You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (6 page)

It wasn’t often that Neve felt she could escape the confines of her body, but in those hot, sweet moments, she imagined herself transformed into a creature of nothing but pure sensation. She didn’t care about anything but Max’s mouth and hands on her, and even the feel of his cock, hot and hard, against her inner thigh was something new and exciting.

‘Can I touch it?’ she asked, when Max let go of her mouth so he could kiss a spot on her neck that made her grind against him. But her hand was already skittering down his body so she could wrap her fingers around his dick, gauging the length and heft of him, smoothing her thumb over the rounded tip and snatching her hand away when Max groaned as if she’d hurt him. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

He bit her neck gently but deliberately. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Just carry on doing what you were doing.’

Her hand was back on him in a second, marvelling at how a penis could be both hard and soft at the same time, and she kind of wanted to have another look at it, even if it meant shucking off the covers, but her thought processes got derailed as Max’s hand slipped up her legs.

‘Let’s get your knickers off,’ he said lightly, tugging down the reinforced cotton and elastane with a speed and dexterity that Neve couldn’t quite grasp. ‘That’s better. Now why don’t I show you how good I am with my hands too? I’m also pretty spectacular with my tongue.’

The creature of pure sensation exited stage left and Neve was back in her own unwieldy flesh and arching her hips away from Max’s fingers. She could handle the sex because she was going to insist on nothing fancier than the missionary position so Max would be on top with nothing much to look at but the framed Modigliani print above her bed. But there was no way she was going to spread herself out like a sexual smorgasbord. Sex was definitely the safer option.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ she said, pressing her legs tight together and shuffling away from him. ‘I’m ready to go.’

‘You’re sure? ‘Cause I don’t mind if you want to go twice.’

Celia had painted Max as a love ’em and leave ’em, cut-price Casanova, and instead he was being sweet and considerate and doing more for Neve’s bruised ego than the week-long Goddess Retreat that her mum had bought her for her birthday, when she’d specifically asked for a Wii Fit, but she had the winning hand so to speak.

‘No, honestly, I’m good,’ Neve said firmly as she applied the same pressure to Max’s cock as she had when she’d milked a cow on a school visit to the City Farm in Kentish Town. The farmer said she’d been a natural and it turned out he was right because Max closed his eyes and flung his head back.

‘You keep doing that, and it’s going to be game over before we’ve even started,’ he muttered. ‘Condom.’

‘What did you do with it?’ Neve said, loosening her grip on him.

‘Nightstand.’

‘Why are you only talking in one-word sentences?’ Neve asked, as she groped for the foil packet.

‘You know why,’ Max gritted. ‘As you’re so attached to my dick, maybe you could do the honours.’

Neve tried to cast her mind back to her sex education classes and the unripe banana she’d sheathed in slimy rubber. Except Charlotte had said she needn’t bother because no one would ever want to have sex with her. The entire class, apart from her friend Paula, had roared their approval and Neve had been so upset that she’d eaten her unsheathed banana while everyone else was watching a film about STIs.

Just the memory of it made Neve shudder. She thrust the condom at Max. ‘I always put my nail through it,’ she lied with an ease that surprised her. ‘You do it.’

Neve wouldn’t have thought it possible to put on a condom so quickly without even looking, but Max was pressed up against her in a matter of moments so he could kiss the corner of her mouth, which was drooping downwards. Those bad memories had killed Neve’s mood but that didn’t mean she was going to back out now. No. She wasn’t a quitter. When she decided to do something, she saw it through to the bitter end.

They were lying on their sides, face to face, knees knocking together, but Neve pulled gently away from Max to lie flat on her back and tried to think of something sexy to say to hurry things along.

‘Come on then,’ she said in what she hoped was an alluring manner.

Max propped himself up on his elbow. ‘You sure about this?’ he asked. ‘Ready to be ravished?’

‘Quite sure,’ Neve said shortly, tugging at his arm. ‘Please, can you just …’

‘God, you’re impatient,’ Max said, like he didn’t really mind, but at least now he was looming over her, pausing to kiss her while Neve obligingly parted her legs.

Neve lay there completely still, until she remembered that she needed to tug her slip down where it had ridden up over her belly because the quilt wasn’t covering everything she wanted it to.

Max was fumbling at her girl parts now and Neve was sure her clitoris was actually recoiling as it tried to evade his touch. She stared at the ceiling and tried to divorce her mind from her body, just like she did when she was having a smear test. What was taking him so long?

‘Neve? I know you said you were ready, but you don’t
feel
ready …’

She lifted her head. ‘Believe me, I’m completely ready.’

Max frowned, a lock of hair flopping over his forehead. ‘Could you tilt your hips a bit? No, tilt them towards me.’

Now it felt like she was in her Pilates class and trying to find ‘neutral spine’. Though actually breathing in through her nose and exhaling through her mouth seemed like a good idea as Max began to enter her slowly and laboriously, lower lip caught between his teeth. It seemed to take for ever, as if they weren’t two people having sex but two satellites docking.

At least this time, Neve knew for absolute certain that she was being penetrated. It didn’t hurt but it was extremely uncomfortable and not something she was planning to do again any time soon. But it would be different when she was having sex … no,
making love
with someone she was in love with. Only love could make this more bearable.

Max was pulling out and Neve wished he wouldn’t, because he’d only have to push in again and he was hissing slightly, teeth bared, features tight, his hands on her hips. Neve shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him, and how could she have been so stupid? She’d been too impatient and decided that sex was something she could rush through, then cross it off her to-do list. But it wasn’t an item that could be scored through; it was special and it was really, really intimate. If someone had never really got inside your head and your heart, then they shouldn’t be inside your body. Neve got that now, but her epiphany was too late. She’d reached the point of no return about ten minutes ago.

