Telling Tales (13 page)

He’s not cut, for starters—that’s a surprise. I’m sure I heard somewhere that most American guys are, but when I work him just right I can feel the soft skin sliding over the slick head of his cock and, God, God he feels amazing. All I have to do is swipe my thumb over the slit at the tip and he leaks precome, copiously, everything getting slippery the more I stroke until finally he’s just talking absently through a haze of moans and sighs of pleasure.

“Really,” he says, and jerks into my touch as he does so.

“My last girlfriend—I had to go down on her for hours before I could get inside her.”

I think
I
moan then.

“But it’s OK. It’s fine. I love…doing it.”

I definitely moan after hearing him say that.

“I love it more than getting anything for myself, you know? Because anything for myself just feels like…like I’m being…I don’t know.”

Dirty
, I think for him, though I’m not sure if that’s true. There definitely seems to be some shame-based nonsense to his behavior, but he speaks so little I can’t tell.

All I know for sure is when I put a palm flat against his belly and push him back a little—just to make room, just so I get on my knees and finally have him in my mouth—his cock jumps in my grasp. More fluid leaks from the tip and runs in a thin stream down over my working fist.

He likes being pushed; he really likes being pushed. He likes being pinned, and he likes it double when I sink suddenly to my knees, one hand suddenly on his upper thigh, holding him fast, the other on his cock as I sink my mouth down over the tip.

In truth, I can barely take more than that. He’s so thick and fat, and when I suck hard it doesn’t take much to tighten my mouth around him. It takes so little, in fact, that he’s moaning and trying to thrust before I’ve done a single thing.

Any second and he’s going to come, I think, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t. He just stands there, shivering, with his big cock barely sliding in and out of my mouth, the salt-hot flavor of him immediately on my tongue.

I work him quickly, sucking hard then licking over the little slit at the tip. Over the ridge on the underside—the one that makes him almost buck right into my mouth. But he doesn’t come. He doesn’t even do it when I make my hand nice and slick and rub over the shaft as I lap around the head, though he does make a sound when I make one.

When I gasp with the sudden pleasure of it—God, this is
Cameron
I’m sucking off, oh Lord he’s so slick and hot and hard—he gasps too, like an echo of me. As though it turns him on to hear me, which I suppose it does. He did say that thing about preferring giving over receiving—probably because he’s a god sent from the heavens to stun us mortal women into submission—but I didn’t really register it until now.

Until I break away from his swollen cock just long enough to tell him how wet he’s making me, how hot, how I don’t care what other girls think—I can’t
wait
to feel this big thing inside me. Arousal makes my tongue loose and I really go for it. I even slip a hand inside my knickers to chase it, to make my words dirtier, hotter.

“Oh God, I just want to rub your cock over my clit—do you know how swollen it is? How hard? I can’t even touch it—it feels too good. I’m gonna come any second just thinking about you fucking into me, hard, hard—”

“Jesus Christ,” he gasps, then even better: “Are you touching yourself, Allie?”

He sounds incredulous, even though it seems pretty clear to me. I can hear the folds of my slick pussy, parting around my busy fingers.

“Yes,” I tell him, but my voice is wavery now. I’m pretty close—too close to do anything decently—so I just stroke over him roughly, flicking my tongue over the tip until his thighs start trembling and his hands go suddenly to my hair.

Of course I assume he’s going to force my mouth over his cock. But since it’s Cameron we’re talking about here, he does just the opposite. He tries to push me away, instead, and when I won’t go he gasps out a little frantic: “Ohhh no, baby, no—I’m really close.”

It takes me a second to realize what he means, and when it comes I’m struck for the first time by the similarities between this, and my encounter with Wade. No real sex, just stroking and touching ourselves and then finally Wade covering my face with his come.

But apparently, Cameron doesn’t want to. Or at least, he’s giving me a choice—again.
I
can
do
whatever
I
want
, I think, and then after a long moment filled with shivering thrills I push his hands away from my hair.

I
order
him to keep them at his side.

“No,” he says. “No.”

But I ignore him. I slide my mouth down around him and suck, strong and steady, while his fists remain somewhere around his hips. And then when he chokes out a sound, I rub him in time to the slippery wet rhythm I’ve worked up.

It takes about ten seconds. Maybe longer, but I find it hard to be sure because I’m suddenly delirious with the grunting, guttural noises he makes and the sound of that cultured voice telling me he’s coming.

It gets me there too. Just hearing him and feeling him swell in my mouth, then all the hot, thick spurts of come over my tongue. The whole thing goes on for a long, long time and I work myself through it, stroking my clit until it’s almost painful. Until I’m shuddering and boneless and just waiting for him to tell me how sorry he is.

