Addicted (5 page)

‘About why you were really there. You know, if it wasn’t about you being an insane braggart. Which I don’t believe it was, by the way.’

There. Perfect.

Or it would have been, if he didn’t take my words as his cue to start walking backwards right in front of me. Now I’m all boxed in, and even worse – I have to look at his gorgeous face, while I attempt to lie. This just isn’t going to go well for me. Everywhere I look, there’s more of him. He’s kind of hunching his shoulders against the cold, and they’re
still
taking up my entire world.

And now he’s saying things. Revealing, warm sorts of things.

‘I guess I just wanted to find out why I feel this way.’

Oh, Lord. He’s talking about feelings. He’s looking at me with those eyes and talking about feelings. Shouldn’t a guy like him be mashing a beer can to his head while mooning the Prime Minister? I’m sure that should be his MO.

But apparently it’s not.

‘And how do you feel?’ I ask, still expecting something stupid.
I feel like lighting my own farts
, he’ll say, and then he’ll snort and probably run off to find some guy to punch. I’ll see him on an episode of
Street Cops
two months from now, and never regret jumping over a hedge to escape him.

Though all of that nonsense just makes it more of a shock when he answers:

‘Empty.’

Man, does he ever have a way with his single words. That whispered ‘Faker’ made my pulse race; now my heart sinks all the way through my body and right out onto the street. I can’t speak for the longest time, and when I finally do it’s not about anything useful. It’s all general and blasé, despite the very specific echo I’ve got inside of me.

‘Hate to break it to you, but I think everyone feels that way,’ I say, while the echo tells the truth:
Especially me,
it says.
I’m so hollow you could fill me with helium and float me up to Mars
.

Which is a depressing thought, when you really think about it. I’m almost glad when he flicks the switch from serious to silly again – despite the topic he raises.

‘Even fakers?’

‘Are you seriously bringing that up again? I just wanted to … learn about sex things. I just wanted to make my work more … real.’

He nods, sagely.

‘Ah, yes. Sex things. I believe that is the technical term.’

‘Shut up,’ I say, and come dangerously close to batting him playfully when I do.

‘Why, when we’re so close to a breakthrough, professor? I really wanted to discuss my pee-pee and your yoohoo.’

I give him a withering look.

‘I don’t call them that.’

‘Are you sure? Maybe
you
can’t say “vagina” either.’

‘I can absolutely say … that word.’

He hoots with laughter to hear me evade it, but there’s nothing I can do. Somehow the word just won’t come out in his presence, no matter how much I want to prove him wrong.

‘Yeah, it definitely seems that way.’

‘Hey – I’m trying to write a book. Not talk dirty to you.’

‘Does the
book
have a vagina in it?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well … maybe I don’t exactly call it
that
. I mean, it’s not a particularly sexy word.’

I realise a second too late that it’s the wrong thing to say. I’ve added a Y to the end of sex, and now my writing is no longer the biology textbook I know he was thinking about. He called me Professor, and talked about technical terms – but I’ve lost all that now.

‘Oh-ho-ho,’ he says, as my dignity disappears down the drain. ‘So I guess it’s not just a dry treatise on the benefits of having one?’

Is it weird that I like him using the word ‘treatise’? Because I totally do. I like how heavy and solid he seems, while all of this too-fast talk rattles out of his mouth. I can’t even keep up with most of it, despite the immense effort I’m putting in.

‘Having one of what?’

See? That’s real effort, there. I’m terrified of the answer, but I’m still asking the question.

‘A
vagina
. Were you really that mystified there, or are you actually not sure?’

‘Sure about
what
?’

Goddamn, he needs to finish his sentences.

‘About the benefits of having a vagina.’

‘Look – I know the benefits, OK?’

I totally don’t. Currently it feels like an angry animal that wants to eat him, between my legs. That can’t be a benefit, can it?

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because I can help you out in that area, if you were a little shaky on the many and varied advantages to having a yoohoo.’

He’s like a used-car salesman. Who sells lady bits.

‘I don’t need your help anywhere near my area, thanks.’

‘Ooh, baby, stop, that almost sounded like a proposition.’

