Authors: Charlotte Stein
Even though I’m not the sort who suspects anything, of anyone. I usually get it wrong in some spectacular fashion. I imagine someone’s watching me and it turns out they’d just noticed my skirt tucked into my knickers. I believe I’m loved and discover it’s just a mild affection. This is the usual way of things, and for a while it makes me pace the living room like a trapped animal.
I put it off and put it off, by turns angry at myself and almost pleased. I don’t care who he is or what he does, I think to myself. And then I call quite suddenly, when I least expect it, and thirty seconds later he calls me back.
The moment he does, a half-made circle in my head clicks closed. I guessed, and was proved right. For once, I was proved right. I wasn’t punished for imagining something amazing, only for reality to fall so very short.
He’s right there, on the other end of the phone.
‘Hello, Alissa,’ he says.
It’s practically his catchphrase.
‘Hello, Janos,’ I say.
His name sounds like something sacred and unspoken, in my mouth. My clumsy English accent stumbles over the J that should be a Y and the missing H at the end. It’s a travesty, really, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
‘You remembered,’ he says, as though I could ever forget now.
It’s burned onto my brain. I say it in my sleep.
‘Of course I did.’
‘I get an “of course”? Well. I do feel privileged.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘No?’
‘I’m hardly anyone important.’
‘And you believe that is how I weigh things? By importance? Perhaps I would like you better for being the undiscovered queen of a small country.’
‘It would make more sense.’
‘Then I shall make you one. You can be queen of my island.’
‘What island?’
‘The island that all men are, naturally.’
He sounds like he’s laughing, again, but I’m starting to think that’s his default state. Or at least it’s his default state with me. I make his voice go all rich and rolling like that, with a faint curl upwards on the end of every sentence.
‘That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I’d probably have to wave a gloved hand from inside an expensive car. Accompany you to functions I’m not prepared for. Wear outfits I look terrible in, with hats I can’t afford.’
‘That isn’t the sort of island I had in mind.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Then what? What sort of island are you?’ I ask, but I’m picturing it in my head before he’s even said. I see tangled jungles lit by a thousand lurking eyes … great jagged rocks turned black and nightmarish by a storm that’s always raging.
And me, swept up on the beach.
‘One where it’s always night.’
‘I can see that.’
‘And the ocean rages.’
‘My little boat hardly stands a chance.’
‘No, probably not. But you needn’t worry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I am waiting for you on the shore.’
‘In your suit?’
‘No, I’m never in my suit, on the island inside me.’
For some reason it makes my breath catch in my throat, when he says it like that:
‘island inside me’. I have to sit down on the edge of my bed, because my legs don’t want to hold me up any more. I’m almost in the same state I was before, at the office.
Flushed, famished, eager to get lost again.
‘Then what?’
‘Barely anything. A savage animal stripped to the waist.’
‘I think you’re just telling me things you think I want to hear, now.’
It’s not the first time I’ve wanted to say it. It’s just the first time I’ve been brave enough to – and not just because of how intimidating he is. I wanted to hold onto the illusion a little longer. I wanted him to be real, to honestly find me interesting, to wonder what lies beneath my cloak of invisibility.
But now it’s OK if he doesn’t.
Because I’m pretty sure he does.
‘I’m disappointed in you, Alissa. Do you really think I’d be so dishonest?’
‘I think you’d do a lot of dishonest things to get what you want.’
‘It’s true. I have. I do. And yet not with you.’
‘Why not with me?’
‘Because you are already sure everything is a lie. My only defence is the absolute truth. My only power over you is the truth. And if I keep telling it, eventually you’ll believe.’
My breath is caught again. Actually I think it’s been bound and gagged and sent before the firing squad. And when I finally speak, my voice is shaking slightly.
‘How do you
know
this stuff? Did Lucy tell you?’
‘Lucy?’ he asks, and my heart sinks before he’s even finished. ‘Who is Lucy?’
‘The woman you were supposed to meet that night.’
He laughs, low and startling.
