Addicted (8 page)

‘“Fuck me with them, then,” she said, and I did. I did what I thought fucking was, back and forth, like a piston. I had no more sense than a dog – but that turned out OK, too. Because I think, more than anything, she liked the idea of teaching me. See what I mean? She’d cluck her tongue and tell me, “No, like this
.
” Or she’d nudge me with one of those incredible thighs, until I went where she wanted me to go. And all the while I’m getting hotter and hotter and more frustrated, the frustration like some other layer of arousal I’ve never encountered before.

‘Which was when I
really
started to appreciate patience. Not some five-second hold-off in my own bed, thinking I’m hot stuff ’cause I don’t come right away. Not fantasising at three o’clock then waiting ’til seven to fucking do it, everything all tight down there and just ready to fucking come. No, no, no.
Real
patience. Really holding it off. Just … revelling in that feeling you get, when everything’s too much and there isn’t a thought in your goddamn head. Getting a sense of your own body, and every tiny little sensation it goes through.

‘Yeah, that’s what I learnt from her.

‘But I got something even better than that, too.’

I can’t imagine what’s better than seeing him in this theoretical state of sexual euphoria, but I’ll hold off on my verdict, for now. He’s deep into his story, by this point – eyes all far away, body practically sprawling back against the boxes – and I’m just as far into it with him.

No sense in distracting him now.

‘After a while, she started sighing and tossing her head, as though I was the most useless person in the world. And then she said something else I’ve never forgotten. She said: “You don’t get anywhere by banging on the door. You want a girl to come outside? Beckon her over.”

‘Of course I didn’t have a fucking clue what she was talking about. I started wondering if this was some hint to go down and answer the doorbell that wasn’t ringing. Maybe she didn’t want a sex slave, after all – maybe she wanted some guy to run her errands and do her chores for her.

‘And I fucking hate admitting this – but I would have done it too.

‘Lucky for me that she didn’t mean that at all. She gave me a demonstration, when it became pretty clear that I was lacking most of my higher brain functions. She crooked her fingers, like this –’

He makes that exact gesture – of the kind I’ve seen a thousand times before in everyday life. Teachers used to do it to me in staid classrooms; my elderly Nan was a fan, for those times when she wanted to give me a boiled sweet.

But it’s different, when he does it. For a start, I don’t think he’s got a sack of pear drops waiting for me in his pocket. And then there’s the way he goes about it, all seemingly innocent, with a layer of lewd on top. It’s kind of like … he’s stroking the air with the tips of those two crooked fingers.

And the air really, really likes it.

‘– and told me to do it that way. “Do it hard,” she said. But when I did she only wanted it harder. I couldn’t get the pace right, the rhythm right … nothing I did was what she wanted. I fucked her in a way I was sure should hurt, and held myself back a dozen times.

‘Until I realised that it didn’t matter what I thought. It mattered what
she
thought. It mattered how she responded when I did something. Yeah – that was the thing. That was what I started to pick up on. I didn’t have to tiptoe around, waiting for her to say or me to guess. I could see it in her, if I only took the time to look for the clues. Her face gave away almost nothing – but her body did.

‘When I pressed upwards, just a little, her back would arch. And if I just kind of … drummed my fingers against that soft, sweet spot inside her, I’d get a sound. A faint one, but a sound all the same.

‘I tell you, I could have lived for a month on that barely-there sigh. I’d have worked on her pussy until my arm dropped off – which it wasn’t far off doing, anyway. I was drenched in sweat, exhausted, aroused to the point of hallucination, but I didn’t want anything else, right at that moment.

‘I wanted to hear her sing for me – though I wasn’t really prepared for it, when she did. You know what a woman looks like, when she comes because you’ve done her like that? She’s not polite about it. She doesn’t blow you a kiss and gasp a yes in your ear.

‘She loses every bit of control of her body. She loses it so badly you can hardly believe it’s the same person – the one who wore gold-rimmed sunglasses and gave you thousand-yard stares through their blank, black lenses. The one who could have graced the cover of an eighties fashion magazine: all power and money and long, blonde beauty.

