Run To You (7 page)

‘Of course it’s fair. If you want something, you have to ask.’ He walks around me again, only this time it’s more like pacing. It’s more like prowling. ‘I did say that you couldn’t expect me to do all the work. You have to offer me something at least, and really I’m requiring so little. Am I not?’

The answer is yes, obviously. Yes, you’re requiring so little. Words are barely anything when you really boil them down, and I know I could compress them even further. I could mash ‘fuck’ together with ‘me’
and he’d understand.

He would.

So why am I floundering? It’s simple, really.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’d like to touch you.’

There, I think. There.

And just as I do he strikes me down.

‘Liar,’ he says, like a fist rapping against glass.

A little harder and it will break.

A little gentler and everything will stay the same.

‘That’s not a lie.’

‘Of course it is. You don’t want to touch me. You want me to carry on touching you. You want me to peel off your blouse and your bra and get right underneath. And when I’m finished there, you want me to start on other items of clothing.’

He gestures to my skirt, though perhaps gesture is the wrong word. It’s much more like a caress, from the curve of my hip over and down my thigh to my knee. And I suppose it would be, if his hand wasn’t around two feet away from any of my actual body parts. It just dances through the air over certain places, and I shudder as though he really touched me.

I’m fighting a losing battle.

‘You’re wrong. I hate being naked.’

‘You hate being naked because you think you’re unappealing. But secretly you long to be confident … to have a man’s eyes following your every move as you strip out of your clothes, so sure and certain that he wants you. That he craves you. Isn’t that so?’

‘No.’

This time he stops in front of me, and tick-tocks his finger back and forth.

‘That’s another lie, Alissa.’

‘How can you always tell?’

‘I make my living from being able to tell.’

‘Really? True or false, then: I threw my childhood pet in a lake.’

‘Are you challenging me?’ he asks, laughter in his words. ‘Very well: true.’

‘You honestly believe I’d do something like that?’

‘Whether I believe or not, it’s obvious you aren’t lying.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you wanted to trick me, so told me the most ridiculous thing you could think of in the hopes I’d get it wrong.’ He sits back down in his seat by the table, while I make every effort to close my gaping mouth. ‘Correct?’

He’s so correct it hurts. My pride is still reeling from the blow.

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t know why you did it, however. Are you going to enlighten me now?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘I killed it by accident. It was just a mouse and I was mostly afraid of it and it jumped out of my hands when I tried to hold it too tight.’ He was right about the ridiculous part. This story is so absurd I’m blushing over it, and not just because of the content. There’s also the fact that he’s making me tell it to someone like him. What does he know about petty concerns like this? I wish I wasn’t telling him about petty concerns like this. ‘And then I was scared my parents would find out, so I got rid of the evidence.’

‘That’s a sad little tale.’

‘It’s a stupid, meaningless little tale.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it’s meaningless that you were afraid, and that you tried to hold on tight, and then couldn’t tell the people closest to you,’ he says, and something rises in my throat after he’s done so. It kind of feels like a knot of frustration on the way up, but it comes out in the form of a word.

‘
God
,’ I snap. ‘Do you really have to be like this? You can’t work me out so easily, you know. No one can work out another person so easily.’

‘I never claimed I could. I only claimed that I can interpret some of the things you say and do, and that I know when you lie. And I believe I’ve proved that much, at least.’

He’s right. He has. But I’m not willing to accept that. I’m not willing to accept any of this. I just want to go back to the touching and the guessing, and that urge is so strong it’s making my teeth ache. Before I answer I have to clench them together, and the words come out all grating and ground up.

‘Not enough for my liking.’

‘No? Then perhaps we should play another little game,’ he says, in a way that suggests it isn’t going to be little, and it isn’t going to be a game. People don’t brace themselves over little games – but that’s what I’m doing. I’ve stiffened my shoulders and tightened my hands into fists, and when he finally speaks I close my eyes. It seems better to close my eyes for something like this: ‘If you tell me a lie about your desires and I catch you, you then have to do whatever it is you tried to conceal from me.’

