Run To You (24 page)

He doesn’t have to ease, though. I take him without a hint of trouble, everything just opening to him in this deliciously slow and slick way. And then once he’s in to the hilt he stops, as though he wants to savour it.

Or wants me to savour it.

And, dear God, I do. I’m so swollen I can feel his length against every inch of those soft, slippery walls, pressing in places other men usually don’t reach. And when I clench around him – even just a little bit – it sends pleasure radiating outwards through me. It makes me gasp, and I think the feel of me has the same effect on him.

He’s just resting there in a way that seems designed to tease, until I give him that little squeeze. After which, his response tells me all I need to know. He’s not teasing at all. He’s trying to wrestle back some self-control. For some reason, he finds this so exciting he’s close to triggering like some horny teenager.

However, he shouldn’t feel bad about that. I think I’m about to trigger too. All I have to do is consider him suddenly spurting inside me, and those little waves of sensation become swells. It’s still so startling to see him like this – quivering with tension, still full of feeling, and so deep into whatever this is that he may never find his way out. He’s stuck seven miles down, I’m certain of it – but only because I’m in there with him.

I’m so flushed I’m sure my cheeks are glowing, and so breathless I’ve been reduced to a kind of desperate panting. I breathe out in a long slow gasp when he rolls his hips towards me, and greedily devour the air when he pulls away, and I only just avoid a sob.

But the moment he starts up a more definite rhythm I stop bothering. I don’t hold anything in, or hide an inch of my feelings from him.

What’s the point?

He already knows. Of course he does. He’s feeling the same way. His cheeks are as red as mine feel, and he isn’t just shaking. He’s shuddering all over, and clutching at me – yet still he doesn’t speed up. He just carries on like this, working me over in these slow, steady rolls until I’m mindless and boneless.

And God, so close. Excruciatingly close. I feel like I’m hovering on the brink, and have been since the dawn of time. My sex aches and I’m making a sound like someone dying – so much more than a sob now. So much more in every way. There are actual tears rolling down my cheeks, and I don’t even know why. It’s not because it feels so good – though that’s part of it. And it’s not because this is love that we’re making. It’s something else, and as my orgasm surges up and up, breaking in a way I can hardly take, I realise what it is.

This is the proof, I think,

And yet I still don’t believe.

My home looks different to me when I first walk in the front door – as though I’ve been away for a thousand years. It’s like there’s a layer of dust over my possessions, and it makes the colours dull. It makes the furniture shabby. I’ve been looking too long at the sun, and now everything is gloomy by comparison.

But I guess that’s just part of the problem. It’s a symptom of spending time with him, even though I so desperately don’t want to be dazzled by his world. I don’t want it to seduce me into forgetting what’s important, and yet I think that is what’s happening anyway.

My first reaction to the gift he’s sent me is not offence or squeamishness. A little surge of excitement goes through me instead, and it lingers inside for far too long. It’s there when I tear off the glossy paper, and there when I finally get to the box beneath.

It doesn’t even go once I’ve drawn out the prize itself: a cashmere dress, cut at odd angles around the neck and even odder ones at the hem. It’s all asymmetric and so soft you could probably blow on it and send it off on a breeze, and for a while I actually marvel. All of my worries drift away in the face of this luxury, and it’s only this slowly dawning realisation that draws me back.

That love-making – it was never intended as the proof.
This
is the proof. This dress, the shoes that go with it, an appointment he’s apparently made for me at some salon with a name I can’t pronounce. He can’t tell me I fit in yet, because I don’t.

But he can
make
me.

He can take the round peg I seem to be, and slot me into a square hole. All he has to do is give me corners where none were before – and boy, are these some pretty ones.

The shoes are even more glamorous than the dress, perfectly matched and in possession of all the things my own footwear doesn’t have. They’ve been fancily stitched – probably by hand – and they have real leather soles and heels with little metal tips, whereas mine … well, mine are like these, without the extra finesse. All of this stuff is like mine, without the extra finesse. Once I’ve gone over everything it comes to me: this outfit is practically the same as the one I wore to dinner with him.

