

I let out a guttural groan of absolute bliss – one that gets louder when I realise exactly why he rubs me between my legs like that. He can deny it all he wants, but I know it. I feel it deep in my bones, along with the almost constant roll of intense arousal. He wants to look, I think. He wants to see for sure just how wet I am. And when he finally speaks, I find I am right.

Because he asks me for more.

‘If you stand with your legs a little further apart it will be easier to take,’ he says, so crafty I feel like giving him a round of applause. I probably would, if I were not so desperate. I almost get tangled in my own tights in my eagerness, rubbing them down with my shins until I can do exactly what he wants. I don’t even think about what he will see once it’s done.

And when it is, another glut of pleasure pushes through me. My clit seems to swell and jump, and my already flushed cheeks flush harder. I bet I’m glistening, I think. I bet my pussy looks like that description in the book. Like a ripe, wet peach, freshly split. All my folds so pink and plump, and coated in slickness from my greedy little cunt all the way to the tightly closed hole between my spread arse cheeks.

He could probably push in there with no difficulty, I think.

But I don’t expect him to do it. It seems far too sexual for someone like him. He is still intent on pretending this is an ordinary punishment. If he did something like that he couldn’t go on claiming he has no interest in sex, because penetrating me is about the sexiest sex thing someone can do. There’s no room for misinterpreting it, no matter how hard I try. I do my best to think, Oh he must have slipped, as that strip of slender wood ever so slightly eases in.

And then I let myself see it for what it is, and lose any restraint I had left. The words ‘He’s fucking my arse with the thing he just spanked me with’ flash up behind my eyes. They practically have a parade, or at least that’s how it feels to my body. Everything seems to burst, and when it does I do not hold back. I think I put a hole in his couch. I say things I never want to say to someone like him: ‘ohhhhh yeah oh my God I’m coming you’re making me come oh fuck fuck fuck.’

But best of all, I don’t regret it. If anything, the sound of me blurting out such filthy things – so full of abandonment and burning lust – makes me go harder. I imagine his startled face, as all sense of propriety flies out of the fucking window. Or maybe his disapproval, oh, yes, God, yes, his disapproval makes me come so good. I all but feel it in my teeth. My cunt clenches hard around nothing, as if jealous of the thing that’s fucking my arse.

And my clit, oh, the shivering, stuffed-full sensation that blooms from my clit. It seems to strain against my skin. I feel as though I can’t quite contain it, and although I do, everything is over-taxed. My heartbeat is a raging, brain-squeezing thunder. For a second I can’t breathe, and when I finally do I have to gasp it all in. I have to pant and shake and sag against the couch, face suddenly wet with tears I don’t remember shedding. I don’t mind, though. Even if he sneers at me for doing it and says something cutting, I can take it. It would be a small price to pay for whatever that just was. My primary feeling is relief, rather than any silly shame. Relief that I finally got some respite from the arousal that’s been torturing me for days, weeks – months, if I’m being honest.

I’ve wanted him to take me apart from day one, I know.

He was made for this thing. He could have done it in his sleep, if he was not so unsure of his feelings about sex. If he had given in sooner and just gone for it, forgot all his reservations and left his hang-ups behind. All he had to do was give me one look and we could have been doing this all along. But I don’t regret the wasted time. It was all foreplay for this, and now that it’s here we can have so much fun. There is so much I want to do and say and explore, now that he is at last eager to try.

But I am glad I keep all of it inside.

It would have been mortifying to have said ‘Thank you,’ I think.

Only to turn and find him reading his paper as if nothing had happened.

Chapter Eight

I consider broaching the topic with him. Maybe slipping some references to sado-masochism into everyday conversation, instead of simply agreeing that Thomas Hardy was an insufferable bore of the highest order. Or I could ask him what he thinks of Anaïs Nin, and see how far things go. If I get lucky he might read a little to me – though that is kind of the problem. I have to be lucky. I still need to approach with caution and move stealthily, as if one wrong step will dislodge everything.

I can never be specific, though Lord knows I would love to be. Again and again I want to ask him if the thing that happened really happened. It just seems so staggering to me, considering how he now behaves. He never brings it up. He seems to suffer no ill-effects because of it. He could have poked a lollipop at my mouth for all the shame it seems have elicited.

Instead of fucking me in the arse with a cane he’d just finished thrashing me with.

In fact, the only evidence that any of it happened at all is the sting I sometimes get when I walk. Or when I shower. Or when I stroke my bare backside while frigging myself into oblivion. Seriously, I’ve never masturbated so much in my life. I never really could, before I came here. Everything had to be furtive, usually in the back of some Ford owned by a boy I vaguely liked. Doing it at home was out of the question, with my brothers always crowding around. I barely had a bedroom, and there was no lock on the bathroom door.

There was no door, full stop. Even pissing was a frantic do-it-before-anyone-sees-you affair, so the slow realisation that I can and want to here is something new. I am set free, in more ways than one. If I want I can fuck myself night and day, and when I do I dream of a dozen things he could do to me. I imagine him using a belt, to make welts I can feel with my fingers. Great thick red ones that spark through to the centre of my body when I stroke them, so hot to the touch I feel burned when I pull away.

But that is not the best fantasy. No, the best fantasy is always about all the things I know he will never do. The touching he can never give me and the kissing I know he will never want. All the filthy things that are forbidden to me, made flesh in my feverish head. Some nights I go so far it leaves even me breathless, and in the morning I’m always just a little embarrassed. If he knew, I think.

If he knew that last night I imagined him sticking his cock in almost every hole I have, just like he described. Most likely he would be appalled. He certainly seems like he would be, whenever I see him now. His comments are always so careful, and he stays even further away from me than before. He won’t even go down the hall when I’m coming in the opposite direction, as though the very thought of our hands brushing is too much. Too tempting, I think.

Then I try to strike that thought from the record.

He’s probably just disgusted. He thinks he’s filthy or I’m filthy or both of us are filthy for ever going that far. And even if he doesn’t, his behaviour so closely resembles indifference I could almost believe it was. At the very least I struggle to tell for sure.

Until I catch him looking.

And not just once, either. Oh, no, no, no he does it a lot, whenever he thinks I’m concentrating on something else. The first time almost seems like a fluke. I point to a section of bookcase and ask if he wants me to organise his fanciest books by colour rather than alphabetically. It will probably look nicer, I say, then turn a fraction faster then I intended and see his eyes dart away. Could have been the books, I tell myself.

But then comes the second time, when I actually see it before he smothers it. I’m busy brewing tea and suddenly feel a bristling, prickling sensation all over my body. When I glance back, his gaze is resting on me so strangely that I struggle to know what it reminds me of. I think of scientists watching experiments, and of people seeing something shocking, and then on the third try it comes.

He looks at me as though unable to believe that I am real. Like someone seeing the ghost of their long-dead wife, or some member of an alien species, come to tell him he is not alone. There are other worlds out there, that expression says, far better and sweeter than this one. And if you want, you can go there with me. I’m waiting for you, whenever you’re ready.

God, I wish he was ready now.

I wish those eyes did not seem so haunted when I steal a look at them. They are almost vulnerable, and not just because of the light in them. They make his face look suddenly younger, as though all the years he wears are not the product of cigarettes or centuries but of stress. He so desperately wants to keep himself closed that he ages himself to do so. And once he lets go – if only in the moments when he thinks I’m not watching – he becomes a boy again. He becomes even more beautiful than he already is.

I almost stumble the first time I see it.

Nothing in my life has ever been so sweet – or so painful. It won’t compromise you, I want to say to him, but even that might disturb his fragile peace. His guard is up, just waiting for me to get in again. He is watchful and wary, wounded by fuck knows what.

So I have to be even more skilful than I was the last time. Just let him come to me, somehow, though it takes time to hit on the right way to go about it. I finally find it almost by accident. I put his extensive and ancient encyclopaedias in the wrong order, and as soon as he sees he turns into the withering, sarcastic arsehole I’ve come to know and adore. ‘Honestly, Molly, do you really think M follows K? Did L suddenly cease to exist? I can see we are going to have to have a talk,’ he says, but something happens just before he finishes. He seems to catch himself on that final ‘to’, as though holding back some other word that wants to come out.

Then he simply substitutes ‘talk’ at the last second.

But I don’t think that was what he intended to say. I can almost smell the scent of punishment in that sentence. I can even guess what word it was going to be – something about correction, I think, but of course correction is far too telling. It could lead him back down that terrible path of temptation. He might suddenly find himself with something swishy in his hand again, and I can see that the idea disturbs him. That indifference was just a ruse, a cover, and now it’s starting to peel back. One more push and it might disappear altogether.

Though still I proceed as carefully as I can.

Especially now that I know how to go about it. He can hardly resist a mistake, and there are so many I can make. I can forget to put milk in his tea, and remove bookmarks from important pages. He likes the ornaments on the mantelpiece to face forwards, so I just turn them a quarter of an inch. Not a lot, but enough to drive him to distraction. Soon after I’ve done it I see him standing there, hands in pockets, one foot tapping and tapping, as though he can restore them to their positions just by being supremely irritated.

The second I step into the room I know he’s going to say something.

So, when he doesn’t, I feel momentarily confused. I watch him sweep into his favourite chair with a great flourish and take up his paper, without a second glance at me. And when he finally acknowledges me, it’s only to say, ‘So what did you make of Nabokov?’ Which is fine, I have to admit. I like the fact that he randomly asks me about books I’m reading. It means three things: that he is different from everyone I’ve ever known, that he thinks I’m worth having a discussion with, and, more importantly, that he notices.

He never enquires what I might be looking at. He sees the open books sitting on one of the tables in the library, or left over the arm of the chair. Details about me are so important to him that he pays attention, even if only offhandedly. When I answer his question about Nabokov with ‘beautiful but offputting’, he says, ‘Yes, I felt he was a tremendous pervert too.’

He knows what I mean before I mean it.

A fact that should probably tell me something about his failure to react to the disturbed ornaments, though it takes me a while to get it. I have to pretend to be reading while really I am watching him carefully – and then, suddenly, there it is. One furtive glance over the top of his paper, as though checking whether his ploy worked. Then, when he sees me looking at him steadily, he tries to act like he just wanted to mention some item of news. ‘It seems as though birds are flying into a lot of buildings,’ he says.

But immediately realises that is a ridiculous thing for him to have mentioned. His face crumples, as though the words have turned bitter and gross in his mouth. They don’t suit him, and he knows it. He knows I know that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about birds. That he hates tedious trivia and will be annoyed they thought to write about it in his precious Guardian.

So that leaves only one possibility: he is really trying not to care.

And failing really fucking badly.

‘Look, I know you’re doing it on purpose. Put them back.’

‘I haven’t the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes, you do, you despicable creature. Turn them the right way.’

‘Or you’ll do what exactly?’ I ask. Then there is a silence so deep I could use it to thicken gravy. It stands between us like a third person, made more intense by the look he gives me. His gaze is unwavering and almost lightless, the blue of his eyes almost too frosty to bear. I nearly break and run for thermal underwear and a furry overcoat.

But I’m glad I stick it out, because after an interminable silence he does actually speak.

And what he says was totally worth that moment of excruciating torture.

‘You are a very, very wicked girl.’

‘I know. You should probably do something about that.’

‘That will never, ever happen again,’ he says, but I can see he knows he made a mistake. He shouldn’t have said ‘again’. ‘Again’ implies that there was a first time, and he would obviously like to pretend there wasn’t. He did not do that filthy thing to me. He is utterly above it, and proves it now by turning back to his paper. He even lifts it so I can no longer see his face.

Though I have no idea what protection he thinks that affords him.

‘I also put all your black socks in with the white, and took all your left shoes and put them with the wrong right ones. You can’t tell, because your shoes are all the same, but I bet just knowing will drive you mad,’ I say, and this time there is no hesitation. He snaps the paper closed and tosses it aside, as though he somehow no longer cares about trivia like litter on his floor.

He’s not even bothered that it creases his immaculate copy of today’s Guardian.

All that matters is dealing with me and my disobedience.

‘Right, stand up then,’ he says.

He even claps his hands, the way teachers do when they want to start a class. Though Lord knows what lesson this is going to be. The second I do as he tells me I feel weird inside, like he poked a hole in me with a pin and now everything is running out. No wonder my feet shift around and legs are bending at the knee.

I have nothing solid inside me holding me up.

And even less than that, once he starts unbuckling his belt.

I swear I stop to check that I’m not hallucinating. I had no idea that he wore a belt. When I think back I can’t remember one. Which means that he probably put it on specifically for this purpose. He knew what would probably happen, and was prepared. Worse than that, in fact – he knew that this would happen and so went out and bought a thing he possibly finds plebeian. I know he did, because once he has it free I can smell the leather. I can see that his trousers have no goddam belt loops.

Good God, I am in so, so much trouble here.

Deliriously exciting, delightful trouble, because this is what he tells me as he loops the belt around his fist: ‘I should probably tell you now that begging will make no difference to me. I care nothing for cries of “stop” and “please” – only something truly disgusting could ever grant you a reprieve from this punishment. Such as, for example, my first name.’

And of course I know exactly what he means. How could I not? His suggestion has all the subtlety of a brick. Oh, he tries so hard to keep it just this side of sexless, but anyone would know the score. He just gave me a safe word. That was a fucking safe word dumped in the middle of all that scary stuff. If I want out, all I have to do is say ‘Cyrian’.

But the chances of that happening are slim to fucking none. I think I would sooner poke out my own eyeballs than call this off. My body is fizzing at the thought of it, and not just because of his conscientiousness, disguised as something else. There is also the act itself, and everything that comes with it. The way he lets the belt end trail on the floor, a second before he tells me to turn round. The tone of his voice, so steely I could almost believe he barely cares.

Though the waver in his next sentence says otherwise.

‘Palms flat on the ground, if you please,’ he says and I know, I just fucking know, that he has thought about this before. That is the reason his voice falters on ‘flat’, though he does his best to hide it. He makes his ‘please’ sound like a punch, then follows it with what could well be the sexiest sound known to mankind.

The snap of the belt, as he tests it between his hands.

Man, oh, man, I could live off that for the rest of my life. Probably I’ll hear it in my dreams, if the bit before dreaming doesn’t get there first. You know the one – when your mind starts wandering, and so does your hand. Suddenly you seem to be doing some really filthy things, even though a second ago your only thought was sleep. Though I doubt my thoughts will ever be on sleep again. If this is anything to go by, my future is going to be nothing but masturbation.

Even the stretch of my thighs when I bend over sets me on fire.

And the sting of that first strike…oh, I can hardly stand it. I want to do something the second it happens, but I resist. Then he hits again, and this time I can’t help it. I don’t care if he wants it to be a certain way or not – I just need to touch myself. I need to stroke my bursting clit and finger my wet and wanting hole, and, if that blows the whole thing, so be it. I don’t see how it can, though, given the things that have happened. He fucked my arse and is currently spanking me with a belt he bought for the purpose. The jig is up, I think, and then I just go right ahead.

I lick my fingers and slide them over my stiff little bud, though once there I don’t know why I bothered with the licking. I’m all sticky and slippery, from the seam between all the way over my swollen lips to my thighs. My fingers barely make contact. I just glide over and through everything, in a way that shouldn’t make any impression.

But it does. Holy crap, does it ever. The sensation is so thick and strong, I sort of want to stop there. Let him just strike me again, and I’ll probably come over that alone. I can already feel it welling up inside me. A little more and it will happen.

I think I want it to happen, so he can see me do it. I want him to see my fingers playing between my legs – and he will be able to, with very little trouble. I’m in such a lewd position he can probably make out all of me, especially if I’m really bad. If I part my folds for him and really fuck into that greedy pussy, over and over, and not just with one finger but with two, both nice and stiff so that when they slide in everything opens up for them. Everything spreads, in a way I know will look so filthy-dirty-disgusting.

He might even tell me as much, I think.

Then I feel a great wave of pleasure. I don’t even know why. His scorn should be the last thing I should want, yet somehow it only seems to take things higher. I think I hear him hiss in anger and I almost fall to my knees. I’m so bad, I think, so wicked, so completely lost to my own insatiable lust.

And that’s when it happens.

My cunt tightens around my still working fingers, so hard it almost brings everything to a standstill. So hard I have to say it out loud, no matter what the consequences. He might hate me for making it all so overt, but I don’t care. I’m coming I’m coming oh God you make me come so good, I tell him, as pleasure shudders through me. Glorious, golden pleasure, of the kind I could never regret.

Until it’s over.

It drains away, and I’m left with something far worse than the reaction I received last time. He doesn’t pick up his paper, and there’s no pretence at indifference. All I see when I turn is plain horror at all the things I made him do.

And all the ways he saw me be.