‘She went to pieces when I made her come. Every muscle in her body turned tight, in a way I can’t forget. I can’t forget the way she made a stiff little ball out of her perfect body, and begged me to stop where once she’d only known how to command. She nearly crushed my fingers, and ohhhhh the slipperiness of her. How
wet
she got. She practically came all over my hand, like a teenage boy, unable to help herself.

‘Man, I was proud. I was so full of pride that I might have gone away from that encounter even worse than I was before – that stupid fucking swagger bolstered by my badge of honour, courtesy of her. I even stood up, cock sticking out like I’m flipping her the bird with it, most of me ready to get my reward, now.

‘But she saved me from that fate. She waited, until she was calm and I was not. She took her time composing herself. And then she said the worst possible thing she could – the thing I’d based my whole idea of seducing her on, the thing that made me grin whenever I glanced across at the picture of her skinny little nerd of her husband, on her bedside table. She said:

‘“I guess no one’s as good as he is.”

‘And some part of me is still trying to be whatever it was that he gave her. To reduce a woman to a mess so helpless that it compares to the great and incomparable Mr Edwin G. Goldman – accountant, owner of some bitching hair plugs, sweats when he’s nervous, Edwin G. Goldman, who had the hottest wife in my neighbourhood, simply because he knew what to do with his hands.’

There are many things I feel, once I realise he’s finished with his story. Which I don’t, at first. In fact, my faintly stupefied lack of realisation is so bad that he claps his hands together, and does a kind of semi-wince. He sucks air over his teeth, the way people do when they’re bracing themselves for a horrible verdict.

However, I don’t know how to give him one – horrible or otherwise. I’m still shell-shocked. And once I’m done being shell-shocked, I’m trapped between a whole bunch of conflicting emotions – and all of them are the most intense versions of those feelings I’ve ever experienced. My arousal is stalking around inside me like a rabid dog. No matter what move he makes – from innocuous chin-scratching all the way down the pervert scale to fairly obvious rubbing through the pocket of his shorts – the thing has to be yanked back on its choke chain.

And this giddiness I’m going through … it’s of the hysterical kind. I feel like I might get up at any moment and start frantically shaking his hand, before offering him the grand prize for Being a Man.

Because he deserves it. Even I know that, and I kind of hate him. I hate him for making me feel this way – so inexplicably grateful to another human being, for doing things that probably aren’t even real. I mean, they’ve got to be made up, right? Everyone’s heard the ‘Dear
Penthouse
’ story of the pool boy and some hot older woman who looks like Chrissie Brinkley. And even if Chrissie was real, what’s the likelihood that she’d do these things? That she’d instruct him in the ways of womanhood – ways that are even more ridiculous than the idea that bored housewives really do fuck the help?

It never happened, I think. It’s all just another fucking fairy tale.

‘I should probably go,’ I say – though, in my defence, I’m an idiot. I know I am. I don’t even know why I care that he might have made it up. At least he
told
it.

Telling something like that is more than I’ve ever gotten before. And yet somehow I’m still trying to pull my bag over my shoulder – wrapping the strap around myself several times in the process. I think I actually send it into orbit, briefly, and I know how stumbly and fumbly I must look.

I go over on one shoe – these stupid fucking heels I shouldn’t have worn – and everything in his apartment is in the way. I almost trip over an old ski boot, just to make it absolutely easy for him to laugh. He’s got to be laughing.

That’s why he did it, didn’t he? That’s what he likes, isn’t it? To reduce women to helpless messes? Well, he’s certainly succeeded with me. My shoe has actually kind of come all the way off, and I can’t seem to get it back on.

‘Kit,’ he says, but I’m not listening. I’m too engrossed in this shoe debacle. It’s like
The Krypton Factor
, only with a leather-heeled Mary-Jane instead of an intense logic puzzle.

My shoe
is
the intense logic puzzle.

‘Kit.’

I think I shout, ‘You stupid fucking shoe’ in response.

‘Kit,’ he says. He won’t stop saying my name. And he’s stood up now, I’m sure of it. I can see him out of the corner of my eye. He has his hands in his pockets, and he’s kind of casually sauntering over – as though he suspects that sudden moves and the appearance of his hands might incite me to attack.

