Seduction (18 page)

I looked at him and knew he could have gorgeous young women but he'd chosen me, and my stomach went all butterflies and I think I fell a little bit in love all over again.

He took his clothes off piece by piece while he watched me pinch and stroke my nipples and rub one leg along the other so that my tormented clit could find some relief. He stripped down to nothing, and I in turn didn't care that he didn't have a six-pack. I cared more about the width of his shoulders and the dark curls sprinkled across his chest. I cared about the cock rising thick and erect from the darker bush between his legs.

I thought of how often, how much, how viciously I'd fantasised about his cock and the sight of it, so close, made me dizzy with wanting. He followed my gaze and smiled as he took his length in hand and stroked the skin up and down, rubbing
the head and watching my lips part and my fingers unconsciously clamp harder on my nipples.

‘Do you want this, Robyn?' he asked me and I gave him another dirty look.

‘If you don't bring it over here, I'm going to come and take it,' I threatened.

He chuckled. ‘Do it then. I dare you.'

Wrong words. I kicked the sandals off and then the skirt and then I went after him. He didn't run far, just a few feet away from the blanket before he let me catch up with him and grabbed me and pressed my naked body to his. We kissed and groped each other under the trees like some wild creatures out of Greek mythology, with the springtime breeze caressing our sweating skin and the music of the wilderness as background to the rough beat of our blood.

Then he led me back to the blanket and knelt over me and I spread my legs for him. Just like I'd planned, just like I'd fantasised. Only with the scent of grass mingled with the scent of sex and skin; with the heat of afternoon baking up from the earth and the touch of wind all over my body; with him kissing me more gently than I'd ever thought about even as one of his fingers thrust hard into my pussy and the other into my ass and I cried aloud from the sheer confusing pleasure of it all.

He wiped his fingers on the grass while I panted, and smiled at me.

‘
Now
,' he said. ‘I want to fuck you.'

‘You got protection?' I demanded.

‘Of course.'

I let him retrieve it from his pants pocket, tear the wrapper and pull the condom out before I snatched it from his grasp, stretched it out and tossed it aside. He stared at me, and I smiled.

‘Been years since I've needed those, love.'

He gave me the dimples, but he still had to get one last jab in. ‘And you're sure I'm safe otherwise?'

‘No,' I told him. ‘But I'll take the risk. I want you like this.'

And I had him. He couldn't say another word. He just filled me and fucked me like his life depended on it. Like it was all he'd ever been created for or meant to do. He fucked me until I hurt and the white blanket under us was spotted with red, and still I begged him for more. He lifted my legs and kissed the soles of my feet while he drove deep into me and I didn't think about tuna salad or anything else. I couldn't think at all; I could only lust and feel and come, and this – him – was what I'd needed all along.

I watched his face as he came and listened to him yell and I smiled. I wiped tears away from my eyes and his and played with his hair while he lay still on my breast and our breathing slowed, melded and at last found the same rhythm. He kissed my nipple and made me laugh and I thought that it had been worth the wait of half a lifetime: this silence, the satiation, the ache between my legs that told me I was alive. This feeling of being complete.

I closed my eyes and sniffed his hair.

‘Know what?'

‘What?' he replied, his voice drowsy and husky and delicious to my ears, muffled by his lips against the curve of my breast but vibrating through his chest and into my belly on the single word.

‘I think you're the best damned Christmas present I ever met.'

He laughed.

HE'S SUCH A
dark horse, that's the thing. Always with that peaked cap pulled down low over his eyes, and those eyes always pretending to be naked and vulnerable and like they're telling you everything.

But they don't really tell you anything.

He has none of the flat bland allure that the conventionally handsome usually have, and so none of that easy by-the-numbers readability, either. Back in college, when he read out that gross fat chick story, his face should have read: I hate you, gross fat chick.

But it didn't. It read like nothing, as it does now.