‘So that’s why you were hiding in the wardrobe. It was not meant to be you.’
‘That’s right, it wasn’t. Which means everything you think about me is wrong.’
‘On the contrary. Everything fits a little better, now. I thought you’d merely changed your mind, but this is much more you. Slipping into the skin of someone else, just as I said.’
Damn him. Damn damn damn him.
‘It’s not like that. I wanted to find out what she’d been doing. That’s all.’
‘Are you sure?’
I close my eyes briefly.
‘Not even a little bit.’
‘Ah, that’s good. It’s good to hear your honesty.’
‘Then tell me yours. You said you would. How do you know me?’
He hesitates, then. His silence is almost as overwhelming as his words.
Almost.
‘Do you think you are so very hard to read? Perhaps no one has ever bothered before, and this has led you to believe you are inscrutable. But no, I think not. I think it is more likely that these other people are lazy. You take a lot of studying and so they let you pass them by, even though everything you do says so much. You hide when you don’t want to; you hang up when you want to complete the call. You deny the things you feel the most and admit what matters least. My little study in opposites, are you not? Heart on her sleeve, though she would say it was only the pattern of the piece of clothing she was wearing.’
He’s right again in many ways, but this time I only swallow thickly and try to change the subject. I try, even though it’s difficult. My heart is thudding through my body like an oncoming army, shuddering my foundations as it goes.
‘Maybe you should tell me something about yourself now,’ I say, despite knowing what path those words are putting me on. It’s the path that leads to him, not away. And worse: I think I like that this is the case.
I shiver strangely when he answers.
‘And what would you like to know?’
‘Anything.’
‘Will you tell me anything in return?’
‘You mean you don’t know it already?’
He laughs that low laugh. It’s almost a growl, but not a threatening one. More like the sort you’d hear as an animal sleeps, and dreams of defending his home.
‘I don’t.’
‘All right, I will.’
‘Very well, then. Ask me a question,’ he says, and in the silence that follows I pick and discard several options. Some seem too personal, others too flippant. And all of them lead me back to the real issue.
My every word apparently tells him a thousand things about me. A single slip and I’m suddenly wretched and shallow, to go with all the other things he’s uncovered so easily. My habit of doing the opposite of what I want to, my tendency to hide – he had it all.
So I have to be careful here, and completely innocuous.
‘How old are you?’
‘Worried that I am older than you’d like?’
Dammit, question, you were supposed to be innocuous.
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’
‘Really?’
‘Why would I? What would it matter to me if you were?’ I say, and try to laugh lightly somewhere in the middle. I largely fail. And even if I had succeeded I don’t suppose it would matter, because he soon blows all of that nonsense away.
‘It would matter because my intention is to do all of those things you spoke of to you, and far more than that besides. I intend to bring you pleasure and sweetness of the sort I’m sure you have not yet known, and so you can see: how old I am is of some importance. Many women don’t like to be with someone twice their age.’
‘I don’t think the idea would even enter most women’s heads, when it comes to someone like you,’ I say finally, and only because I’m afraid of something else escaping. My body pulsed once, hotly, over several of the things he’s just said, and if I give it too much leeway I know what it will make me do.
There are so many words it wants me to say, always hovering beneath the surface of our conversations. ‘Yes’ is one of them. ‘Please’ is another. Both broke through last time and embarrassed me, but I won’t let them out again.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.’
‘Am I pretending?’
‘Of course you are.’
‘And why would I do such a thing?’
‘To get me to admit it.’
‘Admit what?’
‘How handsome you are! You want me to admit how handsome you are. You want me to say that you’re gorgeous, that you’re amazing looking, that I was mesmerised by your great granite face and your hooded eyes and your mouth like an imprint of a kiss, and I want to because you said all of those things about me and I can’t stop thinking about any of them even though none of them are real and God,
God
, you’re the most frustrating person in the world.’ I pause to take a breath. ‘Why do you even need to hear this? Everyone on the planet has probably told you how handsome they find you.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he says, so coolly, so clearly. I could almost believe there was nothing else coming, until it hits me around the head. ‘But it only matters to me that
you
do.’
