The Things That Make Me Give In (19 page)

Even if she still hasn’t touched her clit.

‘God, I bet you’re so soft. So soft and your neck . . . do you curve it up to meet my mouth?’

‘Yes, yes.’

If he wants her to say something more complicated, she’s going to be in trouble. She’s amazed that he’s managing the complicated things he is, though he’s definitely slurring his words and grating them out between heavy breaths.

‘Oh, I know you’ll taste amazing. Jesus, I’m gonna burst.’

The gasping lack of words that follows makes her speak. She has to speak. He can’t stop just yet!

‘Wait – wait. Roy – tell me what you look like, first. Tell me what your mouth is like when it closes over my shoulder and my neck. Tell me what your hands are like.’

‘I’m almost there – I can’t –’

‘Please! Please just tell me something.’

‘I make you look small, remember. You’re so small and I’m so
big. I’m big and gangly and goofy . . . my mouth is like . . . my mouth is like . . . oh, man, Ol . . .’

She remembers what his mouth is like. She remembers his lower lip, softly pouting. Sulky, almost. She remembers him biting it, sucking the ice-cream away, and wanting to do that for him. She remembers him grabbing a thick hank of her hair and wrapping it around his huge hand.

If he had just pulled. If he had just pulled, almost roughly, and tipped her head back and said, ‘Lick the ice-cream off me.’ If they had just moved that little bit closer on the couch on the way home, and let their mouths come together.

She could have raised her skirt and let him see and pointed her legs skywards and done other things, spiralling circling things that they left behind with thirty-miles-apart phone calls, for reasons it’s best not to get into. Nice, safe, reasons, where everything is spoken and unspoken at the same time.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ she says, because she remembers and also because the sound he makes – drawn out long and gruff – makes her press her finger down on her aching clit, and her body goes rigid with the pleasure of it.

When this pleasure finally lets go and she spreads like liquid all over the bed, she remembers the worst thing of all: the thing that she’s just said.

Everything is ruined now. Of course it is! They should have stuck to knitting and
Poirot,
and she knows it. He probably knows it, too, but then she told him that he’s amazing so he doesn’t have to be worried about anything ever again. It’s all right, when someone else thinks you’re beautiful.

Especially when that someone else is a troll. He probably thinks she’s a troll. And even if he doesn’t it’s not OK to suddenly move to actually seeing each other and touching each other and abandoning the tunnel altogether.

They’ll make blunders without the tunnel, she knows they will. They’ll trip all over each other – because he’s so massive
and gangly and clumsy – and not be what they expected – because she’s probably fatter and weirder than he’s thinking, and he’s probably thinner and his ears are definitely more sticky-out than she’s remembering – and it will all fall to ruin.

All those phone calls. Gone. All because of sticky-out ears and fat and blundering.

She can see the back of his head from where she is right now. He’s sitting exactly where he said he would be, on the park bench where they used to sit and wait for the number 9 bus to uni.

His hair is darker than she recalls it being. Darker and shorter. His shoulders look broader.

But then he turns, and smiles, and that’s just as she remembers. That smile was worth the risk, she knows. She needs all five senses for that kind of smile. The tunnel was fine, it was great, it was fun, but when he puts his arms around her she understands that it’s never really living, when it’s all just phoned in.

THE FIRST THING
he says is this:

‘I want you to walk around the apartment, naked.’

And I try to think of a word that is not no.

I try, but ultimately fail. Really, I should have expected this one. I can’t say no when we’ve made a deal, and I should have expected this, anyway. He loves me being naked. Me, not so much.

And so here we are.

‘Yes,’ I say.

His expression is caught somewhere between triumphant, and shocked.

‘No – no, wait,’ he says, when I start pulling my shirt over my head. He grins, and I know it’s going to be something wicked. ‘Slow. Nice and slow. Men are visual, right? Don’t I want to see you putting on a show for me?’

He is a naughty, naughty boy.
Men are visual
. I know for a goddamned fact that he doesn’t like half the things men are supposed to, but he chooses this one – this stupid one – to kick things off.

Just to watch me blush and stumble my way through a striptease.

