Sweet Agony (20 page)

Loving every second of him giving in. Giving it all up to me, in one great glorious burst that leaves us both gasping and flailing and only really understanding in the aftermath. I come around from an orgasm so intense it almost knocks me out, to find myself sprawled halfway over him. My body is all over his body, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

In fact, when I start to sit up he stops me. 

And his arm goes over mine.

Chapter Twelve

I wait until he’s sleeping to have a look around, which doesn’t take long. After whatever that was he nearly lapses into a coma. He hardly seems to care that he’s got no clothes on, and he doesn’t pull the covers over himself as he drifts off. He just sprawls there on his stomach, one hand trailing off the bed in a way that strangely affects me even more than all the rest of it. I see his fingers curled about an inch from the floor, and a second heart just starts beating inside me.

And this one is only for him.

Him and all the things he is, from the man I know to the one he clearly was. The one I find in a thousand places in this worn old cottage in the woods. It’s smaller than I imagined, this place. Much smaller and poorer, though I suppose not all upper-crust families had money to match the titles. They must have lost a lot of it along the way, because everything here screams of falling to ruin. The furniture is rickety and mismatched; the carpets threadbare and dusty. I find earthenware riddled with cracks and the bathroom suite definitely needs replacing. The toilet flushes thanks to a lengthy chain. The tub has rust around the plug.

Though none of this means anything to me.

The keys carved into an end table mean something to me. I see them underneath a greying, lace-edged cloth, so carefully concealed that I nearly miss them. Anyone would miss them, if they didn’t know what they were looking for – but of course I do. My heart is already shivering before I go over to it and lift that frayed cloth. I see the C and the D and the F dug deep into the wood, the letters shaky, as if written by children, but the lines surrounding each one as straight as though a machine made them.

He must have used a ruler, I think.

A ruler and a pen-knife, to make a mock-up of the thing he was forbidden. To create something he could practise on or simply enjoy, so often that the letters are worn down. I run my fingers over them and can feel the lack of sharp or splintery edges, too obvious for my heart to take. I have to cover them up again and pretend I never saw them, though by the time I do it’s too late.

I turn and there he is in the narrow doorway. Face nearly expressionless, hands loose at his sides, so still and silent he could be a shadow of himself. Or maybe a shadow of someone else, because he seems like that too in those clothes. The ghost of himself past, I think, too small and thin inside a too big and too worn jumper, pyjama bottoms so overused the stripes they once had are barely visible.

Plus his feet are bare.

He always looks extra vulnerable when his feet are bare. As soon as I see them I want to clutch at myself, or at the very least apologise. I’m glad I don’t. If I had we might have descended into a conversation so painful he would never return from it, whereas in silence he can just go over to the table and sit down. He can point to the space beside him so I can sit too, and see his ritual. He reaches underneath first for a packet taped there – old enough that the words on the front are faded, and the cigarettes inside taste terrible. He lights one with matches that shouldn’t strike and grimaces, before he slowly dissolves into a kind of bliss.

And then I watch, as he shows me just how good he is.

So good, in fact, that I can hear the song without the sound. I lean against his arm and feel it through the muscle there. I get it in every thump of his fingers against wood, more lovely than anything played on a real piano. This is a real piano, I know – the one that lives inside him. The one that keeps him going until late in the morning, barely sensible of the cigarette I take away when it starts to burn his lips.

And which tastes like him, when I touch the tip to my own.

So sweet, I think, and just a little bit bitter.

Just a little, so little, and less every day.

I learn later, much later, after copious quantities of bread so thick it takes forever to chew and jam too sweet to be legal, that it isn’t just the cottage. There are grounds attached, extensive grounds. ‘I own most of the woods,’ he tells me, as though he’s talking about a small allotment instead of an enormous enchanted forest. Most of the trees are so tall and sprawling they look like gnarled and knotted dragons, and when I stand at the bottom of the garden of this tiny cottage I can’t see where they end or begin.

