Date: 2016-01-21 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Erotica; Romance; Erotic Romance; Contemporary Romance; Anthologies
Description: Eleven stories from bestselling erotica and erotic romance author, Charlotte Stein, exploring all of the filthy fantasies and forbidden loves that her work is renown for.Dangerous liaisons and sexy strangers, naughty encounters and rekindled flames, women who don't want to say no, and the men who love to give them everything they've been craving. All together at last in one unique collection designed to leave you desperate for more.

You Already Know

Twelve Erotic Stories

Charlotte Stein

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF
www.mischiefbooks.com

Copyright © Charlotte Stein

Cover images: Shutterstock

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 collection 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.

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008179281

Version: 2015-12-16

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

You Already Know

Four For The Seesaw

I Have You

Don’t I

Heavenly Shades

I Am

New Dress

Dancing On The Edge

Heat

Thief

Oppositeland

Falling

More from Mischief

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

You Already Know

Charlotte Stein

I tell him not to, I tell him, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He’s as big as a bull, as big as a brick wall, and he just bulldozes right into the store and takes Mickey D around the neck as though he’s nothing, and throws him over the counter.

Of course, everyone knows Mickey D is no good. He shirks his responsibilities, as Mr Kirkpatrick would say – but that doesn’t mean he has to be thrown over the counter. It doesn’t make it right and fair that this bull has him crying and bleeding on the floor of Mr Kirkpatrick’s store, for something he owes or something he has or has not done.

Even I know that. I’m pathetic, and I’m weak, and I don’t know anything about drugs or whatever this guy is into, but I understand that much.

‘Stop,’ I tell the bull, and he turns and looks at me with his mad, blazing eyes.

Only they’re not mad and blazing at all. He looks wounded, I think, like someone stuck him in his side. The matador waved his cape and he charged, and now there’s a lance through his body. Soon he’s going to bleed out on the floor of this little grocery store, and no one will care because he’s the guy who threw Mickey D over the counter.

He’s the guy who works for some drug lord or thief or pimp, and nobody cares about guys like that.

Least of all me. I just stare at him and stare at him, until he steps back from the counter. Mickey D is crying somewhere behind it, snottily, but the bull pays no attention. He just looks at me until I notice other weird little details about him.

His eyes are the colour of melted chocolate. He has a tattoo on his arm – a big Star of David. The grain on his shaved head is the colour of a million little iron filings, so rich and real I can almost imagine them sifting through my fingers.

Even though there’s nothing to sift.

And then he backs off, and walks right out the door.

* * *

Next time I see him, he’s not beating the shit out of anybody. But the stench of a million battles hangs all over him, like a soldier returning from a war he didn’t want to fight. He’s leaning against the truck he drives around in, shoulders too tense for someone who’s meant to be looking casual, cigarette dangling from one hand, unsmoked.

He flicks it away when he sees me coming down to open up. It’s 6 a.m.; the light is the same colour as that grain on his head. On his face now, too, because he hasn’t shaved and there are deep shadows around his too-curved jaw.

There’s something in his face, I think. A roundedness all over that cuts against the sharp masculinity he wears everywhere else. It’s in his eyes, too – those eyes that aren’t like chocolate at all. They’re deep and fathomless and when he calls out, ‘Hold on there a second,’ they tell me a thousand things he doesn’t want to say.

I’m just not sure what all of them are.

‘Hold on there,’ he says, and I think about Mickey D flying through the air. I think about him panting, full of rage or aggression or something else altogether, and I want to run. I want to tell him, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ just like I did in the store.

But I don’t.

‘Your friend,’ he says, then pauses as though he’s waiting for me to recall who he’s talking about. He licks his bottom lip, and I notice it’s very fat and full, and also chapped. ‘He did some bad shit, got it?’

I don’t know what to think. It’s like an explanation, only not. It’s like an explanation he needs to punch into my gut, though I’m surprised as anyone to find I’m still standing when he’s done. I go one worse than that, in fact.

I blurt out: ‘Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?’

And I don’t even know how or why. It just comes out of me, as jagged as I thought he was, and when I’m done he stares at me like I’ve gone mad. Maybe I have. He could punch me for real right now and I’d go down so hard, so hard. Hell, he wouldn’t even have to punch me. He could just swipe me with the back of his hand and I’d be bloody and sore tomorrow.

But he does none of those things. Instead he runs a hand over the bristle on his head, and when he does I see his knuckles are as raw as fuck. They’re not just bloody – they’re split and scraped and there’s a glimmer of something shiny in amongst everything, as though somehow he’s gone right down to the bone without gushing everywhere.

He doesn’t even seem to notice, however. He just seems … tired.

‘What do you want from me?’ he asks, only it comes out all run together in that gravelly voice of his. It’s like he’s entirely made up of building materials: rocks and iron filings and the stuff you line driveways with.

‘I want you to come inside,’ I say. ‘So I can take care of that hand.’

* * *

I don’t know why I say it. I suppose it’s because I can’t get it out of my head, once I’ve seen it. It looks disgusting, and it’s even worse under the queasy fluorescent lights of the store’s bathroom.

‘What did you do? Punch out a wall?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer.

He does something better than answering. He cocks one eyebrow at me, and the corner of his mouth turns up – almost like he’s smiling, really. Yeah, almost.

‘You know, if you look like a thug and act like a thug, people are going to think you’re a thug,’ I tell him, but again he doesn’t say anything. He just lets me run his knuckles under some warm water, a hiss or two coming out of him every once in a while. I watch the little sink turn red, then white again, and then finally there’s nothing but a series of tiny pink mouths along the heavy bumps of his knuckles.

And me holding his hand, as though it’s something separate from him.

‘Stay there while I get something to put on it,’ I tell him but really it’s only so I can go out into the store and catch my breath. Stop the shakes I’ve fallen into, somewhere in between touching his hand and right now.

However, when I go back in there I’m still doing it. And I think he notices, too, because his eyes go all over me in little stuttering fits and starts, and as I paint Bactine over his knuckles he asks if I think he’s going to hurt me.

‘No,’ I say, but I don’t know if I’m telling the truth.

‘I’m a thug though, right?’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s all I’m good for.’

I put strips of white over the little mouths, to hold them closed – neatly, I think. Fussily.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say and he replies:

‘’S that why you’re being good to me?’

Though I hadn’t really thought it was the case. His knuckles just looked rough, that’s all, and I wanted to see to them. It was me – the urge to make them all right again, to do what he hadn’t, to do what he probably never does.

And then he says: ‘Maybe you just want me to be good in return, huh?’ in this new kind of voice – this curling, deep-down sort of voice – and I can’t respond. I know what he means, of course I do, but I can’t tell him to back off or get out or any of the things I know I should go with.

They won’t come to me, no matter how hard I pull.

‘You want me to be good to you, baby?’ he asks, and maybe it’s that word. The one on the end, the one that isn’t my name. Or maybe it’s the way he puts a hand on me – so much gentler than everything else about him would suggest.

He just rests it on my hip, as though he could take it off any second. All I have to do is say the word and he’ll go away, he’ll never have existed, he didn’t come into the store the other day and throw Mickey D over the counter.

Only I know he did and I can feel that hand, those long thick fingers, stroking the material of my little grocery-store uniform into fine little wrinkles. He doesn’t bunch, or tug, or rip. It’s just those little wrinkles like he’s ruffling feathers.

‘I’ll be so good to you,’ he says, and I believe him, I do. I don’t know where it comes from or why it’s in me now, but I believe him enough to let him lean down slowly, and press his mouth to mine.

He’s soft on the upper lip and rough on the lower, just like I’d thought. But there are other things I don’t expect, like the strange half-smoke, half-cinnamon taste of him, as though he chews Big Red between each cigarette.

And his hands go up instead of down, circling over my back until I’m boneless and wondering what it’s like to be the kind of girl who fucks someone in a grocery-store bathroom. Is that the kind of girl he usually has? Up against some tiled wall somewhere, clothes barely off? Mouths hard and clashing, almost too rough to stand it?

Only then he says: ‘You live upstairs, right?’

And I don’t tell him no. Apparently I’m the kind of girl who takes strange, bullish guys up to her apartment when she’s supposed to be opening up her place of work, and when this guy says lie down on the bed and spread your legs, she does it.

I do it.

I spread my legs over my flower print coverlet, and he just comes right on over and slides his hands up my thighs. Underneath my dress, underneath all of my clothes with everything about him strange and too big in my neat little bedroom, one of his massive knees making my mattress dip and his face set to that almost-smile he sent me before.

His eyes glitter in the half-light and I can’t speak, I can’t breathe, he’s moving too slow and I thought this would be fast. Like someone ripping a Band-Aid off, quick and painless. You don’t even have to look.

But I do have to look, because he’s right there and now his hands are at my panties. They twist the elastic into spirals, and tug so slow it’s almost maddening.

‘This what you want?’ he asks, but his flickering smile says he already knows. My breath is coming in weird little hitches, and once he gets my panties around my knees – almost off, but not quite – the scent of my arousal hits the air.

Of course it does. I’m as wet as a river. He hasn’t even done anything and I’m so slick it’s embarrassing, my body like a wire strung too taut – but worse than this is the fact that he can tell it. Before he puts a single finger between my legs he can tell, and I think the idea makes him hard.

I can certainly see something, pressing against the rough material of his pants. And when he shifts on the bed the view gets better, until I’m sure I can make out the exact solid curve of his stiff cock.

Is it weird if the sight makes me wetter? I suppose the weird thing is how wet I was before anything really sexual happened, but I can’t think about that now. I don’t want to think about anything but his hands on the insides of my thighs, and then, after a moment, his body between my spread legs.

‘Wider,’ he says, and I obey. There’s nothing else for it, really. I might as well just do whatever it is he wants, and then I can simply slide back into the way my life was before, as though nothing ever happened. Service was not interrupted.

I did not let him put his face between my legs, I swear to God.

Only I did, and I know I did because when it happens I’m so shocked I put a hand over my eyes. I make a little noise, thinking of all the things I expected him to do. Get his cock out and fuck it into me bareback, ride me hard then leave me wet and wanting on the bed. Maybe something dirtier – something I can’t even think of and don’t really want to – and then him laughing afterward.

But instead he cups my thighs with those big rough hands, and dips right down as graceful as a cat. Like maybe he’s going to bite me somewhere, but decides to kiss at the very last second. Right when I’m on edge and I’m staring into the blackness behind my hand, sure it’s going to be one thing then getting another.

Of course I think of skinny Brad and the boy I had before him – the one who bought me flowers and seemed like a real swell guy. I think about the way they pressed their mouths to mine, all teeth and sloppy wetness, nothing smooth or sweet or calm.

And then I think of this bull between my legs, with the iron filings coating his scalp – the ones I can feel burring beneath my fingertips when I dare to just reach down and touch him – and his hands like shovels. The brutish swell of a million muscles working beneath every item of clothing he wears.

The Star of David blazing on his massive bicep.

And I forget about flowers and skinny Brad and everything I’ve ever believed in. His mouth is like silk. He doesn’t lick: he strokes me with his tongue. He doesn’t suck: he draws me into him.

He makes a million romance clichés between my thighs, and when I arch my back he does them all over again, in spirals.

Feels like he does it for hours, though realistically I suppose it’s only been a few minutes. All of this teasing, all of him pressing down on my thighs until I’m good and open for him, all of this flickering over the very tip of my clit … it’s just a little bit of time, really.

So why am I bunching the sheets up into my fists?

I try to tell myself not to. He’ll know it so bad, if I react the way I want to. He’ll get that I’m so close to coming – so close it feels like agony – and then he’ll smile his little half-smile and I’ll be trapped for ever.

I fight it. I keep my mouth pressed tight closed and when he sinks a finger into me like he’s just testing the waters, I bite down hard on my lower lip. Not enough to make it bleed but close, and oh, it feels good to get that bit of pain.

It’s what I need to keep me above the pleasure swelling through my clit. He’s barely doing anything at all to it, really – every circle he makes around that little bead feels as though he’s studiously avoiding it – but somehow that’s worse.

It’s building and building, and it’s going to be terrible when it finally comes. And I think he knows it, too, because the more I struggle against it the tighter he winds things, using two fingers instead of one, pumping harder and faster in response to the sounds I make, his free hand almost like a restraint on my thigh.

Though I’m sure I could get away if I wanted to. Positive. Any second now I’m going to get up, and walk right out the door. Go downstairs to the store and continue my life as it was. Any second now.

And then he swipes one long stroke right over the tip of my clit and, oh God, I come, and come, and come.

* * *

Next time he comes by, Mickey D cowers. Mr Kirkpatrick says: ‘You’d better get out of here, you!’

But I don’t do any of these things. I just stand there with the broom still in my hand, and think about him kissing between my legs the way most men have never even kissed my mouth. I think of the spiral patterns on my ceiling, and how for the first time in my life I didn’t notice them during sex.

Though I guess technically he didn’t have sex with me. It was just a kind of sex – maybe just foreplay, when I really think about it – and then he had simply stood and walked back out of my bedroom.

Though I lie when I say that. He hadn’t simply stood and walked out. He had looked at me as he backed towards the door, this expression on his face like … I don’t know.

Like maybe I surprised him, and the surprise amused him greatly.

Which I suppose I should be mad about. I mean, I’m not something to be amused over, you know? I’m a decent person and I do the right thing when called on and I’m not a sex maniac, or anything.

So why am I looking at his big, rough face while thinking, Do it again?

This time, he takes my dress off. I don’t say he can, and I don’t ask him to. He just turns me until I’m bent over the bed, and unbuttons everything back there. Undoes my apron and lets it drop to one side. Spreads everything once he’s done so I’m only clothed over the front of my body, but bare at the back.

It’s a weird feeling. Like being separated from myself – I’m separated from myself and then he rumbles that he’s going to do the same thing he did the day before. ‘You OK with that, you OK?’ he asks, but I can’t answer.

I think I’m shaking. I think there are tears running down my face but it’s fine – he can’t see me. He doesn’t need to know what I’m doing as he sinks to his knees and licks and licks over my swollen sex.

Though I’m pretty sure he can tell when I come within a minute, and sob too loudly for anything inside me to take, and then, oh, then he runs a gentling hand down over the curve of my back.

It’s too much. Be rough, I think at him, but he isn’t like skinny Brad. He’s not like the swell guy with the flowers. He says, ‘Easy baby,’ and then he asks me. He asks me:

‘You OK with me taking you, now?’

And I can’t say anything to that. If I open my mouth I might beg.

But he gets to me before I have to endure a thing like that. He turns me back over and spreads me across the bed, most of his own clothes still on. Most of mine gone. And though I don’t want it to happen with my face wet and all of me mixed up like this his mouth finds mine.

His big arm goes around me.

I’m not even sure when he starts fucking me – though the word fucking is stretching it a bit. It’s stretching it a lot, in fact, because he rocks me slow and easy and there’s something unbearable about that. So much so that a hot rush of anger goes through me, unaccountably, and the urge to bite him or dig my nails into his back swells up.

The urge to tell him, ‘Do it hard’ comes up with it, but it’s difficult to say words like those with a soft mouth on yours, and everything like a long, smooth roll into bliss, and his big arms around me – God, his arms right around me.

It’s like he’s holding me as I go down.

And, even better than that, I can feel him moaning. I can feel him doing it all the way through my body, because his mouth doesn’t veer from mine and his voice is like the distant rumble of thunder.

Mine sounds faint, by comparison. Faint, but I hope he can hear and feel it anyway. I hope he knows I’m clinging to him, instead of digging my nails in. I hope he knows how good this is – how each stroke of his thick cock strikes me just right, pushes me a little bit further into bliss.

But then he pulls away just long enough to gasp, ‘You gonna come, baby?’ So, in all honesty, I think he knows. He can probably feel it, bubbling up through me. He should definitely be able to feel my pussy clenching around his ever-working cock, and, even if he can’t, the words I get out do the rest of the job.

‘Oh God, oh God, I’m coming,’ I gasp.

But I only say God because it occurs to me in that moment of bliss – I don’t even know his name.

* * *

It’s early morning, and that sweet bluish light is just starting to creep under the drapes. I watch it make its way over all the ordinary things in my apartment, and then finally it gets to him and paints the solid curves of his gorgeous arms. It slants shadows over the side of his face, the heavy slab of his cheekbone, the delicious curve of his perfect mouth.

I don’t know when he started sleeping over. Probably some time after I dared open my mouth to ask him what his name was, right in the middle of a hot and sweaty fuck session. He had grinned, at that – not offended the way I expected – then said: ‘It’s Tyler, Bethany.’

Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I’d told him things had to end, then. I should have let things go the moment I realised he already knew my name, but I think it was too late even then. It was too late when he stared at me with those wounded eyes. It was too late when he leant against his truck, cigarette in hand.

It’s too late before it’s begun, with Tyler.

He stirs and turns over and my heart stirs with him. I’m lost, God, I’m lost.

‘You OK, kid?’ he asks, before he’s even opened his eyes. Maybe he can tell I’ve got my back pressed too tight to the headboard. Maybe he can tell I’ve been gazing and gazing at him like some lovesick puppy.

Lord, when did this happen? When?

‘Man, it’s early,’ he tells me – just for something to say, I guess. But then he follows it with this, right out of the blue: ‘Love you, kid.’

And that isn’t just something to say. I don’t know where he gets these things from, I really don’t. I don’t know how he’s this person inside – it’s impossible, it’s awful, I can’t look at him.

‘You love me, right?’

He sounds so sure, and I’m glad. Mainly because I can’t speak and even if I managed to I’m sure I’d do something dumb when I did. Blubber, probably. Laugh it off, this thing we’ve got – this thing born out of fists and brutality and bitter lives made up of nothing.

It’s good that he keeps talking, really – right past everything I can’t say.

‘How come you never answer?’ he wants to know. ‘I ask you a question, you never answer. Afraid the answer’s yes, huh? Don’t wanna get caught out saying yes to the likes of me.’

He’s smiling, though, when I look at him. The teasing smile that tells me I don’t have to really say – and then I realise. It floods through me, the understanding of how he is different to every other man I’ve been with.

‘I never have to answer with you,’ I say, and I think of those big arms of his holding me as I fall down, down, into this sea of strange love. ‘You already know.’

Four For The Seesaw

Charlotte Stein

‘Go on, Tia,’ he says, and I want to say no. But he’s rubbing and teasing my nipples – which are tight and swollen anyway – and it’s real muggy and close in here, and I don’t know. Why would I want to say no, again?

He knows that I like what he’s doing. He sticks out his tongue and wets the material of my T-shirt, pushing that slickness down and down through the material until it’s all over my stiff nipple. And then he licks and sucks the tip until I’m squirming on the airbed, glancing across at the sleeping forms of Sean and Kay.

They’re going to wake up. It’s obvious they’re going to. I’m not a quiet fucker and we’re only in this tiny little tent.

I spread my legs open for him anyway. He gives me this cheeky grin when I do, before getting his hand right down there to rub and worry my clit. I’m already really wet, so his fingers just slide around in all my juice, easing down to my grasping hole before coming back up to rub me some more.

Any second I’m going to come. I’m going to come in a tent with our friends right there next to us, and I’ll be really loud and probably say dirty stuff like fuck my cunt.

