Authors: Charlotte Stein
It’s a blind instinct, like feeling for someone’s hand in the dark. I don’t know if he needs it and am kind of sure he doesn’t, but the words are there and I want to offer them.
‘You can say the safe word, if you want,’ I tell him, and for a second there’s such a stripe of vulnerability on his handsome face. It breaks him in two, right down the middle, in a way that makes me think he can never be put back together again. He’ll never be the same now, and I know he won’t, because after a second he just reaches down and gathers me up. He pulls me close to him, my back to his front. My face in his hands.
And then he kisses me, he kisses me, he kisses me. He puts his mouth on my mouth as though that is the transgressive thing, while his cock eases back and forth in that forbidden place. My hands are chained and my ass is getting the fucking of a lifetime, but this one act of intimacy is so much more searing.
And not just for him. Oh, God, it’s not just for him at all. It burns through me, too, completely unexpected and totally unprepared for. I’m not ready, I think, I’m not ready, but it’s too late for that now. The fire is already raging, whether I want it to or not. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s stoking the flames higher as I flounder in the middle of the inferno.
He doesn’t just kiss me – he covers my throat with one hand, in a way that’s so tender and adoring I can hardly stand it. Suddenly it’s me who wants to say the safe word, though it’s not for any reason I ever thought I’d need it for. It’s for messy feelings and gushing emotion, as brutal and shocking as any kinky sex.
I love him
, I realise. And as we stumble towards our pleasure – heaving and hauling and grasping at each other desperately – I realise something even more subversive:
He loves me too.
I jerk awake in the middle of the night, half-panicked and completely unsure of where I am. Everything smells so unfamiliar – like his cologne and whatever his cadre of servants wash his sheets in – and, when I reach out for something to reassure me, there isn’t anything there. All I can feel is the vast and empty acres of his immense bed, coated in sheets that make me think of skating rinks.
It’s too cold and too smooth, and no matter how hard I search I can’t find him. He must have got up, I think, but I’m not sure if that’s really the discomfiting part. In fact, I know it’s not the discomfiting part, because when I finally find him after seventeen years spent wandering in this bed desert, I don’t feel relieved.
I feel unsettled. Somehow, somehow … I’ve slept with him. We’re sleeping in the same bed, like a real couple who do real things together. And though I’ve done this before with other people, the idea of doing it with him is jarring. Did he even ask me to stay? I don’t think he did, and yet here I am anyway – like some interloper in his world of cold liaisons and crisp sheets. In a moment he’ll probably wake up and realise I’m still here, then point at the door like some silent harbinger of doom.
And the fact that he doesn’t is disturbing in itself. I creep closer and he doesn’t even stir. Apparently, my presence hardly troubles him at all. He’s quite content to remain asleep, no matter how close I get. I actually manage to lift the sheets off his shockingly naked body, and I’m poised for a reaction that never comes.
I think I expect his hand to lash out and grab my wrist, though I’m not sure why. Because this is the first time I’ve really seen him naked? Up to this point I suppose it had seemed like something secret … something he had to hide beneath his Prada suit of armour and his numerous rules.
But now I guess all of that is gone. He doesn’t need it any more. He can just lie here bare and exposed, while I gingerly peel back the covers like
I’m
the panicked one.
Even though I’m not. I’m absolutely not. I’m just thrilled and startled by the sight of him, so fleshy and solid and real. When he’s wearing his jacket and his shirt and his tie, you could almost believe that there’s nothing but steel underneath. He’s not made out of flesh and bone. He’s made out of moveable mechanical parts.
Only he’s not, he’s not at all.
He’s covered in rough hair, and much broader across the chest than his suit ever implies. Of course, he’s always looked big in it. I’ve known right from the start that he isn’t a small man. But to see it now up close and so naked … to see the jut of his collarbone like something found in a dinosaur’s graveyard … to see his thick but firm pectoral muscles and shoulders like an enormous yoke …
It’s unnerving. I feel like I’m sanding away the topsoil to get at the bones of some mythical creature beneath. Every new revelation makes me wonder what I’m going to find next, as though he doesn’t actually have ordinary legs below the waist. He has great furred things that bend the wrong way and possibly end in heavy hooves.