Chapter Nine

I can tell things are different between us. And since our relationship was quite strange to begin with, any shift to something even less normal feels enormous. He seems doubly awkward around me now, as though I have told him a terrible secret about myself and he has no idea how to handle it. Somehow it has reduced me in his eyes, though I could have sworn there was nowhere lower to go. I thought I was already at rock bottom, and that he kind of liked that about me.

But judging by his current behaviour I was incredibly wrong. He goes back to avoiding me, in a way that seems even more brutally obvious than it was before. Now he doesn’t just turn around at the end of the hall. He leaves rooms when I enter them. He has to brace himself before he goes into a place where I am – I know he does, because one time I catch him.

I hear him in the hall and fling open the door, to find him standing there with his hand hovering where the handle was. Face like something recently stripped of all protection. Eyes almost hot with anger or confusion or fuck knows what. Everything about him telling me what I should have already understood: I shouldn’t have fucking masturbated. It was too filthy, I know it was too filthy. It crossed the line from pseudo-punishment into full-blown fuckery.

And all after he told me specifically what he did not want.

He said in no uncertain terms that he hates sex and touching and anything affectionate. He’s in love with logic, and what did I do? I gave him greedy feelings of the filthiest sort. It’s really no wonder he hates me now, though man I wish things were otherwise. I don’t just miss whatever we were slowly descending into. I miss talking to him about things, and hearing all his weird opinions. I miss sharing my weird opinions, and having someone accept them.

Because he always does. He may not agree, but he will go with it to the bitter end. Nothing I say is beneath debate, no idea I float is unworthy of his attention. Sometimes he acts like it’s unworthy or beneath him but carries on talking about it anyway. He gives more attention to things no one else bothers about than most people will to things they think matter.

And I am beside myself without it.

I find myself doing the same stealthy things I did before for sex, only now I am foraging for conversation. I say ridiculous stuff and write it on post-its, then paste them in the books he’s reading. I even go so far as to answer questions he asks in the margins. ‘Why would she do something so ridiculous?’ he asks, and I answer, ‘She does it because she loves him.’ I tell him, because I feel sure he has no idea.

Then afterwards realise my mistake.

It sounds like I love him. It sounds so much like it that I want to take the post-it back before he can read it, but when I go to get the book from the study the door is locked. It’s the first time I have been forbidden to enter it, so I don’t think I’m overdoing things to have a mild panic attack in the hall. Most likely he found the post-it, decided that I am a danger to myself and others, and barred me from his presence. Or maybe he just wants some private time to laugh and laugh and…oh, God, this is not going well.

And it continues that way even after I get my hands on the book. I find it back on the shelf in the library, but when I frantically open it at the right page I find nothing but hatefully post-it-less pages. It hasn’t slid into some other section, because of course I check. I would check every book in here, if it meant I could get it back.

But there is nothing.

He found it and threw it away – an idea I am so convinced by that I search the bins. I look through the one outside, pretending I’m searching for a lost fiver, and feel no comfort when I don’t find it there either. It probably means he got rid of it even faster than I thought. He saw it and was so allergic to the contents that he wrapped it around a brick and hurled it out of a window.

Which would be fine.

If it didn’t feel like he was doing the same with my heart. My poor heart, so suddenly sore that I come back inside from my search in a thoroughly bedraggled state. Everything inside me seems slumped, defeated. I suppose I should have known things would end this way. What did I think? That he was going to suddenly become a completely different person and spend long nights making love to me? That’s not so much a fantasy as a ludicrous descent into madness.

Or so I would probably carry on believing, if it were not for the clothes he leaves for me to take to the dry cleaners. He always does it the same way, everything so neatly hung on hangers that you would never know it needed cleaning. And I always search the garments first, because he leaves all sorts of stuff in them. I find sticks of chalk in his suit jackets and paper clips attached to his cuffs. Sometimes there will be items I can barely identify, and this time is no exception.

There is a box in the inside pocket, only I know right away that it’s not really a box. It reminds me of those Chinese finger cuffs that trap you the second you do anything with him. Or a puzzle, maybe a puzzle, but I can hardly imagine what purpose it could serve. It’s too small to open and reveal something, I feel sure – until I see the design on the back.

I recognise it right away. It’s the flower from the wall in the parlour. I can tell, although the petals are in the wrong order. It’s arranged in concentric circles, first smaller shapes, then bigger ones, somewhat like a rose. And though the inner ones are filled in, the outer ones are empty – only here it’s all higgledy- piggledy. They’ve been rearranged into the complicated mess I remember from a million solve-that-shape puzzles.

So I just put them back. I stand in the hallway, and fumble with it until they’re right again.

Though still I don’t really expect it to open. And even if it had – if I’d imagined for one moment that I was doing this for a reason – I could never have imagined what would be inside. It seems like I should or I would, or that I knew all along, but I swear I didn’t. I see it and still it doesn’t connect in my head.

I was so sure, you see, that I was the one who went too far.

I never thought that he would go further.

But as soon as I process I know that he has. It sends a shockwave through me, as though someone had thumped me on the chest in an attempt to restart my heart. All I can do is stare at the little slip of yellow inside the box, suddenly certain what it is but hardly daring to believe. I didn’t even mean anything by it. I barely thought of the implications.

He clearly has, however.

He thought about the note I left in his book. He read those words of love and longing, however accidentally they were given. And he kept them, close to his heart. More than kept – they seem treasured, in a way I didn’t think he was capable of. I still struggle to think of him as capable of it, in spite of the evidence in my hands. I try to turn it into something else, but he seems to have decided to make that virtually impossible. When I go to him and hold it out – now neatly closed with its secret locked inside – he doesn’t do what I expect.

I imagine retribution, or denial.

And instead he says, ‘Thank you, Molly.’

He says, ‘I thought I had lost it.’

But some part of me knows what he really means. He holds my gaze as he takes it back, and in answer my heart thunders. It reaches towards him, half-stunned and half-soaring, as I slowly realise that he wanted to say something other than ‘lost it’ – so much so that he almost does. He almost tells me that he thought he had lost me. The last few days I spent without his company, he spent without mine.

And he missed me. Maybe he even thought I was avoiding him because of some minor infraction in BDSM etiquette – an idea that seems insane until he breaks the practically glowing silence that is still between us. I begin to smooth my dress – most likely out of awkwardness – and wince. I forget about the row of jagged teeth-like marks on my backside, still as sore as anything.

Though I’m glad I do, because then he says this:

‘I wish I had not hurt you – more than you could possibly imagine.’

Just like that, without artifice or evasion. There isn’t so much as a hint of sarcasm, and certainly no sudden rush to correct himself. No changing of that word ‘wish’. It stands as it is, completely astonishing just because it’s so singular. He never expresses wishes to me. I wasn’t even sure if he had them, and certainly I had no idea he had them more than I could possibly imagine.

That sounds like hyperbole to me, and Cyrian despises it. He told me so only last Wednesday, when I said Brussels sprouts were worse than biting into something Satan pooped out. ‘If Satan took a shit in your mouth, Molly, you would probably dissolve from the inside out. Honestly, you exaggerate with such flagrant disregard for sense, you make me discuss a made-up religious icon simply to set you straight.’

And yet here we are, in the aftermath of him doing the same. He is even less likely than Satan to admit a feeling, a longing, a regret, but he still did it. And about something so ridiculous, too – does he really think he was the one who went too far? He has to know he never could. I have to tell him he never could, so that he doesn’t think so for a second longer.

But he gets there first.

‘I also realise that I have neglected to do what I ought to have in these circumstances, for which I can only ask your forgiveness. I was ashamed and therefore convinced myself it was not a concern. But it is and it must be, or else the whole business is barely worth a thing.’

I’m stunned, and spend far too long trying to make sense of it. By the time he asks the next question I’m so lost in the fact that he apologised that I fail to see what he’s suggesting – or even what he apologised for. I just nod when he asks if he may rectify it, then let him lead me to a room I’ve never been in.

Once we are there, though, it starts to sink in.

I see a bed with a great brass frame and covers folded so neatly they could have been done by a machine, and my stomach decides to drop right out of my body. It can’t take any more revelations. It hears my mind whisper the words ‘his bedroom’ and just has to go.

And I don’t blame it. I feverishly review all the things he just said, trying in vain to work out what he intended. He told me he has responsibilities, but I am almost scared to imagine what they might be. All I know is that he wants to rectify something in this spare little room like something from a monastery, and despite my best efforts that makes me shake. Not out of fear, I think.

But out of some new thing that has no name.

Some emotion too intense to speak of, three parts anticipation and seven excitement. Add a little uncertainty and there it is – the thing I am feeling when he asks me to turn around. By the time he gets close enough to touch, my body is shuddering with it. And then he does touch, and I think it’s possible that I may just die. I certainly stop being able to breathe.

I know, because he comments on it.

‘If it is of any comfort to you, I have no intention of doing what I did before. You can be at ease, Molly, I promise you,’ he says, but only because he is an idiot. He has to be. If he was really as smart as he mostly seems, he would see this for what it is: he touched me somewhere on my back, and my body went absolutely to pieces. Seriously, I’m never going to be able to get it back the way it was.

He touched me.

With his fingers.

And granted, he only did it where the buttons are. But the fact that he makes no real contact with my skin nor puts any pressure on my flesh doesn’t matter in the least to me. How could it, when he’s touching the buttons to undo them? He undoes the buttons. He undoes them. He doesn’t reorder them until they’re the right way. He gets all the way to the waist and then he keeps going, until my dress parts like wings to reveal everything underneath.

My bare back, the silky underwear he bought for me, the stockings he asked for and that I wanted to give him, all so suddenly exposed I should feel self-conscious. I know why I don’t, though. I should ask him to stop – but I know why I don’t do that too.

It’s because I would do anything to see what happens next. This is uncharted territory; this is the surface of some distant planet. Everything that happens from here on in is completely alien, and not just to me. To him. He has never done anything like this with anyone else, I can tell. I would know it even if he’d never breathed a word about it, because when he turns me to slide the sleeves down my arms I see his expression. I see colour in those cold eyes and tension in his jaw.

And when his fingers accidentally glance against my bare skin, he makes a fist. As though nothing, nothing in the world could be more unbearable to him than this. He has to force himself to get this close to another person, so much so that I want to tell him he doesn’t have to. Whatever this is, I can do without it. I don’t want him to suffer for me, and yet when I tell him he says:

‘Perhaps, then, if you would be so kind as to do the rest.’

I mean, what am I meant to do with that? I think it might be the most oddly arousing thing anyone has ever said to me. There’s something about the relief in his voice, and the halting way he asks. The politeness of it. He expects me to carry on undressing, I realise, but I can’t do it. My hands are shaking too much. My mind is on some sex-based auto-pilot. All I can think is he’s going to fuck me, even though I know that can’t be true.

And I’m right.

I just don’t realise that being right is not going to be any better for my already overcharged body. If anything, his intentions are about a million times worse. They involve me awkwardly trying to get the rest of my clothes off, while he watches with eyes that seem to get heavier and heavier. By the time I’m naked before him the lids are so low I can barely see the blue beneath. He looks at me the way other people run their hands all over their skin – in the way he wants to but never can.

But that’s not the most intense thing about this.

That comes when he tells me to lie on the bed. ‘Face down,’ he says, then seems to hesitate before adding something more. Something he needs to do, I think, but barely wants to admit. ‘And please refrain from looking,’ he says, as though this whole thing is going to be so embarrassing he would rather I didn’t see him do it. He wants to hide it from me, which makes me wonder even harder what he might have in mind. By the time I’m lying there with my face pressed into the pillow – the one that smells like him, oh, God, it smells like him – I’m just about beside myself.

I’m shaking not with that new emotion but with the million guesses that are currently fluttering through my head. He must mean fucking, I feel sure, but that sounds way too straightforward. So maybe it’s something perverted, something he put together out of necessity, something born of his bizarrely narrow needs and his many boundaries. He has to put on a mask and then do you with his right foot, my mind tries to tell me, but I should have understood really.

I don’t even know why it shocks me. He pretty much told me what he wanted to do, and I just didn’t listen. But, Lord in heaven, I’m listening now. The very second I feel something as fine and soft as silk on my bare backside, all my senses sit up and pay close attention. They can hardly do anything else. The sensation is too exquisite, the reason for it too achingly clear. He doesn’t want to do a perverted sex thing.

He wants to do something that is weird only to him.

He wants to care for me.

And, good God, the way he goes about it. I can almost understand why he doesn’t want me to look, because in some ways this is much more intimate and intense than anything more overt. He does it so slowly, so deliberately, everything so soft and gentle that something definitely slips out of the corner of my eye. I try to keep it in, but how can I? He is soothing the red marks he made, as sweetly as anyone could. I think he may even be using some cool lotion, applied with what I feel sure must be his fingers.

Though I’m not disappointed when I realise otherwise. I should be, considering how much it would mean to have him really caress my bare skin. But I find it hard to be, when I think of the lengths he’s gone to in order to get this right. To circumvent his own issues and give me what I need. He thought about it so carefully, I know, because the only thing more arousing than his hand is the thing he uses.

A paintbrush, he’s using a paintbrush. And when he eases it around I can tell: he’s writing letters on my skin. That was an S, and there is an O. Then after that I don’t need to discern the rest, because I already know. He just spelled out ‘sorry’, as though he ever needs to be after this. My face is wet before he’s finished. Every nerve ending in my body is singing, and not just for obvious reasons like this feels fucking amazing.

For smaller ones, like the way the charged air stirs against my skin. He keeps shifting, and I’m so hyper-aware of it every time he does. I can’t see his thigh but I know it’s close to mine, and when he turns a little to better coat the stripe just below my back, I almost make out something more. The cuff of his shirt, the slide of the unnecessary belt, all of it so tantalising I come close to turning a dozen times. I just want to see for sure how near he is. I want to know if that was really his cuff.

Or was it something else?

I don’t know, and I swear that not knowing is starting to make my skin fizz. I think my teeth may be trying to chatter, even though I have my jaw clamped so tight shut you couldn’t get so much as a pin into my mouth. It has to be, because if I let my lips flap around I know some really weird sounds will come out. I can already feel them burning the back of my throat, and that’s before he starts making these ever-decreasing circles with that slippery, silky brush. Pretty soon he’s going to be easing it into the seam between, and it seems clear that doing so has nothing to do with healing me.

But I pretend otherwise for a little longer. I let myself be lulled by the slow, easy sensuousness of someone painting on my skin, without thinking for a second about what this might mean. It’s just like getting a massage from a professional, I tell myself, only minus the music and the furniture from Ikea and the undercurrent of practical professionalism.

Because no matter what I do, I can’t persuade myself that the latter is there. He is not professional about this in the slightest, and getting less and less so by the second. Almost as though he is on an icy hill somewhere, and once he stands at the top he inevitably finds himself sliding down. One foot in the wrong place and it’s curtains, yet still he keeps going. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even know he’s falling.

His hand skirts a little to the left, and suddenly there it is:

Me, trying not to scream into the pillow.

Stop, I want to say, stop, but what if he has no idea he’s started? I might have a weal right over the outer edges of my sex, even though he was never as cruel as that. He knows he wasn’t. He has every idea, and yet he still does it. And he still tells me to turn over, despite how little sense that makes.

There is definitely nothing there for him to deal with. Nothing but my aching, trembling body, and its most sensitive bits. Nothing but all the stuff he looks at like a ravenous dog who’s trying to pretend he doesn’t really want to eat your dinner. No, no, you go on. I just want to sit here staring at you for no reason. I have no other intentions, beyond being your helpful companion.

Christ, what if he wants to be more than my helpful companion?

Though even the ‘helpful companion’ part sounds brilliant. It gets me sexy punishments and fierce conversations, followed by this delicious nightmare – because it is delicious, and it is a nightmare. By the time I do turn I’m almost losing it. Seventeen warring emotions are competing for the Hunger Games title in my head, from that searing self-consciousness again, all the way through to plain old fuck-hungry lust. And when they get together, it does some really odd things to me. I squirm in a way I never have before, half like a whore wanting nothing more than for him to see my plump, perky tits, and half like I could run and hide.

I arch my back so he can really see, my stiff nipples sticking up in a deliriously rude fashion. And then I curl inwards, in an attempt to hide my broad hips, my soft belly – all those things that say how weak I am and how imperfect. I am not glacial, the way he is. Not firm and honed to a fine edge by years of abstinence. I’ve been forged in something far less fine; I’m messy and sloppy and overrunning my own boundaries. I have to tangle and twine my fingers around the brass headboard to stop myself grabbing.

But none of that seems to matter in the slightest to him.