When he slides down, down into the tight heat of our shared sleeping bag – that smirky smile still on his cheeky lips – I hiss at him no. No, God no. I fight against him in the strict confines of the sleeping bag, but he’s between my legs before I know it. He just tugs my knickers aside and runs his tongue along the length of my slit, all over the plump outer lips, and then worms inside to find my stiff bud.

I know why he’s doing this. I do. It’s all because I confessed that I think Sean’s a real cutie, and he confessed that he thinks Kay’s a babe, and everything is now going downhill from there. At the top of the hill are normal people, who get jealous when their other halves talk about how hot someone else is. At the bottom there’s us, trying to get off with our objects of desire right next to us.

I bite my lip hard and glance across at them. Both of them are still sleeping, but that doesn’t help me all that much. They’re so pretty to look at and this is such a filthy thing, that it only gets me closer to coming. Sean’s got this sexy mouth, real soft and sensual with lips that hardly seem to have any outline. And his eyelashes are like a girl’s, fanning out soft and charcoal black against his milky skin.

Ryan thinks he’s too feminine, but that’s not true. He’s got a real masculine air about him, what with the strong jaw and his jutting chin. His blue eyes go right through you, and it almost makes me wish they were open, now.

Almost.

And, oh God, Kay’s lovely, too. I can see what Ryan likes about her. That great big thick swatch of red hair, that cupid’s bow mouth. I bet a mouth like that looks amazing sliding down Sean’s cock, while he arches up on the bed for her. I bet he arches. I bet they look so good together, what with her being so small and slight and him so big.

And then Ryan catches the underside of my clit with just a flick of his tongue, and I forget whatever it was I’d been thinking. The trembles my body is going through spiral suddenly out of control, and a tense, tight orgasm grabs holds of me – one that makes me jerk and groan and cream all over his face, picturing Sean’s mouth pressing against Kay’s sex. His tongue in her pussy, circling her clit.

God, that’s good.

It’s so good that I don’t stop Ryan when he climbs back over me, and notches the head of his cock against my slippery hole.

‘My turn now,’ he says as he shoves in, and I notice that he can’t stop his eyes straying over to Sean and Kay, either. Ah, the grass is always greener. Though I suspect the grass is meant to stay green and over there. Not right in our faces as we fuck an inch away from it.

‘I love you,’ I tell him, as he drives into me. ‘I love you.’

But I’m staring at Sean’s sleeping face as I say it.

We’re being far too loud, and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when Sean opens his eyes. Though I am just the same, and even more so because I’m looking right at him when he does it. He seems startled to see me so close and intent on him, but then that’s how he is. A little nervous, a little uptight.

I’m sure he’s going to get tighter still when he realises what we’re doing.

I don’t shy away, and so I see him studying me close up. His eyes inch over the rutting shapes we make slowly, in sections: first flicking to the place where our joined hips will be, beneath the sleeping bag. Then to Ryan’s hand over mine, on the pillow. Then back to my face, still turned towards his.

I’ve always loved the way Sean shows interest in things. By careful, studious increments, as though his eyes are better able to explore something than his hands. There’s an aloofness about him, too, as though even something as base as sex is a thing you can detach yourself from and examine.

He isn’t like Ryan at all. Ryan is quick witted and open, he’s bold. Sean hangs back, assessing, first. His assessing makes me flutter the muscles of my pussy around Ryan’s cock, and he grunts when I do.

I want to ask Sean, Do you ever grunt? But just the idea of asking him something like that makes me twist beneath my thrusting boyfriend, clit sparking, nipples tense, the tight coils of another orgasm winding up low down deep in my belly.

I close my eyes tight against it, but when I open them again Sean is still watching with those strange curious eyes.

‘Kiss him,’ Ryan says, and I almost jump at the rude intrusion of his voice into something that had momentarily seemed so private. As though he’s just a machine, over me, servicing me, while I gaze at something pretty.

But Sean just gives him an incredulous look. I think he believes Ryan is kind of a jerk. But then so am I, because I’m doing this too. Right? And if he wants to think that, well he can go ahead, and have something for his trouble, too –

I lean forward as quick as anything, and plant one on him.

His eyes stay open when I do it, but he doesn’t try to push me away. He just lets me press my lips to his, and, when he stays that passive while I slide my tongue into his mouth, I moan. Thick pleasure gushes through me and I come just like that, Ryan’s cock working in me and my wet mouth on Sean’s, Ryan groaning like a loon as he follows me.

I make my sounds right into Sean. I come in his mouth, so to speak.

He doesn’t seem to mind all that much. I think I make rather a nice specimen for him to examine and assess. I’m an interesting experiment, one that leaves a pleasing flush on his cheeks.

And when he asks me: ‘Was that good, Tia?’ I almost come all over again.

* * *

I suspect Kay knows. She’s not exactly angry with me for coming in her boyfriend’s mouth, but she keeps looking at me sly. As we’re hiking through the woods, as we’re looking out over the lake and taking pictures, as we’re buying tourist crap from Ye Olde Gift Shop.

When Sean stands next to me and gives his opinion on the snow globe I’m thinking of buying, she looks at me even slyer. He puts his hand on my shoulder. She puts her hand on Ryan’s arm.

It’s all very car keys in the big bowl.

I look up at Sean, but his face is as unreadable as always. He could be thinking about fly faeces, for all I know. That’s what Ryan whispers in my ear as we leave the shop – that all day and all night Sean’s head is filled with thoughts of bugs and the things that bugs do and giant bug orgies. I can’t argue with him, because Ryan sat in on Sean’s seminar on the secret lives of bees or whatever, and I didn’t.

But what I can’t tell is this: is my wicked tongue-forever-in-his-cheek boyfriend trying to make me want Sean more, or less? He knows I love all that Professor Kinsey stuff, all that rigorous scientist researching bedroom habits nonsense. After he came back from the lecture I had said to him: Tell me. Tell me all about it. Tell me what Sean said and how he said it.

And then he told me, on the bed and on the floor and in the shower.

‘Knock it off,’ I snap at him, and give him a shove.

But he won’t knock it off. When we’re all in the lake together, mostly just in our underwear and sliding around each other beneath the veil of the water, he pulls me close and kisses me, and kisses me. Our legs tangle together and I can feel he’s stiff as anything, right up against my belly and begging for attention.

And then he murmurs in my ear: I bet he’s hard too, just thinking about your face when you come.

Mostly all I can hear and feel is the water lapping up against me, cold against the places the sun is trying to warm, and then the hot brand of Ry’s erection, and then the hot push of his breath against my ear and my throat. I glance across at Kay and Sean as they splash near the shore, and he keeps right on whispering.

‘I imagine fucking her,’ he tells me. ‘While thinking about you.’

He’s always so honest, so honest that I can hardly stand it. I free his hard-on from his shorts even as they get closer, fondling the swollen shaft just a little, just enough to get him to hide his face in my shoulder. And then I wrap my legs around his waist and slide my own underwear aside, so that I can ease down on him while I watch them frolic.

Kay, in her little red boy shorts and Sean all lean and strong. We hide it well, I think, but when he looks our way I know he knows. He knows well before Ryan grabs the side of my face and presses his mouth hard into the curve of my throat, his cock ploughing a possessive furrow through my ever-molten pussy.

Though I’m not sure how possessive it really is, all of this crazy, frantic sex. It seems so much more like we’ve all crossed our arms over each other’s, and no one knows who’s hand they’re really holding any more.

* * *

It’s like a puzzle game. A sort of jigsaw. Tonight Kay is sleeping on the inside and Sean is at the tent wall, as though she’s trying to protect him from something. And yet another piece has shifted into a different position too, so maybe she’s not so protective after all. She just wants to lie next to Ryan, while I lie like a bookend to Sean – against my tent wall, too.

I suppose I should feel shut out and bereft, but I don’t. I want to go to sleep as quickly as possible, so that he can secretly kiss her in the night. Then we’ll be even; then the puzzle will be complete. One of each, car keys in the bowl.

Though I know that I don’t want to stop at one of each.

I glance across at Ryan’s face, beside me on the pillow. He looks boyish when he’s asleep, and in the dim golden glow of the battery-powered lamp we’ve kept on, even more so. Innocent, I guess you could say – though he’s anything but. He’s my cheeky imp, my sweetest thing, my giver of many gifts. Some of them sexual, some of them not.

I touch his face and he makes a little snuffling noise – a silly noise, that tells me he’s only half-asleep. Then he sneaks his hand up from inside the sleeping bag, and clasps his fingers around mine. Just right there against his cheek.

I’m almost afraid to go to sleep, in case I wake up to him making love to another woman. But then again, what if I stay awake and he doesn’t? What if later on down the line we hate each other for never letting us be the people we didn’t know we wanted to be? Tia with a scientist, Ryan with an actress.

You’ve got to swap and change and explore and find out about your body with another completely different sort of body, while you still can. I remember saying to him: What sort of person would I be if I had never met you?

Better, he had said. But I don’t think that’s true.

I go to sleep, with my hand still in his.

* * *

I wake up to sighs, and moans. Soft and faint, as though knowing they have to hide. Automatically I think of Ryan and Kay going at it, and for a moment I’m afraid to open my eyes. Even though I maybe possibly wanted this, I’m afraid, I’m afraid. All those conventional feelings that he’d probably mock well up in me: what if he likes her better, what if I don’t want him to like her better, what if I don’t really want Sean at all so it’s not OK for him to like Kay?

But when I open them, Ryan has his head in the pillow. Utterly asleep and oblivious.

It’s Kay and Sean who have the reins of whatever sleigh ride we’re on. Or rather, Kay does. She’s the one calling the shots, and her shots are these:

‘They did,’ she’s whispering. ‘Why can’t we?’

And then she gives out a faint little moan, because I guess whatever she’s doing to herself feels nice. It’s certainly not anything that Sean’s doing to her, because he looks tense and tight and is lying ever so slightly off to one side, and when he speaks it’s in a straining sort of voice.

‘Because we’re not like them,’ he says, and I wonder what he means. Not like the sort of person who screws in a lake, or while lying next to other people? Because I wasn’t either, before I met Ryan. And I suspect Kay isn’t much either, while she’s with Sean.

Though I gather she’d kind of like to be.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Just shove it in me.’

Yeah. I kind of think she might.

‘I know you’re hard.’

‘That’s irrelevant,’ he says, but then she reaches down to the place where said hardness will be, and he flinches as though struck.

‘No-oo-oo,’ he whines, and then in a sterner sort of voice: ‘I can’t in front of other people.’

Though I really don’t think that matters so much, when she’s already got her eyes closed and is definitely playing with herself. She doesn’t say it, but the meaning’s clear: if you won’t, I will.

It’s just as she gets her hand underneath the clingy vest she’s wearing to play with one of her spiky little nipples as she squirms and sighs, that he looks away exasperated and catches me looking back. Only then does his face flush. Though I don’t think he’s embarrassed because his girlfriend is masturbating while I watch. I don’t think he’s embarrassed that he’s probably got an erection, either.

I actually think it might be because he’s the one hanging back. He’s the one with a lack of daring. His girlfriend is willing to get herself off in front of other people, and I’m the girl who fucked her boyfriend and kissed his pretty mouth while I did it.

Sean, on the other hand, is capable of nothing. Just a boring scientist set in his boring conventional ways.

He glances down at Kay, her eyes scrunched tight shut and her mouth a cute round O as her fingers work on whatever they were working on, and then his eyes seem to darken. He doesn’t look cross exactly, but he doesn’t look pleased either, and, though it’s a surprise to Kay to find him suddenly on top of her, it doesn’t surprise me.

He kisses her hard and she squeals into his mouth – I guess he’s not usually the sort to be rough. Usually I bet he’s restrained, tender, not quite letting himself go. But he certainly seems to be letting something go now.

He yanks her hands out from inside the sleeping bag and pins them above her head, and a strange sort of echo floods over me. I remember the first time Ryan and I screwed – when we’d fallen asleep together one too many times, and I couldn’t help looking at his face while I touched myself. He had woken up just as I got too excited to hold back, and then he’d taken me in much the same fashion as Sean is about to take Kay: on my back, hands suddenly and startlingly pinned above my head.

His voice in my ear: Yeah, I think I’ll just finish you off.

There’s something about the scene before me that’s the reverse of that, however. It’s Kay who pants at him to do it, do it, yes, fuck me. Sean seems aggressive with her, but resistant somehow at the same time. His expression only relaxes when he’s clearly between her legs and feeling her spread for him – her soft pouting cunt probably slippery with arousal, just aching for the thick push of his cock.

It isn’t hard to imagine at all. I’m aching for it too, and it only gets worse when he starts rocking over her and she starts wailing – and, dear God, does she ever. She cries and pants and moans and claws at him while he keeps up this steady solid rhythm – almost as though he’s insensible to her reaction. The only clue that he’s enjoying himself is the spreading flush on his cheeks and the way he’s biting at his lower lip, but somehow that just makes him more alluring.

I wonder what it would take to crack through that façade. Certainly not all the groaning and squealing that Kay’s doing. She looks a picture: cheeks hot pink, eyes closed, lips gleaming and open. And the words she babbles – yes, right there oh yes, baby, you’re doing it, oh fuck my little pussy – are arousing even to me. But I guess that’s not enough for the man of science.

She comes long before he does. I know she does, because she pants kiss me now, now, and I take my eyes off Sean long enough to realise that Ryan is awake, and she’s talking to him. She must have known what I did with her boyfriend, and now she wants some of the same – she wants Ryan to kiss her as she comes.

Which he does. And not to my consternation, but certainly to Sean’s.

He moves back a little to let it happen – not that he has much of a choice – but I can see the dazed hurt clear on his face. He swipes a hank of hair off his forehead and pulls completely away from her when she doesn’t end the kiss with her orgasm, and then he just sits back on his heels, sleeping bag swaddled around all the parts I want to see, watching his girlfriend make out with my boyfriend.

He doesn’t see it as a free pass, the way I do. He just looks hurt and confused.

Or, at least, he does until he turns his gaze back to me.

I pull away from Ryan and sit up, gazing right back at Sean with steady eyes. Even in the low light I can see there’s a faint gleam of sweat on his upper lip and at his temples, and that he’s trembling just a little. With tension, I think – the tension of whatever it is we’re doing, and the tension of not getting that orgasm he clearly needs.

I know he hasn’t come without seeing a lick of evidence. It’s obvious. And yet he still goes rigid when I clamber over my boyfriend’s body to get at him.

For a second I’m sure he’s not going to take whatever I’m about to offer. Or at least I think so before he lays that assessing look on me, as I crawl across the tent towards him. The light in his eyes flickers and dances, and he leans down, breathless, when I move up to kiss him.

I don’t let our lips touch, however. I ghost them over his until he’s clearly caving and then I back away, just a little. Ryan used to do the same to me, all the time – just be such a fucking tease until I ran river-wet and greedy for him.

And it has the desired effect on Sean. He doesn’t make a peep when I curl my fingers under the hem of his sweatshirt, and tug it upwards. He just lifts his arms and lets me pull it off, as though it’s a relief to be free of the thing.

Which I guess it must be, with the heat in here reaching apocalyptic proportions, and his cock pointing up the way it is doing. It stands stiff and straight and still glistening with Kay’s juices, resentfully red and swollen at the tip. A bead of pre-come wells in the slit, begging for me to lick it up.

In fact, his whole posture begs for me to lick it, in truth. He seems to be holding his breath, and his lips are parted as though suggesting what he wants me to do.

And thankfully for him, I’m not one to say no. In fact, in this case I don’t even have to say anything at all. I just part my lips and poke my tongue out, then wait to see if he can be as weak as most people are when they’re hot and aching and about ready to pop.

Ryan bet me he would be. Turns out he was right.

Sean bumps his hips forward just a little bit – barely enough to be noticeable, but noticeable enough when you’re burning for it. And I reward him with a swipe of my tongue all the way around the head of his cock, following that neat and very pronounced little ridge from start to finish.

He appreciates my wet tongue enough to grasp for more of it, when I back away. His hips rock forward just a tiny bit, and then he’s in my mouth – not quite fucking it but clearly wanting to.

It doesn’t take long to get him to give in, however. I just tease him a little, barely sucking and only letting him feel the flicker of my tongue occasionally. Never giving him more than I have to, until he’s shaking and clenching his fists at his sides.

But even better comes when I palm his tight, swollen balls and he can’t seem to stop himself lurching forward. Cock suddenly shoved deep in my mouth. Something like a gag welling up inside me.

I have to lay my hands on his taut and trembling thighs to calm him, but it seems like he doesn’t want to be calmed now. He’s definitely making little gasping sounds and his cock is leaking steadily. Every time I swirl my tongue around the swollen tip I can taste the tang of his pre-come.

But he still doesn’t go over. He doesn’t go over when I get my hand around the base of his shaft and rub in time with my working mouth, or when I suck hard while wriggling my tongue against that sensitive spot on the underside, the one that always makes Ryan shoot.

Though the sounds he’s making definitely get louder. Little desperate groans and sighs that get shakier and shakier – oh, I could live for those sounds. Ryan’s got a delicious potty mouth but Sean, God. I’ve never heard anyone seem so desperate to come, or seen someone so urgent and shaky with it.

It makes my clit swell and my pussy cream. Something which becomes clearer when someone runs a hand over my ass, before pulling the strip of my knickers to one side in order to get a finger in my pussy.

I don’t even look back to see who’s doing it. I’m just grateful that they are, and more so when they add a second finger alongside the first.

Feels amazing. Feels like something huge against my tender swollen flesh, exciting beyond belief in a way I can’t describe. For a brief delirious moment I think of those words I said to Ryan, of what I would have been if I’d never met him, and then I think of nothing else as I recognise his big hands on my hips.

He doesn’t ask or say a word. He just drags my knickers down my thighs until they make a chain around my knees, and then while I’ve got another man’s cock in my mouth he pushes his own into my cunt.

I groan loudly around Sean’s flesh, and he answers me in kind. In fact, we all echo each other, one after the other, like some sort of unholy round of verse singing. Even Kay joins in, as she watches with big fascinated eyes.

After all, I’m sure she won’t be only watching by the end of the night. She’ll have my boyfriend panting over her, his cock slick and sliding in and out of her the way it’s doing inside me, right now.

Though it won’t be the last time for her, even if it’s definitely going to be for me. I know it. I can feel it, over and around this thing we’re doing.

This is the last time he’s going to hook his hands into the curves of my hips, and tug me back on his eager prick; the last time he’s going to put one big hand on my back to steady me; the last time I’m going to hear him tell me harder. Fuck back on me harder.

Because I don’t obey him. I’m not greedy for his cock – I’m greedy for Sean’s. I’m impatient for Sean’s orgasm, sucking and licking and pawing him in places he’s embarrassed about me going. When I dig my nails into his firm round ass cheeks, he sways like someone drugged. He stutters out a no, don’t, when I do what Ryan taught me to – slide my hand back around and worm a finger to that soft smooth stretch of skin behind his balls, and press and rub until he’s quaking.

Oh, there are so many things I’m going to teach Sean. He’s ripe for my tutorials: pressing against his perineum just as he’s struggling to come, a slick finger in his ass to make him squirm and blush, stopping and starting and teasing and starting again to make his orgasm extra lush.