I can’t be held responsible for the one word I croak out. I’m still stunned after the blow, and probably sprawled all over the floor of my own mind.
‘Why?’
‘Because I want your pulse to quicken when you think of seeing me.’
‘You do?’
‘I want you to be wet between your legs when you imagine my face.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Are you wet now, Alissa?’
‘Can I plead the fifth?’
‘You can, if you wish. Of course it will mean that
I
have to be honest while
you
do not, but if you really must …’
‘All right. All right. I am,’ I say. ‘But it’s not just about your face.’
‘I see. How intriguing. Perhaps you could tell me what it is about, then.’
He knows I won’t refuse, now, but oh, it’s agonising to get the words out. Words he said so easily to me, so freely, and I’m struggling like I’m in a straitjacket.
‘The way you say things.’
‘So it’s the sound of my voice.’
‘Not just the sound, though that’s nice enough,’ I say, then immediately want to make it more than that. He was so generous, I think. Why don’t I know how to be generous with him? Why do I keep thinking that he’s heard it all before, when I can almost hear him waiting on every single thing I say?
He’s waiting now, I can tell, and the longer he does the more the pathways in my mind begin to rearrange themselves. The one marked
sex
no longer has a beware sign barring the way. And the one marked
Janos
is a thousand miles wide and as smooth as silk.
I could probably slide down it.
‘It’s more than nice enough. It’s so beautiful I hear it sometimes in my dreams. The first time I heard it in the hotel room it was like I’d known it all my life, and just hadn’t listened before.’
‘Ah, Alissa.’
‘And your words …’
‘Tell me about my words.’
‘They make me crazy.’
‘Which ones, specifically?’
‘All of them. Any of them.’
‘So mostly “and”, and “when”, and “if”.’
It’s another challenge, ten hurdles high. I can clear it, though. I can.
‘No. Mostly “sex” and “pleasure” and the way you just said “wet”.’
‘Like it excites me.’
‘Yes. Exactly, yes.’
‘Like I want you to tell me all about that slippery seam between your legs, and how eager you must be to have someone lick their way over it.’
‘Oh, God, yes.’
‘And how I would, if I were there. I’d kiss your pussy until you forgot every little sliver of that restraint, play with your nipples to make them so pretty and stiff, slide my fingers inside you just as I think you might be doing now. Are you?’
I’m sitting with my legs squeezed so tightly together you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar, one hand a tight fist just above that place he’s talking about. However, my imagination is an entirely different matter. In my imagination I’m sprawled back on the bed, fingers sliding through my absolutely soaking folds, everything so frantic and furtive it’s almost real anyway.
I don’t suppose it matters if I lie a little.
‘Yes.’
Only I think it does matter that I lie a little. I can tell. There’s a silence after I’ve said it, as though he’s considering saying one thing. But in the end, he goes with the other.
‘Good. And then just when you’re at the point of begging … just when you’re ready to tell me your every secret without dissimulation …’
‘Yes, oh, yes.’
‘I’d stop.’
‘No, don’t,’ I say, and am shocked by the urgency and desperation in my own voice. I sound like I’ve lost my mind, or at the very least would be willing to trade it for more. And worse, he definitely knows that this is the case.
‘It has to be so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this way I can make you take another step, without even really trying. You’re ready now, aren’t you? You’re just waiting for the next part, hovering on the edge. So I will leave you here, sweet Alissa, with a promise.’ He pauses, almost unbearably. ‘I’ll carry on, if you come to me.’
I could kill him. I want to kill him. At the very least I want to cry and kick and scream, and have to fight with myself to stop it happening. I’m not a child who’s been denied something. I’m a rational adult, who needs to tell him rational things like:
‘I won’t be what you expect, you know.’
But he defeats me again, as easy as anything.
‘Of course you will. You’re the girl I saw in the lobby, aren’t you?’ he says, and when I answer with a shocked silence he laughs. ‘Oh, my darling. Did you really think I didn’t remember?’