Sweet Agony (8 page)

‘Her cunt was as ripe and wet as a recently sliced peach.’

I swear, I think my heart stops. I almost pound on my chest to get it going again – but only because, dear God, I cannot die now. He just said ‘cunt’. He said ‘cunt’! Did he say ‘cunt’? There is no way he could have said ‘cunt’. I must have misheard him. After all, there was definitely the word ‘peach’
in there, which probably means he is reading to me from a cookbook. He knows how much I love food so he thought that telling me how to make a cobbler would set my senses on fire.

And he isn’t wrong.

My senses
are
on fire.

They are on fire because he definitely fucking
did
say ‘cunt’. He said it in the most glorious way anyone has ever said it. He made it beautiful, rather than something I’m used to hearing from a tattooed man as he throws a beercan at my head. His mouth almost
worships
it. The word seems to take his tongue by surprise. I can almost see how it would be if he were to lick that very thing in one long, glorious, heartbreaking stroke.

But that isn’t the best part.

No, the best part is what comes
next
.

The best part is that there is
more
.

‘And when she spread it for him he found he could hardly stop himself. He simply had to lick at that glistening slit, and the second he did so she reacted just as he had hoped. She stopped all pretence that she was a lady, and told him all the things she would most like him to do. In a fever she whispered that he should fuck her wet hole, and rub her swollen bud, and when he followed each of these deliriously filthy instructions she made sure to reward him in full,’ he says, in one great long rolling wave that nearly smashes me to pieces. I have to fight for breath and, when I finally manage to take one, it feels far too big and far too loud. It practically fills this enormous room.

To his credit, though, he makes no comment.

He just keeps on reading to me from the book from hell.

‘She came with a guttural groan of pleasure, her wetness running like a river over his chin and throat and chest. For a moment all he could taste was her – the soft, flushed folds pressed so tightly to his mouth and that glorious wash of her first orgasm. There would be many more for her that night, but before he could see to it she spoke the words he was bursting to hear. The ones he never thought she would say – too rude and yet so much the better for it. “Fuck my mouth,” she said. “Fill me there
.
” And though he wanted to hesitate, he found he could not. All that mattered was the tight velvet clasp of her lips around his cock, her lust-heavy eyes on him as he thrust slowly in and out.’

Seriously, what story is this? The cover makes it look like something important and old from a course on super-intelligent texts from the nineteenth century. I think it is bound in leather with embossed lettering, and the paper is thick and expensive.

Yet the words are filth itself. They are so filthy my cheeks are blazing. I think I might be just as embarrassed as I am electrified by it, though it’s a close thing. One emotion seems to bleed into another and then the other attacks the first with a hammer until finally I just have to accept it. He was right about knowing his stuff.

He knows his stuff just fine.

In fact he knows it so well I’m starting to suspect there may be some other motive in here somewhere. He seems calm, on the outside. And, when I react in any way, he barely appears to notice. Or so I think. But it must be hard for him to keep doing so, when I know there are so many signs of my excitement. My nipples are pressing against my dress, so stiff and spiky that not even a layer of lining and support can conceal them. And, though the room is as cold as a tomb, I can tell my cheeks are flushed. I can almost feel them blazing, like a neon beacon saying, ‘Molly is really fucking turned on.’

But even if they weren’t, the fact that I just started rocking in my chair would be something of a giveaway. He starts talking about working a slick finger into tight arseholes and coming in great, pulsing spurts, and I have to do something. I have to rub myself a little, and then maybe a little gives way to a lot, and finally I think I might be just humping the chair – so really he has to know something.

He must, and yet he keeps going.

Now he’s talking about some guy who just came in, as the first one finishes filling her mouth. And though I think I can safely say that one man makes for a simple story to illustrate his point, I’m not sure what to make of it when a second joins in. The second one fucks her pussy while the first licks her clit, and then, just in case that wasn’t bad enough, just in case I wasn’t almost wild with lust, he tells me in that gorgeous voice that ‘he slid out of her still shivering cunt, to spill all over the still lapping tongue of this handsome stranger.’