‘What? It did not.’

‘You’re getting me so hot, I swear.’

Of course, I realise here that he’s teasing me. So it’s quite alarming to feel a kick somewhere lowdown, in that long-dormant area between my legs. He just fakes excitement, and apparently I go nuts. The angry beast rears its head, and starts searching for manflesh.

‘I didn’t … I didn’t even say anything, I –’

‘I’m just messing with you, Kitty-cat. When I said “area”, I meant the book. I meant I could help you with your
book
.’

Is he being serious now? It’s so hard to tell with those madly expressive eyebrows of his. And that mouth – it’s always twisted into the cheekiest little smirk. He’d never be able to deliver someone’s eulogy. Everyone would think he was amused by some guy’s tragic death.

‘I really don’t need help.’

Only I do, oh, God, I do, I know I do. I couldn’t say ‘vagina’ in front of someone so handsome, and now I’ve just shooed him away from my ‘area’. He didn’t even
mean
‘area’ in that manner. He meant something else, and my nineteenth-century brain just got itself all into a tizz. I’m still in a tizz right at this moment. My heart is thumping and thumping, as though we just wrestled for the world heavyweight title.

In fact, it feels like we really
did
wrestle for the world heavyweight title. I’m all sweaty and prickly, and my face won’t go a normal colour no matter how hard I try.

And then it occurs to me, in a scary rush
: is this what flirting is?
No, God, no – it can’t be. This isn’t flirting. Flirting should feel light and breezy, like a Cary Grant film about fast-talking news reporters. I should be jauntily walking away now, while he shakes his head ruefully. That darned Kit!

Oh, how I wish I could be that darned Kit.

Instead of someone he gets to say this to:

‘I think you need help.’

‘Yeah? With what?’

I don’t know why I keep asking these questions. It just leaves me so open.

‘Sex.’

This is
definitely
flirting. I’ve no idea why it has to feel so nightmarish, however. He says one word, and bombs go off inside my body. I don’t even know how he does it. He just opens his mouth, and previously innocuous terms become so sinful. So alien and the opposite of everything they were before. Martin McAllister once said ‘sex’ to me, and I think I answered, ‘If we must.’

But when Dillon says it, the word just slides out of his mouth, ripe with the promise of a million things I’ve never known. Yes, I think. Do sex to me.

And then I’m just mortified over something I didn’t say all over again. This guy … this guy is
never
going to do sex to me. He’d probably sooner fuck a postbox, and here I am mooning over him like a teenager with a crush.

It’s awful. It makes me say things like this:

‘Because you’re such an expert in the field.’

Just to make certain he doesn’t cotton on. Sarcasm is bound to make it seem like I don’t fancy him, surely? Guys usually hate it when I say things like that to them.

So why doesn’t
he
hate it? He’s not normal.

‘I know more than you. I bet you’re not even sure how it starts out,’ he says, in a manner that’s just as warm and friendly as it was before. I think my sarcasm just bounces right off him – probably because of his immense chest.

‘I do so.’

‘Show me then.’

‘Show you what?’

‘Show me how you start things up.’

This is a trap, and I absolutely know it. But I also know that I no longer care.

‘Well, I’d probably … I’d probably … look deeply into … someone’s eyes.’

He chuffs and rolls his own, as though he really is my teacher, trying to give me a lesson.
Could do better,
that expression says, and then he corrects me.

‘That’s not how you get things going. Here – it’s like this. First, I slide a hand around your waist,’ he says, which sounds so innocent on its own. He could be teaching me a dance step, in a class full of cookies and kids and marshmallows … if it were not for the
actual hand that he slides around my waist
.

This isn’t just a tutorial. He’s going for a full-blown demonstration, with things like fingers on my hips, and ohhhh his touch is so warm and firm and good and fuck fuck fuck. Why didn’t I stop this when he first started talking? I’m like Admiral Ackbar, yelling ‘It’s a trap!’ two hours too late.

‘And then, while you’re busy staring at my hand like it sprouted out of my forehead, I just … leee-ee-eeaan down …’

Oh, my God, he’s actually leaning down. No, he’s
really really leaning down –
like the way people do when they’re going to kiss someone. And no matter how much I bend my back, I can’t quite get away from him. I’d have to be a championship limbo artist to evade his face and his mouth and are his eyes actually closing?