And I do. I get my elbow stuck while he sprawls on the couch, arms folded. Eyes amused but getting close to that heated burn. I wonder, briefly, if he likes my embarrassment and my awkwardness – the way I like his, sometimes – but I don’t think so. I think he just likes me getting naked, slowly, for his entertainment.

He says he doesn’t like being the boss man, but I’m guessing this particular type of control presses his buttons. Making me open myself up. Exposing myself to him. Yeah – he likes that, all right.

I remember him in the abandoned warehouse, saying he loved me. God, how open he was! How careless with his heart. He seemed to know how careless he had been, when I didn’t immediately say it back. But then later he told me: ‘I don’t know how to be any other way.’

Maybe I’m going to see him be some other way, right now. He demands that I go slower when I’m shoving my knickers down my legs, and the ‘slower’ sounds sharp and agitated. I imagine him taking me over his knee and my pussy glows nice and warm, but somehow that seems too easy.

It’s going to be stuff that is hard for me, I know. Spanking’s nothing. It’s fun, it’s pretend, it doesn’t mean anything. Being naked in front of someone – just walking around the apartment, as though fully dressed – that’s hard.

I find it hard when he tells me to go back in the kitchen, and finish making myself a sandwich. That’s what I was doing when I heard him getting out of bed. My daily routine, interrupted but now back on track.

Only naked.

I lay slices of tomato on the buttered bread, while naked. I put some ham over that, also while naked. My nipples are already tiny points because of the cool air and because of other things, too, but I keep making the sandwich.

Even when I feel him come into the kitchen, and lean against the counter behind me. I know what he looks like without looking – he’ll still have his arms folded, and maybe one leg crossed over the other – but I can see myself through his eyes, even better.

Round and smooth and soft as the butter I’m spreading. His gaze skims over my bottom and around the backs of my thighs. His imaginary tongue presses licks to the juicy creases just above my hips. He licks and licks and licks.

I sit down at the kitchen table still humming with that feeling.

The sudden ebb and flow of arousal doesn’t stop, either, when he laughs to see me act so casual, as if I’m not naked at all. He sits down next to me and puts his chin on one hand and cocks his head – trying to get me to laugh, I know – but I just keep eating my sandwich.

Despite the urge I’ve got to play with my nipples. They feel unbearably tense, as though he really has licked them when I wasn’t looking. I want to pinch them, just a little bit, but that would spoil things and besides – he hasn’t told me I can.

‘Do you want to touch yourself?’ he asks, and now I do look at him – but mainly because of his sudden psychic powers. Of course, he knows me well by now. Once, while staying for an interminably long time at his mother’s house, he took me down to the potting shed because he knew I needed to get off. He pulled my knickers down around my ankles and fucked me nice and hard where no one could catch us, locked in amidst the dirt and dust. I remember being so eager, so hungry for it, that after he had climaxed I sucked him back to hardness and asked him for it again. I hardly ever ask, but that time I had needed to.

And he had obliged. He had more than obliged. In fact, he had seemed wildly turned on by my eagerness.

‘I bet you do. God, it feels so good to be able to touch myself,’ he says. I kind of know he’s lying – he loves being teased more than he loves just being allowed to do something – but his giving in to his desires isn’t what this is all about. I think it’s more about how he looks when he leans back in his chair and gently strokes his hard nipple through the cotton of his T-shirt.

‘Do you want to touch yourself, Lo?’ he asks, as his eyelids drift almost closed.

‘I . . . do you want me to touch myself?’

Those are the rules, after all.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No – you just sit there and watch me.’

So this is payback. A teasing payback – I’m disappointed in his lack of originality. He could have at least thought of something other than what I did to him.

But then he stands up and peels off his T-shirt and gazes at me with those bedroom eyes and I wonder if we will really have to play this game. I’d probably crawl across the floor to him without him having to demand it.

Though I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Or at least I’m not sure until I do.

He makes me come and look for him. He makes me without saying anything – he just disappears and I tiptoe around the apartment, avoiding not-quite-open blinds and curtains, waiting for him to pop out.

There’s bound to be some surprise waiting for me.