After which, I feel it must be OK to go further. He just described a guy coming all over and inside another guy’s mouth. You just don’t do that unless you expect someone to get excited – though to be honest I’m way past that point. I’m so turned on that I could slip a hand into my knickers. I could tug at my stiff nipples and stroke my slippery pussy. And when he talks about them both kissing her come-soaked sex I get really close. One of my hands almost makes it to mid-thigh and the other is somewhere around the middle of my chest.

But, thank God, it stays there. Thank God, I hold on to some of my senses, because just as sexual certainty has me in its bright-red and burning hot grip, just as I think there’s no way this is anything but a come-on – that’s when he chooses to suddenly snap the book closed, so sharply that I know what’s coming, but all the same, by God, I will it not to.

Just give me some small sign that you meant it to feel so sweet, I think at him.

And then he glances up at me, as impassive and cool as a pane of glass, and tells me what I should have understood from the moment he started speaking. I should have done, but I didn’t, and oh, God, I will regret that until the day I die.

‘So you see it’s quite simple to be aware of sex,’ he says, swiftly followed by the crushing kicker: ‘Without ever feeling anything at all.’

Chapter Seven

I try to pretend none of it affected me in the least. The only trouble is, he makes pretending almost impossible. It would have been easy before, when he spent his days hiding behind doors and darting away into rooms whenever I was around. But, unfortunately for me, he doesn’t need to do any of that now. He no longer has anything to hide.

He can just fly around the house whenever he feels like it, suddenly barging into rooms when I least expect him to. There I am, minding my own business, fervently sweeping the ceiling in order to take my mind off things, and he has the effrontery to come in and be sexy and attractive and probably Byronic.

All of which sounds stupid, considering what he usually wears around the house. I swear to God, he spends most of his time in pyjamas and robes. On one occasion he sweeps in wearing a smoking jacket, with nothing on his feet. I see his bare toes, and that just makes this all the more hellish.

Somehow the skin on his feet is better than the skin on my face. It looks so smooth and pale and tender that someone should probably write a poem about it. An ode to his toes, I think, and I want to laugh and cry at the same time. It seems that even the smallest, strangest things about him turn me on.

I know they shouldn’t. After all, no one could really find a man perched in a chair like a great black bird the least bit enticing. There is nothing sexy about someone who forgets he dropped a stick of chalk into his tea and drinks it anyway, or a guy who craves cigarettes so much that one day I find him rubbing an empty packet of Benson and Hedges all over his face and body.

Those things are repellent.

I want them to be repellent.

I wish with all my might that they were repellent, but they almost never are. Take the last example. It probably would be unattractive if it were any other man, if he were just a friend of the family who had a ferocious need for cigarettes. But the problem is that this is
Cyrian
who has a ferocious need for cigarettes. This is sexless, passionless Cyrian letting me
see
that he has a ferocious need for cigarettes.

And oh, Christ, it’s hell.

I have to watch him smear the foil from inside the packet over his closed eyes and his open mouth, so desperate that he barely cares that I am standing in the doorway. I doubt he would care if the Queen was standing in the doorway. He just wants to lick every last trace of cigarettes from the wrapper, in a way I know is completely helpless. There is nothing sexual intended.

It just feels sexual to me, the hormonal morass.

As does the next thing he suggests to me, much to my horror and consternation. All he says is that my posture is a little poor. At best, it seems like concern, albeit with a skilful hint of insult. But then he suggests I let him correct it, and everything starts to slowly slide sideways.

I have no idea why I say yes. I am going to get myself into serious trouble again, and I see that even before he opens his study door for me. He moves with the same grace as when he sat down and took out that smutty story, that lesson-giving look all over his amazing face. And then he hands me a book and tells me to balance it on my head, and I immediately understand what is going to happen here.

I am going to walk up and down in front of the desk in his study.