My orgasm is going to be extra lush too. Especially when Sean groans that he thinks he’s going to come, and Ryan tells him no, wait.

Ladies first.

And then he fucks into me hard until all I can hear is the firm wet slap of his thighs against my ass, the thick head of his cock butting against just the right place over and over. One long finger pressing firm to my clit, until I cry around this mouthful of flesh.

‘God, you made her come just like that,’ Kay says, in the breathy voice of someone newly infatuated.

But she’s not wrong. My clit swells against his rubbing finger and the tingles already threading through me grow until they’re fit to burst. And then he says that’s it, baby, come on, and I obey like always. I suck hard and eager on Sean’s prick and shudder from head to toe.

Of course the moment I do, Sean cries out. His hand goes to the back of my head and he urges his cock as deep as it will go, spurting over my tongue warm and thick. I remember the first time I ever went down on Ryan and he babbled on through the whole thing – how good and hot my mouth was and how – oh Jesus – he was going to do it in my mouth.

But I think, for Sean, even the sound he made and all that grasping of the back of my head was a lot. Coming in front of people he’s not dating is a lot. Everything’s a lot. And I’m pretty sure Ryan knows that too, because his next words are like he’s read my mind.

‘See,’ he says, as he strokes my back. ‘She likes it when you talk to her.’

And there’s such a strange fondness in his voice, a warmth that’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard from him. I suppose I should be offended that he’s talking over me, that I’m she, and yet I’m not. I want to say to Kay the same thing: be good to him. He likes it when you spoon up against his back.

He likes it when you suck him long after he’s spent, and he likes taking baths together. He likes fingers in his mouth when he’s having sex, and blindfolds are his kink of choice.

Though, in truth, I don’t know if I want to say. I know so well that he likes all of those things, but maybe I won’t tell you, Kay. Find out your own things. Could be that they’re different. I certainly intend to find out what’s different about Sean, all on my own.

Already there’s something different. He doesn’t want to kiss me with a mouth full of his come. But he does want to spoon against my back, and bury his face in my hair, and so it is that I get to lie there and watch, as Kay finishes off my once-was-boyfriend.

It’s been a year and a day since I last saw Ryan. I know it has, because Sean tells me as we’re driving up to the campsite. Number three thousand and eighty-five on the list of things I’ve learned about Sean in a year: he’s very good at timekeeping. Ryan was always awful at remembering days – he’d throw me three birthday parties a year to make up for the one he forgot.

‘Is your mind somewhere else?’ he asks, as we come to the turn-off.

‘Not really,’ I reply, but I’m lying. It is. Currently my mind happens to be on why I still compare Sean to Ryan, even after all this time. It’s something I think about a lot lately.

‘Nervous about seeing your ex?’ he asks, and he does it in that faux-jovial way he has when he’s nervous or trying to be someone he’s not. He thinks people want humour, lightness, not his crazy intensity.

And maybe they do. Maybe they do. Some people do, some of the time.

‘No,’ I say, even though I can feel my heart fluttering against its cage.

I don’t know why it’s doing that. There weren’t any heartbroken arguments, no awkward goodbyes. We jiggled the puzzle around – all four of us, even Sean.

In the morning, Ryan had just said to me: You going with him, then?

And I had replied: Sure.

And then all of our things in swapped-around cars, Kay giggling: This is crazy! This is crazy! I love it!

What’s in all of that to make me nervous? I’ve always wondered if Sean felt odd about leaving Kay just like that, but even the thought of him secretly continuing to love her all this time doesn’t make me nervous. I don’t think he did, anyhow. He told me once that he had never felt the need to say it to her, and if you don’t say it …

Ryan used to say it all the time. It never lost its meaning, either, which I guess is pretty odd.

When I see him at our usual camping spot on the hill, I think about him saying: You really like Sean, huh? You like that whole weird repressed scientist schtick he’s got going on. Yeah, I can see it in your eyes. I can see it when you look at me.

And I had said: no, no. No, never when I look at you.

Just as we pulled into the campsite, where Sean and Kay were waiting.

* * *

He’s almost the same. Wearing the same clothes – goofy T-shirt, smart trousers, hair at odd angles, unshaven.

Kay’s not the same. She’s all creased up and pissed as hell, and the first words he says to me are: I cracked wise. And then he shrugs – yeah, that’s Ryan. He’ll say something and offend the shit out of someone and then shrug.

Only later, I think at her. Later, he’ll come to you with hot chocolate or a Kinder egg or something else suitably ridiculous, and tell you how much he didn’t mean it.

It’s just the way he is. It’s a defence mechanism, a shield for his tender insides. A test, to see if you honestly and really do love him and can put up with his craziness.

But she doesn’t stop being pissed all through putting up the tent and all through dinner, and he doesn’t bring her a present. Maybe that was just for me. Something completely different to how he acts with any other person, just for me.

I bet with other people he never said sorry.

* * *

I wake up in the middle of the night with Sean’s mouth pressed to the turn of my throat. I guess he’s come a long way since we started this whole thing, because that may just be his erection rutting against my thigh.

I smile at him through the darkness, and he looks at me all sweet and eager – so much more open now. Cheeky, even. A little more sure of himself, too. He even talks to me when we fuck, halting words that don’t quite reach sexy.

But they’re good just the same.

I let him tug my pyjama bottoms down, and climb over me. I’m already wet, of course, though he doesn’t seem surprised to find me so. Sometimes he is, as though he can’t imagine why I’ve been thinking about sex.

But I think he knows why I’ve been thinking about it now.

He gets on over me, even so. He slides into me, slow and easy. And I try to only watch him, I really do. I press my hands against his ass and work my hips up at his, chasing the syrupy pleasure until my tight nipples are fizzing with it and I’m so slippery that it trails down between my ass cheeks.

Though I know it’s not enough.

‘Talk to me,’ I say to him, but the words he manages are not enough either.

It’s a good thing, really, that Ryan’s there to provide them for him.

‘All this time,’ he says. ‘And you never told him how hard you like it?’

I glance across at him and he’s just lying there, head on his pillow, expression soft and innocent. He’s a little amused, I think, though not cruelly so.

‘Go on,’ he says to Sean. ‘Give it to her hard. Really fuck her – she loves getting fucked.’

I bite my lip and try to turn away from him. I try to pretend that Sean jolts hard against me because he wants to, and not because Ryan has put something in the suggestion box. But he has, and oh there’s plenty more where that came from.

‘You know what else she likes? When you gasp for her, nice and high. As though her pussy is the sweetest, hottest, wettest bliss you’ve ever felt around your cock. As though she caught you j-u-ust right, and now you’re thinking of every boring thing you can to hold off that almighty orgasm.’

I can’t stop looking at him. I don’t think Sean can stop himself, either.

‘And you’re the authority,’ he says, in his best man-of-science voice, but Ryan seems unfazed. He doesn’t even look away from me to meet what I’m sure is Sean’s accusatory stare.

‘No, not the authority. It’d take years and years to puzzle someone like Tia out. But I’ll give you one more free tip.’ He leans in close, so close that he almost puts Sean off his stride. ‘If you get her as she’s about to come, and she’s shaking in just that way she is now, and you cover her mouth with yours – she’ll give it up, just like that. Right … into … your mouth.’

And then he kisses me, he kisses me, he kisses me.

Of course, he’s right. I come so hard that my body arches up off the bed, and he has to hold me down. Not Sean – Ryan. Ryan puts his big hands over my shoulders and I buck against them, long waves of sensation rolling up my body and out of my mouth, to pour into him.

Always into him.

And I think: you knew. You always knew. You let me fly away to far and different distant shores, just so that I could turn around again, and fly right back to you.

I Have You

Charlotte Stein

I don’t react when he slides his hand down over my bare back. I’m used to not reacting. A hand can mean a million things, after all – a sign of solidarity, a touch of comfort, a suggestion that someone comes with you to the place you’re meant to be going. And for a second I’m sure his hand is all three of these things together, because really it can’t be anything else.

I don’t know him, in that other way. The one where people tangle together and press their mouths to each other’s and feel that thing … What’s it called again? Pleasure, I think it is, but pleasure is so far away from me it might as well be on Mars.

All I can do is dissect the various elements of his hand on my back: the way my skin almost seems to part beneath the press of his thumb. The way his knuckles feel when he turns his hand over and drags them down over me.

They feel heavy, I think. The backs of his hands are heavy, though I can’t remember how I know this. When I close my eyes it’s as though I can hardly picture his face, but then he leans in quite unexpectedly and touches his mouth to the nape of my neck and suddenly I can see it all clear.

He has brows that draw together too often, I’m sure, and eyes that are too often worried, and when the kiss on the back of my neck suddenly becomes hot and wet I think of his mouth. Soft, so soft, and promising so little.

But it promises a lot, here. I can hear him breathing in between those kisses, ragged and not quite in control of himself and, though such a thing should make me nervous, I find I feel nothing instead. Nothing at all, except for the minutiae of what being kissed is actually like.

I think I’m physically reacting to it, too. It’s sort of like cracking through an ice-covered pond, only to find hot lava underneath. My skin catches fire, my heart starts pounding thickly, sluggishly – though it doesn’t do so in my chest. It does so between my legs, where I’m somehow already wet even though this isn’t anything at all, really.

I mean, it’s rude that my back is bare. And though I’ve crossed my arms over my chest in a big X, my breasts are bare too. I somehow never got around to putting my top on, and so here I sit on my bed, staring out of the window over the windy rain-slicked hills, in just a skirt.

I must look like someone who’s lost all of their sense of self. Like I’m vacant, though as soon as I think the word my mind changes it to vacated. I’ve been vacated. Something has left me and I’m just a limp thing staring at a grey world in half my clothes.

Aroused, but not really connected to my own arousal. In truth, I can hardly recall what arousal is – no more than I can remember the man behind me and his face of many parts – and I think so right up until he gets two hands on my hips and pushes me into a clumsy standing position, then begins ruffling up the skirt I don’t remember putting on.

I think I know what he’s going to do. It’s obvious. But it’s still something of a shock when I feel his mouth searching blindly between my legs – shoving me when he can’t get at what he clearly needs to, the sounds he makes all desperate and somehow brutal at the same time.

My nipples are stiff, now. I don’t even try to cover them. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, but I suppose someone could walk by and see me like this – expressionless, trembling, my breasts exposed for anyone to look at. And yet I don’t care. I don’t care about anything.

And I have to confess, something about this intense sort of detachment excites me thoroughly. He’s licking me in a really dirty way, now – right between the cheeks of my arse – but I don’t give a damn. I just want to burn in that lava. I want to plunge right through the ice and boil alive.

I come close, when he slides two fingers into my cunt.

Of course I’m sure it should hurt. The position I’m in isn’t great – legs barely parted, stood as straight as an arrow – and I haven’t been fucked in an age. I should be locked tight, resistant somehow.

And yet he just eases in as though I’ve turned to syrup, which I suppose in one way I have. I’m so wet I can feel it on my thighs, I can feel it sliding slickly around his fingers, and even if I couldn’t I’d know about it because of him.

He makes a sound, a little moan of delight. My wetness stands in for my permission, and he fucks me roughly like that for a moment. Just in and out. Just good, firm thrusts that make me ache. And when I think I can’t bear it any more, he slides his fingers through my slit – backwards, everything’s backwards – and finds my embarrassingly swollen clit.

‘You like it,’ he says, in a tone that suggests he’s surprised. And then with more assuredness: ‘Oh yeah, you like it.’

Who am I to deny him? I do like it. He knows exactly how to touch me – two fingertips just rubbing over the underside of my clit, back and forth, back and forth like a metronome – and it isn’t going to be long before I come.

In fact, I think it’s going to happen in a short and rather humiliating amount of time. I’ve gone from trembling to shuddering and he keeps it up until I’m right on the precipice. I’m just about to do it, I’m really so very, gloriously close, and then he quite suddenly removes his hand.

He bends me over at the waist, so that I’m almost leaning on the windowsill.

He won’t actually fuck me, I think, frantically, but I’m wrong about that, too. I can feel something hot and smooth pressing between my legs, his hands on my thighs, urging and pushing them apart.

It’s the only time the word don’t swells up in my mind, like an ancient artefact of the forgotten me. The woman I was knew how to say no, to stand up, to ask and demand and negotiate. But I am not that woman any more. I am this limp thing, bent over, something hot and solid sliding into my body as though I’m just a receptacle.

Vacated, I think, and then he shoves into me again. Harder this time, but oh God, so much sweeter. I can hear him breathing again and this time it’s really rough. It’s bordering on a panting or a series of moans and I have to reach out and hold onto the windowsill just to keep myself steady. Just so that I have something to press my face against, the crook of my elbow, the soft turn of my forearm.

I think I bite myself, when the actual and real pleasure builds to some terrible point. I’m going to come, I’m certain, even though hardly anything has happened and I’ve no more memory of orgasms than I do of any other pleasant thing.

When it happens I’m still shocked. My entire body clenches against his now rapid and thrillingly forceful thrusts and I make a sound, a choking, half-sobbed sound, as my clit jerks and my cunt ripples around his cock.

When it’s done I realise that I really did sob. When I reach up and touch my face, my cheeks are wet with tears that I don’t remember crying.

* * *

The second time it happens I’m prepared. Or at least I think I am. I’m in the garden, fully dressed, so it’s hard to really expect something like his hands on my breasts, through my shirt.

And he does it abruptly, too, like before. One second everything is normal: we’re talking about the gardenias and the old elm we’re stood by. Then the next he’s undoing my shirt right out in the open, fingers fumbling with the buttons, alternating between getting the material off me and fondling my bare breasts.

Because of course I’m bare under the shirt. Maybe that’s what caught his notice – the shape of me beneath the thin cotton. The stiffness of my nipples in the cold, February air. It had started to mist a bit, so maybe the material had grown a little see-through.

Now it’s completely see-through because he’s parted the two sides like wings, and before I can say or do anything he’s kissing me there. He’s kissing my breasts with that same hot, hungry mouth he had before.

I don’t mind admitting that it feels good. I might have clung to some notion of restraint, before. Some remnant of what’s proper and right, in these circumstances – with everything that’s happened, you know – but I can’t any longer.

He isn’t holding back. He licks over my nipples in the rudest way a person can, and I can’t help it. I have to bury my hands in his curly hair and hold tight to him as he does this to me. This thing, this thing – oh God, what is it again?

I don’t know, but I moan to feel it.

I moan to feel him shoving my skirt up, hands too desperate again. Everything about this is rough and jagged, like the feel of the tree bark pressing into my back. He’s going to take me against it, I think, but I don’t fully understand that concept until he does it.

There’s too much to process. The way his cock feels, thrusting deeply inside me. His hair still in my hands and the smell of him when I press my face to the side of his neck, like soap and some distant memory I don’t want to unearth.

I come embarrassingly quickly this time. So quickly I don’t even have a chance to think about it. The whole thing just swells up inside me and pours right out of my mouth in a way I didn’t let it before.

‘Oh just like that, yeah, like that, baby, do it, do it,’ I tell him. And then there is a whole host of pleasure sounds. Moans and groans and gasps of delight, as I do my best to work the last of it out on his still-solid cock.

Of course he slows, as soon as I’m done. And then after a brief second to catch his breath he steps away from me. Buttons his trousers around his erection, tidies himself as though nothing happened. Like before, when I came around from the tears and the trembling to discover that he hadn’t finished but had left the scene of the crime anyway.

Though it’s obvious why, I wish it wasn’t. I wish, I wish, I wish.

But it remains so, all the same.

* * *

I don’t give him the chance this time. To surprise me, I mean. I strip off all my clothes, instead, and rather than waiting with my back turned I stand in the bedroom completely naked. I face him when he walks through the door.

He looks surprised, the way I have felt surprised. Though I don’t think the two feelings are the same thing. One stems from the sight of me, so freely bared. The other is from the sense of some awakening, some pleasure I never thought I’d experience again.

‘Rebecca,’ he says, and his voice sounds so old and rusty. I think it’s because I can’t recall the last time he said my name. I’d started to think he’d forgotten it, but I can forgive him because I had forgotten his too.

I remember it now. It’s hard to go to him and kiss him the way I used to. We used to tumble on to any available surface, tearing at each other’s clothes, hands so full of each other it felt like greed. But now I’m just so broken apart, I’m that ice, melted and shattered and torn up. And though the heat is back there’s still a flood of pain, too, when I kiss him.

I take off his clothes, one item at a time. He lets me do it in the exact same way I let him do those things for me, only this time I won’t let it be detached, closed off, like a separate part of ourselves. I make him look me in the eye. I make him kiss me even though I can taste salt in his mouth and he’s shaking.

He’s shaking the way I was, when he kissed my back and made me take that pleasure. He made me. I want to make him.

‘Rebecca, I –’ he starts, but I put a hand over his mouth. I tell him don’t, the way I probably should have by the window. But I didn’t, and now we’re almost back to life. We’re almost there.

I don’t regret it. I can’t feel bad about wanting him. And I don’t think he feels bad, not exactly. He only holds out for a moment or two and then suddenly he’s pulling at his own clothes. His arms go around my middle and our naked bodies touch all the way down from chest to ankles, legs tangling briefly. The bed is waiting for us to spread ourselves all over it.

I can feel how hard he is against my belly but it’s more than that. His teeth sink into my shoulder, his hands make bruises on my hips. And in return I give him as many marks, biting in places where I know it will show, then licking over every little sore spot I make.

He used to love that. He loves it still. Before I’ve even gotten halfway down his body he’s moaning my name, hands in my mess of hair, hips rocking up against nothing. Just as he’s at that perfectly lost place, gaze untroubled, brow unrumpled, I take his thick cock into my mouth and suck so hard.

Hard enough to make him gasp in a way that almost seems pained. Hard enough to make him thrust up and beg for more.

‘Like this?’ I ask. I drag my teeth over the length of his prick, before ending on the most lascivious lick I can manage.

His head goes back against the pillow. He’s so close that I could tug him over the edge with just a little more. Clearly he hasn’t allowed himself to do anything beyond the things he’s done to me. He hasn’t given himself up to it, the way I did. And though I want him to there’s something I need a little more.

When he’s just at that point of mindlessness, bucking and moaning and covering his eyes, I stalk up the bed and cover his body with mine.

It isn’t difficult to take him inside me. I think he tries to stop me about halfway through, just as I ease myself down, hands on his shoulders, body thrumming with that new sort of heat. But when I lean over and kiss him he can’t seem to hold onto that note of protest. His eyes stay open and on me, so blue and startling it seems insane that I had forgotten.

I’d forgotten what it was like to be gazed at. To be filled and fucked by him, slow at first but then faster, hotter. I twist above him, leaning back until I get that sweet pressure I crave, and when it comes it’s like nothing else in the world.

‘Oh God, Rebecca, don’t,’ he says, and I suppose he does because I’m really taking it now. I’m working myself on his cock, hips jerking, that pleasure cresting so swift and sharp I know I should be ashamed.

But I can’t be, and he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be full of don’ts, I shouldn’t be full of don’ts: we’ve had too many already and they’ve taken us to pieces. Don’t be happy, don’t carry on, don’t live your lives the way you did before.