Like that story I read as a child, about a woman who takes some charming guy home with her for some casual sex, then realises too late who he really is: the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub. He’s just lurking there inside his man-skin, and when she least expects it he springs the trap and eats her heart whole while she’s still breathing.
Or at least I think that’s the way the story ends. I could be misremembering. It could be
her
who eats
his
heart while he still sleeps, and takes his power for her own.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that was the real finale.
So why am I thinking of another one? Why can I see her behind my eyes, with some great gaping wound in her chest? It’s a ridiculous image, really, when you think about it, and a stupid story that has no bearing on anything here.
Which doesn’t explain why I drop the sheets.
I mean, it’s not as if I’m actually going to find anything. He’s just a man, if ‘just’ is the kind of word you can apply to someone like Janos. And he’s definitely not going to leave me with a sucking wound in my chest, either literally … or otherwise.
I’m safe, I think.
It’s just that I don’t feel it. I’m all restless and agitated, and completely unable to lie back down. I have to get up just to keep this buzzing, brittle sensation at bay, but when I do it doesn’t get any better. I pad out of his plush bedroom and into a hallway that stretches on forever, and I’m immediately unsettled by the silence and the darkness and the sense that I’ll never find my way out.
I have to grope along the walls for a light switch that probably isn’t there – it’s voice-activated, I bet, or maybe connected to him telepathically – until finally I discover a door.
Sadly, however, it doesn’t lead to the relative sanctuary of a bathroom. It takes me to that enormous airy living space that spans the entire length of his apartment. I glimpsed it on the way in, but let it drift below the sex haze I was operating under.
And now it’s back in all of its opulent insanity, both better and worse than I ever imagined it. There isn’t much furniture, so I can’t get too nervous about some platinum-plated this, or some antique that. In fact, there’s so little in here you’d be justified in thinking the place was uninhabited. It looks rather like a showroom, with that smart and sharp-edged couch and the unobtrusive prints on the walls. Of course, they’re probably originals. Hell, for all I know they’re original Picassos.
But that’s not the problem.
No, the problem is the wall of glass that dominates the place – no curtains, no blinds, no fancy coverings that I’m too plebeian to have heard of. Just a great glossy expanse, with a view so glorious it’s almost intimidating. The entire city is beyond that wall, spread out in a mosaic of tiny lights and dancing shadows, near blue-tinged in the darkness.
And it’s beautiful. I never knew the city could be so beautiful, not even after watching a thousand movies that start off with this very thing – the aerial view of some vast metropolis, steely and cold and just waiting for something terrible to happen. But then in the movies there’s always a patina of lifelessness, as though London is just an unfeeling backdrop.
Whereas here it seethes with life.
It makes me want to cry, though I’m not entirely sure why. Because I’ve never really seen anything like this before?
Or is it because I’ve never been allowed to? I’ve gone through the motions for so long, I never realised my way was barred. I didn’t know I was so small in a world that has things like this in it – this view, this life, this everything – and it’s all so vibrant that emotion simply wells up inside me.
Yet I don’t even think he notices. What stuns and scares me is, to Janos, this is just a backdrop, always expected but never admired. He doesn’t have to admire it. He paid for it with money that means nothing to him, despite how much it could mean to so many people. It means something to
me
and I don’t even need it. I’m not hungry, or cold, or poor.
But I’m still five hundred levels below whatever this is – and I always will be. I’ll always worry that I’m sitting wrong on seats too expensive for my terrible clothes. And there’ll for ever be that moment when I wonder if I’ve made a gaffe, or stood in awe of something when I should have been blasé.
I can’t be blasé about this stuff. It makes me do funny things, like stand here in the middle of the night half-mesmerised by a view of the city. I even put my hand up to the glass, as though I might be able to reach through and touch it.
