Exposure (4 page)

After James walked in on us that day, I
made Nathan go to my place most of the time. No one would disturb us there. It
didn’t matter to Nathan. He was just as happy to make use of every room in my
apartment.

One time I stood at the kitchen sink after
dinner and he came up behind me, kissing my neck, his hands reaching under my
blouse and massaging my breasts.

“I’m trying to wash up here,” I said,
laughing.

“And I’m trying to distract you,” he said,
lifting my skirt and pulling my panties to one side. “It’s not only the washing-up
that’s wet.”

“Nathan…oh.” His fingers were exploring
where my panties had been, making me forget the dishes entirely.

“I’m going to fuck you right here,” he
said.

“But there’s a window here.”

“There’s no one out there, but you’d better
pretend you’re washing up if you don’t want to look like you’re being fucked,”
he said, as his fingers found my sensitive nub and started circling, until I
was bucking against his hand, raising my hips to him, aching with need, and he
entered me.

He fucked me so hard that day, my bra and
blouse got soaked in hot water and suds, and two buttons were wrenched off.

Days later, I still blushed when I did the
dishes. It wasn’t the only place at home where the memories made my cheeks
flush. No place was sacred—the bathroom counter, the laundry room, the dining
room table—we had christened them all.

But in time I found out that wasn’t quite
exciting enough for Nathan.

***

I felt as if anything that made me as happy
as Nathan did that summer was a bubble waiting to burst, like the doll I had
craved for months and got for my seventh birthday. It was never the same again
after Alice Riley pulled the head off.

Something was bound to go wrong. I knew it.
But what? I didn’t know why I couldn’t just enjoy being happy.

My friends liked Nathan. My family liked
him. What was not to like? He was easygoing, and he charmed the pants off
everyone else—and the panties off me—and as far as I could tell, only me. There
was nothing to worry about, was there?

After they met Nathan, my friends wanted to
know all the details about our dates. “Come on. What’s he like in bed?” they
wanted to know. But I blushed at the thought of telling them anything. I’d
always been shy and only had a few close friends.

Justine was more interested than most,
given how Nathan and I met at work, but she was easily diverted into talking
about her own relationship.

“Robin and I just got engaged,” she said,
flashing her finger, complete with huge diamond ring, at me.

“Wow! Congratulations. Have you set the
date yet?”

“Not yet. He’s working on a big project at
work at the moment. I’m thinking next year or the year after. I’m really
looking forward to it.”

Justine’s engagement helped her keep the
green-eyed monster at bay. Robin was an up-and-coming architect, doing well by
all accounts, and I think that beat having a boyfriend with a precarious acting
career in her eyes.

I didn’t tell her that Nathan didn’t have
to work. He was happy to make his own way in the world, but he was never going
to end up starving in the gutter whatever happened. His dad bought and sold
companies.

“Don’t they mind that you want to act
rather than join the company?” I asked when he told me about his parents.

“My brother Alex has that covered. He’s a
chip off the old block, that one. It meant my sister Chloe could go off to art college
without Mom and Dad freaking out too much. And they paid for me to go to drama
school. What about you? Have you got any sisters or brothers?”

“There’s just me and my sister Suzanne. She’s
two years younger than me, but she acts older.”

“Even more sensible than you? Is that even
possible?”

He kissed my nose. I think he liked the way
he could get me to act out of character any time he crooked his little finger.

“Oh no, not that kind of older. I meant
when she was fifteen, she was acting like she was eighteen. Looking back I don’t
think she was that bad. It just seemed as if she was going wild at the time.”

Suzanne was the worst culprit of everyone
trying to find out what I was up to with Nathan. She wanted to know everything.
Though my sister and I were very different, I loved her to bits. I had feared
for her reputation as she grew up, but she didn’t care what people thought of
her, while I was the complete opposite of that. Criticism, justified or not,
made me curl up inside.

“Lighten up, Mel,” she said when I
cautioned her once about seeing two guys at the same time. “I’m not doing
anything different from any of the other girls. You need to get a boyfriend
yourself, and get off my case.”

She teased me mercilessly about my lack of
experience, and I think that’s what made me go out with Simon Barnes in my last
year at school and get it all over with. It’s a wonder that episode hadn’t put
me off sex for life.

***

School was out for the summer, but once the
open-air production began, Nathan and I couldn’t see each other as often.

According to him, if you had less time, you
just had to play harder. And playing harder to him meant taking more risks.

If we had to scramble over a cliff to get
the best view of the sea, so be it. If we had to pretend to be someone else to
grab a table at a restaurant, he was an actor, it was his job to pretend to be
other people! And if he wanted to make love to me outside where someone could
come by, who was anyone to say he couldn’t?

I thought we were just going for a walk in
the country the day Nathan first wanted to make love to me outside. I should
have known a walk was too tame a pursuit for him.