I even go to the top of the nearest hill and am none the wiser. All I can make out is an old barn that probably once belonged to a farm I can only assume is long gone. Though, when I press him about it, all he will say was that he rarely went in there. He doesn’t suggest that they owned that too, or that they once had animals or fields full of barley or anything of the sort.

But when I head towards it, he doesn’t try to stop me. He just follows, mildly indulgent and surprised, as though it had never occurred to him that anyone could be interested. And once we step inside, it’s the same. ‘So, as you can see, the contents are just as thrilling as the outside,’ he says, and actually they are. The whole place is like something out of a fairytale, faintly grimy and dappled with hints of fading sunlight.

And I tell him so.

I tell him with excited words that this is the place I would have loved to play as a kid, trapped in tower blocks that stank of piss. Then I tell him with my actions, too giddy to contain. He calls after me as I climb the ladder to some upper level, but still I don’t stop. I can’t even hold back when he tells me he never played as a child, because somehow that makes it seem more important. We were both cut off from things like this, for different reasons.

Me in my stripped-bare life, and him in one ringed with barriers and boundaries. He doesn’t even understand why I go up, or reach for the rope that dangles over the great hills of hay piled to his right. He just knows that when I take a running jump off the edge it turns him momentarily upside down. The second my feet leave that upper level he shouts – he actually shouts – the fear in his voice so real and raw it thrills me.

But not as much as swinging through the dim darkness of an abandoned barn. I let go at the highest point and damn near soar through the air, arms and legs flailing and every part of me full of the joy of it. This is what it must be like to live, I think. This is what it must be like to have fun, of the sort that makes me giggle. I hit the hay in a great
whoomp,
a million strands of it puffing upwards and most of it burying me almost immediately, and then I laugh out loud.

Much to his irritation.

‘You could have been killed,’ he says, but I can’t help noticing something odd in his voice when he does. A lightness that wasn’t there before. An amusement that matches my own perfectly, and becomes sweeter as he carries on speaking. ‘There could have been a pitchfork in there somewhere – I might have been forced to watch you die with it stuck through your middle. Honestly, you never think reasonably about anything, and you do the most insufferable things, and you are an eternal source of exasperation to me.’

Yet he does it all as he climbs the ladder, at my suggestion.

‘Try it,’ I tell him, then watch in breathless wonder while he does just that. He even takes a running jump off the edge, far more athletic about it than I was. It makes me think that I should ask him about that body of his, and whether he rowed or boxed or did some other vigorous thing. But then he lands almost on top of me, and I forget whatever I want to say. Mainly because for a second he actually bursts into laughter.

But also because once he’s done he turns to me. He looks at me through the dim light that I would dearly love to call gloaming, his expression slowly sinking into the warmth he probably should be incapable of. He should be, but I know he isn’t now. And even if I was unsure, even if I had no idea and could hardly guess, after one lovely moment filled with all the affection in the world he does this:

He leans across to me slowly, haltingly, raising his arms so stiffly that I don’t recognise what he’s doing right away. I just lie there looking at him, unmoving, and only after his hands pat over my arms and his body brushes mine do I get it. Though to be honest, getting it still leaves me somewhat stupefied. ‘What is this?’ I find myself asking, in a slightly scared and wondering tone.

And in the end I’m glad I do.

It means I get to hear him say: ‘I’m hugging you. This is me hugging – am I doing hugging wrong? Molly, tell me, am I doing it wrong? It feels awkward and awful so I have to imagine this is not right, but would appreciate some sort of confirmation’
.
I get to feel him trying to correct his technique, in wholly ridiculous and unnecessary ways. He shifts one hand down and the other up, and tries bending his elbows instead of holding them stiff. And he does all this even though having my face almost pressed to his chest is enough for me. Just knowing that his hand is on my back gives me everything I need.

I know it does, because I burst out with words I shouldn’t tell him.