And then I hear his voice from the bedroom, and I react in an even stranger manner. I jerk around too fast, the way people do when they’ve been caught doing something bad. I had my hand in the cookie jar and he’s just seen me, and now I have to explain. But how to explain this? How to explain this feeling going through me?
‘I feel so small’ sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, even to me. And ‘the sight of the city moved me’ is even worse. His eyes will go bright with amusement, the way they do, and that smile will hook the corner of his mouth.
While I quietly die inside.
In fact, I think I’m dying already. I lumber back to the bedroom like there are weights in my feet, still thinking of views and gaffes and the way he lives his life. I just can’t shake that image of him walking past that window without so much as a second glance, even if I know that may not be entirely true. Perhaps he looks all the time, and I’m just being unfair. Maybe he takes none of this for granted at all.
Though even if he doesn’t, his effortlessness is still real. I know it is. I’ve seen it first hand, in the way he walks and talks and moves inside his own skin. He belongs in this world of wealth and power, no matter what I tell myself.
And I do not.
I can’t even walk back into the bedroom. I just stand in the doorway, gazing in at him like some urchin with her face against the glass – though, granted, his utter nakedness might have something to do with this paralysis. He hasn’t even got the covers over him any more. He’s just lying there with everything out on show, to the point where it seems deliberate. Apparently he’s grown tired of hiding behind his suits, and wants me to see all of him.
But now I’m the one who isn’t ready. I’ve grown used to him one way and don’t know how to process this other him, with his flagrant nudity and his willingness to let me sleep over and his soft words, spoken just as I’m about to stumble over to him. ‘Come back to bed, love,’ he says, and I’m stopped in my tracks all over again.
‘Love’, he said. And he didn’t do it in Hungarian, either. He said it in English, so I can’t possibly pretend it’s anything else, like with
szeretett
. I’ve come close to looking that one up a number of times, and always turned away at the last second. If I turn away, I don’t have to find out that it means adored or amazing. I can just imagine it means sweet piece of ass, and keep everything on an even keel.
Instead of it being like this.
This is like being on the bow of a boat as it tries to negotiate a tidal wave.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, but it’s impossible to explain. Most women don’t mind when their incredibly wealthy sex buddy decides that he’d like to be something more. In fact, isn’t that the goal, according to
Cosmo
? To get him to love you?
I’m sure it is, though I wish they’d at least offer advice on the other stuff. The surrounding stuff, such as
he’s massively wealthy and you’re not. Six easy steps to negotiating class- and money-based landmines.
Or how about:
confronting your feelings of unworthiness
… or even
being someone’s perfect amazing magical blow-job-giving girlfriend is not the be all and end all of existence
.
Yeah, I’d appreciate that last one. Of course it would be a bit of a steep change in direction for them, considering all the money they make from persuading women to feel bad about themselves. But I’m sure they could do it.
They could do it if they were in my shoes right now.
‘Should I ask again, or would you rather stay standing there in a state of what looks like abject terror?’
‘I’m fine, really.’
‘People who say they’re fine, really, usually mean the absolute opposite. And especially when their actions confirm this theory.’
He’s not just talking about the refusal to come to the bed, quite obviously. There’s also the way I’m picking at the door frame, as if there’s actually something there to be picked at. And every now and then I’ll pluck at the hem of this shirt I’m wearing – his shirt, to be exact. It’s seventeen sizes too big and smells so divine I could curl up inside its depths and never come out again, and yet I keep worrying at it anyway.
If there was a loose thread I’d pull on it until everything unravelled.
‘I was just … wondering …’
Oh, I know that’s not a good place to start. It leaves me too many options, and all of them so dangerous. If I go with the wealth thing, he might be offended. Or maybe I’ll be offended. Or worse: we’ll work things out and live happily ever after.
Lord, I just don’t know how to live happily ever after. I can see that now. It should have been clear before but it wasn’t, and so here we are in hell.
‘And what was it you were wondering about?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Give me a second to come up with something, OK?’