Thrill Seeker (8 page)

‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘I’m miles away. You’re safe from me.’

I slowed. ‘OK, good, thanks.’

‘For the meantime, at any rate,’ he added.

‘Ha ha,’ I said dryly, trying to show I wasn’t afraid.

‘So this kidnap thing,’ he said, echoing my choice of words and making them seem trite. ‘You up for it?’

I swallowed, my throat dry as a bone. ‘Maybe.’ I sounded cheerful and unfazed, not at all how I felt. ‘I need to know more though. Maybe we should meet for coffee and discuss.’

He laughed loudly. ‘Coffee? I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too easy, too pat. I want to give you the best experience I can and take you close to the reality of what you crave. No good if we’ve chatted nicely over a latte beforehand. The
thrill is on the edge where fear and lust don’t know which way to fall. Don’t you agree?’

Jeez, he understood what I wanted so well.

‘What’s the plan, then?’ I asked. ‘How do we do this?’

‘You want to hear what I have in mind?’

I was almost home but I didn’t want his voice inside my house, didn’t want him that close again. A short flight of stone steps cut into a low wall led to a tarmac path edged with straggly grass and a rusting, municipal handrail. Up there, an expanse of cloud-veiled darkness lay over a shabby football pitch, a hut selling tea and ices, and one of the designated routes to the ruined, cliff-top castle. I hunkered down in the steps, hidden and safe, protected by slumbering stone and by the silence of the centuries.

My voice was a whisper. ‘Yes, tell me.’

‘I intend to kidnap you and hold you prisoner,’ he repeated. ‘I’m going to snatch you when you least expect it and take you far away from your life. I’m going to take you over completely. I’m going to lead you down dark paths where you’ll meet someone you don’t know: yourself. This isn’t about handcuffs or pain or roleplay. Those are just props I use to reduce you to a deep state of submission. And when you’re there, you’ll let me do anything I want. You’re so gone you can barely even speak. You’re not my prisoner at all. If I told you to walk away, you’d beg me to keep you safe. Not safe in my arms but safe in my sadism. That’s where you want to be. That’s where I want to keep you.’

I gulped nervously. He seemed to know what he was doing. His confidence alone excited me, not to mention the content of his words. For a moment, I forgot my strategy of honesty and self-assertion. I wanted him to take over entirely and give me no say in the matter. Then I remembered it was
important to let him know we were matched in our desires, and that I agreed to this. ‘I think I’d like that,’ I said, speaking softly in my stone-step nook.

I strained to catch the sound of him breathing. Was he aroused on the other end of the line? Was he jerking off?

After a pause he said, ‘Listen. And listen carefully because you need to understand this, Natalie. I don’t give a single fuck what you like.’

With that, he ended the call.

For days, his parting shot echoed through my mind. I told myself he did care, of course he did. He was merely roleplaying the bad guy, assuming I’d find it horny. And oh boy, did I ever. I loved the idea he’d be rough and cruel, that he’d make out my desires were of no significance and he’d fuck me this way and that, using me to satisfy his own unrestrained hunger.

Den was a far cry from nice-guy Grant who would instruct me to lie back and enjoy. And that’s what I was searching for, wasn’t it? A dark, twisted dominant man who’d be part of my journey towards my Northern Lights. Those lights, my shimmering destination, didn’t reside with an individual. They were the glow of me understanding and accepting my weird, kinky self. Den was a train ride on that journey. So at last, it appeared my luck was in.

Nonetheless, I longed for concrete details. I figured Den was withholding practicalities to add realism to our kidnap scenario. I simply had to do what I’d said and trust him. Or more accurately, take a chance on him.

Mostly I was prepared to take that risk. Just sometimes,
alone at night when the house was taunting me with its creaky, old bones, I feared he might break in, carry me off to an unknown place and I’d never be heard from again. In the clear light of day I dismissed the notion. I had a job to go to, a cat to feed, friends who would notice my absence.

One evening, watching a band play in a local beer garden as part of a mini festival, I grew convinced he was in the audience. Moths flickered in the halogen glow of floodlights while chatter burbled below the music. The air, warm and still, smelled of cigarettes, beer and a pungent, heady perfume, night-scented stocks or honeysuckle. From a tangle of foliage, a small, ornamental lion smiled up at me. In my veins, the Rioja to blood ratio was high.

