Authors: Charlotte Stein
It seems best to not raise the thing that happened with him. The only problem is, not raising it is much, much more difficult than it seems. For a start, every time I even remotely consider it my face turns the colour of seventeen really embarrassed people squashed together. And I think about it
a lot
. Of course, I try not to. I attempt to push out the stuff we did, typically with a lot of reading or some really complicated quadratic equations.
But there’s only so much you can do to avoid thinking about someone coming all over your cunt. Hell, the words alone seem to suck me right back in. I will be standing at the refrigerator, choosing one of those nice pies he gets from some posh place for dinner, and suddenly all I can hear is ‘come’ and ‘cunt’ going around my head on an infinite feedback loop. And even when I try to erase them from the database, they get around it.
The act
itself
gets around it.
He did it on you, my mind whispers instead, like some naughty kid on the playground. Plus it always does it at the most inappropriate times. He suggests we dissolve our employer/employee relationship entirely, in view of the new parameters we find ourselves operating under. Not one word of it sexy or suggestive, and yet still I find myself flicking back to those new parameters almost immediately. I think of the way it felt, thick and sticky against my over-sensitised clit, until finally I think he can tell something is up.
In fact I know he can, because after dinner one night – when everything seems peaceful and I’m pretending to read and he’s actually reading – he suddenly speaks without looking up. All extra casual, I think, just like the thing he says.
‘You seem singularly preoccupied lately.’
Of course I know I have to tread carefully after that. Select my words well, make sure he knows that I’m not just going insane over the sex and am almost beside myself to do it all over again. I don’t want him to feel pressured or compromised, considering the harrowing things he shared and the horrible way he keeps reacting to certain sex stuff. Just because he gave in to certain urges once or twice or twenty times doesn’t mean he can comfortably do it again, and I shouldn’t assume.
It’s just that sometimes he makes it really hard not to assume. He looks at me over the top of his book, eyes diamond-hard and expression just somewhere south of suggestive. As though he’s waiting for me to say something; waiting for the wrong words to come out. Or is it the right ones? Telling him that coming on my cunt was the most erotic experience of my life hardly seems like a horrible thing.
Most men would love to hear something like that.
Though that’s the thing: he is not most men. He’s not even in some random one per cent margin of error, and that often makes it hard to judge. Or at least it does when my brain is fogged by sex and struggling to understand which things he liked and which he hated. Was it the fact that he lost control that made him look like his face was sinking? Maybe it was, in which case we can deal with that. I have no problem at all with him wanting to be completely in charge.
I lie awake at night masturbating when I think about him being in charge.
But what if it was
not
that? Then I could end up offering something to him that he recently realised is gross, simply because I missed what should have been obvious. My sexual blind spot will strike again, and that Mars scenario might become a reality.
So I stay neutral.
‘Oh, this part of the book is just really gripping,’ I say, and to my great relief he just nods and lets me go back to my writhing agony. I get to suffer in silence, which sounds bad but is infinitely preferable to suffering in his sight line. If he sees me going out of my mind, he may feel obliged. Either that, or he could feel resentful. I’ve pushed him too far and taken too much already, yet here I am greedily asking for more.
It’s like Oliver Twist, I think.
Only with a really evil Oliver.
And that just sounds terrible to me. It sounds so bad that I don’t struggle all that hard to keep myself under control. I can do this, I tell myself, and that pretty much proves to be true. After all, his company is a reward in itself. His conversation is more relaxed now, even if the bars around his body are not, and it gives me a lot of pleasure that I would otherwise never have had. He tells me about his favourite piano pieces to play, in fits and starts at first but then with less discomfort.
At one point he even allows me to sit beside him, while he plays something so wonderful I have to fight to not tell him how much I adore him.
A struggle that is doubled when he admits he wrote it. He just tells me matter-of-factly one morning, expression suddenly tense when he realises what he’s said. He admitted something he was never able to before, and I can see it stings. It makes him think of all the times he had to stay silent – I can see it on his face – and for a second I waver almost as strongly as I did when I thought of the insanely sexy stuff. My heart makes a mess of my insides and I can see my hands shaking with the effort of staying by my side.