It had rained earlier but by then the sun
was out again. It felt so good to be out in the fresh air with Nathan on his
one full day off a week. But ten minutes after we parked the car and ventured
off into the forest along a tourist trail, he started my heart thudding by
whispering in my ear, “I’m going to take your panties down right here and fuck
you against that tree.”

Maybe I should have been shocked, but I
wasn’t. It was hot how much he wanted me all the time. His warm breath touched
my neck as he whispered, the scent of soap and the subtle aftershave he wore
sending butterflies fluttering through my insides.

I squirmed a little at his words and the
picture of us together that formed in my mind, but how could I say yes to that?
There was no way I would risk anyone coming across us having sex outside. That
would be too much. Maybe it was illegal as far as I knew.

“You’ll love it,” he said. “No one will see
us.”

“You hope they won’t, but you don’t know.”

“Then we’ll find somewhere they won’t.”

“Around here? It’s a tourist trail, Nathan.
You know, where people go on walks. Just like us.”

“Not like us,” he said, grinning. “Because
they will be walking along the path, minding their own business. They won’t be
fucking like us. Don’t worry. You’re overthinking things again.”

He tilted up my chin then to stop me
frowning, and kissed me so gently and reverently, I melted a little.

“I’m sure there’s a place well-hidden from
the path,” he said. “And we’re miles away from anywhere.”

I still wasn’t sure.

“Don’t you want me anymore?” he said,
puppy-dog eyes sparkling with mirth and good humor.

I could never resist that face, those eyes,
urging me to give in.

“Look, I’ll show you,” he said, and I let
him lead me through the forest to a copse of trees a couple of hundred yards
off the path.

He was right. It was secluded in there. No
one would see us, and if someone did come by, we’d have enough time to make
ourselves respectable. Although a walker venturing off the trail might guess
what we were up to, no one would actually know.

“Nobody can see us, but imagine they can,”
Nathan said. “That way, it’s a lot more fun.”

I leaned against the rough bark of an old
oak breathing in the summer air, soft after the rain, the sun trickling its way
through the leaves. Nathan kissed me, his cock already hard and ready against
me, though we had hardly touched. He looked into my eyes, intense yet smiling
as he pulled my sweater and t-shirt off over my head. A few rain drops fell
from the branches, cool on my bare skin, but the heat from Nathan as he kissed
me again meant I was not chilled.

He undid my jeans then and pulled them off.
I kicked off my sandals.

“I want you naked,” he said. “Take off your
bra and panties. Undress for me here, in the forest.”

“Can’t you do it?”

“No, I want to watch you.”

“Aren’t you going to take off your
clothes?”

“No. I want to look at you first.”

I gulped and complied, fumbling with the
fastening on my bra, wondering what the hell I was doing. He took the bra from
my hand and put it over the fallen trunk, where he’d put the rest of my things.
The air was cool on my skin. I shuddered, a thrill running through me, my
nipples engorged. I felt so vulnerable, so exposed.

“Now your panties,” he said, holding out
his hand.

I pulled them down and stepped out of them,
my eyes afraid to leave his. I needed the reassurance that he was there,
commanding me to do this. I had to know I wasn’t completely crazy taking off
all my clothes in that clearing.

He took my panties from me.

“These panties are soaking,” he said. “I
knew you’d love it here.” He held them to his nose looking deep into my eyes.

My breath hitched.

“You love getting naked for me here, don’t
you, baby?”

“Yes,” I said.

He pulled me into his arms then and kissed
me against that tree, the rough damp bark against my back, Nathan’s hard, fully-clothed
body against my naked front, my nipples super sensitive against the fabric of
his shirt. He bent and nibbled softly at the engorged peaks of my breasts with
his teeth, then and sucked hard on each nipple in turn, leaving the other wet
and cooling in the gentle breeze, aching for the return of his hot mouth. I
heard myself moan. I couldn’t help it.

I wanted to open my legs to him, let him in
and never let him go. He kissed me again.

“I love it here in the forest. I love you
here in the forest,” he murmured into my neck.

Wait? What? Had I heard him right?

“I love you too in the forest.” I pretended
he hadn’t said anything new. “You’re all wild and savage.”

“Actually I love you pretty much
everywhere,” he said. “In the kitchen, on the washing machine, halfway up the
stairs…”

“Oh you.” I slapped his arm playfully, my
mood broken for a moment.

“If you’re going to slap me, I’m going to
turn wild and savage. You’ve seen nothing yet.”

“Is that so, Mr. Waite?”

“Yes, Miss Hamilton, that is exactly so.
You bring out all my animal instincts,” and he pulled me to him again and
kissed me with such intensity I knew he had stopped being playful, and I wanted
and needed him more than ever.