On the contrary – he takes in all those details with more avid interest than I thought he was capable of. In particular he seems to find my hands completely fascinating, like an alien attempting to understand what makes someone so greedy and short on resistance. Though somehow I suspect he’s about to get a crash course. Whatever restraint he had is starting to dissolve, I can tell. I can see it in his expression, so much softer and slacker than usual. I can hear it in his voice, when he tells me to be still for him. Hell, even the words themselves suggest as much.

For him, I think, as though he has needs that he wants fulfilled.

Be still, I think, as though any more movement will send him over the edge.

Then finally there are the things he chooses to do. Oh, the things, the lovely, lovely things. They all but sing in my blood. Each one is so carefully designed to make me worse that I can’t fail to see what he’s really doing. He’s crossing the line into something flagrantly sexual. He’s not pretending this is just practical or a punishment any more, and that just kills me. I can hardly watch the way he holds the brush, as he eases the point around my tight little nipple. Eyes so intent on my every move that I doubt my toes could twitch without him knowing it. Almost holding his breath as he does it, as though it takes every ounce of his focus and concentration. No prevarication in any of it, no bones about it.

He rubs me there, with the full intention of arousing me.

Even the way he leans over me is lewd – with most of his body, like he wants to loom, like he wants to smother me in his shadow and his scent. And he’s successful. I can hardly see or smell anything but him, it’s all too intense to stand but so much sweeter for it. I could sink into him up to my eyebrows as if he were some deadly sandpit, and still love every second of it. I could breathe him in until there was nothing else left in my body, and be just fine in my dying moments.

But when I see him bring the brush to his lips…

That’s when I lose most of my calm.

I just don’t expect it. I thought he would go back to the oil he has on the nightstand, to make the tip of the brush wet. But he doesn’t. He brings it up as though to kiss it, so casual about it I can hardly believe it. And then he licks it, and my disbelief doubles and triples and eighty millions. I see the tip of his tongue, and still struggle to accept what I’m seeing – partly because I thought his tongue was a myth designed to destroy womankind. But mostly because oh, God, oh, God, the way he goes about it.

Why did he have to go about it like that?

He practically tastes it. Everything about it is sinful, from the slow, slick draw of his tongue over the brush to what he does with it next. I wait with bated breath to feel the coolness I know is coming to my straining nipples, and instead he just ever so slowly lets it trail down, down, oh, way too far down. It gets to my belly button and my mind shouts: he’s not fucking stopping there abandon ship abandon ship.

And my mind is right. I should abandon ship, because he’s not stopping. He keeps right on going until he gets to the slight curve of my sex, lightly furred and tightly closed – though God knows why it is. As soon as the brush coils close to that place I want to fling my legs apart, but when I try to I suddenly get what the problem is.

The unbearable, blissful tension seems to have fused my thighs together. I try to budge them and nothing happens, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. When I go to breathe, all that comes out is a whine. Every time I try to keep still something jumps or jiggles or attempts to escape out of the window, as though disobedience is the only way to deal with this. My body has to divorce itself from my mind.

And especially after he just goes ahead and does it anyway. The point of the brush is so fine that all it takes is a deft hand and a little pressure, and somehow it slides right into that neat seam. I feel that cool smoothness skim my clit and ever so slightly part my swollen lips, then lose control of myself almost completely. My hips buck without my permission. My breathing comes quick and high and I can feel my fingers slipping off the brass.

And that’s before he returns the brush to his lips.

As though he’s going to lick the taste of me on it, I think, and I just about burst with pleasure when he does. My clit jerks and swells beneath the pressure of it. For a second I have to close my eyes – but only for a second because, by God, I want to see. It was bad enough when he was just licking and touching bits of me. But wanting to taste, wanting to have me in his mouth…I have to take every bit of it in. Every little detail, from the flicker of light in his eyes when he sees and feels just how slippery I am to the almost eager way he goes back for more. He pushes the brush as far down as he can get, and then when it’s nowhere near enough he just says. He tells me. ‘Spread your legs,’ he says, and after that I simply cannot help it.

I moan at the sound of those words. I mewl like some desperate, horny slut.

Most probably because that is what I am. I am a desperate and horny slut, who has to obey him immediately. Just the word ‘spread’ is enough to do it, so sinful in that smoky voice of his. It practically licks my clit, and in a much more intimate way than the brush. It makes that hot, wet ache intensify to the point where I don’t know what to do. I want to rock to alleviate it, but when I try it only gets worse. My head floods with thoughts of how I must look – like I’m fucking someone who isn’t there, like I’m so hot to trot I could hump the air – and when it occurs all of these thick, tingly waves flow through me.

Like I’m coming, I think.

But I know I’m not.

I know because when he starts to stand up, I do something unthinkable. I lose my mind in that brief, lust-addled moment, so greedy for an end to this torment that I just don’t process. I put out a hand, and I grab him.

Though of course, I realise my mistake right away. How could I not when he freezes the way he does? He can’t even finish the motion he was in the middle of. He has to just stay in this odd crouching position for a second, half risen from the bed and half not. Knees bent in the weirdest way. Face half turned in my direction. I see it and can do nothing but apologise, immediately, and start to pull back.

But when I do something astonishing happens.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No it’s all right.’

And then he lets the hand stay.

Even after he straightens, he lets the hand stay.

Though none of that is as amazing as the next thing he tells me, in response to my pretty obvious shock. ‘Friends touch each other, do they not?’ he says, which is ridiculous of him for two reasons. The first is the fact that our friendship has never been unequivocally stated as fact, and the second is the sheer audacity of him claiming it now when he knows full well this has nothing to do with being friends. From where he’s standing he can see my vagina. Every inch of me is flushed a deep arousal pink.

There’s no mistaking it, and I intend to make that clear.

‘Yes, they do. But I think you know that wasn’t just me being friendly,’ I say.

Yet he persists.

‘I fail to see what you mean.’

‘You just tasted my pussy on a paintbrush.’

‘And I suppose that is a thing only enemies do.’

‘No, mostly it happens between people who want to fuck each other.’

‘So it is your belief that I wish to fuck you,’ he says, and to his credit he manages to make his incredulity sound almost real. If I were anyone else I’d probably believe it. If he’d said that to me on day two I would have thought: wow, he really finds me repulsive.

But we’ve come too far for that now.

I see him. I feel him. I know him.

‘I don’t think it strains credibility to think so when your mouth probably tastes like my cunt. You told me to take off my clothes and looked at me in a way I know was lusty, and you spanked me, Cyrian, you whacked my arse with a belt you bought especially for the purpose.’

‘Could you possibly not –’ he starts, so obviously pained that I have to stop him before he goes any further. I don’t like seeing the way his hand steeples over his brow. Or the way he almost flinches at the very idea. It should all be clear to him, but he doesn’t like that being pointed out.

‘All right, all right. If you don’t want to talk about sex we don’t have to,’ I say.

Only it seems that I have it a little wrong. Just a little, though somehow it feels like a lot.

‘No, no, I mean the way I hit you. If we could just not refer to the way I hit you, I would be infinitely more comfortable. The rest – no matter how distasteful – is fine.’

‘Is that what you want to call it? Hitting me?’

‘Oh, please refrain from explaining the wonders of consensual sadomasochism to me. There is nothing you could say that would surprise me and even if there was I still expect you to accept that there is something uncommonly unpleasant about a man punishing a woman for having the temerity to feel a little passion.’

‘Well, maybe if you tell me how you came to that conclusion I might.’

‘I am not about to share the tawdry details with you, Molly,’ he says, and I can’t help noticing two things: he stays right where he is, and he dares to mention that there might be tawdry details. The moment he did that he knew I’d keep asking, which suggests only one thing to me.

He wanted me to.

‘Then how am I to judge? How can I know the temerity is there?’

‘You could take my word for it. Is that really so difficult?’

‘It is when you have a history of not understanding why you do things.’

‘I understand perfectly well. I would just rather not have long, tedious discussions about each of my issues as though we are guests on some terrible daytime talk show,’ he says, only this time he realises his mistake. He rolls his eyes to the heavens, as though he knows what’s coming and finds it exhausting.

And he’s right to.

‘I knew you were secretly interested in them.’

‘I only succumb to reruns of Ricki Lake. There is no reason to bring it up.’

‘Same as with everything – just sweep it under the carpet, I suppose,’ I say, as casually as I can. I even wave my hand, and shrug one shoulder.

But I know he sees what I’m doing.

‘Such a dismissive attitude towards something so satisfying,’ he replies, and I hear the snarl on that last word. The insistence in it, as though he knows how ridiculous it is but somehow wants to force the idea through. Suppression isn’t unhealthy and awful – it’s the very lifeblood in his veins. It keeps him going, even as I try to take him to pieces.

Even as he all but asks me to take him to pieces. He’s tired of being this, I think, despite his resistance. I have to help him go beyond, to some better place.

If only I knew how. If only I understood where.

‘There is nothing satisfying about sweeping things under the carpet.’

‘To you, perhaps. To me it is a wonder of the modern age.’

‘Seems positively Victorian, in my opinion.’

‘I have no idea what you want me to say,’ he tells me, so airily I expect nothing more. I’m reaching my limit, and he’s reached his. Now he’ll walk away, before this goes any further, I imagine. Then he gives me this instead: ‘That my mother was away with the fairies and my father was a cold, aloof upper-class arsehole with all the decency of a third-world dictator and a desire to repeatedly drown me in a bathtub? I can assure you that it is a thoroughly tedious tale of woe that I have no interest in revisiting.’

Yet again, it’s not just the saying of it that gets to me.

It’s the fact that he does it so calmly. He could be talking about the weather. He toys with his cuff as he speaks, and not even in an I’m trying to pretend I don’t care way. More in a this is all so dull I will straighten out this crease and neaten my cufflink as I do it manner. As though he honestly has no idea that what he just said is awful.

When I answer him, my voice is more grave and wavery than his ever gets.

‘Your father tried to drown you in a bathtub. On more than one occasion,’ I say, and then he looks up at me. He looks up at me with surprise, to find that someone feels horror over something like that.

‘He also thrashed me when I refused to be as closed off and emotionally stunted as he apparently was, but I feel no compulsion to discuss it. I barely even see a reason to. I am sure you could have drawn these conclusions for yourself with very little effort – after all, they are practically textbook,’ he says, and now I see why he considers it all dull.

He thinks he’s a cliché.

‘They don’t seem so to me. They seem sad, unbearably sad.’

‘Then perhaps you should put that mind of yours to better use.’

‘Are you really claiming that there is nothing else to it? Nothing beyond yet another tale of a teenager who had mean parents and turned into an emotionless adult?’

‘I doubt you could come up with anything different. But do feel free to try and solve the case,’ he says, eyes so bright with challenge that suddenly I want to succeed.

Even if I’m momentarily confused over what he wants me to succeed at.

‘What case? There is no case.’

‘Of course there is: the case of Cyrian Harcroft and his inability to give a woman what she wants or respond in an effective way to her desire or do anything but be as cruel as his father once was.’

‘This is not a game.’

‘Oh, but it is. Now play it, play it for me,’ he says, and I suddenly need to more than I’ve ever needed anything. Maybe because of the way his voice drops as he tells me to, so low I could never mistake the emotion in it for anything other than hunger. Or is it just the thrill of it? It has a heady element that I can’t quite deny.

But the moment I begin, I understand why I like it. His faith in my cleverness – cleverness I barely knew I had before him – is like a song in my soul.

‘Were you passionate, once?’

‘I suppose anything is possible.’

‘You played the piano.’

‘Very good, my little Sherlock.’

‘It meant everything to you, everything in the world, and you refused to give it up.’

‘I did so repeatedly, stupidly, against all sense and better reason.’

‘He wanted you to be something else.’

‘There is that possibility.’

‘Something small and unfeeling, like him. A dull man who lives his life in dusty leather-bound rooms populated by important people, all of whom you already despise,’ I say, and this time his voice is faint when he replies. His eyes are far away, like he can see this future he could have had.

‘Yes.’

‘A wealthy man.’

‘Yes.’

‘A man of standing.’

‘Yes.’

‘And so he beat you.’

‘He did.’

‘He beat you until you forgot what it was like to take pleasure in anything – not just in your piano but in your life and your possessions and other people. Pleasure is pain to you, now, so much so that you worry that when you hurt me, you do it because you want to take away the same things your father took from you. You think you want me to be cold and closed and so much easier to manage, a perfect little aristocratic wife to one day be your helpmeet,’ I say, almost balking several times as I do. The first time because his face seems to flinch when I tell him that he fears he wants to take from me, that he is like his father. And the last time because somehow the word ‘wife’ escapes me. I feel it coming like an out-of-control train, all these words and this knowledge running out of me almost unconsciously until finally that one does.

But I get it out anyway. I get it out because it’s true.

And the truth is more important than him flinching, or snorting at the idea of someone ever wanting to marry me. He will resist, I think, in the silence that follows. I even brace myself for it, and so am startled when he answers with a simple ‘I could not have said it better myself.’ He even seems darkly satisfied by it, in a way that suggests he knew I would confirm his very worst opinion of himself.

There is just one tiny problem with that: I’m not yet done.

‘Only you’re wrong. You’re wrong, you don’t want me to be that way at all. If you did you would do it all differently, as I said to you before. You know too well what sparks a fire in my soul, and nothing you do tries to dim it. Everything is designed to make it brighter, from the dress to the library to the book you chose to read to me. You say you worry you want to punish me out of a desire to drive away my passion, but you forget. You forget one vital thing missing from this almost perfect theory: you know that I enjoy it, yet you do it anyway. This is not me playing the piano and you trying to make me stop. This is you sitting beside me and teaching me to play. You put the music in front of me even when it makes you bleed to do it, and I adore you for it. I adore you, more than I knew it was possible for me to adore anything,’ I say.

And then there is a long, long silence.

So long, in fact, that I eventually have to break it.

‘How did I do?’ I ask.

To which he answers in a voice like something lost at the bottom of a well.

‘Almost perfectly.’

‘Only almost?’

‘You missed one point.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘I didn’t choose the book I read,’ he says, so cool and sure I go to interject. I assume he just wants to unravel everything I’ve said, and I’m right in one way. He does unravel something, at the very least. He unravels me. He waits, until a dismissal is on the tip of my tongue. And then he tells me this:

‘I made up the contents of the book for you.’

After which, of course, I can hardly say a thing. I just sit there in the silence he knew those words would create, watching the barest hint of pleasure whisper over his lips. Those eyes of his, suddenly alight with a revelation I know he’s been saving. He kept it to himself for just the right moment, the safest moment, the moment when it would mean the most. And he was right to, oh, God, he was so right.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a sentence hit me so hard.

Or leave me so in awe. He invented those filthy words. He invented them, he created them. And he did it to please me. They were designed to fill me with the utmost longing and lust, so perfect I can still hear them ringing in my head. They are deep down inside me – though God knows I’m glad they are. Now I can think of every single one, as he tells me the rest with all the relish in the world.

‘Every word is my own, put in front of you so you would play. Because you’re right about me, of course you are. What other explanation could there ever be? I see you as clearly as you see me. I just pretend sometimes, when it gets difficult to breathe.’

I rise to my feet. I have to. He gives me no choice. No chance to feel self-conscious about it. I want to go to him, so I simply do it – slowly though, slowly, so as not to startle him. And when I am just a few inches away, I do nothing but speak.

‘It never has to be. Difficult, I mean.’

‘I will be the ruin of you, Molly Parker. How can it be otherwise when I can barely bring myself to touch you? Even now when you stand before me like something from a dream once drawn by Rossetti, I want to run screaming from the room. I want to stay and yet still I want to leave.’

‘Then let me, let me do as much as you can stand,’ I say, then raise my hand. Just a little, just enough, not nearly touching but so close he is about to protest. I hear the breath he takes before the one word he wants to say, and feel the beginnings of his flinch. But before both can solidify, I show him what I intend to do. I stop just short of his cheek, yet stroke over the curve as though I closed the gap.

Then, as realisation dawns over his face – as his brows part in something like relief – I go on with whatever this is. I touch him in all the ways I most long to, without ever actually doing so. I trail my fingers over the broad expanse of his shoulders, and down, down that steep, heavy slope of his back. Always mindful to never make contact, but so near it’s like I can feel it anyway.

And I know he can. When I turn my hand as though to stroke the back of it over his perfect arse, his head goes back. He can’t see me doing it, but his head goes back. As though he can make it out through an inch of air and a taut expanse of expensive material. The tension between us is so high it pushes into him anyway, no matter how much space I put between us.

Though I can hardly call it space. I think I actually graze the material of his shirt when I make my way around his right hip – though in my defence there’s a reason for the slip. As I step around him, hand twisting about his body as though this is all some syrup-slow dance, he lifts his arm. He lifts it, like he wants to give me more access.

And, by God, I want to take him up on the offer. My hand shakes at the idea of it; I almost press the whole of my shivering body against his. At least I lean towards him, but once I have I wish I hadn’t. It only makes things more intense. The second I do it his scent rolls over me, somehow not sweet or fine but physical. It feels like heat, and it just about does me in.