‘I’m going to,’ I tell him. ‘I will.’

And then he puts his head back again for me, back arching, and I know he’s doing the thing he couldn’t before. He’s coming inside me, hard and almost vicious, fingers digging into my sides as the pleasure pours out of him and into me.

Because that’s what it feels like. It’s like he’s releasing something through me, and the moment he does I shake with that same blissful sensation. Cunt clenching hard around his cock, my orgasm like a tight fist unfurling in my belly.

It’s unbelievable. I’m sobbing with it, again – only this time it’s the good sort of sob. It feels like a relief, when I spread myself over him. And when he wraps his arms around me, I can feel his relief too.

‘I didn’t know if it was okay to love you like this any more,’ he says, and his voice is so raw. It wasn’t even like this on the day she died, which I suppose should make me feel worse somehow. But it doesn’t.

I feel light, suddenly, as though a wound has been lanced and everything heavy in it flowed out of me the moment he spoke.

‘It’s OK,’ I tell him. ‘It’s OK now. We still have each other.’

And we do. We do. I remember his name. I remember his face. He’s not a stranger to me any more, just another ghost floating through the life we thought we’d have with our daughter.

He’s real again to me. He’s mine. My husband.

‘We still have each other,’ he echoes, and as he does he cups my face in his hands. Lifts me from the crook of his shoulder so that he can see me. I think he sees me. I don’t think it’s just her hair and her eyes, any more – I think I’m me again.

‘You don’t have to be afraid, you know,’ I say. ‘If we had another it’s –’

He shakes his head. Cuts me off.

‘I’m not afraid,’ he tells me. ‘I have you.’

Don’t I

Charlotte Stein

I don’t know what I expect when I first step into the room. A mean-eyed creature, I suppose, with too much hair on his face and hands like shovels. He’ll stand straight away and use said shovels to knock me around the room for a bit, most likely, though I’m not sure where that assumption comes from.

Movies, I think. Movies, in which the heroine is always punished for doing something as desperate as selling her body for cash. Of course, in these movies the hero usually swoops in and saves her right before she’s gang-raped or worse, but somehow I suspect that isn’t going to happen here.

It’s just this. It’s just me, in a dress made for a smaller woman and heels too high for my body to cope with, red lipstick shining incongruously on my plain as paper face. And when he looks at me – this client – I feel all of these things even more keenly than I thought I would.

Because he isn’t hairy at all. He doesn’t have shovel hands, or an air of some underworld I don’t understand. Instead, he’s soft-mouthed and blue-eyed. Big, true, but not in the way I’d expected. I’d thought of grizzly men who’ve earned the term ‘brick shithouse’, but instead there’s just this odd fullness to him. As though he lives just ever so slightly on the edge of delicious excess.

Too many cakes, I think, but that’s unfair – and not entirely true. It doesn’t look like he’s eaten too many cakes at all. It looks as though he’s been filled with something else altogether, and just when I think my mind can’t get any stranger it writes in the correct description for me.

It’s like he’s been filled with come.

Of course I flush red the second I’ve thought it. Not because it’s too rude, but because I know it’s rude and yet it seems to perfectly fit him, anyway.

That’s what he looks like. Like someone who’s just had his ass fucked by ten men, and is now absolutely swimming in jism. It’s running down his thighs, inside those immaculately tailored trousers he’s wearing. He can still taste it at the back of his throat, when he swallows.

And somehow this thought is more paralysing than the other one, about the brutal men who want to gang-rape me. For a long moment I just stand in the middle of the room, while this obviously refined and certainly handsome gentleman looks at me without a single idea of what I’m thinking in his head.

He’s probably the son of an oil magnate. He’s probably Christian Vanderhoof the Third. Really he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing here, and very soon he’s going to tell me to turn down the bed and clean the bathroom.

Only then he says: ‘Would you care for a drink?’

And after that I don’t know what to think. His voice is extremely cultured, his tone utterly polite. Everything about him is coated in a protective sheen of fabulous wealth, and yet I’m certain I can hear something underneath it all. A little burr of nervousness, I think, that doesn’t quite fit my preconceptions of this evening.

Why is he nervous? He paid a thousand pounds for me. I can’t even sneeze without his permission – though to look at him you wouldn’t think it. He shifts in his chair, awkwardly, in a way that suggests he’s impatient for my answer.

He’s impatient, but he won’t demand it.

‘I’m fine,’ I tell him, though in truth I’d love a Scotch. I can see from the empty glasses on the table next to him that he’s had three, though I can’t see why he needed a fresh container each time. Or why he needed so many.

Clean Dutch courage, I think, then feel a strange little surge go through me. Yes, that surge says. He likes things clean and neat and ordered. He likes things a certain way – a new glass for each drink. Each one exactly the same, with a curl of lime and two ice cubes.

And he needs the alcohol to steady his nerves, because he’s never done this before.

‘I suppose … you just want to get started.’

Oh, definitely never done this before. It’s like looking in a mirror, for a second, though I suspect my half of the reflection is starting to seem a little different. I feel a little different, though I’m not sure why.

Because of the row of glasses? Because of the look of him and the way he stands, hands still flat on his thighs? All of the above, I think, and then I simply watch as he starts peeling off his clothes.

I won’t deny it: it’s almost a treat. I’ve never even dated a man half as handsome as this, and here he is, paying me for the privilege. And it is a privilege. His shoulders are broad, his chest big and solid. When he moves, things flex and shift beneath the skin.

And that’s before I even get to his thighs – dear God, his thighs. They’re thick and solid and curved in places I’ve never seen a man’s thighs curve, though after a moment I have to look away from them. I have to.

He’s hard. And though I know that’s what I’m here for, and understand the rules of this game utterly, it’s still something else to see it in the flesh. To have to face it, and know that’s what my purpose is.

Even if I can feel my purpose shifting, as we speak. It’s like it’s poised on the top of a sand dune, and the more time ticks by the further down it slides, until I’m suddenly at the bottom, in a heap. I’m looking and looking at his thick, stiff cock, and I’m not exactly afraid, any more.

I’m not exactly anything. I’m just staring like I’ve stepped outside myself, and when he says: ‘Do you know what I want you to do?’ I don’t tell him what I should. I don’t say, No, not really. I just stand there and examine every naked inch of him, with this strange lewd sort of detachment.

And he seems to see it that way, too. In fact, after a long, long moment of staring, he actually says as much. He shivers once, all over, before telling me how good it feels to be looked at like that. Then once he’s managed to force those words out, he goes one step further.

‘Like a possession,’ he says, but I swear I have no idea what he means. Is he suggesting that I should stand there, naked, while he maps me out with his gaze? It certainly seems as though it needs to be that way around, but here’s the thing – I’m not sure it is.

He told me that he feels like the possession. That my eyes are the cruel, cold ones, judging the various parts of him. And when I really think about it, I am judging him. I judged him before I even walked into this room, and doing so now just feels like a natural extension of that. It’s like armour – I need it.

I just didn’t think he’d want it. I thought he’d have a little tool, rusted and mean. And the second I stepped in here he’d get that tool beneath the metal plating covering my skin, and lever it all off.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he says, ‘What do you want me to do now?’

While inside I rise and fall, all at the same time. I get to choose – is that what he’s saying? That I get to choose what happens now? I can hardly believe it, but before I’ve even worked up the courage to actually ask him he says it again. And this time, he says it far more clearly.

‘Tell me what to do,’ he says, the safety of that question mark now long gone. He looks like he doesn’t want the safety of a question mark any more, anyway – as though little extra things like those ones have held him back.

But of course he doesn’t have to hold back, with me.

And for the first time I realise something strange, something that hadn’t even occurred to me before this moment. How could it possibly? This is a horrible thing, a painful experience I’ve been forced to endure. There is nothing pleasant about selling your body, I’m certain of it.

Or at least I’m certain until I think of those words, when applied to me: I don’t have to hold back with him. He isn’t my boyfriend, who’s likely to dump me if I do something forbidden in bed. He’s not a one-night stand that might spread the urban legend of the girl who likes to lick a guy’s asshole.

He’s my client. And now he’s said: Go ahead.

‘Get down on all fours,’ I say – just to test it out, I suppose. He can always laugh and say no at this point if he likes. There’s still a chance I’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick, after all, and I wouldn’t hold it against him.

Only then he does exactly as I’ve told him. He does it. This big, smooth-as-silk-looking guy gets down on his hands and knees on this expensive carpet and, as he does so, his eyes flutter closed. As though the whole thing is just too much to take, before we’ve barely done anything at all.

I understand how he feels, however. My legs seem weaker than they did when I first walked in here, and somewhere inside me there’s this new sensation, blooming – one that gets stronger when I tell him to crawl towards me.

And he does.

‘You like it down there?’ I ask, though I don’t really feel like I need to. It’s obvious he likes it down there. His cock is still hard and, even if it wasn’t, there are other things that point the way. Things that shouldn’t seem familiar to me – Miss Vanilla – but somehow are anyway.

Like the way he shudders when I walk around him. Like the way his head drops between his shoulders the second I toe the ripe curve of his perfect ass with the point of one shoe.

Of course, I realise then the appeal of footwear like this. They had seemed skyscraper high and uncomfortable before – a nuisance, more than anything. But now they’re weapons. My shoe is a tool, like the one I imagined him having. And all I have to do is shove said tool between the cheeks of his ass, to get his armour off.

‘No,’ he says, but something unexpected happens when he does. I don’t automatically think of what I should – that it’s time to be nervous, now, and back off before he tells on me. Before there are consequences.

Instead, I imagine just how far I could go.

From here, it looks like a million miles spread out before me.

‘No?’ I ask, and there’s something new in my voice, now. I’d call it resentment, but it isn’t exactly. It’s crisp and cold and almost mocking, instead – and he seems to know it.

That shuddering gets worse. One of his hands jerks beneath him, like a reflex, but I can’t allow that any more than I could allow him to tell me no. Who does he think he is, telling me no?

Doesn’t he realise I’m a professional?

‘Get your hand away from your cock, boy,’ I say, and then it’s my turn to shudder. Because, of course, I’m not a professional. I’m not anything. I don’t even know what this thing is that seems to be growing inside me.

I only know that it made me say ‘boy’ and it made me say ‘cock’, and both things pound hard on that door inside me. The one that’s closed, currently, but clearly labelled: You like this. You like this you like this it’s making you wet.

I swear, it isn’t. I can’t feel it, sliding slick and slippery between the lips of my cunt, as I circle him. I can’t feel it soaking into the expensive panties I was given to wear, until they’re near ruined.

I’m insensible, a professional, I’m stone.

Even when he plants one shaking hand back on the carpet, I’m stone.

‘Touch it again and it won’t just be the toe of my shoe you’ll feel,’ I say, though I have to admit – I don’t know what it is he will feel. The stiletto heel? My fingers? The cock I don’t have?

All three seem crazy, but then so is this. It’s crazy, that he seems so shaken up, by so little. There’s actual sweat gleaming on his broad back now, and all I have to do to make him shiver and moan is just hint at touching him. Just ghost my heel over his side until he squirms and actually begs.

‘Please,’ he says, in a tone I never thought someone like him could get to. ‘Please.’

But for what? What’s he pleading for me to do? I can’t imagine it’s just a straightforward fuck, now – though the thought flashes in me far brighter than it had before. I mean, it’s possible that he’d let me pin him down, while I did it. It’s likely he wants me to tie him to something, while I use his cock for my own greedy pleasure.

And if those are just my own desires coming to me, unbidden, well … is that really a problem? He doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem when I put my foot on his back, and dig that heel in until he lies flat to the carpet.

Quite the contrary. He seems to think it’s the best thing anyone could ever do to someone else, and I know this because he tells me so. He moans and babbles incoherently, until real words finally manage to spill out of him.

‘Oh, that’s perfection,’ he says, though I’m not sure how it can be. Doesn’t it hurt to be abused like this? Isn’t he dying inside to feel someone doing this to him? And if he is, why don’t I care?

I should care, I think, as I reach down to grab a fistful of his hair. I should be better, I think, as I wrench his head up – one foot still in the small of his back, like someone starting a heavy piece of machinery. Bracing themselves to get every ounce of strength into it that they can.

‘Is this perfection, boy?’ I ask, and he tells me yes. He tells me to do a million things I shouldn’t want to, things that involve the throat I’ve just bared to a knife I don’t have, and when I do them … God. God.

When I close my hands around his neck and choke him, just a little … I don’t know what that feeling is. I can’t name it. It’s like he’s got that rusty thing beneath my armour anyway, without me knowing it, and suddenly I’m bare and bleeding.

‘Take it,’ I tell him as I press my face into his sweet-smelling hair, one hand on him, squeezing and squeezing. I could kill him, now, I think, but that’s not the worst thing about all of this. No – the worst thing is the thought that comes afterwards.

He’d let me.

I pull away then. I have to. All of this is far, far too much, in the opposite way I expected it to be. I thought I’d be crying, by now, and I suppose I am, but they’re not tears of pain. They’re something else instead.

‘Get up,’ I tell him, once my back is turned to him. If I look when he stands, I’ll lose control of myself. I’ll be the guy with the shovel hands, wanting to take this as far as he’s willing to go.

Though I suppose that’s the kicker, isn’t it? He’s willing.

‘Lie down on the bed, face up,’ I say, gentler now. Softer, though certainly more breathless. In truth, it kind of feels as though oxygen has made a fist halfway up my chest and every time I try to suck more in it just cycles back. It just gives me a quarter of what I really need.

And that feeling gets worse when I allow myself to look at the shape he’s made on the bed. All of his limbs so heavy, sprawled out for my delectation. Wrists crossed one over the other, above his head – like a vague idea he’d once had, of what submission should look like.

But that’s OK, though. That’s OK. I see the same formless pattern in my head the moment I close my eyes. I think I’ve been seeing it all my life and just hadn’t known it. I hadn’t listened.

I’m listening now.

‘What are you going to do to me?’ he asks, and it’s like a song. It’s like a song inside me, playing just loud enough for me to hear.

‘I’m going to fuck you until you beg me for mercy,’ I say, as I climb onto the bed. ‘And if you come before I say you can, I don’t know what I might do. Is that what you want, boy?’

Before, it was hard to meet his eyes. But it isn’t any more. I just lean right down and meet that foggy blue gaze directly, one hand cupping his chin – like I’ve pincered him, I think, like he’s mine – and murmur words against his lips.

‘Do you want me to not know?’

His breath catches in his chest – I hear it. I almost feel it in the subtle shift of his body beneath mine. And then it comes right out of him, in that one perfect word I’ve so longed to hear. The one no one’s ever said to me; the one that makes me lean down and offer him something I swore I wouldn’t willingly.

‘Yes,’ he says, and I kiss him. I kiss him I kiss him I kiss him, through the dozens more he then gives to me. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, as though it’s the easiest thing in the world to just give in to someone.

To let them do whatever they want.

I want to tell him that it isn’t, but then again I’m the one putting the condom on him. I’m the one shoving my dress up around my waist, as frantic and flustered as I’ve ever felt myself. For a long embarrassing moment I can’t seem to get my panties off, and I just tangle over him, legs everywhere.

But then it’s done and I’m naked there and he can see me, those eyes of his still full of the same thing they were before. Not God you’re clumsy but God, just take me, just fuck me, and when I do he says the name I haven’t told him.

He pants it, into my open mouth – hands still linked above his head. Everything about him just so ready to be used, in a way that makes me wetter, hotter, more desperate for it. I can feel the evidence of my arousal coating more than the lips of my sex, now, and every time I move, every time I slide against him, my clit swells. Pleasure swells with it, sweet and thick.

Though worse than all of this is how quickly he becomes sensible of it. He knows, the second I ease myself down on his solid cock – because of course he can feel it. He can hear it, all slick and filthy.

And though I can too, I think I hide my shame well. More than well, in fact. My voice still comes out as cool as a winter river, when I tell him what I want him to do.

‘Lie still,’ I say, though the moment I do that feeling courses through me. My clit becomes one long pulse between my legs, and more of my wetness coats him – because he’s just a doll, now. He’s a thing I’m using for my own pleasure, and he doesn’t even seem to mind.

In fact, he does more than not mind. He gives me his utter obedience, through the tensing of the muscles in his shoulders. In the way his lips disappear into his mouth, as he struggles to hold himself motionless.

It must be an almost impossible task, I know. How could it not be? He’s so aroused there’s a flush spreading over his chest, and everything I do makes those little shudders pass through him, minutely.

And if I’m really honest, this thing we’re doing – this slow up and down I’ve got going, on the thick length of his glorious cock – it’s almost too much for me. It’s almost making me ache somewhere low down in my belly, so God only knows how it must feel for him.

He wanted this. He paid for it. And now he’s just got to lie there and take it, as a hint of some kind of impossible orgasm just rubs ever so lightly over my clit.

‘Oh that’s good,’ he bursts out, after a moment of this agonising slide around the swollen head of his cock. I won’t deny – it feels best there, right up against the front wall of my clenching cunt.

But I will deny that I want to say the same thing back to him. Instead, I do something very mean and very delicious, like maybe just grabbing a hold of his face again. And when he tells me, ‘Yes, yes, do it,’ I go one step further. There’s always one step further with this man whose name I don’t even know.

Like slapping, for example. I hadn’t even thought about slapping, but the moment I do it – hard and sharp across his perfect face – he forgets he isn’t supposed to be moving. He bucks up, jerkily, into the absolute mess of my slippery pussy, and I can’t help it either.

I actually let out a sound, as his cock jams firmly against that little bundle of nerves inside me. And then again, as he seems to become sensible of what he’s done, and lets his hips ease back down to the mattress.

Of course when he does so, his cock eases back down with it. Though I’m beyond admitting that this isn’t incredible, now. I’m beyond anything, and that includes my own control it seems. My own control says, Be calm, don’t fuck him like this, don’t slap him harder, while my body squirms against that good, good feeling, and my hand lashes out to crack across his face.

‘You like that, huh?’ I ask, but it’s almost like I’m saying it to myself. And the second I realise this, I answer in my own head: Yes. Yes, I like your cock in me. I like seeing my handprint on your beautiful face, and I like knowing what it does to you.

It makes him buck – that’s what it does. It makes him stop holding his hands above his head and start gripping my hips, so that he can grind me down harder every time my slaps connect.

And God, they’re really connecting now. They’re directly related to the pleasure building in me, it seems, and the closer I get to that unbearable edge, the more viciously I do it – though he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s getting close too, I think – closer than he’d probably like to be – and there’s something about this thought that gets me going, too.

Just the idea of him, holding off the bliss that’s coming. Just the idea that he’s struggling and straining with it, cock swelling inside me anyway, unbidden. All of the breath in his body caught somewhere inside his chest – the way it was for me, only moments ago.

Then finally his words, God, his words.

‘Ohhh fuck I’m close – please. Please, let me do it. Please.’

But I can’t. I can’t – not yet. I’m too cruel, I’m too full of feeling, I’m too not myself. I want to come first and, Lord, I know I’m going to. I can’t even hold it off now, never mind denying it, and, when it finally breaks, I don’t care about telling him so.