“Bend over,” he said. “Hold onto the tree,
and don’t let go. I’m going to fuck you so hard, you’ll need to hang on.”

My heart was thumping as I bent over,
offering my body to him. He entered me from behind, rutting like an animal,
harder and faster, hitting every part of me inside until he came deep inside me
with a groan, sending me over the edge, my limbs shuddering. I couldn’t help
but cry out when I came, no matter who might hear. I lost all sense of decorum
every time with Nathan. My body was his. He could do anything he wanted with me
in the heat of the moment. I was his in that forest. I was his anywhere.

It was only once we came down from the high
of our wild coupling and Nathan was holding me as I recovered that I realized
how out in the open we were. I heard voices on the path where we had been
walking before Nathan took me on that little detour into the forest.

I panicked and grabbed my clothes, but
Nathan didn’t seem to care. I thought the risk turned him on more than ever,
and I knew it for sure, in time, as our dates became wilder.

Sometimes I wondered what possessed me to
go along with Nathan’s wishes, to risk someone finding us making love, and I
always thought I would say no the next time, but when it came down to it I
never did.

In the moment, I was fearful, but Nathan
urging me on and my desire for him always won over my anxiety. And there was a
kind of adrenaline rush that I got from it all that brought out a new impulsive
side to me I hadn’t recognized before I fell in love with him. It seemed as if
the extra element of wickedness added to my desire and spurred me on.

We weren’t always outside when Nathan took
risks. He liked sex everywhere—the restroom at a restaurant, the cloakroom at a
party, or a deserted elevator were no match for him.

Lost in our love making, I always felt like
we were invincible, hidden in our own bubble of lust in the middle of a world
that couldn’t see us. It was only later that my heart would lurch at some of
the risks we took.

Nathan didn’t care if there was someone
right outside the bathroom or elevator when we emerged, sated and guilty. I
did, and still I didn’t say no to him. I was well and truly under his spell,
but still happy when there was no one there.

***

Once, on one of his free nights, Nathan managed
to wrangle tickets to a hugely-popular show in London. As we wandered back to
our hotel hand in hand in the dark, the traffic buzzing around us, he decided
we should round off the evening by making out in an alleyway between two of the
city’s busiest streets.

“We can’t do anything here,” I said as he
led me down the alley and kissed me against the wall no more than ten yards
along from the main street. “Anyone could come along here.”

“We’ll be quick,” he said. “Anyway, let
them look.”

My eyes widened.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Perhaps I do.”

I didn’t say anything. We could have easily
walked back to the hotel in twenty minutes after the end of the show—faster if
we had taken a cab. He could have done anything he wanted to me there in that
hotel room. But Nathan had wanted to walk.

“Got to experience London on foot at
night,” he’d said, even though we’d both lived in London in the past as
students. Now I understood why he had insisted on walking.

“Take off your panties,” he said. “Give
them to me. No one is looking.”

“No, Nathan this is ridiculous. Let’s go
back.”

“Take them off. For me. Just because I want
you to,” he said, looking at me in the deep, searching way he had that made my
legs weak even now we had been dating for a few months.

A shiver of desire ran down my spine. I
loved it when he was at his most dominant. I put my hands under my skirt,
pulled down my panties and took them off.

He felt below my skirt.

“You’re wet,” he said. “You’re always wet
for me. I love that.”

My pulse was fluttering wildly in my throat
as he bent his head to kiss me again, still holding my panties. I could sense
people passing by each end of the lane.

At that point, we were just lovers kissing.
There was nothing wrong with that. Perhaps, it would just look as if we were
having a secret affair and needed to avoid being seen if anyone wondered what
we were doing there, tucked away from the main street.

And we would have been just lovers kissing
if Nathan had left it at that. But almost before I knew what he was doing, he
lifted my skirt, unzipped himself and thrust his hard length into me.

I gasped and had to close my eyes then,
fearful what I would see if I peeked out as he powered into me. Were we being
watched? I didn’t know. Somehow that made it all the more exciting. I was being
fucked in an alleyway like a common whore by the guy I loved more than anyone I
ever had, and I was letting him because I loved him.

When he came, Nathan made a gruff sound in
his throat, and I opened my eyes to see a middle-aged man watching us,
obviously enjoying the view. He tipped his hat to me and moved on.

“There was someone there,” I said, my heart
thudding, my face scarlet. “A guy was watching us.”

“What if there was? I expect he wanted to
be exactly where I was. I can’t blame him.”

He took me back to the hotel that night and
fucked me like he never wanted to let me go. Perhaps that was my reward. I didn’t
really need one. It had horrified me that someone was watching us, but I was
ashamed to admit it had excited me too.

I was worried though. I was worried Nathan
didn’t know when to stop. And that even if he took things too far, I wouldn’t
be able to say no to him.