As does the thing he tries a moment later.

Oh, why does he have to try the thing? Everything is unbearable as it is – I have a pulse beating between my legs and my body is so flushed with heat I can only compare it to being drunk. I’m drunk on arousal, excited past my limits, and he thinks the best thing to do in the face of that is give me the same back. He raises one hand, haltingly, while my breath tries to desert me for pastures new.

Then he just slides it down over the air around my bare skin, and I have to let out a broken sob. If I don’t, I think I’ll die. There’s too much air in my body and so much heat – I need to let a little of it out. And especially when I realise what he’s really doing. He’s not just returning some favour that I’ve just done for him. He’s almost touching me in all the places he’d love to most. He nearly dips his finger into the hollow just above my collarbone, and finds that dimple beneath the pronounced curl of my lower lip. Then once he’s done breaking me in two with tender things like that, he lets his hand drift down with deliberate slowness. He makes a shape in the air around my breast, so clear I couldn’t misinterpret it.

He wants to cup me there, hold me there, caress my tight little nipple and see what response he gets – though he hardly has to imagine. I make it for him anyway. I show him everything I am and all the desire I have, so thick with it in that moment I don’t hold back. I bring my hands up to his face as I would if this were real – so I could kiss him and kiss him with all the passion I feel.

And for just one glorious moment it seems like he will respond in kind. He’s so tall I couldn’t imagine that he’s leaning down when he isn’t, and he goes so slow that I’m able to chart every glorious second of it. I see his eyes trailing over my face, greedy and searching. Then his lips, as they part in a way you could almost pretend wasn’t there. I want to pretend it isn’t, because it’s only more painful when he pulls back.

Like a promise made but never kept.

‘I can’t,’ he says, and I am bereft. Or at least, I am in the brief pause that follows – because it is brief, and it is only a pause. I barely get a chance to hate the ghost of those words against my lips before he finishes his thought. And oh, the way he goes about it. I know immediately what he means. I hear it and my heart tries to thump through my breast bone, even though it barely seems like anything.

‘Not skin to skin, not like that,’ he says, as if maybe he would in other ways.

Though I don’t really believe he will.

Until he tells me to get on the bed, in a tone of voice I’ve never heard before. How could I have heard it, when usually he is the very epitome of cool? I never imagined in my wildest dreams that he would lose that cool so obviously, but he does. His voice goes up in the middle and down at the end, so packed with frustration or exasperation or plain old desire that he simply has to do something. He improvises, in so weird a way I should probably hate it.

Yet how can I, when it feels so damned good? The second he spreads the bed sheet over me I start shaking. Partly, I think, because of the cool contact on my overheated skin. But possibly because of other, stranger reasons – like the fact that it immediately obscures most of my senses. He swathes me in material from head to foot, and my hearing is muffled. My sense of taste and smell is blocked off by cotton-fresh fabric conditioner.

And most importantly:

I can’t see a thing. I have no clue where he is or what he might be doing, and oh, my good God in heaven, that idea is electric to me. It jumps and sizzles in my veins, in a way that makes me breathe far too hard. Within seconds my makeshift cocoon is much too hot and much too close, and the dip of the mattress does not make that any better. I’m probably going to suffocate under here, because he has decided to straddle me.

I can tell he has. I can feel his thighs on either side of mine, so close I want to scream. I want to spread my legs to increase that contact, just press and press until it starts to hurt. I want bruises from his body, as evidence that all this happened.

Even though I know I’m never going to need anything so tangible. His every move is already burned into my brain. My hair damn near stands on end when he shifts a little like someone trying to get comfortable, and again when I sense that he’s straightening the sheet. In a second he’s probably going to touch me, and when he does it’s going to be bad.

It’s just that I don’t realise how bad.

I expect him to do something tiny, like giving me a brief, chaste kiss through the sheet. I’ll get the sense of something slightly hot and slightly wet and slightly soft, and that will be pretty much it. The thing is, though: I simply don’t get it. Again, I understand all of him so well, until it comes to sex. I subtract too much of his desire from things, so convinced that he could never really want me that I overlook the obvious signs.

Like him going for all the rudest parts first, before he even considers anything else. He doesn’t touch me or kiss me the way a monk would. He does it like the man he is, beneath seventeen layers of awfulness and repression and people fucking him up. And the man he is wants more than tiny caresses on my left elbow or my right knee. He doesn’t want to touch my cheek.

He wants to find my nipple – which is probably poking through the sheet in the most obscene manner possible – and then he wants to pinch it. He wants to pinch it and pinch it, so softly I want to sob. At the very least I squirm the second he does it, and not just because of the way he goes about it. Somehow the sensation is magnified by the sheet. It slides around between his fingers and that sensitive little point, all cool and ever so slightly rough. It rubs me a second time, and I think my whole body vibrates.

I can hardly help arching my back, despite knowing how lewd that must look. Like I’m saying, Go on, go on do it more. Do it harder or softer or faster, until I come over something so slight. Because the thing is – I think I really could. Him doing this feels better than most masturbation I attempt, and it only gets more intense from there. Once he’s managed to pluck and play with one nipple he seems to grow in confidence, and attends to the other at the same time. Two fingers on the right, lightly tugging until I go insane.

And then his mouth on the left.

Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, did he just put his mouth on the left? I think he might have done, but as my mind is currently taking a vacation somewhere just south of reality it’s rather hard to tell. I have to take several calming breaths and get some control of myself, in order to be sure. Then, once I have, I wish I had stayed in the dark. Not thought anything or worked out what he’s really doing.

If I had I probably wouldn’t have made a fool of myself. But I do, so I just have to deal with it. He puts his mouth on my nipple, and sucks hard enough for me to really feel it. And in response I ramble like some incoherent sex maniac. ‘Ohhhh God yeah do that to me do it to me lick my stiff little nipples,’ I tell him. And though it’s no worse than the things I said when he took a belt to me, it somehow feels it in every way. The sheet makes it so, as though it really is a shroud and I’m supposed to respect the dead.

At any rate I shouldn’t be groaning orders – an idea that he seems to agree with. He pulls away almost immediately, as though the belt incident was Nam and now he’s having flashbacks. All of this is just getting way, way too horrifying for him, and now it all has to stop. That was enough, that was everything I’m allowed to have, and I should just make do.

And I can, too. I lie there quietly, awaiting my probable doom. Not saying a word or asking for anything, every inch of me just waiting for him to rip away the sheet. In fact, I wait for it so hard and so confidently, that when he tells me to spread my legs I at first think he’s said something else. Or maybe he did say that, but means it like he did in the study. He just needs to correct my supine posture, and once he has we can go about our business.

But I swear to God, I had no idea our business is going to be him with his face between my thighs. If I had, I probably would have prepared myself more. I would have put myself into some bracing position, as though he was a plane and in real danger of dive-bombing into the side of a mountain. It certainly feels like he might be, and not just because he’s put his goddam head between my legs.

There’s also all the stuff he does when he gets there.

Good God in heaven, the stuff. I can’t even call it by its real name. I just have to give it vague labels, like ‘thing’ and ‘this’ and ‘that’. He uses his thing to this my that, my mind garbles, and oh, God, when he does, when I get that first hint of contact, obviously too slick to be anything but his mouth…I think I call him ‘baby’. It mortifies me beyond belief and I automatically want to take it back.

But I’m also glad I don’t get to. He deserves a ‘baby’ for this. He deserves it just for pushing himself to these lengths – lengths that definitely affect him in uncomfortable ways – and then again for how he goes about it. Dear God, the way he goes about it. I think somewhere inside I really thought he would have no idea, when it came to putting his extensive knowledge into practice. Even knowing that he made up that stuff he supposedly read aloud to me doesn’t quite make it real.

Until he spreads my puffy, plump lips with two insistent fingers, to get at everything between. He practically makes my clit stand out, like a sign saying please God do not touch directly. Though I suppose he’s not going to touch directly. He’s doing it through a layer of ever so slightly damp material, and, by God, he knows it. He knows what to do with my body, he understands the medium he’s working in, and he just applies both to devastating effect.

I cry, really I do, when I feel his tongue work over me there. When he just presses the tip to that over-sensitised bud, then rubs and rubs until I absolutely cannot take it. Real tears leak out of my eyes as raw sensation rips through me, too intense for me to keep still for a second round. I think I mean to get away or at least close my legs – which feels like a stupid mistake until I try.

And then I get his response.

Oh, my God, his response. ‘No,’ he says, only the ‘no’ has twenty-seven syllables and sounds like a song. Plus it finishes on something so brilliant I can scarcely believe it. He gets a great handful of me, and I still struggle to fathom it. I find myself actually asking him if he just grabbed my arse, and to my great delight he tells me yes. He tells me more than that.

‘I did, and if you keep refusing to be still I might have to squeeze,’ he says, and, man alive, I understand him. It isn’t just the idea of him doing that that’s almost killing me. It’s the idea of him doing it in a place that he recently branded. Those marks still burn, and if I am a bad girl he will make them burn brighter. He will make them sting so much I might cry.

While coming so hard that I want to die.

I’m not far off that now. And I get so much further when he returns to the task at hand. He shows me almost no mercy, both in the things he does and in the things he doesn’t do. He pauses when I want him to make circles, and makes circles when I want him to stop, and when he really starts going for me I don’t feel any better about it. Mostly because I realise in a great wrenching glut of excitement:

That sudden sense of him pressing against me, mouth working more urgently against my aching cunt…that is not me needing it. That is him wanting to do it. That is him grasping at something, so greedy he can’t even come up for air. I hear him gasping and understand it all for sure, the knowledge like a lightning bolt directly into my veins. It lays me to waste just thinking of him desperately kissing and licking and lapping at me, everything so lewd and close it’s unbearable. The contact is too intense, my orgasm like a waiting fist just south of my stomach. In a second I’m going to go so hard.

I think he likes the idea of me going hard.

And I don’t let him down. As soon as I fully see how much he wants this, my body tries to burst its banks. I scream into my teeth, grateful for the barrier because it stops me making a blurting fool of myself, but hating it just the same because, Lord, I need to let something out. There’s too much sensation inside me. It bursts from my aching clit, too thick to stand. I think I actually soak through the sheets – and a second later I know for sure. I know, because, holy hell, he tells me so.

‘I had no idea a woman would taste so divine,’ he blurts out, so full of strange wonder that I could never doubt his sincerity for a second. He really means it, he really means that he enjoyed something he should probably hate more than anything in the world, and the second I know he does I cannot hold it back.

‘Fuck me,’ I say to him – which I suppose is bad enough on its own.

But the real problem is: I do not stop there.

‘I know you want to fuck me. I know you liked doing that and I promise it would be no different at all. I’m so hot and wet you could just sink right in without any trouble, just rut and rut until you fill me up,’ I say, and I do not regret a word of it.

Why would I, when his response is so fucking fantastic?

‘God, you greedy little slut,’ he says, those words alone enough to get me. However, it’s the admiration in his voice that really finishes the job. I hear it and I just respond without even thinking about it.

‘Oh, fuck, yes, say that again,’ I tell him.

But I’m glad I do. He apparently feels the same way too.

‘I should get you by the hair,’ he says.

‘Yes, yes, yes, you should, yes, please.’

‘Fill your mouth so you can never say such filthy things.’

‘Mmmmm, yeah, just do it, just come in my mouth,’ I say, so delirious over the fact that he suggested it that I hardly think about what I’m doing when he does. My excitement seems to have reached some kind of apoplectic level where I’m no longer sensible of things like moving parts of my body over other parts – or at least I’m not until he speaks again.

‘Are you masturbating? Not two seconds and you’re already frigging yourself like some beast in heat,’ he says, and I honestly don’t know what I like best. The fact that he uses the word ‘frigging’, or the sound of him being so affronted by my gall.

In all my days I never thought I’d be so lucky, to affront someone with my gall.

‘I can’t help it, I can’t help it, you make me this way, you do this to me,’ I tell him, but what I really mean is: I think a spring wedding would be smashing. And, judging by his just slightly too amused response, he feels the same.

‘I make you fuck your own cunt, do I?’

‘Ahhhhh, yeah, yeah – just the idea of you doing it makes me go out of my mind.’

‘So you’re thinking of my cock while you slide those fingers in?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, so close to incoherence I’m not even sure if those ‘yeah’s count as words. They fumble out of me minus much-needed letters, and I can see that the situation is only going to get worse. My pussy is so sensitive that any real stroking makes me wild, and all the while he just keeps on talking.

Good God, his talking is the best.

‘Shame they’re nowhere near as thick,’ he tells me, so casual about it I could just kill him. He knows what he’s doing, saying something like that. He always knows, even when he pretends otherwise. He makes it seem like some boring detail that he just felt like bringing up, and I have to deal with the fallout.

And in this case the fallout is the full understanding that he is telling me he has a big cock. A big thick cock, of the kind I now have to think about constantly.

‘Oh, don’t say that.’

‘You’d need to use double what you appear to be using now.’

‘Fuck, fuck.’

‘You’d need to stroke in so much more deeply.’

‘This is torture, this is torture,’ I say, but I have no idea what torture really is. I think him telling me about previously mysterious parts of his body is bad; I think hearing just how much he would fill me up is worse. But, as he then points out, there is something that trumps all of this, in at least a dozen different ways.

‘You think this is torture for you?’ he asks.

And then I’m not quite sure what to do. On the one hand, I want to be sympathetic. I want to soothe and be kind and apologise for my complaining. But on the other, there is my body and the way it chooses to deal with this news. I will be honest: it does not do it well. I think I might actually have a little orgasm, just at the idea he presents there:

That he not only wants something more than this.

He’s tortured by his desire for it.

He looks at me writhing and moaning and making myself wet, and he craves it more deeply than he does that iron-clad restraint. I know he does, because, even if I set what he just said aside, his silence afterwards speaks volumes. It almost vibrates with a waiting, as though he expects me to do the rest.

And to my great surprise and delight, I do not disappoint.

‘Tell me what you need,’ I say, and, by God, I mean it. I think I’m pretty much prepared to do anything, up to and including things I would never have entertained before. If he asks me for my arse, I will give it to him. If he wants to fill every hole I have, I am happy to let him. In fact, when he finally tells me what he needs it’s almost a disappointment, after gearing myself up to so much.

‘Just keep talking. Keep saying every filthy little thing you can think of.’

Though to be fair, almost disappointing with him is pretty much explosive excitement in any other context. It makes me giddy just to think about doing it, and especially after I try.

‘I’m so wet for you,’ I say, with more moaning abandonment than I ever used before. I alternated before now – making sure the dirtier words were spoken as calmly as possible and the calmer ones got the dose of lusty breathlessness. But that is not the case here. I sound like the horniest whore on the face of the earth, to the point where I feel confident I hit the mark.

But man, am I wrong about that.

‘More than that,’ he says, so I go one step further.

‘I want you to fill me with your hot, slippery come,’ I say, now certain that this must have done the trick. It burns me to get that idea out, considering how much it refers to him. It suggests that he can get hard and have orgasms and spill his jizz just like every other man, and that thought is roasting hot.

Yet still it falls short.

‘More,’ he says, like someone unsatisfied with a knife in the gut.

He needs it to be twisted, to really do the job. He needs to make it bleed.

So I make it bleed. Oh, man, do I ever make it bleed.

‘I want you to fill every hole I have – fuck my arse, fuck my mouth, fuck my pussy. I want you to cover me in come, just make me a mess, it doesn’t matter. I know that you’ve never and you know I’ve never so just do it all over my face, do it on my tits, cover my clit in great ribbons of it, cream in my cunt until I’m overflowing and still ravenous for more,’ I gasp, every word so filthy and shameful that at first I think I must have gone too far. I overshot what he was asking for and hit gross, and when I finally pull the sheet away he will have left the room. And maybe also the house, and the country, and possibly this planet.

The next time I hear of him will be on the news: First Man To Start Living On Mars.

Or maybe: Man Murders Woman With Sex By Tearing Off A Sheet.

Because that is what he then does. He rips it off so suddenly and shockingly I give a little squeak, as though I am the one who needed it there. For a second it’s as if our roles are reversed, and, I have to say, I love it in a way I feel sure he must never. It makes my heart pound in my pussy and my breath come all ragged and weird, and the feeling only grows stronger.

I see him staring down at my totally bare body, and the pounding seems to triple. In a second my heart is going to bust right out of there, and when it does I feel sure there is going to be a mess. There is already a mess down there. I can barely keep touching myself without skating off to less interesting parts of my body. I aim for my clit every time, and end up somewhere just south of my left knee.