I’m like a bear. A bear who doesn’t know how to deal with sexual feelings – which is weird, because I’m pretty sure bears are really good at that sort of thing. Don’t they just lumber up to each other and mount?

I wonder if he knows that I want to mount him. I wonder if he’s going to try to make me feel like a fool, now, to make sure I don’t make a pass.

‘Kit,’ he says.

And then he touches my arm in this oh-so-soft way, and I go all still. Just like that.

Likely he has a lot of experience with wild animals. I can see an Ocean World T-shirt slung over the dresser by the door – he’s probably a shark wrangler or maybe a killer whale wrestler. Are those actually things? I don’t know. But I do know I should be focusing on the here and now, instead of imaginary careers he might have. He’s still touching my arm, and I’m still watching him touch my arm, and after a while the tension is just too great.

I have to look up at him.

Hesitantly, though. Maybe I even briefly slip into slow motion – it kind of feels like it. I’m afraid to see his face, in case it looks too good for me to stand.

And sure enough, it absolutely does. His expression is molten metal, from those heavy-lidded eyes of his to his parted lips. The intense heat from the ironworks he’s operating inside himself has melted any higher considerations, and suddenly he’s just
this
. This greedy, lustful thing. He looks at me from underneath those thick, black lashes, and I don’t think he’s doing it so he can assess my shoe problem.

He’s doing it because he knows it makes me weak in the knees.

‘Come on,’ I say, doing my best to hit the same note of incredulity he does, when he utters those two words. But the problem is – he has whole sentences to go after them. I don’t. I just go, ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ over and over again, until he’s forced to ask for clarification.

‘Come on what?’

‘None of that really happened.’

Shame that such sure words have such a faint voice to support them. I feel like I barely have any breath to push out the things I want to say, and the cocky pose I’m trying to hold is coming apart at the seams. It doesn’t help that my right side sinks much lower than I expect it to, every time I sag beneath the pressure.

If only I hadn’t lost that one shoe!

‘I mean, nobody really loses their virginity like that, to some hot older woman.’

‘No? So how do they do it?’

He’s not looking at my face any more. He’s looking at the fingers he’s busy trailing up my arm – the ones that somehow end up at the collar of my suit jacket.

And then he … then he kind of … opens the material a little bit, in a way that should make me very, very nervous. He’s almost peering around the corner of my clothes, to get a look at what lies beyond – which sounds terrible, I know.

Yet somehow it’s not. There’s such a gentleness to it, and that way he sneaks a peek is so overt it’s nearly cute. I like the way his mouth skews right, like he knows he’s being cheeky. I like how his eyebrows mysteriously make everything playful, even when they should be turning my insides upside down.

I like
him
, I realise. A lot.

‘In the backseat of someone’s car, in under twenty seconds.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And it feels kind of like being thrown into a cement mixer.’

‘Sounds awesome.’

‘It sounds
real
. More real than anything you just said.’

‘You think? And where exactly did I fall down, on the reality front?’

I debate whether to say, specifically. There’s a chance it will lead me down some very narrow paths, to some incredibly uncomfortable cul-de-sacs. Most of them are marked
you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and he’s going to tell you so in great and graphic detail.

But the thing about a cul-de-sac is: once you’re in it, you can’t easily back out.

‘Well, for a start you can’t make a woman … do that. Like that. And I know, because I am a … I am one of those … I am a woman.’

Unfortunate that I sound so unsure on that last part. Kind of undermines my point, a bit.

‘I see. You sure do seem to have it all figured out.’

‘I do.’

‘Mmmhmm,’ he says – probably because my collar is so fascinating he can’t possibly tear himself away.

‘So you admit it, then?’

‘Admit what?’

‘That you just … made all that up.’

He takes what looks like a thoughtful breath. Clears his throat, in preparation to deliver the truth. I should be pleased, really, only once I know it’s coming I kind of don’t want it to. Just give me another thirty seconds with that thing that could never have possibly happened
,
I think at him.

And he does.