They are.

‘Dillon,’ I say, then again with more panic and less ability to breathe, ‘Dillon, Dillon, don’t lean down. Don’t, don’t – stop leaning, stop leaning, please for the love of God stop leaning in, are you leaning in, oh no!’

Yes. I actually use the phrase ‘oh no’.

My deepest apologies to my vagina, who expected a kiss, and instead gets this:

‘How do you make
leaning
sound like a dirty word?’

‘It’s a gift,’ I say, and I must applaud myself for doing so. The sentence comes out so bright and chipper, even though I’m delivering it three inches from his glorious mouth. In fact, this entire conversation is now happening with me dipped down in his arms, like the dance partner I almost was.

‘It really is,’ he says, while I try not to enjoy the feel of his hand in the middle of my back. Or the heat of his breath against my lips. Or the hint of his body pressed against mine. ‘I think you actually gave it an extra syllable.’

‘Can you let me up now?’

‘Do you really want to be up?’

I hate the way he asks me. It makes it almost impossible to say yes – though I do my damnedest to. I make my mouth move, and some sounds come out. If you turn your head on one side, they could almost be an affirmative.

Plus, I do actually push against him.

If pushing means flapping my hands ineffectually against the solid mass of his stupidly big body. It’s really not a surprise when he eventually laughs and lets me go.

‘All right, all right,’ he says – probably because I was making a noise like a child who’s got stuck. He even spreads his hands apart in a gesture designed to soothe, while I attempt to straighten my clothes.

Of course, my clothes don’t actually need straightening. It’s not like he yanked my shirt over my head and then gave me a wedgie. It just sort of feels that way. It feels like I have to do something to put myself back together – I need time to think and process, before he says anything else.

Without it, I’m likely to say yes to anything.

‘I tell you what.’

Like this. I’m going to say yes to this. I can feel it.

‘You really want help with your book?’

No. No, I definitely don’t. And no amount of sweeping me off my feet is going to change that. I don’t care how handsome you are, or how much I internally swooned when you dipped me. That was just the logical reaction to something I’ve never experienced before. You caught me off guard by being different to every other guy I’ve ever known.

Have mercy. Please have mercy.

‘I live at 453 Maitland Avenue, apartment 6C. Come by tomorrow, and we’ll talk.’ He nods, satisfied. ‘Yeah. I think we could have a great, loooong talk.’

And what do I say?

I say OK.

His apartment isn’t really an apartment at all. It’s more like a converted floor of a warehouse that didn’t actually get converted. The floors are that grey, untreated wood that you often see in seventeenth-century sweatshops, and he hasn’t bothered to make things like ‘rooms’. There’s a badly hung curtain between his bedroom and his rudimentary living area – and when I say rudimentary, I absolutely mean rudimentary.

Cavemen had more mod cons than this. He invites me to sit on a garden chair, and I’m actually grateful for that. Because the only other seat in this ‘living room’ is a crate that used to hold melons. His television is sat atop another television, which I’m assuming doesn’t work. Unless his attention span is so bad that channel changing just wasn’t cutting it any more. Maybe his remote control doesn’t move fast enough – who knows?

I don’t.

I’m too busy studying every bizarre detail of his mad home, so that I don’t have to look directly at him. Because when he answers the door, he doesn’t do it like a normal person. I can’t give him the bottle of wine I brought, and inquire after his mother.

It’s impossible to do those things, when your host is completely naked.

And all right, he’s not completely naked. He is, in fact, wearing a towel. But when I say wearing a towel, I mean it in the loosest sense of the term. He hasn’t even folded it around his body then made one of those nice little tucks at one corner.

He’s just kind of …
holding
it over his bits. And the hold itself is very tenuous. He’s practically doing it with his pinky finger, and the drape that’s causing is very narrow. Before I’ve had chance to stop myself, I’ve glanced down and seen just about everything he’s got. I can practically make out the insides of his thighs, which has to be some sort of optical illusion.