Not that I really mind all that much. I think if I actually hit the target here, while lying in the sudden liquid darkness of his heavy-lidded eyes, I would most probably never stop coming. Chances are he’d have to take me to the hospital, to get some kind of anti-orgasm medication. Either that, or constant climaxes would end up being my lot in life. Medical science might want to study me – and all because I accidentally rubbed my clit in the middle of whatever this might be.

Though I say ‘whatever’, when really I know.

This is him losing control.

Of course, on anyone else it would probably look like nothing – and especially in light of what he has done to date. He has read dirty stuff to me and spanked me and made me stand in rude ways, stroked me with a paintbrush and licked me between my legs. He really should be exploding by this point. Most people would most likely want to kill me with their cocks, way before we ever got to here.

But he is not like that, and all the arousal centres of my body know it. They see him stripping out of his jacket and decide to go haywire. It takes every ounce of restraint I have not to fling myself at him immediately, and not just because that jacket is now on the floor. He threw it on the floor, I think, then I have to move right on to the next set of revelations. And they are revelations.

He has dark patches under his arms, as though he has spent the last hour in something other than complete cool calm. In fact, I know he spent the last hour in something other than complete cool calm, because aside from the sweating and the shaking – holy God I think he might be shaking – I can see something distinctly in those expensive trousers of his.

Something I have to break the rules for, despite my better judgement. I know, I know how much he hates physical contact. I know he does and yet if I just lie here and look I might never be sure. I could go away thinking that the shape I see there is nothing, instead of something that turns the world upside down.

So I just…reach forward. Slowly, slowly, to give him a chance to tell me no. He can stop me at any time, I tell myself, and that much is technically true. But once I brush the thick, hard thing between his legs I no longer feel as sure. He seems frozen, utterly frozen. I could probably carry on doing this for hours if I wanted to.

But if I did, I somehow doubt he would ever speak to me again. He looks like he might not ever want to speak to me now, thanks to my stupidly curious hand. The hard breathing comes to an abrupt halt, as if grabbing his cock also gets him around the windpipe. And for just a second, those eyes flash wide.

I can almost hear the ‘how dare you?’ coming, though when it doesn’t I don’t exactly feel grateful. I feel like I might have ruined him. Destroyed him for ever just because I needed to feel his erection – because it is that very thing, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I pull back almost immediately, but I can still feel the exact curve and heft of it. More than likely I will still be able to some time into the next century, even though I try to put it from my mind.

I try, but it gets difficult when he starts to unbutton his trousers.

Is he really unbuttoning his trousers? He does it so slowly and deliberately I think it must be something else – like an optical illusion brought on by extreme lust. It almost looks like he fell asleep and is doing it while dreaming, despite the fact that he is one hundred per cent awake. If he wasn’t, I doubt he would be able to tell me to lie back down. And he definitely couldn’t add the other thing he does, because the other thing he does is so specific, and so hungry-sounding.

‘Show me your clit,’ he says, as though he’s been thinking of what he’d like to see best of all for a long, long time. All he needed was the will to ask it, and now he has I have to obey. I don’t even think about it. I just use my fingers the way he did not so long ago, parting my slick folds until he can see. Every part of me tingling with the thought of what he might do – and I think pretty big too.

I imagine him putting his hand inside his open trousers, while he orders me to frig myself. And I do get part of it right. He does tell me to keep rubbing until I come. He just also happens to take his cock out while I do it. I make one slow circle around my oh so sensitive clit, and then he just can’t seem to help it.

He fumbles himself out, so frantic I almost miss the main event. I get a flash of skin and the curve of his fist, and precious little else. But then, I hardly need anything more. Just the idea of him jerking his cock while I finish myself off is enough. Just the knowledge that his cock is there, almost out in the open and so stiff I think it strains against the confines of his hand. Really, anything other than that is a bonus.

So when he gives me one…

Oh, God, when he gives me one…

I suspect I will never recover. I see him start to shudder the way I do as I get close – the way I am now, as my orgasm begins to break low down in my body. And that hand he has on himself speeds up, so suddenly quick and eager that it thickens everything I’m currently feeling. The little bursts of too dense sensation in my cunt and my clit get bigger, better, brighter, and even more so when he puts one knee on the bed.

He’s going to do it on you, my mind babbles deliriously.

I really think he might. I think he might so much that I tell him to go ahead, I tell him to come all over my pussy, I tell him, why should he care? I even think to tell him that it poses no danger, because he never has with anyone and I never have with anyone and we both know it. He even knows I’m on the pill, because he’s a smart arse who reminded me to take it the other day, just to show me that he knew.

Though still I somehow think he won’t.

I somehow think he can’t, right up until the very last moment when my pleasure is almost peaking, all the sounds I want to make stuck somewhere in my throat, my body like a live wire, running hot. And then I feel the first burst of slickness against my jerking clit, so thick and good I simply have to go over too.

I twist in absolute bliss, filled to the brim with the idea that he just did the dirtiest, nastiest thing. He came on my cunt, so copiously I can feel it running between the cheeks of my arse. I can barely move my fingers through my swollen slit without getting in all the mess, and oh, it just absolutely sends me. It makes me think we are finally over whatever hill we were on, with nothing but more of this in front of us.

And then I see him. I see his falling-down face as he takes in the thing he just did, and I know. There will always be a hill, and no relief waiting for us on the other side.

Chapter Ten

It seems best to not raise the thing that happened with him. The only problem is, not raising it is much, much more difficult than it seems. For a start, every time I even remotely consider it my face turns the colour of seventeen really embarrassed people squashed together. And I think about it a lot. Of course, I try not to. I attempt to push out the stuff we did, typically with a lot of reading or some really complicated quadratic equations.

But there’s only so much you can do to avoid thinking about someone coming all over your cunt. Hell, the words alone seem to suck me right back in. I will be standing at the refrigerator, choosing one of those nice pies he gets from some posh place for dinner, and suddenly all I can hear is ‘come’ and ‘cunt’ going around my head on an infinite feedback loop. And even when I try to erase them from the database, they get around it.

The act itself gets around it.

He did it on you, my mind whispers instead, like some naughty kid on the playground. Plus it always does it at the most inappropriate times. He suggests we dissolve our employer/employee relationship entirely, in view of the new parameters we find ourselves operating under. Not one word of it sexy or suggestive, and yet still I find myself flicking back to those new parameters almost immediately. I think of the way it felt, thick and sticky against my over-sensitised clit, until finally I think he can tell something is up.

In fact I know he can, because after dinner one night – when everything seems peaceful and I’m pretending to read and he’s actually reading – he suddenly speaks without looking up. All extra casual, I think, just like the thing he says.

‘You seem singularly preoccupied lately.’

Of course I know I have to tread carefully after that. Select my words well, make sure he knows that I’m not just going insane over the sex and am almost beside myself to do it all over again. I don’t want him to feel pressured or compromised, considering the harrowing things he shared and the horrible way he keeps reacting to certain sex stuff. Just because he gave in to certain urges once or twice or twenty times doesn’t mean he can comfortably do it again, and I shouldn’t assume.

It’s just that sometimes he makes it really hard not to assume. He looks at me over the top of his book, eyes diamond-hard and expression just somewhere south of suggestive. As though he’s waiting for me to say something; waiting for the wrong words to come out. Or is it the right ones? Telling him that coming on my cunt was the most erotic experience of my life hardly seems like a horrible thing.

Most men would love to hear something like that.

Though that’s the thing: he is not most men. He’s not even in some random one per cent margin of error, and that often makes it hard to judge. Or at least it does when my brain is fogged by sex and struggling to understand which things he liked and which he hated. Was it the fact that he lost control that made him look like his face was sinking? Maybe it was, in which case we can deal with that. I have no problem at all with him wanting to be completely in charge.

I lie awake at night masturbating when I think about him being in charge.

But what if it was not that? Then I could end up offering something to him that he recently realised is gross, simply because I missed what should have been obvious. My sexual blind spot will strike again, and that Mars scenario might become a reality.

So I stay neutral.

‘Oh, this part of the book is just really gripping,’ I say, and to my great relief he just nods and lets me go back to my writhing agony. I get to suffer in silence, which sounds bad but is infinitely preferable to suffering in his sight line. If he sees me going out of my mind, he may feel obliged. Either that, or he could feel resentful. I’ve pushed him too far and taken too much already, yet here I am greedily asking for more.

It’s like Oliver Twist, I think.

Only with a really evil Oliver.

And that just sounds terrible to me. It sounds so bad that I don’t struggle all that hard to keep myself under control. I can do this, I tell myself, and that pretty much proves to be true. After all, his company is a reward in itself. His conversation is more relaxed now, even if the bars around his body are not, and it gives me a lot of pleasure that I would otherwise never have had. He tells me about his favourite piano pieces to play, in fits and starts at first but then with less discomfort.

At one point he even allows me to sit beside him, while he plays something so wonderful I have to fight to not tell him how much I adore him.

A struggle that is doubled when he admits he wrote it. He just tells me matter-of-factly one morning, expression suddenly tense when he realises what he’s said. He admitted something he was never able to before, and I can see it stings. It makes him think of all the times he had to stay silent – I can see it on his face – and for a second I waver almost as strongly as I did when I thought of the insanely sexy stuff. My heart makes a mess of my insides and I can see my hands shaking with the effort of staying by my side.

I could do the thing I did before, the almost touching thing, I think, but I know I would never stop there. I would keep going until I was skin to skin. I would touch him in the worst possible way, because although sexual contact is an issue for him I know it’s nowhere near as bad as anything affectionate. I know because he tells me so.

‘He used to move in as though he was going to put a comforting hand on my shoulder,’ he says, when he sees my shaking hands. As though he knows, he knows I want to do just that. But I can’t, because then he adds, ‘Though of course it was never a comforting hand. Unless you include a slap under that umbrella.’

I never want him to think I might be including a slap under that umbrella. I don’t want to do anything that will make him flinch or bristle, or be despairing about sex he doesn’t want to have. I want him to be content and calm, and if that means I never get to do anything naughty ever again, well, so be it. I can cope without ever experiencing that life-altering pleasure again. I can be satisfied with a celibate life, as long as I get to spend it with him.

Or so I think.

Until the train.

I don’t think he really wants to invite me. I hear him talking on the phone about a business trip, and he definitely says he wants to travel alone. He even says something about ‘not exposing himself to that’, which definitely makes me wonder. It makes me think it might be to do with me and the awful shame I would bring down upon him – though, if it is, he gives an admirable impression of that not being the case.

He tries, and I appreciate the trying.

‘It will be terribly tedious for you but I find myself asking you to come anyway,’ he says, and he goes out of his way to make me feel welcome. I ask him if I should pack my jumper and he just gives me a withering look, as though what he does next is completely obvious. I mean, of course he has bought me a brand-new wardrobe. Of course he has. How on earth did I think he’d let me travel to the freezing countryside with a jumper that has more holes than material?

‘It looks as though someone knitted it using tissue paper,’ he says, as I hold up jackets with linings far thicker than the thing he’s currently examining. Even the shoes look cosy somehow, all of them made of this buttery leather with buttons and stripes of material. One of the pairs actually matches a suit made of the thickest, smartest tweed, and I swear to God, when I put it on I look like a telephone operator from the nineteen-forties. I immediately love it half to death, but I keep that almost entirely inside. I am a nun now, and that means never getting close to anything like excitement.

A nod and a thank-you will suffice, I think.

And I feel proud of myself for doing it. It seems to me that I have almost completely mastered this indifferent attitude to sex. I never burn his clothes off with my eyes any more, and even when I do I usually manage to suppress it. I look away from him as he swirls his coat on, and pretend that the way he turns up his collar is not cool at all. He looks stupid, I tell myself. He looks like a stupid show-off, instead of an insane sex god who drives me wild with desire.

And I almost never think of the filthy things we did. I think and act as prim and proper as I look. I even shrug off his offer of help getting on the train. I am the very model of patient restraint, making do with what we have. Nothing can stir me. Nothing can bother me. I actually tell him so. ‘You know I don’t mind if you never want to do anything sexual again,’ I say.

But that just makes it all the more shocking when, halfway there, I feel his hand on my thigh. So much so that I glance down, as though expecting it to be something else. Something he dropped, I think, like a case for glasses that he doesn’t actually have. It has to be, and not just because he hates touching. We are not alone in the carriage. There is a man in a tracksuit across from us and a little to the right. If Cyrian let his paper drop just a little the man would definitely see.

And considering how high that hand is I doubt he would want him to. It must be a mistake. He got lost on the way to the bag between my legs, or something similar. In a second he will ask me for a biscuit, I think, only he doesn’t. He doesn’t even take the hand away, once he’s done with this tiny gesture of affection. Instead he starts to slowly pull up that tweed skirt, inch by impossible inch. Face a mask of indifference as he does it. Not a hint of what’s happening anywhere on him.

Not even when he gets it all the way up, right over my silky panties. I feel the air hit me there and want to scream, but I understand why I don’t, why I keep so still, so very still, despite my all-consuming shock. It’s because I want him to keep going, oh, God, more than anything I want him to keep going. I don’t care why he’s doing this. I’m not bothered if it’s just some strange accident. All I want is his gorgeous hand cupping my aching pussy – just as he does, not a second later.

He cups me there, and squeezes. Like he wants to see what I feel like, and right now presents the perfect opportunity. Now he doesn’t have to be directly involved. He can pretend he’s detached and play the role of a perfect gentleman while he slowly fondles my sex. While he makes it wetter and wetter, until finally I know he can feel it. I know he can feel my slipperiness, as it makes a mess of everything. Hell, after a little while he can probably feel my clit. It seems so big and swollen I don’t see how he couldn’t, and soon I get some confirmation. He strokes a little more firmly, and I have to bite back a gasp.

I have to turn my head and look out of the window, though looking doesn’t help. It just means I can see the reflection of the man sitting with us, as Cyrian slowly works me. As he eases his fingers beneath the material – so skin-to-skin it scorches me – and slides one elegant finger through my soaking slit. All these rude things, I think, all these rude things and with someone right there. Though that makes no difference. In fact, if anything it gets worse when the man suddenly leaves, because that’s when Cyrian decides to murmur the worst thing in the world to me.

‘Do you think he is leaving so he can come with the thought of you being fingered still fresh in his mind?’ he asks, as though he’s suddenly become a completely different person. Gone is that sense of defeat I saw all over his face. He seems barely bothered by our closeness. His lips are so close to my cheek he could be kissing me.

And the words, oh, the words, he knows what he’s doing with these words.

‘If only he knew what a slut you are, he could have come over and pushed his cock right into your mouth. Fucked you there while I stroked you – or would you prefer him in this hot, wet cunt, as I lick your clit? That sounds pleasant, don’t you think? Two men servicing you on a train, so thoroughly that you scarcely care who might see. You scarcely care how you look or sound – just as you don’t now,’ he says, and he’s right. I don’t. I spread my legs for him, so eager for him to fuck me there I forget about everything else.

I forget about giving him space, about being restrained.

I just buck and rub myself against his hand until I come, and come, and come. And I’m glad I do, too. I would have felt a hundred times more stupid if I’d carried on pretending I could be a celibate nun with no feelings, when he says what he does in the aftermath. He turns back to his paper as I sit there slumped and panting, pink-faced and unable to speak. And then, just as regret starts to rise in me, just as I wonder if I somehow forced him into that or caused him intense agony by responding at all, he says this:

‘You might not mind never doing anything sexual again. But I bloody well do.’

Chapter Eleven

Something shifts after that. It has to, because now everything is abundantly clear. Yes, sex might make him look like someone shocked by the return of the recently deceased. Yes, it makes him flinch and balk and occasionally tell me terrible things that turn me upside down.

But he wants it all the same.

He wants it so badly that he’s willing to put a hand on my thigh, even though I can tell it burns him to do it. In the taxi to wherever we’re going he keeps splaying his fingers and making a fist, as though remembering the shock of the whole thing. Occasionally he looks at it as though it no longer belongs to him, but he copes. I know he copes, because once we get to our destination things go rapidly down that hill I thought was unconquerable. And when I say down that hill, I mean a slide coated in sex that ends in a glorious ocean of ecstasy.

Or at least that is what it feels like.

We go in some side door of what looks like a tiny rambling cottage, everything so dark and cold and strange I actually sound a little panicked when I say his name. ‘Cyrian,’ I call out, and expect some deadpan comment in return. Something like ‘Try not to worry, there are only seventeen ghosts living here.’

And instead he gives me this:

‘Get on your knees.’

So sudden that for a full thirty seconds I feel sure I must be misinterpreting. He could not possibly have meant that in the sexual sense. He just wanted to direct me to the light switch, which in this instance is located somewhere around the skirting boards. Old country homes belonging to wealthy families are usually built that way, and I’m just too poor and uncultured to know any better.