‘Hey Hobbs,' he says, and kisses my cheek – awkwardly – and then we sit down – awkwardly – and wait for the rest of our former writing group. Also awkwardly.

I guess it's always been that way between us. I'm too aware of how handsome he is and he's too aware of how unfuckable I am and it's all because he's not like Ryan, all charming and able to banter with me, and I'm not like Kate, all cute and confident.

‘So how've you been?' he asks, and I don't know. Good, I guess. Good enough that I don't care about what he thinks of fat chicks.

Though I still think about it when Kate and Ryan get here,
and everyone's talking all at once. I fade into the background and remember every inch of that story he read out, more sure than ever that he wrote it as an answer to some of mine.

Mine were celebratory, voluptuous, sunk deep in a sensual blur. Never focusing on an excess of hip or breast, but brushing over them, soft as gossamer.

His was morbid in its detail. The deep dimples that crowned her buttocks, the ripples of flesh undulating under his main character's hands, the creases and folds and slopes. And the sad-sack loser obsessed with it all, as though no normal man could ever be interested in anything like that.

But I do remember a line from his story – one line in particular – that was as lovely as his story was obviously not intended to be.

The soft crushed velvet of her skin that begs for my body
.

Yes. I remember that.

He thinks I begged for his body. I'm sure he does. We're all sat around drinking too much, lounging on beanbags like harem denizens, sharing stupid fantasies just like the good ole days, and I'm sure he expects me to say:
you
.

You were my fantasy. You were right; I wrote those honeyed stories about a glittering honeyed land for you, Julian. The head of my queen's harem was modelled after you and your long liquid limbs and your limpid unreadable eyes and that sultry cast of your sultry mouth.

That's what he thinks I will say, but then I guess he doesn't know me half as well as I know handsome men. He wrote that gross story to ward me off – keep away from me, fat chick! We handsome men can't be touched by the likes of you!

So I tell some little thing about how I've always wanted to be a nineteenth-century proper lady, married to a proper husband, who then, on our wedding night, gives me the fucking of my life. Oh I never knew it could be this way, etc.

Ryan laughs and says exactly that, but Julian just stares at me with those storm-blue eyes. He looks sullen, I think, or angry. Because now he's wrong wrong wrong – he'll never be my nineteenth-century husband with his over-styled hair and his peaked cap and everything about him, Mr IT Whiz Kid.

‘OK, OK – what's yours, Julian?' Kate says. ‘Still the same? Or has it changed?'

‘It never changes,' he replies, and I try to recall what it was before. All I can remember are a dozen boring stories about robots and the fat story, however.

‘My favourite fantasy,' he begins, ‘is the one with the girl who doesn't know I'm there.'

We all immediately sit up straighter. He's never told this one before.

‘I guess it's kind of a voyeuristic fantasy. Though maybe not really. I don't know what it is. But it's my favourite anyway.'

‘Are you sure?' Ryan asks. ‘Because we can all still go back to believing you're dead inside at this point. I think I speak for everybody when I say we thought you only had robots in you.'

‘I do,' he replies, in that slightly uncertain yet lazy way he has when he's about to say something possibly funny. ‘They operate the cogs in my cock.'

I take too big a drink of wine, and almost go over the wrong way on my beanbag. He, on the other hand, looks like he was born to loll on beanbags. As though he's the sultan of our harem, only it's a harem of people who never, ever have sex with each other.

Unlike the people in my stories, who do nothing
but
have sex with each other. My harems are filthier than a garbage truck. Only not disgusting. Never disgusting.

OK. Maybe sometimes disgusting.

‘So you were spying on someone,' Ryan says.

‘It didn't happen like that,' Julian says, and I'm sure he now looks half as though he wishes he hadn't said anything at all.
No one ever honestly wants to share their perverted fantasies with friends they've barely seen for years.

‘It was in our final year. Remember Tawny Housam?'

Boy, do I ever. She had legs longer than my entire body. Did he spy on her striding over the Eiffel Tower?