Instead, I find him in our bedroom, as naked as I am. He looks at me as though he hadn’t expected me to follow him – one eyebrow raised, pleasure warm on his face – but when I close the bedroom door and shut us into the soft glow caused by the candle he’s lit, he switches back to this new mode. This teasing mode.

He trails a hand down over his stomach, to toy with the trail of crisp hair that licks up from his groin. The visual is more than arresting. He’s hard – of course he is – and ever so slightly rocking his hips, so that his cock sways. I even like the way his toes curl and uncurl, and the way he’s blinking – lazy and slow.

But I wait. It’s his turn – I’m supposed to wait!

Why am I still waiting?

I take a step forward, but then I wonder if the idea is that I stand here for him. He wants to keep looking at me while I’m naked, before maybe masturbating. And I don’t mind that, I don’t mind that at all, because he looks hot when he’s jerking off. He can make it look like the sexiest thing in the world, the way he moans and bucks and delves right down into enjoying himself. He once told me that back in college he used to miss classes because he was so into a big solo sex session.

Something about that definitely lights my fire. It built the fire higher that he was faintly embarrassed about admitting it, as though I was going to tell him what a loser he was, what a dork.

I love that he’s my big dork.

I just don’t love it now when he won’t make me say yes. I’m here, I’m ready. Why won’t he tell me what he wants?

I take another step forward and his eyes run up and down my body. They run around all over me and make me warm. I can feel my nipples tingling again, just aching to be sucked. The ache in turn spreads to my sex and down my thighs. My thighs want my knees to give way but that only leads to thinking about me actually having to crawl, which makes my arousal worse.

I think I want to crawl. I think I want him to make me weak, somehow, tie me up and force me to do something disgusting. Break me, baby, break me.

But when I get to the bed, he just turns his head on the pillow and gazes up at me. He strokes himself. He’s as lazy as a cat in sunlight. It’s so frustrating that I almost just grab him or jump on him or something.

He stops me just in time, with the feather he has in the hand I couldn’t see.

It’s not from our goodie drawer, and it’s too long and pink to have been pulled out of a pillow. Obviously it’s something he’s purchased from somewhere, which I find as exciting as the first sensation it provokes.

He trails it over my belly, and grins when the muscles there jump and shimmy. Then he slides it up to ju-u-ust underneath my left breast, tickling with a few of its softer strands, before moving on to the fine skin of my inner arm.

He’s very good at it. It’s as though he’s practised – on himself, I’d imagine, standing in front of a mirror and watching every hair prickle and every muscle twitch. And then on to the squirming, the squirming I can’t help. I don’t even know if I’m
supposed to help it. Is this a test? Am I supposed to just stand here and take it?

I can’t take it. I’m stretching and relaxing all over as though by doing so I can either get away from the torment or get more from it. My skin is humming, not quite tickled enough for me to want to itch, but not firm enough to be satisfying.

I know I’m starting to breathe hard, but I can’t stop myself. When my chest heaves, he gets up on his knees on the bed. Finally, I think. Finally he’s going to do something more or tell me what to do – only he doesn’t. He just keeps on stroking me with the stupid feather.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me to do anything?’ I blurt out, but the blurt turns into a gasp because he then decides to trail the feather over my too-exposed pussy lips.

He pulls the feather and his hand away when I make the noise, and I act instinctively. I grab his wrist, hard enough to get his attention. He snaps his gaze up to me, eyebrow raised again.

‘Todd,’ I say. It’s awful how much it comes out like a whine.

‘You want me to do something?’ he asks, curse him.

‘You’re supposed to tell me what to do. Those are the rules!’

He seems to consider, as he swaps the feather to his still free hand and tickles my neck with it.

‘I think you’re already doing what I want.’

‘But you’re not . . . you’re not ordering me to do it.’

‘I know,’ he says, and smiles, slow and cryptic.

He’s still tickling me. It is now agonising. I’m so wet I can feel it when I move. Not even this increasingly uncomfortable conversation can turn it off – we shouldn’t have waited a week to play the second half of this game. A week without his body inside mine is too long, it’s just too fucking long.