‘And how would you go about catching me?’ I ask, in some vain attempt at injecting some bravado into this. I already know it’s the wrong thing to say, however. The second I speak that word aloud, my mind starts picturing him chasing me down hallways. In some of the scenarios he has giant metal hands or a big chainmail net, but in all of them I’m exactly the same way. I’m panicking and stumbling and completely unable to escape.

He’ll have no trouble, I think.

And apparently, we’re of one mind on this.

‘I don’t believe it will be so very difficult.’

‘I could lie about lying. I could tell you it isn’t true no matter how hard you pressed me, and then what would happen?’

‘Then the game comes apart.’ He picks at lint that isn’t there, somewhere around his right knee. ‘Though I trust that you won’t let that happen. No matter what you say, I think you like it when I guess.’

He’s right and wrong at the same time. Sometimes he speaks and my insides soar, but I always have an urge to punch him afterwards. I have an urge to punch him now, and it’s really only being eclipsed by the need to play this game until it reaches some probably nightmarish conclusion.

He’ll ask me if I’d like some anal sex, and I’ll lie and say no.

And then
I’ll have to do it.

Oh, God,
yes
, I’ll have to do it.

‘All right. I haven’t the faintest clue how this is going to work, but all right.’

‘Excellent.’

He shrugs around inside his jacket, as though to make himself comfortable. And when he finally is – when he’s completely at ease and the master of his own domain – he speaks in this casual way.

It’s just a shame that the words themselves aren’t casual at all.

‘What are you waiting for, then? Take off your clothes.’

‘What? That’s not the game.’

‘Of course it is. You lied about not wanting to be naked, and I caught you. So now you have to remove every … little … thing.’

For a moment I’m too taken aback to speak. He’s like a wizard. He’s like the designer of terrible traps for foolish people, and somehow I’ve stumbled right into one without even realising it. My leg is caught and I’ve lost my map, and I’ve really got no one to blame but myself. I actually feel stupid for complaining, though I have to do it.

‘But we weren’t
playing
then.’

‘I don’t remember that being in the rules. You didn’t specify a starting point, as far as I can recall, though you can try to tell me otherwise if you like.’

I bet he’d let me, too. I bet he’d let me talk just to see how deeply I can tangle myself in him and all of his craziness. And the answer is, of course:
very deeply indeed
. Oh, so deeply I’m never going to get back out again.

‘I don’t want to tell you otherwise.’

‘So then,’ he says, and holds out a hand – like the conductor of a symphony, I think, awaiting a command performance. I can even hear the strings singing in the background, everything rising and rising to the point where I have to do this.

Doesn’t he realise I can’t do this? I’ve never learned; I don’t know how. The instrument is unfamiliar and clumsy and the notes are all wrong. I can’t I can’t I can’t, I think, about a second before he speaks again.

‘Begin,’ he tells me.

And somehow I can play.

I start out quite simply, slipping out of my shoes and casually tossing my jacket aside. But after a moment I realise this is meant to be more than that. It’s meant to be a striptease, I can see. It was in his words, and that hand gesture he made, and now it’s in his expression. That near-smile is dancing around his lips, though it hasn’t quite reached his eyes.

Oh, no, his eyes are as dark as midnight and twice as intense. They glitter at me like onyx from all the way across the room, and they never waver. They don’t even flick to something else when I reveal the silly thing I’ve done.

I wore tights, instead of stockings. I wore big, clumsy, grey woollen tights, unthinkingly. All I considered was how good they’d look with the only expensive suit I own, and in truth they do. They look great when I’m fully dressed.

They just don’t when I’m not.

Why didn’t I think about not? I knew what I was coming here for. There weren’t any illusions, though I suppose I might have pretended otherwise. I erased our final phone conversation from my mind, and just focused on other things. His voice, the island, this room.

I’m such a fool, I think, but there is nothing for it now. I have to reach under my skirt and wriggle out of these ugly elasticated things, and I have to do it fast. I have to do it without glancing up, in case his gaze makes me lose my nerve.