‘I love you,’ I say, and strangely I don’t regret it in the least. Not even when he answers with silence and stillness, as though it shocked him out of his skin. Not even when he finally responds, and it’s with something frantic and physical and not like him at all. Hell, if anything the latter is a bonus – his hand suddenly slides to the hem of my skirt and I go weak almost immediately.

Then even weaker when I realise he really is ruffling the whole thing up. I feel the air on my bare thighs and my partially clad backside, and all my muscles melt.

And that’s before he pulls my knickers down. He almost yanks them, as though he can’t wait more than a second to get at what he wants. Me, I think, he wants to get at me, though such a slight sentence doesn’t quite cover what he does. It seems too small to contain the way he attacks the buttons on my blouse, so roughly that I hear some of them skittering across the floor. The cold air hits my bare breasts before I’ve had a chance to think: But anyone could walk in.

And by the time I get round to it I don’t really care.

How can I, when his next move is to kiss me there? He puts his mouth on my nakedness, as though he hardly worries about anything of the kind. Hungrily, I think, sloppily, so far past caring that I doubt he could stop if he tried. He just wants to bury his face in my tits, and once there his only thought seems to be to taste every tiny scrap of skin he can reach.

It’s like he’s been starved. Like he’s just stumbled out of a long and arduous famine, and now he gets to feast. He gets to lick and suck and grope with both hands, in a way that probably should feel awful. It
should
, but, Christ, it doesn’t at all. Just watching him is enough to make me plump and wet between my legs. I see him make an incredibly lewd circle around one stiff nipple, and feel a rush of arousal like nothing I’ve ever known before. It seems to flick at my already swollen clit, and sink deep into the pit of my stomach. For a second I can barely breathe beneath it.

But I battle through.

I have to. If I don’t I’m going to miss the rest – because oh, Lord in heaven, there’s more there’s a million times more. He doesn’t wait for me to catch up with him. Whatever waiting he had in him is done. He just eases two fingers into my slippery cunt, stroking and feeling me out until I realise in a great gush of excitement what he’s doing.
He’s preparing me.
He’s making me ready for that big fat cock, and he’s doing it so thoroughly I think I might come first like this.

In fact, I suspect that’s his goal. I
know
that’s his goal, because after a second of those delightfully long and utterly flexible fingers fucking into me, he goes one step further. He finds my clit with his thumb, and works me so slowly and so well I can feel my thighs starting to shudder. I can feel my belly tightening, and I have an urge to bury my face in that threadbare jumper.

But I’m glad I hold off. I’m glad I keep looking at his face, because oh, God, the way he holds my gaze.

And the things he
says
. ‘Come for me, come for me like a good girl,’ he tells me, and though I try my best to let it last a little longer I have almost no chance at all. He practically forces it out of my body. He does this insane thing where it feels like he’s pincering me, those fingers inside me pulling forward while the meat of his thumb almost pushes down. And the second he does, the very second he does, I almost die. Everything seems to clench all at once, too hard to really be good.

Yet somehow it is good. So good I think I grunt like an animal, and I know I make a mess of his hand. More than that, really. Embarrassingly more than that. I gush all over him, though that doesn’t feel as shameful as it probably should. Partly because nothing that incredible could ever be shameful, but also because I know beyond any doubt that he wanted me to do it.

That’s why he fucked me like that – so I would make a slippery mess. So I would go all trembly and boneless and barely offer any resistance when he eased his cock into my slick cunt. And it’s true, I don’t. I take him so easily I think he goes faster than he was really ready for – but that’s OK. Oh, yeah that’s just awesome, because, holy mother of fuck, the look on his face when he feels me surrounding him.

His mouth actually drops open. I think his pupils dilate – or at least his eyes go wide and blank. He stares at me without really seeing, every inch of his willpower clearly devoted to keeping him there and present and not liable to run. Or does he just need the time to process the sensation? It seems so, because after a moment of rigid shock a sound comes out of him. A sigh, like someone warming themselves by the fire after a long, long time out in the cold.

And then his eyes drift closed.