I could do the thing I did before, the almost touching thing, I think, but I know I would never stop there. I would keep going until I was skin to skin. I would touch him in the worst possible way, because although sexual contact is an issue for him I know it’s nowhere near as bad as anything affectionate. I know because he tells me so.
‘He used to move in as though he was going to put a comforting hand on my shoulder,’ he says, when he sees my shaking hands. As though he knows, he knows I want to do just that. But I can’t, because then he adds, ‘Though of course it was never a comforting hand. Unless you include a slap under that umbrella.’
I never want him to think I might be including a slap under that umbrella. I don’t want to do anything that will make him flinch or bristle, or be despairing about sex he doesn’t want to have. I want him to be content and calm, and if that means I never get to do anything naughty ever again, well, so be it. I can cope without ever experiencing that life-altering pleasure again. I can be satisfied with a celibate life, as long as I get to spend it with him.
Or so I think.
Until the train.
I don’t think he really wants to invite me. I hear him talking on the phone about a business trip, and he definitely says he wants to travel alone. He even says something about ‘not exposing himself to that’, which definitely makes me wonder. It makes me think it might be to do with me and the awful shame I would bring down upon him – though, if it is, he gives an admirable impression of that not being the case.
He tries, and I appreciate the trying.
‘It will be terribly tedious for you but I find myself asking you to come anyway,’ he says, and he goes out of his way to make me feel welcome. I ask him if I should pack my jumper and he just gives me a withering look, as though what he does next is completely obvious. I mean,
of course
he has bought me a brand-new wardrobe. Of course he has. How on earth did I think he’d let me travel to the freezing countryside with a jumper that has more holes than material?
‘It looks as though someone knitted it using tissue paper,’ he says, as I hold up jackets with linings far thicker than the thing he’s currently examining. Even the shoes look cosy somehow, all of them made of this buttery leather with buttons and stripes of material. One of the pairs actually matches a suit made of the thickest, smartest tweed, and I swear to God, when I put it on I look like a telephone operator from the nineteen-forties. I immediately love it half to death, but I keep that almost entirely inside. I am a nun now, and that means never getting close to anything like excitement.
A nod and a thank-you will suffice, I think.
And I feel proud of myself for doing it. It seems to me that I have almost completely mastered this indifferent attitude to sex. I never burn his clothes off with my eyes any more, and even when I do I usually manage to suppress it. I look away from him as he swirls his coat on, and pretend that the way he turns up his collar is not cool at all. He looks stupid, I tell myself. He looks like a stupid show-off, instead of an insane sex god who drives me wild with desire.
And I almost never think of the filthy things we did. I think and act as prim and proper as I look. I even shrug off his offer of help getting on the train. I am the very model of patient restraint, making do with what we have. Nothing can stir me. Nothing can bother me. I actually tell him so. ‘You know I don’t mind if you never want to do anything sexual again,’ I say.
But that just makes it all the more shocking when, halfway there, I feel his hand on my thigh. So much so that I glance down, as though expecting it to be something else. Something he dropped, I think, like a case for glasses that he doesn’t actually have. It has to be, and not just because he hates touching. We are not alone in the carriage. There is a man in a tracksuit across from us and a little to the right. If Cyrian let his paper drop just a little the man would definitely see.
And considering how high that hand is I doubt he would want him to. It must be a mistake. He got lost on the way to the bag between my legs, or something similar. In a second he will ask me for a biscuit, I think, only he doesn’t. He doesn’t even take the hand away, once he’s done with this tiny gesture of affection. Instead he starts to slowly pull up that tweed skirt, inch by impossible inch. Face a mask of indifference as he does it. Not a hint of what’s happening anywhere on him.