‘I’m coming, oh, my God, I’m coming,’ I say, because it’s true. But also because of the look it produces, all over his face. He seems almost in awe, for a second – as though he’s never seen a woman actually do it before, in the middle of weird encounters like this – and not even that thought can put me off.

The pleasure coils tight in my belly and then unravels all at once, forcing me to tighten hard around his still working cock. Making me shiver and moan in the exact way he’s done for me all the way through this.

I understand now, I think. I get it. And if he still seems shocked that I do, well, that’s OK. I can probably pretend that I didn’t, once this is all over – and it is nearly all over. He’s asking me over and over: ‘Can I? Can I?’ And though there’s some remnant of that cruelty in me, I don’t want to say no any more.

‘Do it,’ I tell him, and then I watch with my own kind of awe as he does. His back arches, his mouth opens. Near soundless cries of pleasure come out of him as his cock surges inside me.

It’s almost a disappointment when it’s over.

Almost.

Because you know – this isn’t my real life. This is just something I had to do, to pay a mortgage I’m too behind on. To save myself from worse, like maybe sleeping on the streets. It’s not really something I enjoy, once it’s done and I’m picking up my underwear and telling him yeah, sure, I’ll be available again.

I won’t be available again. I won’t be – not even after I’ve looked into his hopeful face and seen him smile for me, almost shyly. Because the truth is I have my thousand pounds now, and I never have to do this again. I never have to climb those stairs, and feel all of these strange, mixed feelings, and look into this man’s eyes while that surge of power goes through me.

I mean, after all, I do find all of this awful and abhorrent. I do, I really do.

Don’t I?

Heavenly Shades

Charlotte Stein

I can hear the prickle of a needle on vinyl from all the way up here, but this time I don’t flinch. My heart doesn’t try to scramble out of my chest. Instead, I just let myself float here, in the tepid water now filling my bathtub. I drift, like an island of perfectly slick, pale flesh.

While downstairs the music cycles up. First the violins, looping along one after the other. Then that crushed velvet voice, pouring out of the record player and all the way up to me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, the singer croons, as I let my hand flow back and forth in the water. It’s twilight time, the singer croons, and then I know for certain.

He is here.

It’s like his calling card, I suppose. The cue, for him to enter stage right. That shushering beat starts, and after it comes his footsteps on the stairs, one after the other. Heavy and slumberous, somehow, even though he is neither.

He’s as quick as a snake and barely past six foot, body like a whip. Face like one, too. If I hadn’t seen underneath his clothes I’d think he was a pointed finger, muscle-less and mean. But I know different, now. I didn’t want to, but I do anyway.

And I suppose that’s the way of things, with him.

I don’t want to get out of the bathtub, and put on the nightgown he gave me, for such special occasions. I don’t want to wait for him in my bedroom, as pretty and clean as a picture.

But I do it anyway. In fact, I do more than that. I dry my hair, and brush it out into one long spill down my back. And then finally I look in the mirror, as I always do, and try to think what makes my face the one. What made him look at me and think:

It’s her I’ll do this to. Not sunny Kelli Fisher, from number thirty-six. Not Mrs Levine, who’s still lovely and lissom and not half as plain as me. My face is like a blank slate, empty of anything that could move a man to madness. My eyes are like stones, my mouth is a barely there imprint.

And yet he comes to me, all the same. He’s there, when I pad across the hall and enter my entirely alien bedroom. It used to be a place of comfort, in here; everything in it used to be familiar to me. But now it looks like the funhouse version of that said same space, shadows striping things at odd angles. Pictures hung where they shouldn’t be. The full moon barely penetrating into the room, even though I know that shouldn’t be the case. I know its light should be more than this weak little blurred thing, that creeps over my carpet and scarcely touches my toes.

It’s like he drives it away, somehow.

It’s like he drives my will away, too.

‘Come and dance with me, my little bird, my little one in particular,’ he says, and I think of those words over and over, as I force my feet over the carpet to him. My one in particular, he always says, because I’m special, I’m so special.

So why is it that I sob against his shoulder, the minute he takes me in his arms?

Because I do. I make a sound like something dying and let myself sag into him, that strange wired strength in him holding me up, even as I try to sink down to the floor. I suspect he could hold me up if I was as heavy as twenty bags of concrete. I suspect he could lead me around like this, boneless and doll-like, if I fought with all of my might.

I fought the first time, after all. All the way back then, when I had only suspected. He’d come over to borrow a cup of sugar, and I’d thought to myself, half-giddily: if he really is some kind of creature of the night, he won’t be able to come into the house—so don’t invite him in.

And I hadn’t. Instead, I’d just tentatively passed the cup over the high holy threshold, waiting for him to reach forward and take it. And then when he had, I’d done the worst possible thing I could have. The thing that caused all of this, the thing that made it be so.

I’d pulled the cup back at the last second, and watched him press his fingers to the invisible barrier blocking his way—as though to a pane of glass.

It was too late for me then, I understand that, now. He knew that I knew, from that moment on, and from that moment on my only job was to evade him—and I did. I raced the daylight home every day after it happened, but there’s always more twilight. There’s always more night waiting to descend on me at just the wrong moment, and it had descended even faster after he put that hole in my gas line.

Because he’s clever, you see. He’s not like the ones you see in movies, who creek out of their coffins and hypnotise you in nightclubs. He has to use his wiles, rather than some set of hoary old mystical clichés. He has to rely on a serial killer’s tricks, to snare his prey.

And he snared me well. I walked all the way home from the middle of nowhere, knowing what he’d done. Knowing, but unable to do anything about it. The darkness had fallen so fast, and I simply wasn’t capable of running the five miles home.

Even if I had, I wouldn’t have made it in time. I didn’t make it in time.

And so here we are, dancing to the music I hear no matter where I am, or what I’m doing. In the supermarket, trembling and near bloodless from the night before. Always tired now, always so weak, my mind drifting to the sound of that slowly dripping song, and his face. His eyes, like burnt syrup.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please.’

But I’m praying to the wrong God. This one has hair like a raven’s wing and hands as cold as stones at the bottom of an icy river, and when I beg him to give me my life back he just murmurs shhhh, shhhh, in a way that should be soothing.

And it almost is. Everything he does is almost soothing, almost tender—like a lover trying to coax me into the most sensuous bout of lovemaking. One hand pressed to my lower back, rubbing and rubbing there. The other in my hair, stroking so softly it makes me sob again.

It’s so close to something sweet, I think. So close I could almost believe in it, if it were not for the true purpose behind the push of his fingers through the newly cleaned strands.

He doesn’t like it to get in his way, when he gets a mouthful of me.

‘Oh my little one,’ he says, against the side of his face. But even without looking I know the teeth are there. I can almost feel the steely press of them as he comes close to kissing me, and as his breath ghosts cool and strange, all over my skin.

‘Don’t,’ I say again, but the word is small and fluttering and he is powerful, so powerful. I can feel the twist of those muscles, beneath the hand I’m pushing against his shoulder—though it’s more than that. He’s like a steel cage, in a way no man should ever be. He locks me in tight, and though he coos and murmurs and tries to calm me down, in the end he always has to force it.

He holds me fast, that hand in my hair now like a vice. And though I know what’s coming, I still squeeze my eyes tight shut for it. I brace myself, and then there’s just his icy mouth against my throat. That eagerness in him, suddenly—despite the fact that he’s never eager for anything.

He’s always slow, so slow and deliberate. After he’d caught me that first time, he’d stalked me like some crouching, clever beast that doesn’t actually exist. A raptor, I always think, but there’s nothing lizard-like about him—apart from the cold. And when you look at him, that cold isn’t there at all.

He looks heated, primal somehow. His hips had practically rolled, as he’d backed me into a corner. And the second I tried to evade him by doing something stupid—like jumping into the swimming pool he never uses, of course he never uses it—he’d just walked right into the water as though it wasn’t even a step down.

Where are you going, Francesca, he’d said, like I was so silly, to want to get away.

And I suppose he had a point. There’s no getting away, from him. I just have to hang there helpless in his arms, as his lips part and that razor sharpness grazes my skin. Every inch of me waiting for the worst feeling—the one the movies never suggest.

It’s like a crunch. His teeth slide into me and then there’s the strangest sensation afterwards … like he’s breaking my bones, somehow, even though I know he isn’t. There’s never more than two puncture marks on my skin, afterwards, and no side-effects apart from the lethargy.

But that first shot of pain, so intense it’s almost like pleasure …

It’s unbearable. It’s unstoppable. It’s like a side-effect in its own way, because even when I’m alone I can remember and feel it almost exactly.

But the pain right now is remarkable, even by those standards. It’s narrows my body down to that one bright focus point, until I have to do something unbearable like, gasp harsh and guttural at the ceiling, tears spilling in an entirely different way, down my cheeks.

This time they come like a reflex, with barely any sadness behind them at all. And if I say his name at the same time, well. Isn’t that like a reflex, too? Isn’t it like the begging I always do, before he sinks his teeth in?

‘Merrith,’ I say, because he’d told me it once, after the blood had made him lazy and satisfied. Vulnerable, I always think, but that’s not true at all. He just seems it when he cradles my limp body against his, and tells me things I’m sure he never tells anyone else. Everyone else thinks he’s Jimmy Brecker, but he isn’t really. He’s Merrith, just Merrith, as though he came from a time beyond surnames and Christian names.

Maybe he really did, I think, as my life flows out of me and into him. And though it’s painful, this is the part where a different sort of sensation starts to take over. A pulling sensation, like he’s got a hand on some thread inside me and he’s just easing it on through.

It’s as debilitating, in its own way, as the bone-crushing first bite. It turns my legs to jelly; it makes me faint and fearful of myself. Sometimes I almost drift off like this, and there’s the ever present terror that I’m never actually going to wake up again.

But there’s something else there, too. Sometimes I come around and I’m clinging to him in the same way he clings to me—like a lover, not a victim. One arm looped around his shoulders; a hand stroking down over the perfect curve of his spine. Every sense I’ve got so aware of my own body, as it turns to water in his arms.

By the time he’s done, I’m no longer standing. He’s holding me like this, with my pointed feet nearly all the way off the floor. And when he takes his first big breath—of the kind a little kid would do, after drinking too much lemonade—I feel his body shuddering against the whole length of mine.

‘So sweet,’ he says, once he’s capable of speech. ‘So sweet when you let me have you like this.’

And though I try to tell myself not to, I think of the dual meaning of have. Of course I do—it’s like a compulsion, after all this time of his hands and his mouth and the music, rich and strange. I sag against his shoulder and think of those liquid eyes of his, always searching through me like a hand sifting through pretty things.

‘My one,’ he says, and then he just licks long and languid over the still bleeding bits of me—everything about the move so tender that my mind immediately goes to animals, and the way they heal each other.

Is that what he is, really? An animal underneath, reacting to things in a blind, instinctive sort of way? And if so, is it really so bad if I do the same?

Because it’s perfectly true that I don’t know what I’m doing, when I push my fingers into his thick, dark hair. It’s like I’ve lapsed into that heavy state of unconsciousness, even though I’m still awake. I understand that I’m still awake, as I hold that suddenly warm and wet mouth to my throat.

Of course I expect him to resume that hypnotic pulling—or at the very least to keep licking me in that way I don’t like at all, I swear I don’t. But instead he makes this sound that I don’t recognise—as though I’ve startled him—and arches away from me. Gets my face in one long-fingered hand, so that he can look down into my eyes.

‘You want me to?’ he asks, and for a second I’m sure he means the other thing. The one that I never think of, when he gets his hand on that thread and pulls. But then he carries on in that startled and completely new tone, those eyes of his suddenly naked. ‘You want me to taste you?’

And I think yes, yes, but not in the way you’re imagining.

Of course I know it’s too late, then, for me. Like when I’d made the choice to try and catch him out, and his fingers had pushed against the invisible glass. I’ve pushed my fingers against an invisible barrier, and just kept on going right through to the other side, where my hands are full of his hair and my body is completely aware of all the things he never does.

In truth I’m not even sure if he knows what those things are, anymore—instead there’s just a hole in him, where desire and lust and pleasure used to be. It’s like knowing someone who never needs to breathe. At some point, you expect them to want to. You expect them to suddenly jolt with the memory of something that once kept them living.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even remember when I reverse what he’s been doing to me. He just hangs there in my arms, blankly staring, and lets me put my mouth on his. Lets me taste my own blood in his mouth, and come away just as he always does:

Streaked with red, stunned by the sensation of feeding.

But unlike him, I don’t let myself lapse into that oddly vulnerable state. I don’t tell him my real name—what would be the point? He already knows it. And I don’t let him curl against me, to chase away the confusion and hurt all over his face.

I just do it again, in all the different ways I can think of to kiss. Open-mouthed and close-mouthed and soft and wet. Then maybe all of those things together, until he does something that shocks me more than his vampirism ever did.

He kisses me back. He kisses me back, as though he does know how to breathe, after all. It’s just like riding a bike I think, deliriously, but there’s another simile just hovering on the edges of my mind. One I don’t want to think about, first, but then—isn’t that what I’ve been doing along?

I’ve refused to think about those hands on my back, roaming and running over me in the way they do again, now. I’ve refused to think about the song, like the sort of thing you’d put on if you wanted to seduce a girl. I’ve refused to think of the word one, and what it usually means in romance novels.

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

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

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

I do.

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

One that ends up on the bed.

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

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

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

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

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

Between my legs, I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until I say:

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to be human, after all.

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

I Am

Charlotte Stein

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

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

He’s biting his nails again, I see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And finally … the last ten days.

‘Where you test me for cracks.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I don’t let him see.

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

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

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

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

Just as I can no longer hide anything from myself.

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

To be my slut. To be my slave.

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

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

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

He looks like a skydiver on the verge of jumping.

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

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

‘No, no,’ I say. ‘Not on your feet.’

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

‘On your knees.’

‘You want me to …’

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

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

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

Like looking at his cock.

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

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

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

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

He’s started coming in his sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he’s gonna get it sooooo bad.

* * *

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

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

I want twenty-nine days. He wants thirty.

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

Not yet. Not yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s not the slave at all.

I am.

New Dress

Charlotte Stein

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

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

Yeah. He was doing something sexual in there.

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

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

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

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

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

Everything about him screaming, Come for it, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No,’ he says, after a while.

But it sounds like he’s lying.

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

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

‘You want me to talk about this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One that has no bearing on our relationship to date.

‘How did you make marks like that?’

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Lord, what am I doing?

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

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

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

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

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

And then he obeys, just like that. He kind of turns his head and won’t look at me, before bringing the paddle down so suddenly and so dexterously I almost miss it. Clearly, he’s done this a million times before. He doesn’t even let out a gasp this time, though I’m sure it must have hurt.

Which just makes me wonder about all of those gasps I heard behind the bathroom door, and how quiet he was really trying to be. I mean, it’s not as though I went far. I only called at the shops and he should have known I’d be returning any second. But he let me hear him anyway, making sounds he clearly doesn’t when he thinks things are more private.

‘This is really shocking behaviour, Brad,’ I say, and am stunned by how stern my voice is. It’s so stern, in fact, that he babbles in response.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I don’t mean to do it but I just have to, I need it. Work is so stressful at the moment and –’

‘Don’t make excuses,’ I say, like a hand rapping on a door. And even more remarkably, he falls immediately silent. Eyes still trained on something other than me. That paddle gripped sweatily in one fist. ‘Just admit it – you’ve always done this, haven’t you? It has nothing to do with work.’

I don’t know how I dare. I’ve certainly got no real idea if what I’m saying is true or not. And yet I want to, I want to, I need to say those words to him.

‘Yes,’ he replies – sullenly, I think.

His dark hair has fallen into his eyes and his mouth looks soft and sulky, and, oh, God, I don’t think I can take much more of him. He smells like cinnamon and apples, and he’s all raw and obviously aroused and I’m talking like this, I’m talking and talking and I don’t know who I am anymore.

‘Bend over the sink, Brad,’ I say, and, oh, how he moans in response. He moans and squirms and it’s as though every one of those little reactions connect directly to my clit. Any second he’s going to say something whiny like please no, I don’t want to, and, oh, dear Lord, I’m going to love it.

‘Bend over, and give me the paddle,’ I tell him again, in a colder voice.

And this time he obeys. He just hands it over to me, body violently trembling as he does so, those black-as-midnight eyes of his suddenly shut tight.

‘You’ve been bad,’ I tell him, which I’m sure is probably the hokiest thing a person can say in this situation. It’s a cliché right from the BDSM handbook, page one, paragraph one, line one.

But then, that’s where I’m at. I’m on the Beginner’s Pamphlet, still waiting to find out if the rules suit me. Because there are rules, aren’t there? I mean, I’m not supposed to really hurt him. Or what if that’s not the rule at all – maybe I am supposed to really hurt him. Maybe he wants me to reduce him to a blubbering, twitching mess on the bathroom floor, unable to sit down the next day without a reminder of me burning up through his body.

Is that the way it works?

‘Hold still, Brad,’ I say, and then I crack that thing down on him so hard.

Or at least, I think I do it hard. It certainly seems as though I do when I feel it whooshing through the air, and then the heavy connection of it with his gorgeous flesh. That connection spreads from him and back into me, all the way up my arm and into some heretofore undiscovered centres of my brain, most of which sizzle and spark and say things to me like: Slip a hand into your panties. Just slip a hand in and stroke your clit, while you spank him.

But I resist. I resist right up until the point where he says some sort of glorious, insane, magical word: ‘Harder.’

God, I thought I did do it hard. I can already see the mark I’ve made, tugging the pink of his ass back to a glorious crimson. But apparently, in the world of Brad Henderson and his thirst for corporal punishment, I’m just a wussy.

‘Like this?’ I ask, and this time I bring it down heavily. Not like a spank. More like a thud, a heavy dull thud on his perfect ass – one that makes my shoulder ache and my body judder under its pressure, as though I’m hurting myself as much as I’m hurting him.

I think I almost make the same sound he does, when it connects. A sob, thick and breathless but buried under the press of my lips.

Of course, he doesn’t try to bury his. He lets it out, so loud it reverberates around the bathroom and all the way through me. It spurs me to test out this newfound power, slapping him hard and fast with just the very edge of it, then slow and softer and heavier.

Both seem to make him shudder, but the ones that connect more solidly provoke a slightly different reaction. A lower note to his gasps, a hint of words in among all of them. And when I lean in close I can almost hear what he’s trying to say – a little fluttering of pleases and yeses and mores.

I think it’s the sound of those exhortations that finally pushes me to do something about the hot throb that’s taken over my body. Of course, I have to do it when he isn’t looking, but that’s not all that hard considering he hasn’t so much as glanced at me since all of this began.

His shoulders are hunched and I can see that his hand has disappeared to some place in front of him, so it doesn’t seem like I’m doing the wrong thing by sliding my fingers under the waistband of my skirt. Even though it completely feels like the wrong thing once I’ve done it. It feels like the dirtiest thing in the world, and the pressure of the material against the back of my hand doesn’t make it any better.

But it does make it hotter. I can hardly reach, and my other arm is aching from the swinging I can’t seem to stop, but the moment I get close …

My body thrills before I’ve even found and rubbed over my clit. Just the feel of my soaked panties, and the swollen curve of my outer lips standing out so stark through the material … it’s enough to make me miss the next spank.