She steeled herself for re-entry, eyes screwed tight shut, fists clenched until she realised that nothing was happening. Max had stopped.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked tersely, taking his hands off her hips so he could move back.

‘No, I’m fine. You can carry on if you like.’

‘Well, I would, but it’s not easy staying hard when the girl underneath you obviously wishes she was somewhere else,’ he bit out.

The searing flush of utter mortification was like being plunged into boiling hot water. He thought she was crap in bed. She
was
crap in bed.
And
she was so utterly repellent that he’d lost his erection. Neve willed her eyes to open but they decided to stay shut so she wouldn’t have to see the obviously repulsed look on Max’s face. It was bad enough that he swore under his breath and slid out from under the covers so he could sit on the edge of the bed and put as much space between them as he could.

Neve said the only thing she could in the circumstances. ‘I’d like you to leave, please.’

‘I asked you if you wanted to do this. Not just once but several times.’

‘Please, will you leave?’ Neve rolled over so she was cocooned in her quilt and wouldn’t have to look at Max when she finally opened her eyes.

‘You should have said something, because I would never have … I don’t force myself on women. Did I hurt you?’ He was angry, not without good reason, but Neve could hear other things in his voice: shame, guilt, uncertainty. All the things she was feeling too.

‘You didn’t hurt me,’ she said woodenly. ‘You didn’t force yourself on me. Not at all. But I really need you to go now.’ She couldn’t stand to stay in the same room with him so she inched her legs out of bed and when she felt the floor underneath her feet, threw back the covers and snatched up her dressing-gown from the chair in one fluid movement. ‘I’ll give you some privacy,’ she mumbled as she sped for the door.

Neve scurried for the safety of the lounge so she could curl up in an armchair and huddle miserably in her ratty old dressing-gown, arms round her knees and listen to the sounds of Max getting dressed. Her heart thudded painfully in time with his tread on the stairs and she waited for his footsteps to keep going and for the front door to open, but they stopped – and when she looked up, he was standing in the living-room doorway.

She cringed back from his steady gaze, though it wasn’t angry or accusatory as much as thoughtful.

‘Bad break-up?’ he asked.

Neve blinked at him. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘You’ve just broken up with someone and you thought you could go out and grudge fuck some random guy but your conscience got the better of you.’ Max smiled thinly. ‘Usually it happens about ten minutes after, not during.’

‘You think I’ve dated? That I have had a boyfriend?’ Neve shook her head in disbelief. She’d turned on all the lamps because the darkness had just made everything seem, well, darker, so Max could really see her in all her tarnished glory. The smudged make-up, the voluminous dressing-gown, and her calves were pressed up against her body so there was no disguising how stocky they were. He could see all that and still think that she had at least one other notch on her bedpost. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

Max folded his arms. ‘So, what is it then?’

‘It’s not anything I want to talk about,’ Neve said stiffly. ‘I really need you to leave. Now. Please.’

‘I’ll see myself out then, shall I?’ Max snarled and Neve couldn’t blame him for being mad at her. She totally deserved it.

The sound of her front door opening was the sweetest symphony, although Max slammed it shut behind him. Neve heard Charlotte start shrieking and the familiar sound of a broom handle banging against the floor but she ignored it and listened to Max thumping down the stairs, then another slam of the street door – and only when she was sure that he was gone, she stretched out on the sofa because she wasn’t sleeping in her bed until she’d run the sheets through on a boil wash.

Neve woke up a few scant hours after the tumultuous night before and wondered why she was asleep on the sofa. There were a few seconds of blissful ignorance, then the events that had cast her out of her own bed came flooding back. She stared at a spot on the rug where she hoped a handy vortex would open and swallow her up. Alas, those handy vortices never appeared when you really needed them so Neve settled for Plan B.

An hour running on the treadmill at the gym helped immensely, and by the time she arrived at work Neve was calmer and the exercise seemed to have staved off her hangover too.

Neve had worked at the London Literary Archive for the last three and a half years. It would have been impossible to continue in higher education without a part-time job, unless she’d had a huge trust fund, so Neve had supplemented her tiny British Academy grant by toiling away part-time at the LLA, which was situated in the grimy hinterland between King’s Cross and Holborn. Once she’d finished her MA and realised that she didn’t have the appetite or the funds to spend another four or five years turning it into a PhD, she’d gratefully accepted the full-time position of Senior Archivist, even though her mother insisted on telling everyone that Neve was a librarian. Which she wasn’t. The LLA’s dusty files and even dustier books could only be seen by prior appointment and after sending in references from two accredited educational establishments.

Not that many academics wanted to search their archives because the bulk of the LLA’s collection had already been turned down by every other archive in the western hemisphere. Their roster largely consisted of obscure writers who’d yet to be rediscovered, and they rarely turned down a donation from a literary estate, which usually consisted of collections of mildewed books with their spines battered and their pages heavily foxed. Every six months or so, rumours spread among the staff that the archive was closing due to lack of funds, but another pot of money always turned up from the unlikeliest sources: a bequest from a recently expired philanthropist; one of ‘their’ dead authors’ books suddenly getting adapted for an arthouse Hollywood movie; or that Holy of Holies, National Lottery funding.

Even their building was entirely lacking in architectural merit. The LLA occupied the ground floor and basement of a small, squat building that they shared with a firm of accountants and a solicitor who specialised in Legal Aid cases and ambulance-chasing. The Reading Room, reception and the office of the Head Archivist, Mr Freemont, were on the ground floor. Neve worked in the basement where the only natural light came from a tiny window in the tiny kitchen at the back of the building, and where everything – walls, floor, ceiling, even the Health and Safety notice pinned to the corkboard – was nicotine yellow.