Not even when he gets it all the way up, right over my silky panties. I feel the air hit me there and want to scream, but I understand why I don’t, why I keep so still, so very still, despite my all-consuming shock. It’s because I want him to keep going, oh, God, more than anything I want him to keep going. I don’t care why he’s doing this. I’m not bothered if it’s just some strange accident. All I want is his gorgeous hand cupping my aching pussy – just as he does, not a second later.
He cups me there, and squeezes. Like he wants to see what I feel like, and right now presents the perfect opportunity. Now he doesn’t have to be directly involved. He can pretend he’s detached and play the role of a perfect gentleman while he slowly fondles my sex. While he makes it wetter and wetter, until finally I know he can feel it. I know he can feel my slipperiness, as it makes a mess of everything. Hell, after a little while he can probably feel my clit. It seems so big and swollen I don’t see how he couldn’t, and soon I get some confirmation. He strokes a little more firmly, and I have to bite back a gasp.
I have to turn my head and look out of the window, though looking doesn’t help. It just means I can see the reflection of the man sitting with us, as Cyrian slowly works me. As he eases his fingers beneath the material – so skin-to-skin it scorches me – and slides one elegant finger through my soaking slit. All these rude things, I think, all these rude things and with someone right there. Though that makes no difference. In fact, if anything it gets worse when the man suddenly leaves, because that’s when Cyrian decides to murmur the worst thing in the world to me.
‘Do you think he is leaving so he can come with the thought of you being fingered still fresh in his mind?’ he asks, as though he’s suddenly become a completely different person. Gone is that sense of defeat I saw all over his face. He seems barely bothered by our closeness. His lips are so close to my cheek he could be kissing me.
And the words, oh, the words, he knows what he’s doing with these words.
‘If only he knew what a slut you are, he could have come over and pushed his cock right into your mouth. Fucked you there while I stroked you – or would you prefer him in this hot, wet cunt, as I lick your clit? That sounds pleasant, don’t you think? Two men servicing you on a train, so thoroughly that you scarcely care who might see. You scarcely care how you look or sound – just as you don’t now,’ he says, and he’s right. I don’t. I spread my legs for him, so eager for him to fuck me there I forget about everything else.
I forget about giving him space, about being restrained.
I just buck and rub myself against his hand until I come, and come, and come. And I’m glad I do, too. I would have felt a hundred times more stupid if I’d carried on pretending I could be a celibate nun with no feelings, when he says what he does in the aftermath. He turns back to his paper as I sit there slumped and panting, pink-faced and unable to speak. And then, just as regret starts to rise in me, just as I wonder if I somehow forced him into that or caused him intense agony by responding at all, he says this:
‘You might not mind never doing anything sexual again. But I bloody well do.’
Something shifts after that. It has to, because now everything is abundantly clear. Yes, sex might make him look like someone shocked by the return of the recently deceased. Yes, it makes him flinch and balk and occasionally tell me terrible things that turn me upside down.
But he wants it all the same.
He wants it so badly that he’s willing to put a hand on my thigh, even though I can tell it burns him to do it. In the taxi to wherever we’re going he keeps splaying his fingers and making a fist, as though remembering the shock of the whole thing. Occasionally he looks at it as though it no longer belongs to him, but he copes. I know he copes, because once we get to our destination things go rapidly down that hill I thought was unconquerable. And when I say down that hill, I mean a slide coated in sex that ends in a glorious ocean of ecstasy.
Or at least that is what it feels like.
We go in some side door of what looks like a tiny rambling cottage, everything so dark and cold and strange I actually sound a little panicked when I say his name. ‘Cyrian,’ I call out, and expect some deadpan comment in return. Something like ‘Try not to worry, there are only seventeen ghosts living here.’
And instead he gives me this:
‘Get on your knees.’
So sudden that for a full thirty seconds I feel sure I must be misinterpreting. He could not possibly have meant that in the sexual sense. He just wanted to direct me to the light switch, which in this instance is located somewhere around the skirting boards. Old country homes belonging to wealthy families are usually built that way, and I’m just too poor and uncultured to know any better.