I think I catch him on the backs of his thighs somewhere, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s groaning now, really groaning, and, beneath the steady, flat rhythm of the paddle hitting his flesh, I can make out another, slicker one.

He’s jerking off, while I mark him and masturbate to the sound of his voice.

‘Oh, God, yeah, just like that,’ he tells me, and I don’t know what’s more blissful about it. That he’s so desperate when he blurts out the words, or that I now know I’m doing it exactly right. Somehow I’ve hit upon the perfect pace, the perfect ferocity, and after a second of striping him almost black and blue with my little paddle he lets out this glorious sound – all long and drawn out and so thick with lust.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and I don’t mind admitting that it sends a rush of pleasure down through my body. I’m still barely touching my clit, fingers rubbing in some fumbling way at the edges of my sex, but I think I’m going to climax anyway.

I can smell the sharp tang of his come in the air, and when I let the paddle clatter out of my hand it’s all I can do not to grab him. There’s so much I want to feel and lick and touch – the streaks of perspiration on his back, where his shirt’s riled up. The mess he’s obviously made of himself, somewhere just out of reach.

And most of all those marks, those searing red marks. I can almost feel the heat radiating off them the second I lean in, and, though I know I shouldn’t find it so, his wince when I press against him is exquisite.

It makes me think of him clenching his teeth, tensing his fists, biting down hard. And all of these things push me until I’m suddenly beneath the wet material of my panties, stroking over everything that isn’t my clit.

If I touch myself there, I know I’ll die. At the very least, I won’t ever be able to go back. Bad enough that I spanked my roommate until he came all over his fist. Masturbating with the thought of that bright, brilliant pain in my head is a step too far. Anyone would know it.

But as usual, I don’t.

‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Come all over me. Get yourself off.’

How strange that this is the first time I’ve ever heard him say something truly dirty. But, oh, how sweet it is, how like the same sort of permission I gave him only moments before. I arch against him to hear it, just one finger stroking through my slick slit until I find that swollen little bead.

And then I give in; I give in and rub over it with my face pressed to his still heaving back, that heat pouring through me and under me and over me. My orgasm is so fierce it feels like pain, like someone striking hard on my exposed flesh, and when I call something out it isn’t his name.

‘Thank you,’ I tell him instead, though I don’t know what I’m thanking him for. Didn’t I give him something, after all? Didn’t I hurt him in just the way he wanted, and needed, and so desperately longed for?

I guess I did, and yet I’m the one sobbing into his back. My legs won’t hold me up, the pleasure won’t stop pulsing from that single point beneath my working finger, and it’s in this moment that I realise what he has given me.

A new dress, I think. A new dress, made of silk. And, oh, it’s perfect.

Dancing On The Edge

Charlotte Stein

He says it in the middle of talking about something mundane – like quotas or reports or that meeting we all had last Tuesday. We’re just sat here at the bar, and Johnson’s gone to the toilet, and in that tiny moment that we’re alone he puts his lips too close to my ear and murmurs the words: ‘If you come upstairs with me once we’re done here, I’ll lick your clit until you come all over my face.’

They feel hot, up that close – and not just because of the content. I can feel his steamy breath, rubbing against the sensitive whorls of my ear. And I get a heated hint of his body, too, as he invades my space.

I don’t know how to react. A second ago he was Michael Turner, rather quiet and sort of uninteresting colleague. Now he’s a guy who propositions girls by using a word I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say before. Not even in bed. Not even when the guy in question is actually touching me there.

Though, come to think of it, even that’s rare.

But this is rarer. I feel like he’s already done the deed, before I’ve even taken him up on the offer. My clit is suddenly huge, immense. It’s eating the rest of my body in pulses and tremors, and all of them make me realise something startling.

It doesn’t really take a lot to make me come. I could come like this, while staring straight forwards at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. I can see him just to the left of me, toying with his glass of Scotch as though nothing was said – but then he glances up just a little and our eyes meet around bottles of absinthe and mint liquor, and I know.

I know I could come if he just breathed on me wrong. I’m primed like an engine; he’s said the magic words and kickstarted a libido I didn’t previously have. Usually I’m bored, restless, I have to work for it, push for it. I’m always on the edge and never all the way over.

But that’s not the case now. Why didn’t I notice those eyes of his, over morning coffee and dull chitchat? They’re like neon lights, lowering on the front of a predatory sort of car. Something slick and close to the ground, ready to run me down. And his mouth … oh, his mouth.

It’s like someone pressed a blade to his face. They carved those cut-glass cheekbones, and then finished off with a slash just above his chin.

Which is all just a way of saying that he’s stunningly attractive, though I’d never quite seen it before today. I guess I’d passed him by in the same manner I pass by most handsome men, sure and certain in their uninterest, only concerned with what they have to say. Maybe it’ll be something good, like today.

Though usually I’m just hoping for anything at all. From anyone, ever. A word, a sign that I’m alive. A hand on my thigh as nonchalant as a back pat, just before he slides away.

Of course, I know where he’s going. He’s headed to that mythical upstairs – the one I can’t help picturing as a bin for this bar. Beer crates on the stairs, boxes in the bare living room, naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling.

But Johnson tells me otherwise. He asks me if Michael has called it a night, and then he points to the place I was offered. ‘Maybe we should head off too,’ he says, while I reframe the place above with this new information in mind.

Now it’s not a fuck on the stairs, amidst the rubble. There’s no splinters digging into my ass, from stripped floorboards in an abandoned apartment. I think of how he seems, instead, and what the home of a man like him would be like – pristine, elegant, sharp. The way his suits are, the way his haircut is, the way he’d whispered those words in my ear.

So slick, I think.

I should be angry.

Instead, I’m walking up the stairs.

I wait until Johnson’s bid me adieu outside the bar, and go through the motions of leaving as he does so – putting my gloves on, bracing myself for the cold. And then once he’s gone I turn around and go back inside, to the red door he went through at the rear.

No one tries to stop me. No one says anything to me at all, so maybe he does this all the time. Invites a girl through this red rabbit hole, to a flight of stairs that couldn’t be more different from the ones I’d imagined.

Everything is white, bright white, and at the top there’s another door, left ajar.

Beyond, his apartment is the same. Clinical, almost, as though to take back the invitation that was so easily extended. Now I’m supposed to feel like an intruder, in the land that clean built. I’m a filthy whore who’d like her pussy licked, invading his precious space.

Though it’s not this thought that makes my face heat. It’s how he catches me when he emerges from some space-age kitchen. I’m in the process of fleeing, before any of this solidifies and turns into that thing I did one time.

‘Leaving so early?’ he says, and my cheeks nearly flame. I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar, then compounded my error by vacating the scene of the crime. Now I have to be punished, I suspect, though his and my ideas of punishment differ greatly, it seems.

I think of spankings, or maybe a brutal fuck bent over his couch. He thinks of the promise he made me, and kneels down to shove my dress up over my hips. No talking. No asking. I’ve never been so bare before any kind of discussion has taken place.

And it gets worse. He looks up at me with this shark’s grin on his gorgeous face when he sees my panties: plain cotton, humiliatingly girlish. And once he’s judged them suitable, he hooks two come-hither fingers into the elastic.

Then drags them down. Slowly, slowly, as though my shivering shame and uncertainty are worth savouring. And I can tell he is savouring it, too, because he doesn’t look at my newly exposed pussy, sparsely furred and already gleaming with the evidence of my arousal. He looks at my face as he inches them down, then once they’re on the floor he lifts my feet to free them.

Which has the bonus of spreading my legs. Once my feet are back on the ground, they’re noticeably further apart than they were before – and he’s still staring, too. He holds my gaze long after he’s leaned in to plant an open-mouthed kiss on my split sex, all wet and warm and too much, too much.

I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t watch someone watching me, as he slides his tongue between my swollen lips and licks whatever he finds there. I just can’t. He isn’t even tender about it, holding back until I can take it, delicately forging forward when I urge him on. He grasps great handfuls of my ass and holds me there. He mashes his face right into my spread slit, and once he’s as deep as he can go he licks over my slippery hole like he’s searching for a way in.

Which he finds, easily. Of course he does. He’s so greedy I’m surprised he hasn’t lost his way down there, so eager for more that he’s forgotten the breadcrumbs to get back. It’s like he’s drowning inside me, and when I make a startled sound he only forces himself deeper down.

He finds my clit and really rubs it, in a way I didn’t think was possible with that particular appendage. I thought it had to be a thumb, for it to feel like that – or maybe some sort of toy of the kind he most likely has. He’s that kind now, I see.

He’s the kind who forces me to stand still while he works his tongue back and forth over my clit, until I’m moaning. I actually moan, even though we don’t really know each other and haven’t properly spoken before now.

Our first real words to each other are cries of stunned pleasure and feral grunts of satisfaction – the former from me, the latter from him. Of course the latter’s from him. I can practically see the triumph in his gleaming eyes, as though this is all some strange sex-based revenge for wrongs I didn’t know I’d done to him.

He’s going to give me orgasms until I’m sorry for dressing him down in that meeting one time – even though I never actually have. We acknowledged each other at the photocopier, once. We saw each other in the bar downstairs, and conspired in the awkward camaraderie of colleagues who don’t really know each other.

And it all somehow led to this.

‘Oh, God, I’m coming,’ I say, because I have to. It’s so shocking that voicing it is a requirement, not an option. My legs are trembling, trembling, trembling and it’s kind of like he’s twisting something, lowdown in my gut. And then he takes my so-swollen clit between his teeth and that’s it.

I make a noise like an animal dying. I grunt the way he did, five seconds ago – guttural and unfettered, full of a kind of satisfaction I’ve never felt before. This is what going over the edge easily feels like. This is what pleasure is.

Something that makes you sob, even though you don’t want to.

Though it seems that he isn’t satisfied with this. I’ve not given enough. I’m not the kind of mess he was hoping for. He wants to reduce me to rubble, I realise – which of course only gives credibility to that whole revenge-based idea.

But the thing is … it doesn’t feel like revenge, when he carries on making these wet, nearly unbearable circles around my clit. It feels like he’s simultaneously bringing me down from the most gut-punching orgasm of my life and winding me back up into another.

It’s almost good. It’s almost not. It’s just right on that glancing edge, perfect and blissful and nearly too much.

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

From incredible orgasms.

‘Stop,’ I tell him. ‘Stop.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s just too easy.

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

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

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

‘Again,’ I tell him. ‘Do it again.’

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

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

And then hold hands, as we ascend the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

I should have known.

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

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

Heat

Charlotte Stein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As though that’s perfectly reasonable.

He even makes it sound reasonable.

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

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

He’s the giant in question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why isn’t he saying anything now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stop, I think. Don’t, I think.

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

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

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

How disappointing.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of the kind Hunter then lifts.

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

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

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

I don’t know what to do with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thief

Charlotte Stein

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

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

It’s too late, now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of how he actually is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I’m doing it, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve made myself a thief.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like that. Like it’s nothing.

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

He’s also stroking his cock, as he fucks himself with those two slick fingers.

I could do the first part, right? I could stroke my clit, as he does this frantic and extremely lewd thing on his bed. It’s getting almost impossible to resist, because I’ll be perfectly frank: I’ve never seen a man behave the way he’s doing.

And it’s electric. It’s like watching someone shape-shift into a different creature, right before your eyes. He’s groaning far louder than he did before, rocking against those pumping fingers in his completely stretched open hole. His hips are jerking up to meet the hand he’s got around his cock, all rough and jerky; it’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined, even in my most lurid fantasies.

But it’s also far more compelling than any of that stuff. My hand has crept to my own breast, without my permission. I’m almost pressed to the slats, so greedy for more suddenly, so desperate to see what it looks like when a man fucks himself like this. When he comes from the feel of a finger stroking over his prostate and a hand rubbing roughly over the head of his cock.

Though, when it happens, it’s something of a disappointment. Not because it isn’t glorious – because it is. He grunts so loudly and so forcibly it’s like he’s trying to expel a demon out of his own body, and the long slick ribbons of come spurt out hard enough to touch the underside of his chin. And it’s not as though I’m short-changed in the length department, either, because the whole thing seems to go on forever. He works and works and works those fingers inside himself, eking out every last drop of pleasure from his orgasm.

It’s amazing. Only, once it’s done, it’s done. That’s it. My weekly moment of something wicked is over, and I have to do the furtive, silly thing now. I have to sneak out while he’s in the bathroom, and bury myself under the covers on my bed.

I have to pretend that I don’t like this, that it doesn’t mean anything, that I’m not a bad, bad person for intruding on someone’s most private moment. And, though all of those things have their own little frissons of illicit pleasure, they don’t have anything on actually being a part of something.

Even if I’m not really a part of it at all.

* * *

The third time isn’t just on purpose any more. It’s practically a pattern, a routine that we’ve struck up without his knowing it. I wait inside his closet at a certain time. He comes in and peels off all his clothes.

And then I hold my breath, in anticipation of what he’ll do next.

Of course, I’m expecting something big this time. Last time he fucked his own ass until he came all over himself, so it’s going to have to be something spectacular. Though, I have to say, when he finally does something …

It goes beyond even my most insane and perverted imaginings. So far beyond that I cover my face with my hands the moment he does it, as though this is the thing I can’t bear to see. I can’t watch this, I can’t. Even if he clearly thinks I can.

‘You can come out of there now, Susie,’ he says, as loud as a gong. As loud as my world ending. He’s naked and he’s poised on the verge of doing his usual thing, but suddenly I am a part of it – real and whole.

And I don’t know if I want to be. I’m not sure I can be. I’m just not built that way, I’m not prepared for something like this. I thought he hadn’t known at all, but clearly he had.

He knew, and yet he did those things all the same.

‘Susie,’ he says again – so much more forceful than he is usually. Of course it’s shameful that this excites me, but I guess I can no more help that than I can help all of the things I did.

I watched. I intruded. I stole. And now it’s time to pay the piper.

‘You’re really not fooling anyone,’ he says, at which my face flames red. I mean, I know I’m not fooling anyone. That wasn’t my intention – to fool. And yet somehow I’m not leaving the closet.

As though I could just melt into the walls, if I stayed here long enough.

‘Come out, and we can talk,’ he says.

But I’ll be honest. I think he’s lying. I don’t think he wants to talk at all, and, even if I tried to pretend as much, his nakedness is an awfully big clue.

One that gets bigger, when I finally step out of his closet.

He’s hard. Of course he is. If I’m excited, then he’s got to be, though I’m not sure why I come to this conclusion. Apart from his thick stiff cock sticking up between his legs, he’s as implacable as ever. He watches me with those cool still eyes for what seems like an age, before finally breaking the tense silence.

And, oh, God, he doesn’t go with what I think he’s going to. No accusations, nothing about what I’ve done. Just that crisp voice, and a number of words I don’t want to hear.

‘It’s my turn now,’ he says.

Of course, I think he means I’m going to fuck you. But then he just sort of takes hold of my sides and steers me in front of the television, before sitting back on the bed. Eyes on me at all times, as I stand helpless before him.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he asks, and I suppose I know then. It’s fairly obvious, I think, though I can’t quite bring myself to do it without some final say-so from him. He’s been dictating this thing all along, so why should it be different now?

Even though it is, it is.

‘Take off your skirt. Then I want you to put your hand inside your panties,’ he says.

I try not to moan in despair. I know he’s serious, but still some part of me hopes it’s all just pretend. I dreamed this, I never did any of this, I’m not guilty, your honour.

Though, for someone innocent of all charges, I seem to take to my punishment pretty quickly. Too quickly, I think, as I slide out of the second-to-last barrier between us. And then of course my face heats past red and all the way into some unbearable level. My legs don’t want to hold me up; my clit thrums wildly between my legs.

And when I just barely stroke over it – hand struggling within the confines of my underwear – I almost lose every part of myself in the pleasure. I gasp, I shake, I think about saying his name. I think about giving myself over to something for once, and almost do. Almost.

‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘Touch your wet little pussy.’

And then almost becomes definitely.

I’ve never heard him speak like this. In truth, I’ve hardly heard him speak at all. Once, we had a conversation about a book we both happened to be reading. We’ve exchanged pleasantries, and shared mundane details about our day.

But never like this. Nothing like this.

‘Stroke your clit,’ he says, and I almost faint right there on his carpeted floor. It seems like a miracle that I not only manage to take in his words and understand them, but that I also obey him without question.

I slide my finger through my embarrassingly – and loudly – slick folds, searching out that little swollen bud again. And when I really and properly find it, God, when I find it … it doesn’t feel like a part of me any more. It feels like some other, secret thing I’ve uncovered, some new centre of pleasure that shouldn’t actually exist.

A burst of thick sensation goes through me, as good as an orgasm but not quite all the way there yet. Despite its intensity, I know there’s more to come, but, Lord, I don’t know if I can take it.

The sense of which gets worse when he tells me to do other things.

‘Do you know what I want you to do now, Susie?’ he asks.

No, I think, in reply. No no no. Though, in all honesty, I’m not sure I’m actually answering the question. I’m just shoving a refusal out there, with the mind powers I don’t have. No no no, please don’t do this. Please, I can’t.

But he isn’t listening.

‘I want you to take your panties down, turn around and bend over.’

How is it possible that I’m still standing? I don’t even know. And I definitely don’t know how I manage to obey him. It seems like an almost monumental effort, one that gets bigger as I wriggle the material clumsily down over my shaking legs.

I turn around and face the television that remains resolutely off, with thoughts of what this means flooding my mind. If I bend over for him, I can never go back. I’ll always be this girl who spied, and then took her humiliation. We won’t be casual acquaintances any more. We won’t share little breakfast anecdotes between mouthfuls of cereal.

We’ll just look at each other and know.

But I do it anyway. I bend right over, past the point of what he asked for. I don’t even crook my knees or do it to the halfway point – I just make a neat fold in the middle of my body, and clasp my ankles, for good measure.

Of course, he can see everything. I think I can see everything, and I’m back to front. I’m blind, down here, with just the cool air against every single part of my sex, to tell me what this looks like.

Wet, I think. And so, so exposed. I must seem like some split fruit, all open and juicy and rude, but he doesn’t say anything like that. He doesn’t make a disapproving sound, and get out his morning newspaper.

He stands up instead, and strokes me ri-i-ight there.

It’s not unexpected, but I jerk forward anyway. I stumble, almost, clumsy in this position with my fingers wrapped around my ankles. But that’s OK because, even though this is my punishment, he steadies me with those two big hands I promise I never noticed before. He holds me quite still, in the middle of his bedroom, and then just as I’m sinking into a kind of calm he slides the wetness he’s gathered up over something he shouldn’t.

This time, I don’t jerk forward. I sob instead. I think about telling him not to – because I’m sure he would if I did – but the thing is it’s tit for tat. I can’t say no now, after watching him do what he did.

I have to just stand there and let him stroke over my clenching asshole, with that one unbearably, mortifyingly wet finger.

Though, naturally, he doesn’t stop there. He waits until I’m poised on some trembling brink, sure I want to say no but unable to actually express that simple idea, and then he just kind of presses against me.