When I accidentally do, however, the near-smile hasn’t spread. He’s not laughing. If anything he looks even more intense than he did before. He’s leaning forward a little now, with one hand on the arm of the chair, and as I slowly restart this clumsy strip, his eyes follow my hands.

He watches me slide the wool down over my knees, occasionally tilting his head this way or that – as though to get a
better
look, I think. He wants a better look at something so completely ridiculous.

And I don’t know what to think of that.

I know it makes my breath come in shaky bursts, however. I know it makes me even clumsier. For a long moment I can’t quite get the tights over my ankles, and I wrestle with them briefly before finally giving in.

I’m going to have to sit down to do it, though God knows what kind of striptease that is. The truth is, I suppose, it isn’t any kind of striptease at all. It’s just me removing my clothes, in blundering fits and starts. First the shoes, then the tights, and now my shirt. Oh God, my shirt. Why is it so much harder with the shirt?

I guess it was just easy to pretend, with the other things. But I can’t with something that covers most of my upper body. Once the material is off he’ll be able to see secret parts of me that usually stay covered up, and the idea makes my hands tremble. I fumble my way through the buttons, random thoughts flitting through my mind as I do: what will he think of my frayed bra? What will he think of my weird breasts?

But in one way, he answers all of my silly worries.

He still isn’t wavering. He doesn’t look away when I slide the material off. He just keeps staring and staring, until it almost becomes a kind of challenge for me. Go on, go on, I think at him. Glance at something else. Here I am, with my tights and my worn underwear and my mannish shoulders.

Be bored. Be disgusted.

And when he refuses to obey I go faster. I get a little braver. I fumble the zipper down on my skirt and let it pool around my ankles, and once I’ve made a fist of my nerves my bra follows. It’s really quite easy with him looking at me like that, because his look makes it abundantly clear.

He likes what he’s seeing. Somehow, impossibly, he does. His eyes are almost fondling me, and when I finally bare my breasts that feeling gets stronger. I get that same spark of sensation thrumming down from my taut nipples as I did when he was actually touching me. My back arches and my shoulders straighten – like I’m proud, I think, like I’m proud to look like this and as confident as he said I could be.

And I am, really. In that moment, I am.

I feel all raw and ripe, and so aroused. My sex is a swollen fist between my legs, just aching for me to take that final step. The material of my panties is practically a prison by this point, and it only gets worse as time ticks on. I think he’s looking now. I think he can see my wetness seeping through the cotton, and after a while I know he can.

He gives me this hooded look, near feverish and so greedy.
You’re making a mess, you bad girl
, that look says, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before he tells me to take them off. I can almost hear him ordering me, in fact.

‘Just remove them before you sully the material any further,’ he’ll say, while I come close to collapsing on the quicksand carpet. Or maybe he’ll simply tear them off with his teeth, as I swoon dead away. He certainly looks like he wants to do that.

He’s baring those pearly whites right now. And he keeps licking his lips in this lovely, lascivious manner, like he’s thinking what I’m thinking even though I haven’t the slightest clue about anything in my head. I’m too busy enjoying the sensation of someone not actually touching me to get as far as what it might be like if he did.

Will it be as good as him watching me awkwardly easing my panties down my legs? I doubt it. He seems to flash fierce when I snap the elastic and softer when I get things right, and everything is so backwards I can’t bear it. Why does he like it when I blunder? Because it’s clear now that he does.

I almost trip when I get to the last hurdle, vacillating wildly between sureness and a fumbling lack of grace, and it’s then that he moves. I hardly even hear him, or see him. I’m too busy tutting at myself for being clumsy, and then suddenly his hand is on my shoulder. His big, broad hand, as firm as I imagined it.

Only this is more than my mind could offer. My mind is thin, compared to him. It suggested a poised and professional man intent on a particular goal, but that isn’t what I get. I get a man possessed by a raging demon. He pushes me back onto the bed without saying a word, all questions and answers and truth and lies forgotten.