Or too dumbstruck to understand that he wants me to do it so he can put a hand in my hair. Which I guess seems fine, if a) the man you are with was totally okay with touch and never had any problems with it whatsoever, and b) he didn’t do it for sexy reasons.

But unfortunately for me neither is true. He does have a problem with touch – or at least he did, until very, very recently. Right now it seems to be snowballing into some other thing altogether, which includes him getting a fistful of my hair. He gets a fistful of my hair, and then, oh, then he just starts unbuttoning his trousers again.

Like the whole business on the train has got him so riled up that he forgets who he is, momentarily. Or is it more that he remembers, and simply doesn’t care? He’s somehow stumbled to the same point I get to, too far gone to be bothered about things like propriety and personal boundaries. Right now, I doubt he could pick out personal boundaries with ten telescopes and a tricorder.

If he could, I suspect he would never do anything like this. The hand in my hair is so tight it almost hurts, and despite the darkness I can see what he’s doing fairly clearly. I can make out how frantic his hand is on those buttons, followed by a glimpse of something so thick and solid it makes me go a little faint. I almost pitch forward the second he eases it free, but even if I had fallen flat on my face I could hardly have faulted myself.

How can I, with this one thought going round and round in my head?

He’s going to fuck my face. He is absolutely going to fuck my face, I think, and then it basically feels like a wonder that I stay upright at all. The insides of my thighs automatically go weak, as if I’ve drunk too much gin without knowing it. That drumbeat starts between my legs again, and it doesn’t get softer or slighter when I realise he isn’t quite going that far.

He so often leaves me feeling like this is the last sexual contact we will ever have that anything is basically OK with me. The train was enough. The order was enough. Him jerking his cock about an inch from my lips is just a joy and a pleasure. It thrills me in all kinds of ways, from the smell of his arousal to the slick sound of his hand shuttling back and forth to the idea that I could just do it if I wanted to.

He is mere centimetres from me. It would take almost no effort to stick out my tongue and get a taste. And it would feel good to him, too, God knows it would. He’s never had someone lick him there, which seems like a crying shame to me in this moment.

But I want to resist. Despite the heat and the hand in my hair near dragging me closer, despite the sense that he would like me to, I want to resist. I want to show him that he can trust me always to respect his boundaries, and be as patient as he needs, and am I glad I do.

If I had licked he might have pulled back, instead of doing what he does:

He groans my name like some sinful prayer as he fills my open mouth.

I wake wondering if yesterday was a dream, still too blindsided by it to fully understand and accept it. He touched me on a train. A train with people on it. He even seemed to like the fact that there were people on it, and told me so in graphic detail. And then, just in case that wasn’t terrifying enough, he made me kneel on a cold stone floor in the kitchen of his old family home, and came all over my face while saying filthy things.

‘He did it in your mouth,’ my mind informs me in wonderment.

And I can’t tell my mind she’s wrong. I can still taste him on my tongue, clean and sweet and sharp all at the same time. I can still feel his hand in my hair – a sensation that gets stronger when I try to turn my head. He pulled just a touch too hard, and my scalp twangs the moment I move.

Though scalp-twanging is not really what I find myself focusing on.

The fact that he is lying next to me is.

He’s in this strange bed with me. And true, yes, he’s fully clothed. He hasn’t even taken his shoes off, and has barely disturbed the roughly knitted blankets beneath him. But the fact that he did it at all is something. It makes my heart lurch just to see him here, eyes closed and lips ever so slightly parted. One arm a little flung out, as though he forgot decorum in his sleep. Curly hair almost spread out over the pillow, so black and glossy and gorgeous I can hardly resist it.

He touched mine, I think.

Is it OK for me to touch his? I could just stroke that tiny kiss curl at his temple with the very tip of my finger. Or maybe run along the length of his collarbone – I can see it there, peeking out from behind his open collar. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, would it? It seems like twelve steps down from face-coming, so I think it might not be.

But then I remember the promise I made the night before. The one about building up his trust, and having faith in him in return. He will get there in his own time. He’s never going to abandon me to a life of celibacy. I just have to be patient, really patient. I have to make do with occasional stretches between sex, as he recuperates.

Or at least, I assume I do.

‘I can only lie this still for so long, you know. Better do it before I stop pretending I am entirely asleep and absolutely not getting an erection at the idea of you fondling me while I am as helpless as a woman in a painting by Rossetti. Or any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – they were all insufferable misogynists who wanted to fuck dead girls rather than interacting with real live women.’

I should have known better, considering yesterday’s events.

‘I have no idea where to start with that speech.’

‘I think most would begin with the “fucking dead girls” part.’

‘I want to, but you just said “erection” and then I lost the train of whatever we were talking about.’

‘It began with me suggesting you keep doing whatever exquisitely awful thing it was that you were doing, without wondering if I want you to stop,’ he says, and I think he means it. He means it so hard, in fact, that his eyes are still closed. He keeps the illusion going, even after it’s been smashed apart.

But the problem is: I can’t.

‘If it feels painful I want to stop.’

‘It feels agonising, but oh, the agony is sweet.’

‘Then you want me to just cross your boundaries without any consideration for how you feel?’ I ask, and there is a long pause. So long that I think he’s run out of patience and just wants me to go ahead. Those eyes of his are still closed. His lips are still parted. And he’s so close, so very close, so much closer than I thought he was. I can see that curve between the spiky parts of his upper lip, so tender it tempts me to put my finger just there. I can see the strange furriness of his eyebrows, a hundred times less refined than the rest of his face. I could stroke them and see just how rough or soft they are. I could smooth them out with my little finger. I could kiss him there, as sweetly as he can stand it.

I could, but still I resist.

And then he speaks, and I wonder why I ever did.

‘I have no boundaries now. You burned them all. I have no walls around myself; you have reduced each one to rubble. You have undone me in every conceivable way and yet still you hesitate, and I adore you for it. Sometimes I wish I did not; God knows it would be easier for me. But if an easy life must be paid for with the absence of you then I find the price too steep to so much as contemplate. I am your creature now, wholly and completely – so do with me what you will. I shall not turn you away,’ he says, so low and calm you could almost imagine it meant nothing.

Except for all the ways in which it means everything. I think my heart tries to eat him, while he just lies there as impassive as stone. Eyes still closed, that arm still flung almost to me. Like a dying man that half made it, I think, and then it just has to happen. I have to touch him, even if I am slowly realising the other thing that is holding me back.

I thought it was mostly his disgust.

But I think it could also be my terror. My hand is shaking when I reach towards him. I search his face almost frantically for signs of discomfort, and when I see the line between his brows I want to back off all over again. I stop short just like I did before, half wondering if he will be content with that much. Just that stroking as though there’s an invisible barrier between us. No more than that, I tell myself, no more.

‘You could start by taking off my clothes.’

Or maybe I am supposed to do a ton more, after being told in so sudden a way. I come very close to gasping, because oh, God, I didn’t expect him to speak there. He practically stabbed the tension with a ten-inch butcher’s knife. Now it’s bleeding everywhere and I can’t breathe and he knows it, he knows it – even though his eyes are closed he knows it.

‘This game is probably not going to work if I have to keep telling you what could conceivably be OK with me, and my many boundaries.’

‘So this is a game then. This is a game that I am supposed to be in charge of instead of you. I have to take control of everything, while you just lie there.’

‘You sound panicked, Molly. Do you think panic is really the best way to put me at ease?’ he asks, but only because he is a total bastard. He knows what the answer is going to be to that, yet still it stays completely unfair. Of course I panic.

He makes me panic.

He’s still making me panic, even now.

‘I have no idea how to put you at ease. My speciality is fucking your shit up.’

‘So fuck it up, then. I can assure you I will say the safe word I gave you if you are in any danger of putting me into a fear-induced comatose state.’

‘Is there an actual chance of that, Cy?’

‘There is if you call me Cy again.’

‘All right. All right. I can do this. I can do it.’

‘Of course you can. Brilliant woman like you.’

‘I just have to pretend you’re sleeping.’

‘Exactly, not an issue at all,’ he says.

Only it is an issue, almost immediately. Partly because I am sweating and trembling and worried about doing the wrong thing, but mostly because once I get down to it I can see a number of practical problems. Taking someone’s clothes off is easy when they are actively involved in the operation. Taking them off when they are lying down with their eyes closed is complicated. It involves lifting limbs and turning parts you feel nervous about touching, and even if it didn’t there is also his size.

He might be relatively slim, but at six foot something he’s still way too heavy for me to lift in places where I might need to lift him. I find myself eyeing his butt area with something like trepidation, despite how compact and tight and awesome his butt actually is. And I cannot imagine hauling his torso up to take off his jacket.

So I suppose it’s good, really, that he’s there for me.

‘There are scissors on the nightstand.’

It just doesn’t feel good.

It feels more like abject terror.

‘You want me to cut your suit off?’

‘No, I want you to trim my toenails.’

‘Your suit probably cost more than the house I grew up in – no need to be a smart arse about my completely understandable reluctance.’

‘I have forty-seven just like it.’

‘That doesn’t change the fact that it’s worth a ton,’ I say, though now all I can really think is forty-seven. Forty-seven identical suits that probably cost at least a thousand pounds each. And I suspect that the thousand-pound estimate is hopelessly naïve. People probably pay that for a good one from Debenhams, never mind the tailors I know he gets his stuff from. One of them delivered something to the house, and they did so in what looked like a car James Bond would drive. The package was wrapped in cloth, not paper.

All of which poses the question: just how wealthy is he?

It seems like a question I should revisit at some point, but for now I have to focus on this. I really, really have to focus on this, because it is taking some interesting turns.

‘All the better that it is, quite frankly. I think I might be getting hard just at the idea of you carving away at the material, and I feel quite confident that it makes you wet. But if you would rather hesitate some more please go ahead – it might build the tension to the point where I come the second you undo a single button.’

Seriously, what am I supposed to make of that?

He said ‘wet’. He said ‘hard’. And then there is the other thing.

‘Oh, my God, is that a possibility?’

‘Probably not, no, but it got you all excited so was most likely worth saying.’

‘I was excited before, I can promise you that much.’

‘Yes, but there is a certain state you get into where you will throw all your reservations away, and that is more what I was aiming for. You know, the one where your nipples start poking through whatever you might be wearing and your cheeks become delightfully flushed and every breath you take sounds like a moan,’ he says, and I don’t know what’s worse. That he understands this about me, or that he talks about his knowledge in so casual a fashion. It’s like he sees how exciting it is to underplay the sexiest things. To act like his observations are nothing, when really they mean the world to me.

And by ‘me’ I mean my vagina.

They mean the world to my vagina.

Though I try to keep myself as calm as he seems. If this game he plays is exciting to me, I have to wonder if it is the same for him. He might even want me to do things this way – so I give it my best shot. I put on my breeziest voice.

‘That does sound familiar.’

‘Are you there now?’

‘Fairly close, I think.’

‘Perhaps I should keep talking until you are.’

‘You could do that, if you like.’

‘I could tell you what I almost did to you in the kitchen.’

‘So you wanted to do more than come all over my face?’ I ask, at which point I realise I’m losing the breeziness. He might be able to do it, but then he has had years and years of practice at pretending he feels nothing. I, on the other hand, have had years and years of practice in being a gushing, clumsy, over-sexed mess.

And my reaction to what he says pretty much proves that.

‘I wanted to yank your knickers down and fuck your arse. I imagine it would not have been so difficult. Your cunt was such a slippery mess – I feel sure it must have made a river between those pretty little cheeks. Of course I would have prepared you a little first. I seem cruel, I know, but I have no desire to truly hurt you. And of course I know you’ve never had anyone there, by the way you reacted when I slid that cane just a little way in. So I think I would have licked you there first, had I been able. Licked you and fingered you and then fucked you over the kitchen table, while you most probably begged me for more,’ he tells me, and then I lose whatever sense I had left. How can I not? He just told me he wants to fuck my arse. That is one hell of a leap from barely touching.

And the worst part about it is that he totally knows it. I can see the smile lurking somewhere just behind his lips, like when he thought he’d played a winning hand in the parlour. Only this time, this time, oh, this time. This time he has. I am nailed, utterly and completely. He doesn’t have to persuade for a second more.

I just say in a strangely small, grave voice:

‘OK, lie still now and be quiet. I need to cut your clothes off.’

And then I grab the scissors from the nightstand and lay siege to his suit. His expensive, beautifully tailored suit, as soft as butter and so gratifying to cut into. I get the blades around one cuff and just slide all the way up to his shoulder, the sound like something out of a tailor’s wet dream. Hell, it could be something out of one of my wet dreams. I know I moan when the material peels away.

Though the best part is: so does he.

Very faintly, but then faintly is all you need with someone like him. Faintly is like a bomb going off, and ground zero is definitely my ladyparts. I stiffen the second I hear it, and not in the innocent way. In the lewd way, the very, very lewd way. I know my nipples are poking through this blouse just as he described. I can see them when I glance down, and feel the silky material against them whenever I move. It sends shivers of sensation all the way down to my swollen clit every time it happens.

But I try to keep myself under control. I’ve barely got one sleeve off him yet. If I don’t keep at least a little bit calm I’m probably going to go crazy once the rest of it is off. I might maul him, I think, then I want to laugh at such a ludicrous idea.

Until I actually see what he has underneath those neat little shirts and jackets.

Christ, why did I not realise what he had underneath those shirts and jackets?

It should have been clear, considering how well cut they all are. I knew he had big shoulders and I’ve made out the hard, heavy, smooth lines of his chest. I somehow didn’t connect that with muscles, though. He seems so slim, even slight, most of the time. He’s the very embodiment of some harassed man from a gothic novel about ghosts, and they are always, always gaunt.

But he isn’t really that at all.

He looks like a boxer underneath his clothes. He looks like he rowed for Oxford – which he probably did. He spent his university days heaving boats up rivers, and now has a great big slab of a chest that makes me want to cover everything back up again. If I cover it, then I don’t have to be even more excited than I am already. I don’t have to imagine how hard it probably feels, and how probably smooth too because oh, God, yeah there’s that too.

He has just acres and acres of porcelain skin, and all of it begs me to touch it. I can see him tensing a little now and his mouth has become a mean line, but there’s no going back. He was right to push me, right to say those filthy things. If he hadn’t, most likely I would have stopped here, instead of letting my fingers trace oh-so-lightly over the planes of his chest. I would never have made it to his taut belly, or known the pleasure of seeing the muscles there jump at my touch.

And I wouldn’t have heard the sound he makes when I do.

God, it was worth it just for that sound. Almost pained, but just at the last second, just as it finishes hissing from his lips, it turns into something else. Something hot, and sweet, and desperate – though not the sort that says he wants me to stop. No, this is a different kind of desperation. One that all but begs me to go further, even as his hands make fists at his sides.

So I lean down and lick where my hands just were. Just a little at first, like I want to experiment. I want to try it out, maybe taste him a little and see how he responds. I honestly don’t intend to flick my tongue over one tight nipple. And even if I did intend that, I definitely do not mean to go on doing it. His back arches and he makes more of that odd pained-pleasured sound and then I seem to be doing a lot more than licking with the tip of my tongue. I seem to be sucking him there and maybe making circles – the way I know I would like, if things were the other way round.

Though of course, I get that it’s different for men. Probably he feels almost nothing, I tell myself, as I draw my teeth together around it. The throttled sound he makes is just him clearing his throat, and his head going back has nothing to do with me.

It just looks like it does.

And feels like it does.

I think it makes my toes curl to see it. I have to take a few deep breaths to keep myself from doing eight more things all at once, but whether I succeed is a matter for the jury to decide. At least four filthy things follow his thrilling response, and all of them are enough to convict me. I practically assail his chest with my face and hands, groping in places I know I’m not supposed to.

Like between his legs.

How did I end up between his legs?

I was confined to his upper body a moment ago, yet suddenly I seem to be attacking his belt. I just cut through a section of it, despite all kinds of reasons not to. He’ll never be able to spank me with it again, my mind reliably informs me, and yet that’s not even the worst of it. The worst is when I just start hacking at his trousers, so frantic I don’t even stop when I hit underwear. I just keep going and going in some kind of lust-driven frenzy, until finally there’s nothing left. Not a single sock; not a stitch of suit.

He’s just spread out in front of me, surrounded by the ruined remains of his clothes. They form a strange halo around him, shredded beyond recognition but still serving as a reminder of what I’ve done. I’ve stripped him down to nothing, left him bare in more ways than one. That line between his brows is now four fathoms deep. I can’t even see his lips – that’s how tightly they’re pressed together. And his whole body is so tense it seems to be minutely trembling all over, in a way that suggests I should probably hold off.