‘After we'd split up, I guess I was feeling pretty weird. Wondering how I fitted in, wondering if I'd ever meet anybody right – the usual college stuff. Or maybe seventeen-year-old girl stuff. Whichever. Anyhow – that's when it happened.'

‘You started your new life as a seventeen-year-old girl?' Ryan says.

Kate giggles. I drink.

‘I went to the Hallsdale party.'

‘The one where Curtis Blalock dislocated a testicle?'

‘That's the one. I got bored trying to pretend I was charming after around twenty minutes, and fell asleep playing on someone's computer upstairs somewhere. Woke up covered in coats.'

I'm sure that's happened to him at a dozen parties. I've seen him trying to talk to women in the corner of kegfests, looking glorious but sounding like a computer manual. Though I can hardly knock him – I've woken up in my own fair share of coats.

‘I think it was maybe morning, or close to it, and the house was deserted. Or at least I thought it was.'

‘Dun dun duuuuhhh,' I say, but I think I'm drunk so it's understandable.

‘I went downstairs, and saw the door to someone's bedroom ajar. And I could hear running water, too, which sort of made me want to pee. So I went into the bedroom thinking I'll talk to this left-behind person, and then use the bathroom, and then go home and kill myself.

‘But I got into the room and it was all quiet and dim, with that soft morning feeling and someone's bed covers all ruffled,
and even before I saw what I did I felt real relaxed and kind of . . . warm.'

If only he could talk like this at parties with women. But I think he has to be comfortable. We're apparently comfortable, like old shoes.

‘And then I turned, and the bathroom door was ajar, too.'

I think I've heard this one before, but there's still something about the way he's talking. He seems kind of breathless, and even beneath the shadow of his cap his cheeks look flushed. Like he can hardly bear to get it out, it's so scorching hot.

I can hardly bear for him to get it out, either. I'm on tenterhooks, waiting to hear what he's going to say.

‘I didn't mean to look. Or at least, I didn't mean to keep looking. I can remember seeing a flash of pink and knowing that I should walk away immediately, but I didn't. I wanted to look – which makes it worse and better at the same time.

‘I think the thing was – she was so unexpected. Everything about it was unexpected. Her being there, the way she looked, the effect it had on me. She didn't look like anything I was used to – she had tiny little legs and broad square shoulders – but those things only served to make me more interested. They made me not want to look away.'

I can't picture this short boxy woman.

‘She was completely naked, and wet from the shower.'

Which makes the doors being ajar completely implausible, but do go on anyway, Julian. You're still making it sound as though it's the truth, and that's the important thing. The delicious thing.

‘Her skin was like syrupy icing sugar, all glistening and pale and edible, and I remember that
thud
, that kick of sex I felt, thinking about eating her up.

‘There were so many nooks and crannies to her body: that dark secret crease between the top of the thigh and the edge of her triangle of hair, a dip where her hips met her upper
body, the place at the underswell of her breasts. I wanted to map out her secrets, and give all of these places names. I wanted to write the names on her skin with my tongue so they'd always be on her like burns.

‘All the other girls I'd ever had faded away as her hands glided over the blooming crescents of her breasts and the deep hollow of her belly button. They couldn't compete with that sudden desire to have my hands be her hands, and discover that body she obviously had no idea about. She had no idea it was capable of having this effect on anyone, I know.

‘And that fact excited me more. She had no idea she was seducing me – wouldn't have even if I had done all of this legally and made small talk with her and got her back to her bedroom and laid in semi-darkness, waiting for her to take her clothes off in some clumsy hesitant way. I think that, more than anything, turned me on. She was doubly oblivious of her seduction of me, so oblivious that she could have read me erotic stories as lush as her body and thought only that I was stone.

‘Of course I
was
stone. Just not in the way she might have imagined.'

His liquid voice is what makes a wet dream wet. I'm convinced of it. I hadn't realised it before right now, but it seems as though his voice can make even the words ‘nook' and ‘cranny' into fluid sinuous sex.