He pushes, he works, he is so diligent in his terrible little task. Oddly, it makes me think of him fixing one of the kitchen drawers – everything about his actions so neat and precise. Dusting things off carefully when he’d done, with just one smoothly running-over-the-wood finger.

And this is the same, in some way, because he isn’t rough. It doesn’t hurt. He just patiently maps it all out for me, stroking and urging and going about his task so carefully, until that one long finger eases all the way into my wound-up and too tight body.

I don’t mind admitting that it’s blissful. I really don’t. Somehow he’s made me do the rudest thing ever, but, as he slides that finger back and forth, I know one thing very clearly. I see it, the way I saw him not so long ago.

This is better than watching. Doing is better than watching. Why steal, when you can have?

‘Fuck me,’ I tell him, just like that.

And he does, he does. He covers that gorgeous cock of his with rubber, and then he simply slides all the way into the now slick and strangely tingling hole he’s only just vacated.

The one I’ve never actually had penetrated by anything, for reasons I can no longer understand. I can’t understand anything, in fact – least of all the person I was, who stood in the closet and didn’t do anything about anything. But it’s OK, now, because he’s filling me up. He’s saying things – words he would never have dared to before, like God I need it, I need this.

I need you.

Before he wouldn’t have said I’m in need of some salt, on my mashed potatoes. Could you possibly pass it over? He would have just sat there, waiting for something he didn’t think he could just take if he wanted to.

But he can, oh, he can. It feels like nothing I’ve ever imagined, to have him sinking so slickly into that tight little place. To know how excited it’s making him, how jagged it’s turning his thrusts, until finally he’s panting and jerking at me just like he did to himself. One hand scrabbling desperately for my clit, my cunt – anything to make me feel the way he obviously does.

I don’t need it, however. I’m already there, buzzing with every new and strange sensation. The sense of being filled past the point of bearing, the rudeness of it, the stroke of his thick cock over every last nerve-ending around that spread opening … it’s enough on its own.

I’m coming before his fingers have made a full circle around my clit. I’m coming just from hearing him gasp my name as though he really knows it, so breathless and exciting and, ohhhh, God, I can feel him doing it in my ass.

I don’t even know what to say about that. Or about any of this, if I’m honest.

Though I suspect we’ll think of something, over breakfast and his daily paper, in the morning.

Oppositeland

Charlotte Stein

I purposefully pick out the most mundane and unneeded items I can think of, as I stroll around the supermarket with a basket over my arm. Of course, no one pays me the slightest bit of attention because they’re all picking out their own mundane and probably unneeded items. Things like the mop they saw on some infomercial or a jar of capers that’s on offer they don’t want. They’ll never use them – the capers, I mean – though really what can I say about that?

I’ll never use them either.

Me and Artie, we don’t eat capers. We don’t eat macaroons either, but they’re in my basket too. They’re just the most perfect thing to buy to keep my mind on that drifting, unthinking edge, that I’m completely bored state of nothingness I don’t usually feel when Artie and I walk around the supermarket together. When we do it together, we plan meals and giggle over funny-shaped aubergines, and maybe at some point I’ll slip a hand up the back of his jersey because he’s just so gorgeous I can’t resist him.

Though I suppose you could say I’m resisting him now. This is the ultimate in resisting, really – like a test, I suppose – but it doesn’t feel like it, somehow. It feels like something else, instead, though I don’t let myself think about it too hard. Just that little glancing edge of it, I tell myself, then let my mind wander back to mundane considerations like capers and macaroons and super-mops. I pay for my items and stroll back home, forcing my gaze and my attention over shop-window signs and people I see on the streets, and once there I deliberately put each item away in various newly made spaces.

Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of Artie’s presence.

I am, but it’s a peripheral kind of thing. I bustle through the bedroom, collecting things I want to wear after my shower, and I can feel him just burning on the edges of my vision. I’m aware of him twitching and stirring towards the sound and smell of me, and after a moment he allows himself a little faint sigh. I can’t tell if it’s a discomfited sound or something else, but I don’t stop to find out.

I have my shower instead, taking time to remove any scrap of hair on my body and smoothing everything nicely as I go. Once I’m out, I dry myself and rub lotion on my various parts and then after a moment, I slide into the little silky slip thing Artie bought me for my thirtieth birthday.

Of course, it’s this action that almost gets me. I think about him running it all over me, bunched in his too-tense fist, telling me how he wanted to buy me something that would make me feel as sexy as he always thinks I am. Something that would feel glorious against my skin and make me near buzz for sex.

And it always does. My nipples stiffen as it flows over them, so cool and buttery soft. All I have to do to know how aroused I am is look down, and see them sticking through the material, dusky-pink and spiky-hard. I’m turned on because of shopping. I’m turned on because Artie’s in the bedroom and he’s still waiting, waiting, waiting.

When I walk back in there he turns his head blindly, searching me out from beneath the confines of the scarf around his eyes. His breathing is slightly unsteady, but I can’t tell if that’s because of the promise of things to come, or because he’s starting to really feel the effects of the state he’s in.

The muscles in his thighs are trembling – I can see them from here. And every now and then he cycles his shoulders backwards and forwards, as though the strain of having his hands tied behind his back then bound to the headboard is getting a bit too much. It’s putting pressure on his joints. The leather around his wrists is starting to rub against the tender skin there.

Though I’m not too worried, I have to say, because he’s still impossibly hard. Even after all this time – all the shopping and the shower and me getting myself ready – his cock is still sticking right out and almost up, all swollen and slippery at the tip. As I watch, a thin stream of pre-come slides down the length of his stiff shaft and I feel my cunt clench in sympathy.

I don’t let him know it, however. I don’t say or do anything to him at all. I just walk into the room and stand close enough to let him scent out the lotion on my body, the tang of my shampoo. Of course he doesn’t say anything – he just leans forward, slightly, as though he can get at me through sheer force of will. That leather leash straining against the bulk of his big body, the smooth solid rounds of his shoulders standing out starkly through the gloss of his skin as he works against them.

But it’s his mouth I like the best. He has a beautiful mouth at the most typical of times – soft and full in his otherwise perfectly masculine face – but now, here, it’s even sweeter. His lips are parted and moist, as though he’s been constantly licking them just to feel how good and dirty and slick his tongue feels, working over the only point of his body he can reach. And whenever he makes a little sound – a little strained sigh or a pulled-in groan – he ends it with his teeth pressed into that soft flesh.

I’m so wet by this point I can hardly stand it. Even the shower hasn’t taken the evidence of my arousal away – the arousal I built up without really thinking about it directly, as I walked around the supermarket and made my way back home – and now it’s starting to trickle down my thigh.

But I stiffen my own resolve and keep my voice light and disinterested.

‘Did you have a good time while I was gone?’ I ask, and his glorious lips move soundlessly around words he can’t say. They make me think of other things he could move them around, thicker things, more solid things, and then my clit jerks and more slickness spills down my slippery thighs.

I think I know what I’m going to do to him today. He always says go further, do more, make it a surprise, and I think this is going to fulfil those criteria very nicely.

‘You haven’t been bad, have you?’ I ask, and he mmpfs in discomfort when I trail a finger down over the solid mass of his body, to the straining stalk between his legs. It jerks upwards when I fondle it, briefly, and then again when I scratch at his tightly drawn up balls. Another second or two of contact and he’s going to come, and it isn’t just the leaking state of his swollen prick that tells me so.

He’s so breathless, and his whole body trembles, tautly. There’s a flush all over his cheeks and whenever I get even the slightest bit close, he can’t help moaning.

‘If you’ve been bad, I might have to punish you,’ I say, but he just strains further forward. As though instead of punishment I said pleasure and instead of tying him I let him go. It’s always Oppositeland with him, my Artie.

‘But if you’ve been good,’ I tell him, ‘if you’ve been good, I might give you a reward.’

The two are interchangeable, and he knows it. It’s why he tenses when he hears me moving towards the bedside cabinet, because I could be doing just about anything. I could be finding something to spank him with, something to whip him with. Once, he begged me to hit him with a belt, right across his back. Hard, he’d said, like you want to mark me, like you want to hurt me.

And I had obeyed.

But it’s always better when it’s secret and special and he doesn’t quite know what’s next. In fact, he’s trembling when I return to him. His whole body has drawn taut, and it gets tauter when I go back to him and run the thing I’ve brought over his only-just-hairy chest.

I think he can tell what it is. It’s pretty new and still smells latex-y, because I’ve hardly used it. Why would I want to use it when I’ve got his big thick cock at my beck and call, almost the equal of this toy in my hand? I don’t even understand why he bought it for me, though I’m getting a clearer picture right now.

His face has gone bright red, despite the fact that almost nothing humiliates him any more. I can grope him right between his legs in the middle of Marks and Spencer’s, and nothing happens. He just goes boneless and parts his lips, waiting for more.

‘You want it?’ I ask, and he groans loudly. Of course he wants it! I should have known. All I have to do is run the head of this thick latex cock over his mouth and he shudders like a struck dog.

He pokes his tongue out and tries to wet his lips, but it just means he ends up inadvertently licking the thing. Or possibly not so inadvertently – I don’t know. When I press it to his mouth he won’t take it in, but he’s not exactly stopping it either. As though most of him is screaming no, but some of him just wants to know what it would be like to take someone’s cock in his mouth.

Not that he’d ever admit it. Of course, I’ve suggested it to him before, in the panting heat of a marathon sex session. Usually when he’s on the verge of orgasm and too far gone to care, his cock lodged deep in my pussy and my finger somewhere rude, like between the cheeks of his ass. And he’ll squirm and try not to look at me, but I can almost feel what he’s thinking – what would it be like? What would it be like to have some guy in his mouth, thrusting until he came?

Like this, I think, and then I order him to suck the vibrator in my hand. As though I’m the guy, and I just can’t wait for him to do it. I’m hard and eager and wanting it, and he’s a wanton slut, almost but not quite willing to give it.

‘Yeah, take it,’ I say, and he moans around the thick length of the thing. He moans and grimaces and doesn’t want to do it, I can tell, but he keeps going nonetheless. He sucks even though I haven’t told him to, as though he can taste real flesh and feel real heat and wants nothing better than to please.

And it’s so … so … oh …

‘Yeah, you like that, baby?’ I ask, as my sex swells and more liquid trickles down my thigh. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take, in all honesty, but I’ll do it just for him. I always do it just for him. ‘Feels good, huh? Feels good taking that big cock in your mouth.’

He squirms and jerks forward, the tip of his cock just skimming the material of my nightie. Though I suppose even so slight a contact must feel like bliss, when you’re so close to coming.

Which is why I give him a spank, for his trouble.

‘Bad boy,’ I tell him and take the sex toy away – like a punishment, I think, though of course I don’t know it is one until he actually tries to go after it. His mouth opens and closes, searching and searching for the thing I took away, while my clit jerks and my body thrums and I can’t stop myself running a hand over my own nipple.

I have to. He’s the one tied up, but I’m the one losing control. I need to dig my fingers in for just a second, feel the flesh of my breast as it gives under the pressure. And once I’m done, I lick the tip of the thing he’s just sucked. Just to give myself a little taste. Just to know, for a second, what it’s like.

Before I move on to the next stage of the plan.

‘Move back,’ I tell him, and of course he obeys. He shuffles and wriggles awkwardly, until the leash bows and there’s space enough in front of him. Of course, the whole thing is still going to be difficult for him – he can’t rely on his arms, after all – but I can’t afford to care about that.

Caring is not the point right now.

‘Bend over,’ I tell him, as abruptly as I can. And though he hesitates, I only think he does because he’s considering how best to do this thing. Should he just lean, gingerly? Go face first into the mattress? I don’t think there’s enough length to the leash to allow the latter, but for a second I think he’s going to attempt it.

And then suddenly he’s shuffling on the bed again, rearranging himself until his legs are spread almost embarrassingly wide, body straining as he attempts to go on all fours – only without the two stabilisers in front. Instead, he’s just clinging to the leash behind him, muscles straining to keep him in a rough L-shape, shoulders creaking with the effort.

It’s only after he’s completely still and in position that I realise I’ve been holding my breath. Would he do anything, just absolutely anything, if asked him to? If I told him to?

I think he would and yet I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. It strikes me hard, in the gut – my husband’s almost total willingness to obey – and then once the feeling has dissipated I’m just left with this …

My almost total willingness to push him as far as he can go. It soars through me, so strong suddenly that I’m momentarily stymied. I’m not the cool girl, wandering oblivious around the supermarket. I’m just Clara Henley, clumsy and unsure.

Then less so, when he strains just that little big further and finds the head of the cock I’m still holding, with his mouth.

Of course, it’s entirely different when he does it like this. We’re on different but familiar levels now, me knelt on the bed in front of him. Him with his face so close to the mattress.

And also to the thing I’ve inadvertently put in almost the right place. I mean, it’s not as though I can avoid the idea. I’ve done it without thinking, and now it’s as though I really do have something thick and stiff between my legs.

Something thick and stiff that he’s now sucking. Because he definitely is, and I definitely like it. I know I do, even when I don’t exactly want to accept it. Words just come to my lips, and they make me accept it.

‘Yeah, suck my cock, you little bitch,’ I say, far fiercer than I was a moment ago. Far gruffer, too, though that sound has almost nothing to do with wanting to feel like a man, in some way. It’s because I’m aroused, so aroused at the sight of my husband debasing himself like this, and I just can’t keep my voice on the straight and narrow.

It goes up and down and left and right, then drops out altogether when he starts moaning around the thing I’m now holding like a raised fist. Jutting and rude and angry, almost, only pulling back on it when that soaring feeling inside me gets too much.

I could drown in that feeling. I could get lost, and worse – I think he knows it. He wants me to go past that point, but I can’t, I can’t. This is enough, just this.

Just slapping my husband’s face, when he gets too greedy with the cock.

‘Enough,’ I tell him, while his mouth moves soundlessly around words he doesn’t know how to say. Perspiration stands out at his temples, along his hairline, on his upper lip – but it isn’t unattractive. Quite the contrary. It spurs me on, in the same way his squirming, heated body does.

Though nothing gets me as good as his response, when I tell him plainly:

‘I’m going to fuck you, now.’

It’s like I’ve touched a live wire to his spine. He shoves into the bed even though he knows he’ll be punished for that. And he moans so loudly, which he definitely won’t be punished for, at all. I could never punish him for something that makes my clit swell and my cunt clench around nothing, every inch of me suddenly right on the edge.

I’m going to come, I realise, calmly. Detached from it, almost. I’m going to come without anything touching me, and all because of the thought of what I’m about to do. I’m going to slick this big cock with oil. And once that’s done, I’m going to finger his tight little asshole until he opens up for me.

Then after all of these frankly excruciating stages, I’m going to ease this big thing past that ring of muscle until he begs me for more.

Which he duly does. I knew he would. It’s like we’re connected too tightly, when we get to this place, every action familiar even though it’s absolutely not, in most other ways. My hand feels too slippery – I’ve used too much oil. I’m conscious, so conscious of hurting him, even though the sight of the plastic sliding past all of his resistance is enough to almost send me over.

And yet that feeling remains. Of knowing him and understanding. It sings in me as he chokes out that I should fuck him so, so hard. Do it, baby, do it, he says, but I wait right on the brink. I stay just like that, with the thick shaft only partway inside him. Oil dripping and dripping down over his spread thighs, onto the sheets. Onto me.

Then just as he’s ready to beg again, just as I feel it shuddering through me too, I push in hard. I draw the cock I don’t have back out again, searching for a rhythm, searching for what he’ll like, and oh yes when I find it … when he gasps for me …

‘There?’ I ask, but I don’t need to. He’s already shoving back against that feeling, chasing it. He’s already saying things I don’t dare to, like ohhh yeah. Make me come, make me feel it, give me that hard fucking thing.

Of course, I notice that he doesn’t use the word cock. But that’s OK, because somehow the evasion of it hits me harder. My clit jerks again, just once, as though there’s a little string attached from it to the shaft I’m now pumping in and out of him, and I think that’s it. I’m going, I’m sure. I’m doing it, without so much as a rub over that swollen little bud.

But no, there’s something more to come, yet. Something I need, without even understanding that I do.

It’s OK, however. He knows.

‘Oh God yeah, baby,’ he says, as he works himself back on the thing I’m almost not holding any more. As he shudders, and gets so close, he follows it with other blissful words like: ‘You love it, don’t you.’

It’s not a question, I know. It’s permission. Permission to love it, permission to love this. Permission to dig my nails into his back and sob something garbled and frantic like take it take it take it, as my orgasm blooms so low and thick in my belly.

It’s almost like pain, I think. And it’s too all over the place, too unfocused. It runs riot through my body, glancing over my clit and striking me hard at the tops of my thighs. I almost sink right down onto the bed. It’s so strange and not right and good all at the same time.

But I stay up, for him. I keep the twist I’m giving to the cock inside him, until I hear him choke the words out. The ones I can hardly believe myself, even though the thing is still happening.

‘Oh Christ,’ he says. ‘Oh fuck, are you coming? Are you really coming? Ohhhh baby yes, yes. I love you, I love you.’

And then he goes over himself in one big, incredible surge. Body stiffening under its pressure. Near soundless grunts of pleasure throttling their way out of him. Every one of his shudders running all the way down him, and out through me.

Because by this point, I’ve sprawled all over his back. I can hardly help it – every bone in my body seems to have turned to soup. I’m wrung out, done in, turned upside down. Of course I am. I’m in Oppositeland, where orgasms happen without touching and he gets fucked, not me.

Where instead of saying I despise you for making me wait like that, he murmurs, low and sweet:

‘You’re so good to me, my lovely girl. So good in every way.’

I’m not, though. Sometimes I’m thoughtless, and impatient. Occasionally I cry without warning, and won’t let him comfort me. Hell, there are even times when I can’t let him comfort me, when I can’t let him in, when I don’t know what to say a second after he’s told me he loves me.

But I can do this.

For him, I can be the person I pretend I’m not.

Falling

Charlotte Stein

I suppose I’ll be a fallen woman, soon. Of course everything seems respectable on the surface – he takes me out to tea and he tells my father there’s a chaperone, you know. There even is a chaperone, though mostly she seems to sort of fade away once we’re sat together in some secluded corner.

I suspect she’s a friend. A mistress, perhaps, though whenever I think of the word it sounds almost unbearably exotic. Too exotic for the likes of me, little prim Lyds Alcott, in my flowery dresses and cardigans and sensible shoes. I look so out of place in the restaurants he takes me to, like a plain daisy amidst the roses. Or perhaps something better than roses. Some flower I can’t even imagine, rich and vivid with colour and scent, petals too thick and the heart of it pulsing and pulsing.

This is how his world seems to me, though I don’t say so. I don’t say anything at all, really, because I don’t want him to know how small and gauche I am inside. How I want to finger the fur of his suits and how I marvel at the littlest thing he does, like the way he smokes. He smokes as though he’s done it for a thousand years, effortlessly, in rich curling plumes that emerge from between his parted lips in ways I’ve never seen before.