Even though holding off is torture, oh, my God, it’s torture. Just the sight of him turns the place between my legs to liquid. Just the look of his cock out in the open, instead of half-hidden by his hands or cloaked in pitch-black darkness. It’s just as thick as he said it was – so thick in fact that parts of me clench, thinking of him forcing his way in – and unbelievably stiff.

Too stiff for my libido to take, in fact. I had no idea he could get like this, and as soon as I see proof that he can I go all hot. My cheeks feel stuffed with molten lava and my pussy seems about to burst, and that’s before I take in the rest of him. I’m busy marvelling over how rude it looks, how heavy and swollen and so unlike every other elegant part of him. I don’t get the best bit until a moment later – but God, when I do. I see the gleam of it on his belly, where the tip of his cock has kissed. I see it glistening on the curving underside of the shaft, so copious that for a second I think he might have come.

He might have climaxed over you cutting off his clothes, my mind informs me.

And then I have to beat my mind up and stuff it in a cupboard somewhere. I have to, because if I don’t I’m going to do some very disgusting things. I almost immediately want to rub my face all over that slick, sticky mess, and that just seems like a little too much at the moment. What I need now is restraint, because that tension seems to have doubled in the last thirty seconds. I can almost see his jaw clenching, and of course I understand why it does.

He knows I’m looking. He can feel my feverish eyes all over him, drinking in that big, fat, slippery cock. He probably even knows what I’m thinking: that he did it all over himself like some eager teenager, creaming in his pants over next to nothing. No doubt he’s just dying to correct me, but really he has no need to. I can see for myself what’s actually happened here – he just got so worked up that his cock drooled precome everywhere, in great slippery bursts.

Though to be honest I don’t know if that’s better. It still makes my clit swell and become stiff. It still makes this hot, wet pulse go through my pussy, so intense that I have to squeeze my thighs together just to keep it under control. He gets wet when he’s really excited, I think, then really and seriously wish I hadn’t. I’m supposed to be focusing here. I’m meant to be slowly easing him through this.

And all I want to do is do myself until I orgasm all over my hand. I want to rub my swollen cunt all over various parts of him, from those long, thickly muscled thighs to his still tense face. I want to come in his mouth just like he came in mine – so I suppose it’s good that I just settle for stripping off my blouse. Just my blouse, so I can get some air on my overheated skin. Then maybe my bra too, to stop the material sliding all over my nipples. They’re so tiny and tight that the slightest touch sends me to some pleasure-stuffed brink of insanity, so really I think it’s for the best.

Or at least I do until I’m down to just my stockings and suspenders, and then I wonder what the fuck I was thinking. Now I look like such an eager little slut that it turns me on just to see myself. I make the mistake of glancing down and see my spiky nipples pointing skywards, red and aroused and rude. And then there’s my cunt, framed far too neatly between those bloody things he bought me, and so soaking wet I can see it. I can see it all over my puffy pink lips, and in the curls of the hair there. I can see it on my thighs, all slippery and glistening.

I’m twenty times as bad as him, I think.

But doing so doesn’t make me want to stop. It just makes me want to go further. Open your eyes, I imagine myself saying, so he can take in just how horny I am. How eager for a fuck – because oh, God, I can think of nothing else. After a second I actually put a hand between my legs and ease a finger into my wet and wanting hole, just to assuage that urge to climb on him. To straddle him and sink down on that big, thick cock, feel it stretching and filling me in a way I’ve never experienced.

The most I’ve had is three fingers, in the back of some boy’s car. The handle of my hairbrush, when I knew everyone was out for the night. I’ve never had someone that big sliding into me, and it excites me more than I can say. More than I can reasonably cope with, in truth, because I can feel myself starting to lean towards him. I know the hand I lightly run over his thigh is not going to stop there.

Though God knows I try. I try to make do with the finest of touches – just the tips of my fingers over the curve of his cock, or the ghost of my lips around the head. Once or twice I almost use my tongue, but at the very last moment I resist. I maintain a respectful distance, still so mindful of how slow he might need me to go that I never once think of the opposite. I don’t imagine what a terrible tease this must be, my mouth ever so slightly grazing his cock. I don’t fully consider my hot breath all over him and my hands barely touching various parts of his body – parts that have never known the burning bright sensation of someone else’s skin.

I just think of his agony.

And forget all the parts that are so sweet. I don’t even notice the way he’s shuddering, or how close his hips are to a long, slow roll – like he just wants to rock into my eager mouth, or maybe flip me over and fuck me there. And when I feel his hand in my hair my first thought is that he wants to pull me away. I don’t even remember why he did it the last time, all of me so at war with my own desire that I start to say sorry.

But of course that only makes it more shocking when he explains.

‘For God’s sake just suck my cock,’ he bursts out, so clearly full of frustration that it almost does me in. I think about him lying there waiting and waiting for me to do it, stewing in a great mess of desire and arousal so thick he actually brings himself to say it. He tells me to do it – more than that, in fact. He tugs my mouth to the heavy head of his cock, and when I just hang there stunned he goes one further. He uses his free hand to ease himself past my parted lips, working and pushing until I’m full of him, until all I can taste is him and that slippery precome and oh, God, oh, God, I just can’t cope.

I go limp and lax, as though someone pulled all the stuffing out of me.

But that’s OK. That’s fine, because he’s suddenly full of all the urgency in the world. That hand is tight in my hair, and he uses it to almost work me over the head of his cock. And when that isn’t quite enough, he lifts his hips. He fucks my face as I just crouch there half stunned, body on fire and mind a blank. I can’t even think about the fact that I need to get off right now – though I don’t have to.

I think I’m going to come anyway. Just hearing him grunt is enough to do it, and even if it wasn’t there’s all the other stuff. Like the way he tastes, so sharp and clean and sweet. Like the way he tells me, ‘Take it, take it, you come-hungry whore.’ That’s what he calls me: a come-hungry whore.

And oh, my God, I’ve never loved anything more.

The words practically lick my stiff little clit. I feel that aching pulse thicken and deepen, like I’m going to do it. I’m going to go over because he said filthy things to me while fucking my face – and when I do, sweet Jesus, it feels fucking fantastic. I hear him gasp that he’s going to come and feel the flood of it in my mouth, and then my whole body simply seizes up. It lights a spark that was already on the verge of burning, and I go up like a bonfire. I groan and buck just as he’s doing, nearly choking on the liquid ribbons spilling over my tongue but loving every second of it.

Loving every second of him giving in. Giving it all up to me, in one great glorious burst that leaves us both gasping and flailing and only really understanding in the aftermath. I come around from an orgasm so intense it almost knocks me out, to find myself sprawled halfway over him. My body is all over his body, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

In fact, when I start to sit up he stops me.

And his arm goes over mine.

Chapter Twelve

I wait until he’s sleeping to have a look around, which doesn’t take long. After whatever that was he nearly lapses into a coma. He hardly seems to care that he’s got no clothes on, and he doesn’t pull the covers over himself as he drifts off. He just sprawls there on his stomach, one hand trailing off the bed in a way that strangely affects me even more than all the rest of it. I see his fingers curled about an inch from the floor, and a second heart just starts beating inside me.

And this one is only for him.

Him and all the things he is, from the man I know to the one he clearly was. The one I find in a thousand places in this worn old cottage in the woods. It’s smaller than I imagined, this place. Much smaller and poorer, though I suppose not all upper-crust families had money to match the titles. They must have lost a lot of it along the way, because everything here screams of falling to ruin. The furniture is rickety and mismatched; the carpets threadbare and dusty. I find earthenware riddled with cracks and the bathroom suite definitely needs replacing. The toilet flushes thanks to a lengthy chain. The tub has rust around the plug.

Though none of this means anything to me.

The keys carved into an end table mean something to me. I see them underneath a greying, lace-edged cloth, so carefully concealed that I nearly miss them. Anyone would miss them, if they didn’t know what they were looking for – but of course I do. My heart is already shivering before I go over to it and lift that frayed cloth. I see the C and the D and the F dug deep into the wood, the letters shaky, as if written by children, but the lines surrounding each one as straight as though a machine made them.

He must have used a ruler, I think.

A ruler and a pen-knife, to make a mock-up of the thing he was forbidden. To create something he could practise on or simply enjoy, so often that the letters are worn down. I run my fingers over them and can feel the lack of sharp or splintery edges, too obvious for my heart to take. I have to cover them up again and pretend I never saw them, though by the time I do it’s too late.

I turn and there he is in the narrow doorway. Face nearly expressionless, hands loose at his sides, so still and silent he could be a shadow of himself. Or maybe a shadow of someone else, because he seems like that too in those clothes. The ghost of himself past, I think, too small and thin inside a too big and too worn jumper, pyjama bottoms so overused the stripes they once had are barely visible.

Plus his feet are bare.

He always looks extra vulnerable when his feet are bare. As soon as I see them I want to clutch at myself, or at the very least apologise. I’m glad I don’t. If I had we might have descended into a conversation so painful he would never return from it, whereas in silence he can just go over to the table and sit down. He can point to the space beside him so I can sit too, and see his ritual. He reaches underneath first for a packet taped there – old enough that the words on the front are faded, and the cigarettes inside taste terrible. He lights one with matches that shouldn’t strike and grimaces, before he slowly dissolves into a kind of bliss.

And then I watch, as he shows me just how good he is.

So good, in fact, that I can hear the song without the sound. I lean against his arm and feel it through the muscle there. I get it in every thump of his fingers against wood, more lovely than anything played on a real piano. This is a real piano, I know – the one that lives inside him. The one that keeps him going until late in the morning, barely sensible of the cigarette I take away when it starts to burn his lips.

And which tastes like him, when I touch the tip to my own.

So sweet, I think, and just a little bit bitter.

Just a little, so little, and less every day.

I learn later, much later, after copious quantities of bread so thick it takes forever to chew and jam too sweet to be legal, that it isn’t just the cottage. There are grounds attached, extensive grounds. ‘I own most of the woods,’ he tells me, as though he’s talking about a small allotment instead of an enormous enchanted forest. Most of the trees are so tall and sprawling they look like gnarled and knotted dragons, and when I stand at the bottom of the garden of this tiny cottage I can’t see where they end or begin.

I even go to the top of the nearest hill and am none the wiser. All I can make out is an old barn that probably once belonged to a farm I can only assume is long gone. Though, when I press him about it, all he will say was that he rarely went in there. He doesn’t suggest that they owned that too, or that they once had animals or fields full of barley or anything of the sort.

But when I head towards it, he doesn’t try to stop me. He just follows, mildly indulgent and surprised, as though it had never occurred to him that anyone could be interested. And once we step inside, it’s the same. ‘So, as you can see, the contents are just as thrilling as the outside,’ he says, and actually they are. The whole place is like something out of a fairytale, faintly grimy and dappled with hints of fading sunlight.

And I tell him so.

I tell him with excited words that this is the place I would have loved to play as a kid, trapped in tower blocks that stank of piss. Then I tell him with my actions, too giddy to contain. He calls after me as I climb the ladder to some upper level, but still I don’t stop. I can’t even hold back when he tells me he never played as a child, because somehow that makes it seem more important. We were both cut off from things like this, for different reasons.

Me in my stripped-bare life, and him in one ringed with barriers and boundaries. He doesn’t even understand why I go up, or reach for the rope that dangles over the great hills of hay piled to his right. He just knows that when I take a running jump off the edge it turns him momentarily upside down. The second my feet leave that upper level he shouts – he actually shouts – the fear in his voice so real and raw it thrills me.

But not as much as swinging through the dim darkness of an abandoned barn. I let go at the highest point and damn near soar through the air, arms and legs flailing and every part of me full of the joy of it. This is what it must be like to live, I think. This is what it must be like to have fun, of the sort that makes me giggle. I hit the hay in a great whoomp, a million strands of it puffing upwards and most of it burying me almost immediately, and then I laugh out loud.

Much to his irritation.

‘You could have been killed,’ he says, but I can’t help noticing something odd in his voice when he does. A lightness that wasn’t there before. An amusement that matches my own perfectly, and becomes sweeter as he carries on speaking. ‘There could have been a pitchfork in there somewhere – I might have been forced to watch you die with it stuck through your middle. Honestly, you never think reasonably about anything, and you do the most insufferable things, and you are an eternal source of exasperation to me.’

Yet he does it all as he climbs the ladder, at my suggestion.

‘Try it,’ I tell him, then watch in breathless wonder while he does just that. He even takes a running jump off the edge, far more athletic about it than I was. It makes me think that I should ask him about that body of his, and whether he rowed or boxed or did some other vigorous thing. But then he lands almost on top of me, and I forget whatever I want to say. Mainly because for a second he actually bursts into laughter.

But also because once he’s done he turns to me. He looks at me through the dim light that I would dearly love to call gloaming, his expression slowly sinking into the warmth he probably should be incapable of. He should be, but I know he isn’t now. And even if I was unsure, even if I had no idea and could hardly guess, after one lovely moment filled with all the affection in the world he does this:

He leans across to me slowly, haltingly, raising his arms so stiffly that I don’t recognise what he’s doing right away. I just lie there looking at him, unmoving, and only after his hands pat over my arms and his body brushes mine do I get it. Though to be honest, getting it still leaves me somewhat stupefied. ‘What is this?’ I find myself asking, in a slightly scared and wondering tone.

And in the end I’m glad I do.

It means I get to hear him say: ‘I’m hugging you. This is me hugging – am I doing hugging wrong? Molly, tell me, am I doing it wrong? It feels awkward and awful so I have to imagine this is not right, but would appreciate some sort of confirmation’. I get to feel him trying to correct his technique, in wholly ridiculous and unnecessary ways. He shifts one hand down and the other up, and tries bending his elbows instead of holding them stiff. And he does all this even though having my face almost pressed to his chest is enough for me. Just knowing that his hand is on my back gives me everything I need.

I know it does, because I burst out with words I shouldn’t tell him.

‘I love you,’ I say, and strangely I don’t regret it in the least. Not even when he answers with silence and stillness, as though it shocked him out of his skin. Not even when he finally responds, and it’s with something frantic and physical and not like him at all. Hell, if anything the latter is a bonus – his hand suddenly slides to the hem of my skirt and I go weak almost immediately.

Then even weaker when I realise he really is ruffling the whole thing up. I feel the air on my bare thighs and my partially clad backside, and all my muscles melt.

And that’s before he pulls my knickers down. He almost yanks them, as though he can’t wait more than a second to get at what he wants. Me, I think, he wants to get at me, though such a slight sentence doesn’t quite cover what he does. It seems too small to contain the way he attacks the buttons on my blouse, so roughly that I hear some of them skittering across the floor. The cold air hits my bare breasts before I’ve had a chance to think: But anyone could walk in.

And by the time I get round to it I don’t really care.

How can I, when his next move is to kiss me there? He puts his mouth on my nakedness, as though he hardly worries about anything of the kind. Hungrily, I think, sloppily, so far past caring that I doubt he could stop if he tried. He just wants to bury his face in my tits, and once there his only thought seems to be to taste every tiny scrap of skin he can reach.

It’s like he’s been starved. Like he’s just stumbled out of a long and arduous famine, and now he gets to feast. He gets to lick and suck and grope with both hands, in a way that probably should feel awful. It should, but, Christ, it doesn’t at all. Just watching him is enough to make me plump and wet between my legs. I see him make an incredibly lewd circle around one stiff nipple, and feel a rush of arousal like nothing I’ve ever known before. It seems to flick at my already swollen clit, and sink deep into the pit of my stomach. For a second I can barely breathe beneath it.

But I battle through.

I have to. If I don’t I’m going to miss the rest – because oh, Lord in heaven, there’s more there’s a million times more. He doesn’t wait for me to catch up with him. Whatever waiting he had in him is done. He just eases two fingers into my slippery cunt, stroking and feeling me out until I realise in a great gush of excitement what he’s doing. He’s preparing me. He’s making me ready for that big fat cock, and he’s doing it so thoroughly I think I might come first like this.

In fact, I suspect that’s his goal. I know that’s his goal, because after a second of those delightfully long and utterly flexible fingers fucking into me, he goes one step further. He finds my clit with his thumb, and works me so slowly and so well I can feel my thighs starting to shudder. I can feel my belly tightening, and I have an urge to bury my face in that threadbare jumper.

But I’m glad I hold off. I’m glad I keep looking at his face, because oh, God, the way he holds my gaze.

And the things he says. ‘Come for me, come for me like a good girl,’ he tells me, and though I try my best to let it last a little longer I have almost no chance at all. He practically forces it out of my body. He does this insane thing where it feels like he’s pincering me, those fingers inside me pulling forward while the meat of his thumb almost pushes down. And the second he does, the very second he does, I almost die. Everything seems to clench all at once, too hard to really be good.

Yet somehow it is good. So good I think I grunt like an animal, and I know I make a mess of his hand. More than that, really. Embarrassingly more than that. I gush all over him, though that doesn’t feel as shameful as it probably should. Partly because nothing that incredible could ever be shameful, but also because I know beyond any doubt that he wanted me to do it.