And he is going to watch me in a way that makes me go out of my mind. Hell, I am
already
going out of my mind, and nothing has happened yet. I am just gingerly trying to balance the book and he is just sitting at his desk, hands neatly folded in his lap. No one could think this was a big deal.

But then no one would have had his eyes on them while they did it. They probably just played at this once when they were kids, or maybe the headmaster made them do it once, after they were caught slouching in class. A stern and forbidding figure, but even so – nothing like this.

His gaze feels like the sun on the side of my face. I want to stop right there before I get burned, but of course I can’t now. I’ve already agreed to it. If I back out he will know something is wrong, and I never want him to. Not if he has no idea what all this is doing to me. Not if he thinks it should never do anything to me at all. He is repelled by sex, I think, and will see me as disgusting if I try to force my feelings upon him.

So I walk when he tells me to. I take a tentative step in the glare of that unwavering stare, heart pounding somewhere around my forehead, every part of my body sweating. I’ve never sweated so much in my life. I think I feel it forming a slick on the insides of my thighs, but then I realise.

That is not perspiration.

Oh, my God, it’s not perspiration. Somehow the mere idea of this walking thing is making other stuff happen to me. I think of his eyes slowly following me as he sits there like a punter in some really strange strip club, and the space between my legs aches, and becomes full and fat and slick, despite my best efforts to suppress it.

I try thinking of wallpaper wrapped around my grandmother, or paint drying on the word ‘England’ that someone has hung on a tax-office door. Then, when that has no effect, I just go for broke. As clumsily as I can, I let the book slide off my head and fall to the floor. That should do the trick, I think.

Being a big awkward dork is never exciting.

But then he stands up and starts to move towards me, and oh, I know I’ve miscalculated.

I never thought he would come over here. Please, someone, stop him coming over here. It was bad enough when he just sat and watched. I felt like all my clothes were falling off every time I saw a flicker of his eyebrow. But now, with him so close – I don’t think I can cope. My senses are immediately assailed by his smell, smoky and expensive and sweet. And even more horrible: somewhere in the interim he has taken off his robe.

He’s wearing only shirt and trousers, and the trousers seem much tighter than they did before. When he stoops to retrieve the book – slowly, oh, so unbearably slowly – I see the frankly amazing curve of his arse, so high and tight that you could hang a bag full of cement off it. And of course he somehow turns to show it off at the best angle.

Does he know he is doing that? I want to say no, given his indifferent behaviour in the library. But it’s harder to believe that when he finally straightens. ‘Your book,’ he says, only he pronounces ‘book’ with a kick at the end instead of a K. He emphasises syllables that aren’t there, in a tone that would put the Sheriff of Nottingham to shame, and it damn near forces the bones out of my body.

How else to explain my inability to take the book back? He offers it, but my arms are so rubbery I can only manage a limp wave. I just stand there until he decides that the best thing to do is put it back himself, though, Lord knows, I wish I had thought that through. Getting a book put on your head by Cyrian Harcroft is about the worst thing a person can do.

For a start, he almost touches me when he does it. I think I feel his fingers brush some strands of my hair. My breath catches at the faint and tingly feel of it, every part of me so aware of his almost-touch that I could pick it out of a line-up. And how aware
he
seems. How careful he is to make sure everything is almost but not quite. How he positions his fingers in two steeples, either side of the book, so elegant and precise that it leaves me weak. The only thing that seems to be holding me up is my skin, and I can’t be sure of even that. It feels as though it might be on fire. My face is so hot I can almost see it glowing. I can even tell what colour it will be – a deep and embarrassing red, from the roots of my hair down to my neckline. I must look a sight, I think, but the truth is I have no idea what a sight
is
to him. I might be Sherlock Holmes when it comes to his subconscious, but I am Clouseau when it comes to sex. I almost go to pieces over a book on my head and a man bending over, and then I actually do so, just at the sight of his hands raised to my face. He’s going to put them on me, my mind yells, and it really seems like that. They come together around my chin, so close I could almost believe they were there.