All I have are memories of sixth form, so close and yet so far away, girls lined up behind the greenhouse, plucking at their cheap little cigarettes. Spitting out puffs of smoke as though it were the height of sophistication, unaware of this secret world of champagne in shallow, narrow-stemmed glasses and jewels dripping off people like marvellous fruits, and Harrow, Harrow gazing at me with his still blue eyes.

‘Would you care for another, Lyds darling?’ he asks, but I know why. He isn’t being polite. He wants me to have another so by the time we retire to the hotel room he’s illicitly gotten for us I’ll be half drunk.

That is the way men of ill repute persuade naive young girls to part with their modesty. It’s the way naive young girls go from being such to being mistresses or fallen women or whatever it is you want to call it. But he should really know, funnily enough, that these terms do not scare me. In fact, I find myself welcoming them, I find myself just waiting for them to come, for the time I will no longer be Lyds Alcott and can at last become Lydia.

Perfect, poised Lydia, hard-hearted mistress of the exceedingly rich and titled Henry Harrow. She wouldn’t care whether Harrow loved her or not. She wouldn’t care about the path she finds herself on, so lost and alone in a world that can never be the way she longs for it to be.

The world is cold and hard and brutal, and dressing up in all the jewels and flowers in the world won’t change that.

‘Should we retire?’ he asks, and I say yes. It’s time to retire.

We go up to our room and I slip a hand over his arm when he offers. He probably thinks I need support and I suppose in one way I do. I’m about to lose my virginity and even when I squint at that fact hard-heartedly, it’s still a daunting prospect.

His thirty-eight seems very far from my eighteen, suddenly, and I find myself thinking of all the things he must have done in his long life. All the strange things with women far more worldly than me, that all appear behind my eyes as a succession of contorted limbs and sliding, slippery bodies. Everything is golden in these imaginings and yet somehow still nightmarish, and when we get to the room and he slips out of his jacket, I’m suddenly afraid.

Of course I understand the practicalities of the thing. He’s going to take off all my clothes, and then all of his clothes, and then he’s going to climb on top of me and push his great thing into my body. And it is a great thing, too, because I saw it once when he was changing, through those modern underthings of his and with the suspenders clipped to his socks down below – so funny, somehow.

Though it’s not really so funny now. I go to the bathroom and stand in there for ages, unsure as to whether I should take my dress off or not. He hasn’t said anything but then again he so rarely does. He’s not a big talker, Harrow. The most I can remember him saying to me when we met in the gallery was ‘Well, what are you doing here?’ As though he could hardly comprehend a single girl, alone, looking at the paintings.

I decide to go back out again in my dress. If he wants me to take it off he can say so, though when I do actually find myself in the bedroom with him something seems not quite right. The room is lovely – of course it is – with a set of double doors that go out onto a balcony, you know, and he’s opened one of them so the night air can come in a bit.

It’s almost … I don’t know. Romantic, I suppose. Though it seems like a silly word. Especially as he’s laid in bed just waiting for me, in his pyjamas of all things. He’s not even reading the paper or looking over some work thing, either, as I had expected. He’s just gazing at me and I feel awkward, suddenly, though not in the way I had thought I would.

It’s a warm awkwardness. Like lying in the sun by a riverbank, on a summer’s day – though I can’t say what’s awkward about that.

‘Come on then, Lyds,’ he says and pats the bed beside him, as though it’s nothing. As though I’m just a big silly and, oh, it makes such a feeling engulf me. It rushes through me so thick and hard I can’t help blurting out: ‘Aren’t you going to take my clothes off, first?’

Even though saying something like that is just ridiculous. He even laughs and he so rarely laughs. My face burns red to hear it.

‘No,’ he says, and that’s even worse somehow. What does he mean, no? Why does he sound so incredulous, suddenly – and he’s still smiling, too. ‘Though you might be a touch more comfortable in your nightie, don’t you think?’

It comes to me in a shameful flash, then. I haven’t brought a nightie. I didn’t think I’d need one and, oh no, I’ve made some sort of fatal error. I’ve cast myself as some sort of loose and very naked woman before he’s even made me one, though I suppose he might be joking. Is he joking?

His expression softens and he says, ‘Come on now, old thing.’

Which is very strange indeed, because in actual fact I’ve never felt younger. I go to the bed and climb in, with my dress still on and my stockings still on and my hair still done – though it’s not as though I have it all curled and set the way most of the women around here do – and he puts an arm around me, almost like a friend would.

And then he kisses me, in a way a friend definitely wouldn’t.

Of course he’s kissed me before. I didn’t expect him to at all – when he first invited me to the gallery’s new exhibit I thought he meant as a kindly patron, you know. I didn’t expect him to pull me to him and press his mouth against mine with a good deal more passion than any of those sixth-form boys ever did.

But it’s different now, because we’re in bed together and this is it. This is what he’s been angling for all of these months, in all of those almost-chaste kisses in his car outside my house, and his polite conversations with my father, and his little presents of the kind I’m sure many mistresses receive. Little trinkets, pairs of shoes. Books, hundreds of books.

‘Lydia,’ he says, as he kisses my throat, and I think at last. At last I’m not ‘dear’ or ‘darling’ or ‘old thing’ or ‘Lyds’. I am Lydia, and he has his big hands on my waist and his body almost pressed against mine and I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

Should I unbutton his pyjamas? I’m not sure that’s the done thing, but, oh, I can’t help wondering what he really looks like, underneath. I think he’s hairy, because I can sometimes see the hair over his undershirt. And I know he has a broad chest, because it fills out every suit he wears.

But when I go to touch him, he pushes my hands away and says, ‘No, no, darling,’ which quite puts me out of sorts. I hardly know what to think now, and even more so when he clasps my breast quite suddenly, through my dress, and says, ‘You’re very beautiful, Lydia.’

What on earth is he talking about? I’m not very beautiful at all. I’m sort of ordinary and mousy, even if those words sound very convincing in his low, chocolatey voice. He has a lovely voice really, a voice that makes me shiver, and, here, in the darkness, it sounds even better.

I feel certain he’s about to tell me how he’s going to make love to me now. And I suppose, in a way, he does just that. He slides a hand down over my body, slow and syrupy, and when he gets to the waiting place between my legs – the place where I’m burning, just absolutely burning – he says, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Have you ever touched yourself?’

I have no idea why. I don’t know what he means at all, though I try to force myself to say yes. Yes, of course I have. Hasn’t everybody? But instead I have to go with no, because what if he asks me a more detailed question? All I could say is Once, I thought of you so much I pressed something between my legs hard enough to hurt.

It doesn’t seem like much of anything, really.

‘Never here?’ he asks, and then he strokes me just once through all of that material, and I can’t answer. It feels as though I’m huge down there. As though I’ve grown three sizes.

‘Shhh,’ he says, and this time I know why. I’m all … I don’t know what I am. He pushes a hand underneath the material of my knickers and the whatever-it-is gets worse, because I’m wet and he can tell. He strokes through the folds of my sex and when he does he makes a little satisfied sighing sound, as though he’s not Harrow at all any more. He’s someone else, someone who talks a lot and breathes out in this soft, pleasurable sort of way, while his fingers circle my little bud.

I don’t mind admitting: it feels like dying. I can’t help bucking up into his working hand, even though I’ve always had a very clear picture of how I would behave in these sorts of situations. Rigid, I thought, and sort of indifferent, like a doll he’d decided to make love to instead of a real person.

But I don’t feel like a doll now. I’m squirming, actually squirming. He says, ‘Ah yes, my lovely Lydia,’ and I don’t know what to think, I’m not sure how to react, I’m clutching at his arm and there’s this really deep, full sensation building between my legs.

One that gets bigger when I move and bigger yet when I don’t, until I’m sure I’m about to die.

Only I can’t do that, because if I do he will undoubtedly tell everyone. I can just see him now, stood there at my funeral like a posh paperweight, nodding sagely when someone asks him how it happened.

Well, he’ll say. It was a devilish business. I touched her quim with my hand and she dissolved into a fine paste. Quite awful, really. But what can you do about these fallen women?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I only know that it feels blissful, and sort of like I’m exploding, and then, oh then, oh no, he does it with his mouth as well as his hand. That can’t be right, can it? I swear to you, God, I don’t like it one little tiny bit.

Even in all the places where I do. Like behind my knees, where everything’s gone all fizzy and tingly. And low down in my stomach, where it pulses the moment he kisses me just there. Right in the place he had his finger, a moment ago.

I think it’s called a clim or a clat or something like it – well, that’s its real name, at least – but in truth it just feels like a little bead, and the more he kisses over it the bigger those pulses get. The more my body thrums and thrums and wants out of its own skin, until he puts a hand on my thigh and demands I stay still.

He has to concentrate, I suppose, because it’s all very complicated when you really think about it. The way my knickers are still bunched and twisted between my legs, one side of them pulled away so he can get at me. The way he’s using his fingers to spread me open, so he can kiss me and lick me all around that little hard shape, that little nothing that I’ve never actually thought about until right now.

I mean, I knew it was there. I knew there was something there. But it’s different when someone’s running a soft, wet tongue over it, so slippery and good. It forces me to do something worse than move around and make a nuisance of myself – a sound comes out of my mouth, as loud as a firework in this snooty little room.

But he doesn’t seem to mind that half so much as he minded the squirming. He doesn’t pop his head up and tell me to be quiet, in a tone as firm as his hand on my thigh. He doesn’t even jostle me, or slow the pace of the thing he’s doing.

Instead, he licks harder. Faster.

And now I think I’m really going to die. This is it. I’m done for. He’s too good at this – whatever this is – and my end is coming, even if it’s the kind of end I’ve often dreamed of, rather than the one I’d assumed would come to me, walking in here.

It’s a good end, I think. A dying-of-pleasure sort of end – like the ones the girls in the sixth-form toilets frequently talk about. They chatter about ‘mind-blowing’ and ‘awe-inspiring’, though really I don’t think they have any idea what they’re talking about.

Because my mind doesn’t go away anywhere, and my awe isn’t inspired. Instead, I think of the roller coaster at Blackpool, the one that makes you go up and down and up and down and when you get off you feel all jangled – and that’s what it’s like. These waves go up and down inside my body, and I can’t seem to breathe, and I go all tense, even though I’m sure I should be relaxing into it, or something.

And then after I feel sort of like a lunatic, because I’m shaky and not in full control of myself and he’s just staring down at me with his strange, still eyes. Everything about Harrow is so perfectly still, all of the time – so composed.

Why am I not composed? I can’t even be composed now, in the middle of sex.

‘Pleasant?’ he asks, and I think he means the thing that just happened. As in: Was it pleasant? But that seems daft, somehow, because of course it was pleasant. You’d have to be a fool to think it might be otherwise, and Harrow is no fool.

So why is he asking? Is this the one area in which he is not fully aware, fully in control, fully everything? I can’t imagine it is and yet he’s still looking down at me, waiting and waiting for me to say yes.

It makes me nervous. But it makes me something else, too. Something brilliant, I reckon – like a girl worthy of the name Lydia.

‘Perfect,’ I say, and for once I don’t feel as though I’ve said the wrong thing. I feel relaxed, and at ease, and still stuffed full of all of those bizarre roller-coaster sensations. They bolster me as he leans forwards and slides his hands back up my thighs, to catch on the elastic of my underwear and drag them all the way down and off.

Of course, I know how I should feel at that point. Naked and exposed and rude. Like those bathroom girls, flashing each other when they think no one’s looking.

But I don’t. I want him to see. I want him to see how wet I’ve gotten – because I have. I can feel it. It’s all over my thighs and between the cheeks of my arse, but when he looks me over – skirt hiked up, cheeks flushed, sex all slippery – he doesn’t look disapproving or mortified. His eyes are heavy-lidded, instead, and when he speaks his voice is hoarse.

I think that’s a good thing. In fact I know it’s a good thing, because when he unbuttons his pyjama bottoms and takes them off, I can see his prick pressing against his underwear. I can see how big it is, and how stiff – though I don’t get the full benefit of it until he’s completely naked, lying next to me on the bed.

And even then I’m not entirely sure what to think. He’s very big all over, though of course I knew that already. He used to row back when he was at university and, even if he hadn’t, I know he would have been an imposing man.

It’s the broad shoulders, I think, and the long legs. And maybe also his chest, which is all covered in rough hair and sort of like a barrel. Though none of these things adequately explain why I can’t seem to stop looking at him, because after a long moment I realise that’s all I’ve been doing – just staring at him everywhere, like a maniac.

It’s a good thing, really, that he doesn’t seem to mind. He just unbuttons my dress while I carry on trying not to look at him, and then when I get to his prick all thick and jutting up at me like a fist, he takes off my stockings, too.

It’s all very easily done, because of course my attention is elsewhere. My attention is on this urge that’s in me to reach down and touch him in almost the exact way he touched me.

I mean, wouldn’t he like it, if I did? He probably would. Most men like it, or so I’ve heard. The bathroom girls are always talking about hand jobs, and I know that they don’t mean arts and crafts projects.

They mean – you know. Giving a man pleasure with your hand. And now that I’ve looked at the thing I can see how someone could go about it – just stroke it up and down, or maybe rub it around the head a little, in all the places he looks slick and about ready to burst.

Only the thing is, when I actually do it – when I dare to reach out a hand and squeeze him, greedily – he doesn’t force me to carry on or grab the back of my head and make me suck on it, the way some of the girls said men do. He makes a soft sighing sound, instead, and then after a second says: ‘Wouldn’t you rather I make love to you?’

It’s the funniest thing. I really didn’t think he’d ask. I just thought he’d grab me and do it all over me, and when he doesn’t I am suddenly mired in indecision. This is the choice, I know. The choice between being a Good Girl or being a Bad One.

But I say yes anyway, because I want him, oh, I want him. I want him all over me and under me and inside me, with his mouth so usually cool and soft, now hot and fierce and hard. I almost flinch away from the feel of it, but not quite, not quite.

He’s too lovely to flinch away from. He’s too different, right now – like a great, unchained beast. And if I were to flinch away I think he might draw back into himself, into that cool, still place, and I don’t want him to.

I like it when he pins my wrists above my head. I like it when he sinks his teeth into the flesh of my breasts, making circles around the nipples that I’m sure will still be there tomorrow. Little bracelets all over me, little reminders of this new person he’s become.

It’s so strange – I thought I would be the one to turn into someone else. But he’s the one who digs his fingers into my hip, and makes chains of bruises all over me. He’s the one who breathes shakily when his prick slides through my spread folds, seeking the hollow of my sex.

And the moment he finds it, the moment he’s ready to thrust in and make me wicked for ever, he pauses. As though doing this – it’s one step too far. It’s too much. He needs to know first if I can bear it.

‘Do you want me to?’ he asks, and I can’t help it. I shove down on him, hard, in place of all the words I can’t say. My body just says them for me in one long frantic push and shove, until he’s buried to the hilt in my aching sex.

But he still doesn’t move. He keeps deathly still, hands still tight around my wrists, breath so hot and sultry on my upturned face. And then after the longest, most agonising moment in history he finally rolls his hips – just once.

But oh, so good. So slippery, so slick, and the feel of him spreading me open … I have to clench tightly around him, just to chase the feeling it provokes. To get a little bit more of that strange solidity, filling me. It’s almost like … almost like biting down hard to push away the ache in your gums, and I don’t know, I don’t know.

It’s too much. It’s not enough. I’m so hot I’m sure I can feel my skin blistering, but I can’t move away. I don’t want to. He’s above me, rocking slowly, and he looks like that new person again – the different one that I’ve never met before and can hardly bear to look at.

His eyes are hazy and his lips are parted, and when he does make words they’re very far from glacial. They’re the filthiest, rudest things I’ve ever heard, and they move through me as swiftly and as gloriously as the feel of his quickening thrusts do.

‘You’ve got the hottest, sweetest cunt,’ he says, and I go red for hottest and redder yet for sweetest and then practically purple for cunt.

I think that feeling is starting up in me, again. And it gets worse when he tells me how slick I feel, how tight around his cock, how beautiful I look spread out for him like this. ‘My lovely Lydia,’ he says, and I can’t help reaching up to kiss him then. It’s awkward with my hands still pinned and I’m not sure I’ve ever done it off my own bat before, but I try anyway.

Because I want to give him something back, for all of this. I never give him anything back – I realise that now. I always think about things a certain way, or imagine that I’m just a game to him, just a toy. But it isn’t like I’m a toy, right at this moment.

It’s like I’m Lydia, his lover. And when he asks me to tell him how it feels, how much I like it like this, like this, like this, I find I can tell him. ‘There,’ I tell him, ‘right there, do it there.’

Only I don’t say ‘do it’. I say ‘fuck’. ‘Fuck me there.’

And he does. He grips my hip hard and fucks right into my cunt, so rough I’m sure it should hurt. But it just gets sweeter and sweeter instead, all of these feelings bubbling up inside me and right out of my mouth.

‘Oh God, that’s so good,’ I tell him, but I don’t do it in a voice that sounds like my own. I do it in this high, tight, wavering sort of thing, and I press my face to his at the same time. Me – the girl who never so much as dared to take his arm, without him giving the say-so first.

But I don’t need say-so right now. My body’s in charge, electrified by the feel of him sliding all over me and inside me. The hand he’s got over my wrists goes to my hair, suddenly, gets a fistful of it and squeezes tight as his mouth moves against my ear. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, tell me how much you want it. Tell me you love me.’

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him say that word. Though happily, it’s also the first time I’ve ever been brave enough to answer him in kind.

‘I do,’ I say, in that strange tight voice. ‘Oh God, I do.’

And it’s true. It is. I may have fallen, but the falling has been into something else entirely – something I didn’t expect. I thought of hell, of disapproving looks, of all things terrible and wicked. But this isn’t like that at all.

It’s like drowning in pleasure. It’s like falling into him. My strange, cold Harrow, who has somehow turned into a different creature altogether before my very eyes – one who moans my name as that bursting thing overtakes him, too.

And I feel him – hot and slippery inside me. Hips jerking, eyes bright and dark with it, at the same time. It’s almost as though he passes it along to me, that electric, white-hot sensation, and I devour it greedily.

I’m still greedy with it now, after it’s all done. And I think he knows it, when he looks down at me – but that’s OK. I know it too.

I can never go back and, in all honesty, I don’t want to. I am a fallen woman, now, and oh, it’s bliss.

More from Mischief

A Mischief Novel

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.

Discover more about Sweet Agony

A Mischief Novel

Esther wrote down her fantasies about her tutor, but she never intended for him to read them.

Discover more about The Professor

Acknowledgements

You Already Know – Previously published in the Mischief collection Submission

Four For The Seesaw – Previously published in the Mischief collection The Swap

I Have You – Previously published in the Mischief collection Sex and the Stranger

Don’t I – Previously published in the Mischief collection Girl for Hire

Heavenly Shades – Previously published in the Mischief collection Underworlds

I Am – Previously published in Captivated

New Dress – Previously published in the Mischief collection Across My Knee

Dancing On The Edge – Previously published in the Mischief collection Come Play With Me

Heat – Previously published in the Mischief collection Holiday Affairs

Thief – Previously published in the Mischief collection Exposure

Oppositeland – Previously published in the Mischief collection In Her Service

Falling – Previously published in the Mischief collection My Secret Life

About the Publisher

Australia

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Canada

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New Zealand

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http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com