Only
better
.

I can’t deny that it’s better, even if I want to. Without the denial I’m just left with a rather pointed comment, and I don’t know how to process that. I flump down onto one of my dining room chairs and just stare and stare at this rich rubble all over the table, from the curls of fancy tissue paper to the puddle of that little black dress.

Is that what he wants? I have to change to be with him? I suppose that was roughly what I was asking for, but it’s uncomfortable to suddenly face my own request. It makes me wish I had someone to talk to about it – someone who would say that I should only ever be myself and fuck everything else.

But of course Lucy is still on the other side of the world. There’s a postcard from her amidst the mail I’ve been letting pile up, telling me what a fabulous time she’s having – no secret mystery, no tortured love affair.

That was all me. I see that now. I just
wanted
there to be secret mysteries, and tortured love affairs, and in a way I guess I got it. I got so much. What’s a little bit more, really? I can put on this dress and attend these appointments, and pretend to be cool for an evening in a dress worth more than I am.

I can. I can.

* * *

I go to the salon first, pulling up in a taxi on a street that probably doesn’t even know what taxis are. This little tucked-away strip of London is used to limousines and chauffeur-driven BMWs, and it shows. I can already feel people looking as I step out of the car – though I suspect it has more to do with me than it does with the cab.

I shouldn’t have worn jeans. I should have worn the dress, to an appointment that’s intended to get me
into
the dress. Crazy logic, I know, but it’s how I feel as I creep into a place that’s just as glossy as everything else in his life. The floors are glossy, the seats are glossy, the sinks are glossy – even the faces of the people who greet me are glossy. Emotions skate over the surface of their features, eyes almost blank in an effort to be as perfect and precise as humanly possible.

Though I’ll admit: they’re nice enough to me. In fact, they’re more than nice. They greet me like a long-lost friend – or as much of one as they’re likely to have – fussing and plucking at the air around my face and hair as if they can’t quite bring themselves to fully touch it yet. They have to remove the imaginary flies of poverty that are probably buzzing around me, before they can do anything like that.

‘We’ll do this,’ they say. ‘We’ll do that. You’re going to feel like a million pounds.’

And I suppose they’re right in terms of money. But maybe not so right in terms of my emotional state. Whatever his intentions were in doing this, my insides still cringe away when they find little flaws and imperfections. It doesn’t matter that they then buff and pluck and polish them away. They’re still there, under my skin.

I’m still the same person – only now I’m smooth and glossy like them. They thread my eyebrows into elegant arches and wax every inch of hair off my body, until I’m down to a little landing strip above my completely denuded sex. And then once they’ve whisked me through these processes – once they’ve stripped me back to the bare essentials – they start building me back up again.

My hair is sculpted into a series of coils that I’m sure won’t work on my out-of-control mess – but they do. Everything stays perfectly in place once they’ve pulled and brushed and oiled it. It’s a true feat of engineering, though I don’t know what to make of it once I’ve seen myself in the mirror. They’ve given me all this height at the front, and when I make the mistake of standing I seem to be around seven feet tall. I’ll be even taller in those killer heels, I think.

And it’s then that I start to feel nervous.

Maybe I won’t be the same person any more. Maybe you actually become someone else the moment you start down this path – though I can’t halt proceedings now that I’m in the middle of walking down it. I couldn’t halt them even if I wanted to. They’re like an oiled machine, passing me down the assembly line until I get to the last stop:

Make-up.

God, make-up is the worst. It’s like someone is affixing a mask over my features, to complete the disguise. And the girl doing it has to get so close. She has to get so intimate with me – colouring with her little pencil and sweeping with her little brushes, her face so near to mine I can see the flecks of gold in her pretty blue eyes.

At least with the waxing I didn’t have to meet someone’s gaze. I could look away at nothing while my mind went to a far-off place, but here it’s impossible. She’s actually breathing on me, despite it being the height of bad manners to breathe on a person. And after a while this silence is so stifling that I can’t help speaking. I don’t want to do it, because really, what could I ever say to someone like her?