I loved life. There and then, it was held and perfect. Everything around me glowed with a quality apparently greater than itself, as if the essence of the thing had leaked beyond its edges. Then I noticed a guy at the back of the beer garden, standing with a pint in his hand. Tall, built, shorn head. My heart flared even as I told myself that plenty of tall, muscular guys shaved their heads.

But the idea took hold and in the evening’s wine-smudged enchantment, the thought of him watching me became conceivable and exciting. I kept glancing over my shoulder to try and catch him looking my way. To my disappointment, his focus stayed on the band.

When the song ended, applause clattered. I leaned across to Marsha, speaking loudly above the noise. ‘Hey Marsh, I’ve got a new man on the go!’

I wasn’t even sure why or what I was telling her. I’d no intention of fessing up to anyone about the kidnap fantasy, especially not Marsha, eight years married and safe as houses.
She’d think I was nuts and probably come up with a hundred and one reasons why I needed to stop.

‘Yeah?’ Marsha moved her glass to rest her arms on the table. Red-wine stains bracketed the corners of her mouth and her tongue was purple. ‘Where d’ya find him? The internet again?’

I laughed. ‘Where else? He’s called Den, thirty-six years old.’

‘Go on.’

I realised I didn’t have much else to tell. ‘I haven’t actually met him yet but we’re getting on great in email.’

Marsha grinned. ‘Well, good luck with that, babes. Keep me posted, eh?’ Then she sat back as the next song started, a haunting ambient warble bleeding into the night.

We’re getting on great in email
. I had to admit, it sounded lame.

Moments later, when I glanced over my shoulder, the man had vanished. I felt as if I’d conjured him up by enthusiasm alone and he’d dematerialised as a consequence of Marsha’s disinterest.

I said nothing else to anyone for a couple more days. Heard nothing either. That was the worst of it. I kept wondering whether to text him. ‘
Hi, I enjoyed our chat the other night
.’ Or ‘
So when do I get kidnapped?’
Or maybe something porny. ‘
I want to suck your big, hard cock like a dirty little slut.’

But I didn’t text. Sometimes I checked my phone history to look at the time of his initial text (23.53) and my return call (00.02). I wasn’t looking for anything, just proof of a connection.

The following week, I went to see Liam. I’ll tell him everything, I thought. Well, nearly everything. Since Liam and I had started seeing each other a few months previously,
we’d always let each other know if someone else was on the scene, even if they were just a potential date. Our understanding was another relationship wouldn’t necessarily affect what we had, unless a new lover wanted monogamy, but being open about these things was polite and decent. Besides, honesty kept complications at bay.

It was a Tuesday, and I’d worked till half six, finishing off an urgent report whose formatting had acquired a life of its own at the last minute. Everything is urgent in my job and yet nothing is. I work for Saltbourne Council’s parking department. We’re not performing open-heart surgery and yet my line manager acts as if we are. She’s a woman who causes everyone’s stress levels to rise merely by entering a room, half-running in a stiff-legged kind of way, hobbled by her pencil skirt.

When I left the office, I fancied a drink and some non-parking related conversation so I texted Liam to see if he was around. He was still at the workshop. ‘
Drop in
,’ he replied.
‘Am carving something I think you will like.
’

I bought four bottles of fancy cider, Liam’s tipple of choice. He suits cider. His hair is russet like autumn apples, his skin creamy like their flesh, and he spends a lot of time hanging out with trees. Saltbourne Community Crafts, the location of Liam’s workshop, is a council-supported, cooperative venture housed in former stables in the shabby Georgian part of Old Town. Centuries ago, when storms sent the fashionable set hurrying back to London, mud on their breeches, seaweed in their ringlets, the townhouses were left to rot.

Today, they’re B&Bs and cheap hotels. Several are derelict, their windows boarded up, puny buddleia sprouting from their cracks. When I’d spoken to Den while leaning
against one of these buildings, I hadn’t thought it might be unwise to linger in a slightly dodgy part of town. Ah well, I’d survived, hadn’t I?

Community Crafts is one of the areas small successes. The workshops edge the old stableyard and when the weather’s good, some of the artisans set up stalls on the cobbles or open their doors, inviting the public to watch them work.