That’s why he fucked me like that – so I would make a slippery mess. So I would go all trembly and boneless and barely offer any resistance when he eased his cock into my slick cunt. And it’s true, I don’t. I take him so easily I think he goes faster than he was really ready for – but that’s OK. Oh, yeah that’s just awesome, because, holy mother of fuck, the look on his face when he feels me surrounding him.

His mouth actually drops open. I think his pupils dilate – or at least his eyes go wide and blank. He stares at me without really seeing, every inch of his willpower clearly devoted to keeping him there and present and not liable to run. Or does he just need the time to process the sensation? It seems so, because after a moment of rigid shock a sound comes out of him. A sigh, like someone warming themselves by the fire after a long, long time out in the cold.

And then his eyes drift closed.

Ahhhh, yes, the way his eyes drift closed. It reminds me of everything I’ve been able to feel since he first took that cane to my backside, so simple I took it for granted. I found it easy, but I see in this one look how hard it has been for him. I understand in a way I never fully did before, always assuming that he not only couldn’t but didn’t really want to. Not completely, not wholly – maybe not even on the train or in his bed.

But I get it now.

All this time, and he was just longing for this. Everything was theory, nothing was lived. None of it known the way he clearly knows it now, so blissful that his face fills with warm contentment.

But there’s something more than that there. I see it underneath, deep and warm and sweet. I feel it when he raises a shaking hand and touches my cheek. Wonder, I think it is, at the idea that something he feared so deeply could be so easy and feel so good. Because it is, and it does, oh, it does. Even before he moves I want to call out his name. He fills me so completely I can spark sensation through my belly just by tightening around him – and apparently it’s the same for him.

I do it and he jerks as though slapped.

‘Stop, no,’ he says, and oh, it’s the best to hear him do it. It’s the best because he doesn’t mean it in the bad way. He means it in the good way, the I’m-going-to-come way and the second I register that, I just can’t help clenching again. It almost happens on its own, like an involuntary spasm.

And it has the greatest effect. He punches the hay by the side of my head, his gasp so loud and heated it sends me insane. I buck as soon as I hear it, and after that things just snowball. He grabs my arse and takes me hard, pounding relentlessly until I can hardly stand it. I just have to hold on as the pleasure builds up and up and up to some unbearable point, so unaware of anything else that I don’t realise what he’s doing.

Until the very last second, I don’t see how close his face is to mine. I don’t think anything of it, until the thing is almost happening. He’s going to kiss me, I realise, and when I do it hits me harder than all the rest of this. I forget the thick pulses of sensation wavering outwards from my cunt or his cock or whatever is making it happen.

And I focus on his lips. I feel them graze mine, so barely there I could almost believe they weren’t. I could almost believe it, if it wasn’t for what follows that bright and brilliant touch: his orgasm like a barrelling freight train, bearing down until it takes us both alive.

I don’t think anything of it when I wake and he isn’t there. He was quiet on the walk back to the cottage, but he was also quiet when he fucked me up against the wall in the kitchen and then again halfway up the stairs. I still have bruises lining my backside from that last vigorous rutting, as a testament to his eagerness. Not that I really needed them, because he woke me in the night with his face between my thighs. If he was fucked up about it all he probably wouldn’t have licked me with quite so much enthusiasm, considering how sticky and slippery I still was with about ten gallons of his come.

I let it run down my thighs and make a mess of my fur, in part because I was too boneless to do anything else but also because it was a filthy turn-on. It still is a turn-on. I get up and can feel the evidence of his pleasure just about everywhere, and I love it, I love it, I want to masturbate just thinking about it.

But I resist. I go downstairs in search of him, and still don’t feel the slightest concern that he’s not in the kitchen or the garden. He couldn’t possibly have freaked out, I tell myself, and I’m right to. I’m just slightly wrong about some other things. Actually, I’m massively wrong about some other things, and I see by how much when I decide to pull on his old wellies and go and find out where he is.

I wish I hadn’t. If I’d just stayed inside I might never have known, but like a fool I pass the empty barn and keep going. I head in the direction of a great cliff-like outcrop that seems to rise out of nowhere, and discover there’s a huge valley on the other side. Or at least I think it’s a valley. I stand at the top of the outcrop with my back to a sheer drop, and realise that all this green is the grounds of a house.

A great and grand house, so large it still seems so even when seen at a distance. It sprawls on endlessly, covered in turrets and fancy spirals with swirls of green in between. I have no name for its architecture and no words for the way it makes me feel. I just stand there in boots too big for me, my nightie fluttering beneath an old jumper of mine, hair like a ragged streamer in the wind.

And then I know.

I get it.

The cottage – it isn’t his. It must have belonged to the groundsman or the gamekeeper or some other posh servant. Of course it did, I should have known it did, because he would never have carved those keys into a table where his parents could see. How could I have ever imagined otherwise? He wasn’t a fool. He told me he hid it from his father, yet somehow I let it all slide by until suddenly here we are:

Me hardly able to breathe as I take in the real world he came from.

He must be a lord, I think, or a sir, or a marquis or a count. He will have a title, as I thought he did, though if he does it must be under a different name. I searched Harcroft and came up with nothing, so it has to be made up. It has to be, yet still I hope otherwise. I tell myself I might have got the wrong idea, as I make my way down towards the house. I imagine it’s some stately manor museum, filled with a thousand glass cases stuffed with spectacles and pipes and pretty ornaments.

Because if it isn’t then he not only lied.

He did it so the two worlds wouldn’t collide. That was what the phone call was about, I feel sure. The one where he spoke of not exposing something to someone. He didn’t want Lord and Lady God Knows What seeing me, in my jumpers and my wellies – an idea that seems a touch paranoid, a touch silly, just a bit unreal.

Until I remember the clothes. He bought me the clothes too, didn’t he? All those tweeds and pretty shoes and hats, so generous-seeming before but less so when I see him. I reach the grand old entrance, surrounded on all sides by enormous columns, the great doors standing open enough that I can look inside. I can take in the marble floor and the gigantic double staircase, of the sort I’ve only ever seen in period dramas.

And then finally there is someone-who-is-not-really-Cyrian, standing talking to people.

Three important people, and all of them looking just like I did in that fancy suit. Better than I did in that fancy suit, in fact. So much better and so in keeping with him and how he currently seems. They all stand the same way and wear their expensive stuff the same way and when they laugh they look like reflections of each other. It’s amazing, really.

Or hard to take, depending on your point of view.

‘Oh, darling, you must visit more often,’ an incredibly coiffed lady says, and then I just have to walk away. If I don’t I might end up doing or saying something awkward. Something stupid like ‘Well, he would if he didn’t have his clumsy gauche whore to tend to.’ And I know it is stupid, too. I get that this life is not something he takes pleasure in. I understand that he stays in the cottage not because of me but because that is his real home. The real place he grew up, where he did all the things he loved.

But even so I can’t help the sting of it.

He could have said. I could have pretended. Put on those fancy clothes, and kept my mouth closed. I would have even stomached his embarrassment, and as I wait for him to come back I slowly come to understand why. It’s because I am embarrassing. He’s right, I am. He should be ashamed of me really – I can’t even pronounce fancy words correctly, because I’ve only ever read them and never heard them aloud. I don’t know what fork to use at dinner, and can’t discuss the finer points of world economics. I find his massive newspapers dry and dull and last time we ate dinner I did so with a spoon.

And where those thoughts once barely bothered me, I find they do now. I know they do, because when he returns, the smile I attempt won’t stick. My face heats at the idea of what he might really think. It’s a small difficulty, and I can suppress it most of the time. But when he has to be the Lord of the Manor I know it will rise.

It’s there inside, just waiting to tear us apart.

Chapter Thirteen

I do my best not to think about it. Or at least I do my best not to let it show. If it shows he’ll spot it, and the second he does I’ll have to explain. I’ll say that we are from two different worlds, and then he will be practical about it. Too practical about it. I don’t want to hear him be practical about it. I don’t want to hear him say, ‘Well, of course we are’ or ‘What does it matter if you’re embarrassing when I live like a virtual recluse?’

Once he has I can’t pretend he doesn’t care.

And I want to. I would like to, for just a little longer. More than that: I would like to be a different person. A prettier, smarter, more refined person, who knows how to navigate some elegant world without fucking everything up. Who doesn’t have to force herself not to care who’s staring, because no one ever actually is. And if they are, they do it for the very best reasons.

What must it be like to be stared at for the very best reasons? To never worry about holes in your clothes or airs and graces you don’t have? I can’t imagine – but the worst part is, I didn’t want to before. I was strong somehow, defiant in the face of his snooty facade.

Only now it’s not really a facade, is it?

It’s not a game that we can just go on playing for ever.

This is real, this is real life, and real life is almost never what people claim it is in stories. It seems like it might be when you’re a kid, and first read Jane Eyre under cover of darkness. But then you grow up and see it all through a different prism – a glass darkly, only the other way around. I look through and see the fantasy as it would really be, so small and mean in ways I do not want to see.

I would rather never know that he locked away a perfectly sane woman and married Jane because no one else would take him. I make jokes about him being an arsehole, but oh, how much better life would be if that were not true. How much better life would be if the truth did not exist, and we could all just pretend for ever without having to face it at all.

I would do it, I think.

In fact I know I would, because when he finds me looking out over the glorious scenery from that rocky outcrop, I smile. And when he says he was worried, I tell him he had no reason to be. I just went for a long walk, and now we can go back. We can return to his Dickensian home and play at being a perfect couple.

While inside I look out from the attic, and wonder if this is really me.

I wonder it so much that when I start back down to the barn I can feel it trying to fight me. I have to brace my shoulder against it, and the effort hurts. It burns behind my eyes, too intently for me to turn when I realise he isn’t following me. He’s still standing on that bluff overlooking an ocean of green, hands in the pockets of his big fancy coat. Gaze like cold fire, searing strips off my back.

Though still I don’t stop.

It hurts too much to – until he speaks.

And then the pain is so vicious it almost feels like a relief.

‘You should know by now that you can never fool me, Molly. Even if I pretend that you have, or let you go without saying a word, I still see almost everything, and every way that you can possibly be. I know when you stay quiet even though you would like to speak; I know when you are sad, even though you smile.’ Every word makes it worse and worse until finally I’m crying. I’m crying so pathetically I can’t possibly turn now, but, by God, I’m glad I don’t. If I had I might have blurted out something stupid, and never got the rest of this heart-shattering speech.

‘I wish I could tell you that I will one day find it easy to be affectionate. That I will hold you easily and with grace, and answer the same when you are generous enough to tell me you love me. But I simply cannot make that promise. I can give you everything else – I see that now. I see how easy sex can be, because of you. Yet still there will be certain things that elude me. I am sorry for them, but there is nothing I can do.’

I turn without even thinking about it. Suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter if he sees me crying, because the pain I thought I should hide is not the one he’s talking about.

He thinks this is all some other thing – some daft thing I never even thought about.

Is it really about some daft thing I never even thought about?

‘You think…you think I’m sad because you didn’t say you loved me?’ I ask, and after I have I can see that this is indeed the case. His expression shifts from the hard line he thought he was taking to a kind of confusion he obviously isn’t used to experiencing. He thought he had the reason down pat, and now that he hasn’t he doesn’t know what to do.

He just nods and waits.

He waits for me to explain.

So I do.

‘I never expect you to say you love me. Not even for a second, not even for the tiniest moment. Why would I, when I know what loving is to you? You told me. You said that he smacked it out of you, and I don’t think that the healing power of my virtuous heart will suddenly bring it back. I know it doesn’t work that way.’

‘And that hardly bothers you?’

‘It bothers me, but only in so far as it affects you. I want you to be happy, Cyrian – as much as you can be, anyway. So the very last thing I would attempt is some love blackmail or love guilting or whatever you think this is.’

‘Guilting is not a word, Molly.’

‘You know what I mean. Or do you? Maybe you really have no idea at all, if you think I would be sad because you never expressed something you’re incapable of,’ I say, sure that this must settle it before we move on to other things. He might even let me skip the other things if it seems like this is all smoothed over – and for just a second that appears to be the case. He goes very still in that way he has whenever I nail him for something. And his expression is one of obviously dawning comprehension.

Or at least I think so. I think so.

But then he speaks.

‘I am not incapable of it,’ he tells me, in a rush of something that might be fear and could be realisation but is most likely shock. He is shocked, I think, by this new understanding. And I understand why. It rocks me almost to my core when he finishes the idea off. ‘I just want to be. More than anything, I want to be. It hurts to feel – like cranking up a machine that has run to rust and ruin from long disuse. But I would do it for you, my lovely one. By God, I would do anything for you.’

‘Cyrian…’ I say, though it doesn’t sound like his name.

It sounds like the dark glass, as it melts away.

‘No one has ever been more generous to me than you, and it moves me more than I can say. Some days, I wish it were not true. But still, it remains,’ he tells me, and then I just blurt it out. Guilt makes a fool of me, not him.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I was upset, that I thought something stupid. But we can forget it now. It doesn’t matter at all, it wasn’t important.’

‘Of course it must have been. Anything you feel is important to me – do you not understand that by now? I might not be able to deal with emotions properly, but at the very least I can honour yours,’ he says. But I suspect he still doesn’t know what this is going to be about. He seems to tighten all over when I tell him that I saw him at the house.

And all he can reply is:

‘I see.’

After which everything just pours out of me in a great flow.

Quickly, like the ripping of a bandage.

‘And I just thought…I thought that you might have kept all that from me because maybe you’re ashamed. You have this big, secret Lordly life and I’m just so clumsy and silly and common. People like that would never understand me. That woman with the fancy hair would think I was a nightmare. I could never talk to people like that or fit in with that life and though I know – I know – you kind of hate it anyway I just…I had to wonder. I mean, you said that about not exposing them to me –’ I blurt out.

And am so, so glad when he cuts me off.

‘I said I did not wish to expose you to them.’

I had no idea how much it had been playing on my mind, until he just made it so clear. I had it the wrong way around all along, and now I know that I can go to him. I don’t even care about the embarrassment of it. I just cross that last small distance and stand by his side.

‘Oh. Oh. Oh, you meant…’ I say, but he still does not disappoint me.

I’m starting to think he might never do so, in any ways that matter.

‘Yes, I meant I would rather pluck out both my eyes than have to endure those hideous people picking you apart. Though I want to stress, this is not because I feel any shame over the person you are. Quite the contrary: I am ashamed of them. Could you not tell that I am ashamed of them? You must be slipping, Molly.’

I love the way he looks when he says this. He gazes at the glorious scenery, as though the matter is so simple it barely needs his attention.

And he looks way too beautiful – that hair, all wild and tangled, and those eyes now bright with an ever-ready gleam.

‘I’m always slipping around you. I don’t know why you think I’m so clever.’

‘I think you are clever because you see right through me, not because you are always and forever right about everything. Honestly, what fun would it be if you were?’

‘Probably as much fun as if you always understood me.’

‘We are not psychic, you and I. We are simply…’

‘Simply what?’ I ask, and hold my breath.

I don’t know why I do. As soon as he glances down at me I understand what is coming, and after that it’s just a matter of bracing myself for impact.

‘Soulmates,’ he says, as though it was always that simple. We were made for each other, he and I. Not perfectly, but in all the ways that mean the most. I know we are, because when he meets my gaze I see all the things he can never say. It practically sings out of him, so warm and good I feel my eyes overflowing again. I have to swallow seventeen times just to keep the tears down, but even then my voice sounds insane.

It strains over a concept I didn’t even realise was paining me until it comes out.

‘I don’t even know your real name. Cyrian isn’t your real name, is it?’ I ask, but he doesn’t look away. He takes in all of my messy emotion, and he doesn’t look away.

‘The groundsman’s daughter could not pronounce my real and frankly ridiculous one. She turned St John into Cyrian, and so I simply adopted it. To be clear, though, this adoption had nothing to do with you. It is only a representation of the person I wish to be, instead of the one I actually am. And when I met you, when you spoke to me as you did in the library, I could never have given you anything but the sweet dream, instead of the reality,’ he says, and I just have to laugh. Partly because of the utter perfection of his name being St John, but also with a kind of joy I never thought I would feel.

It sings through my soul. It shows in my voice.

‘Cyrian is the reality. I know that now. I could never doubt.’

‘Even though I am hideously and ridiculously wealthy?’

‘Even though. Even though everything.’

‘And if I can never be the man you deserve?’ he asks, but only because he is as blind as ever when it comes to knowing what he’s really worth. Not that that matters now, here, as I take his hand – because from this point on I will always be there to tell him.

‘Oh, my love,’ I tell him. ‘You already are.’

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