But the pressure gets to me, and suddenly I’m jolting out a question.

An asinine, ridiculous question, that I wish I hadn’t asked.

‘Do you do this often?’

I mean of
course
she does this often. This is her job. She’s probably plucked and peeled and attached masks to half the ladies in London, and judging by her expression I’m not wrong. Her forehead wrinkles just a fraction, before she catches it and smoothes it back into place.

‘Indeed I do,’ she says, and it’s only then that I understand what I really wanted to ask. Not does
she
do this often, but does
Janos
? Does he send many women to this place, to be made over in one particular image? He could have been lying about me being the only one, after all. Maybe this is a hobby for him, tempering trash into gold.

But I can’t restate the question.

I can’t.

I have to.

‘I meant … do you often style women who’ve been sent here by a rich man?’

I don’t say his name. It seems better not to, and especially as I’m already being far more direct than elegant people are probably used to. I’m supposed to be silent and smooth, I think – like a fancy car that muffles the roar of its engine – and that theory is reflected in the flicker of her eyelids, and the hint of a downturn at the corners of her mouth.

I wasn’t meant to do that, I know, but she’s classy enough not to make me feel it too much. She doesn’t comment on my mistake or roll her pretty eyes – she only answers, in her best and most noncommittal voice.

‘No, not often,’ she says, and then she hesitates for just a fraction of a second. Long enough to hear, but not long enough to mean anything – unless you want it to. Unless you’re like me, and always think it does. ‘And never for the man we’re talking about.’

It’s funny – she’s answered the way I hoped she would. Apparently, Janos didn’t lie about me being the only one. And yet I leave the conversation with this queasy feeling, and, once I’m outside, it occurs to me why.

She didn’t mean that I was special, I think, as I stand on this posh street with my new hair and my new body and my new face. She meant that other women probably didn’t need the work that she had to put into me.

But I did.

I needed an overhaul, in order to deserve a man like him.

* * *

The place he takes me to is even grander than the restaurant, and one hundred times more intimidating. Here there are no booths for us to hide in, no secluded spots where he can keep me a secret. It’s a charity ball for a cause I’ve never heard of, and everyone is standing. Everyone is milling around.

There’s no escaping.

I have to mill too, even if I really don’t want to. The well-oiled machine is turned on again, and it simply eases me on through – like I’ve got my dress caught in it and can’t quite get free. I have to move when it moves, or I’ll get chomped up.

And, judging by the people here, that chomping will be painful.

There are women with peacocks on their heads, carrying bags that look like they’ve recently emerged from a diamond mine. Even the men are dressed in tuxedos that seem to shimmer and shine, depending on which way they turn.

Apart from Janos, of course.

He’s in something subtler and darker – something that feels to the touch like the softest wool. I can’t stop rubbing my fingertips over it as I clutch his elbow, trying to place the sensation. And then it comes to me … the material is very close to the stuff my dress is made out of. Not quite cashmere, but close.

Which is probably what he intended, now that I’m thinking about it. He wanted us to match. To go together, like bacon and eggs.

And we do, in truth. I can pretend and pretend, but I know we do. I can see us reflected a thousand times in the mirrored walls – Janos all darkly handsome, suit so sharply cut it could have been done with a razor, not a hair out of place and everything so poised.

And then this gleaming stranger on his arm.

Because she
is
a stranger. She doesn’t even behave like me, which is undoubtedly the most frightening thing of all. The salon and the clothes haven’t just made me appear different. They’ve also removed things they couldn’t possibly have – like my awkwardness, and my unerring ability to trip in heels, and my tendency to say whatever is on my mind without thinking.

He introduces me to someone who must be a dignitary – he has an actual sash over his shoulder with various adornments all over it, and if he has a chin I can’t see it. It’s swaddled in seven thousand years of privilege, and all of these things should be enough to make me laugh nervously. They should be enough to force some stupid words out of me, like ‘Is that a toupee or your real hair?’