The place was quiet when I arrived, just a couple of guys across the yard from Liam’s place smoking by a cluster of reconditioned furniture. At the security gate, Liam greeted me with a kiss, his copper curls flecked with sawdust, scruffy T-shirt hanging from broad, angular shoulders. He smelled of wood and sweat. I wanted to eat him. In the workshop, he opened two ciders. My groin gave a quick thump at the sight of his enormous, long hands, his thumb on his Swiss army knife, his wrist angling in a flick on the bottle tops.

He passed me a bottle and our fingers brushed together. He has such beautiful hands, big, knuckly, vigorous and clever. Even when they’re at rest, those hands seem full of life, as if every action they ever performed simmers below the surface and every future action is on the brink of being realised. They are hands that can carve wood, slice leather, fashion rope from nettles, build fires in forests, break the necks of small mammals, roll joints, construct shelters and make me come and gush, time and again.

‘Cheers!’ We clinked bottles and I sank into a low chair of chrome and torn leather, feet on the cluttered worktop. A fluorescent strip light hummed faintly above us, its cold glare outshining mellow sunshine filtering in through high, dusty windows at the rear of the room. Scraps of leather, chunks of wood, sawdust and twists of metal littered the cobbled floor while all around us, tools poked from pots or dangled
from racks like small, medieval torture implements. Liam stood, arse perched on the worktop’s edge, and circled my bare ankle with his fingers, rubbing while I moaned about my boss.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Well, about your vagina, to be precise.’

I laughed, taken aback. Liam and I generally take a while to catch up and settle into each other’s space before we start getting sexy. By now, Baxter Logan would have had my clothes off and his cock in my mouth, but not Liam. We don’t share that lustful frenzy. The ‘buddy’ takes precedence over the ‘fuck’.

‘Oh? And what did you conclude about my vagina?’ The word was amusingly clinical between us.

‘I’m making you a dildo out of cherry wood.’ Liam reached across the table and held up a thick, L-shaped dildo, curved in unusual ways. The wood was pale and unpolished, its surface channelled with rough, narrow grooves, its bulky length striated with a deep pink grain. Liam turned the object in his hands. I sat up for a closer look.

‘See, it has an upright handle. Easy to manipulate if you’re on your own. I’m thinking of drilling a hole in this ridge so a bullet vibe could go in.’ Liam’s slender fingers moved across the wood in synch with his explanation. The object seemed an expansion of him, a natural creation flowing from his body. The connectedness of his hands and the carving struck me as having a profound simplicity. This was a timeless craft being employed to enhance a timeless activity.

‘This flared part should stimulate your G.’ He ran his thumb over the lump. ‘Designed with you in mind, the anatomy of your cunt.’

My body responded as if he’d stroked, not the dil, but me. ‘Can I see?’ I asked.

Liam handed me the piece. The intimacy of the exchange moved me, leaving me choked, but I hid it well. Liam’s hands had been inside me so often and he’d combined this knowledge of my body with his talent and skill to design an item we could use together to make sex even more magical. I caressed the hard, rippled surface, fingertips running over a hundred tiny chisel-marks, each one chipped by Liam. Had he been thinking about us as he’d carved, flakes of wood falling around his feet, his cock lifting in his combats?

I suddenly didn’t want to tell him about Den. Liam was so sensitive and earnest, so considerate and good, that my fantasies, relative to his world, seemed corrupt, black and ugly. Liam wasn’t judgmental but, nonetheless, I feared introducing the concept of Den might sully what we shared. How, after Liam had spent hours carving a dil to give me pleasure, could I explain I’d been flicking my bean over a bloke I’d found on the internet who’d hung up on me after saying, ‘I don’t give a single fuck what you like’? Oh, and that this stranger had been stalking me, had threatened to kidnap me, and I hadn’t called the cops?

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I inhaled the wood, savouring its bright scent. ‘And big! And hard. I’m worried it might hurt.’

Liam smiled. ‘It’s not finished yet. I could smooth it down if you want but I thought the texture might feel nice. It needs to dry for a few weeks then I’ll seal it with—’

‘Whoa, hang on! Are you saying I don’t get to test drive this till autumn? Too cruel!’

Liam laughed. ‘I’m never cruel.’ He said it as if it were a bonus. ‘Do you like it?’