Only he doesn’t. Instead, I feel him sort of…relax against me. Just a little bit, just enough for me to realize how heavy he is and how much I need to prop him up against something other than me.

And then, after a moment, he says: “God. Never thought I’d feel your mouth on me…there before I got to feel it pressed against my lips.”

I like how he says
there
. It’s so him, it really is.

“You want me to kiss you, Cam?” I say, and I guess I’m teasing a bit. I certainly expect him to say no, because…well. I don’t exactly taste like cake and puppies, right at this current moment in time.

But he just fumbles through the darkness for me, and I feel his big hands go underneath my arms. And then he’s almost lifting me, I’m almost off my feet, right before his lips graze mine and, oh God, why is this more intimate than the thing I’ve just done, oh Lord, I’m going to kiss
Cameron
—And then he pulls back, just as I knew he would. I mean, Wade might have liked the idea of getting all in the mess he made of my face, but this is Cameron we’re talking about. He probably needs me to douche my mouth before he even considers it.

Though really, it’s not such a big deal. We can kiss another time, after all! It’s not like we’re going to wait another five years, right?

“Hold on,” he says, and then I have to squint and blink because I think he’s just struck a match. I’ve no idea where he’s got one from but I can definitely smell sulphur, and then after a moment of temporary blindness I can make out the little dancing flame.

In fact, I can make out Cameron too.

I can see the lines and curves of his face, made ghostly by the almost completely enclosing darkness. I can make out the exact tenor of his gaze, so much softer and more liquid than it was but no less passionate. And when he says, “If we’re going to kiss, I want to be able to see it’s you,” I confess, I turn to water and wash away.

I’m still there on this ocean of him when he leans down through the flickering gloom to touch his lips to mine—softly, so softly. I can make out that lush upper lip distinctly, and even though I’m sure he’s not going to press in deeper for fear of what he might taste, he does.

He moves his lips over mine and then for one brief, thrilling second I feel his tongue stroke into my mouth. Just a hint of it, but oh so lovely all the same. It sparks some satiated nerve endings back into life and I squirm against him without shame, sure that things are going to progress to more.

But then the light sputters out and I feel him go still against me, as though the match was the only thing keeping him in this one delicious moment. His breath ghosts over my face through the darkness, and I can almost hear stopping sorts of words welling up inside him:
We
should…We need to…We can do this again later…

You know the kinds of things.

Only he takes that one moment in utter darkness and utter stillness to say to me, quite distinctly: “I can’t wait to taste you the way you’ve just tasted me.”

I think of those words a million times: I can’t wait I can’t wait I can’t wait. He makes me think of them when he’s just standing there in the kitchen, cooking eggs on the big double-top stove, in a jumper that barely fits him and which seems as though it could just slide right off one shoulder at any second.

When he turns around I can see his chest hair, poking out of the top of the slight V-neck. It’s almost obscene, with those three words rattling around my head as a backdrop. And then he flicks his gaze up to mine as he pushes a mess of scrambled eggs onto four plates, and I don’t know what to say or do or think.

He’s so…he’s so…my Corin.

“You want more eggs, Allie?” he asks, as though those are the thoughts I’m trying to transmit to him through my wildly staring eyes. I’m all about a need for breakfast foods, rather than an insane lust for his glorious, gigantic body.

I wonder if he knows now that I lust for his glorious, gigantic body. He must, surely? I’d whispered to him in a fever the night before, about how I couldn’t wait for that too. And then we’d spent an hour shrieking down dark corridors with Kitty hot on our heels, everything like some strange fever dream that’s only tangentially based on reality.

Looking back on it now I think of Byron and Shelley and Keats, only we’re the budget version. The bizarre, erotic version, with every one of my thoughts turning back to his hands underneath my arms and his mouth on mine and the hint of a promise in his words.

When
, I think,
when?
But no
when
comes. He had gone to bed in the middle of the game, leaving me susceptible to Wade’s wandering hands, in the dark. Half my clothes gone already because, by God, Kitty’s a ruthless player, all of me wondering if I was brave enough to just throw caution to the wind and find my way through the shadows to his room.

I think that may be what he wanted me to do. To just creep there and lock myself in with him, then explore all the things Byron and Shelley and Keats probably did, anyway. Their real books
How
We
Had
A
Giant
Orgy: Volumes I, II, III
were buried beneath the floorboards in that big house in wherever-it-was, never to be seen again.

My real book is right now, trying to read the hidden messages behind Cameron’s veiled gaze.

“I’m fine,” I say, because I am. But I’m maybe not so AC/DC when I realize a tense sort of silence has descended over the kitchen. Both Wade and Kitty have forkfuls of food poised in front of their mouths, as though they went to eat then forgot how midway.

Or more likely: they saw something much more interesting than eggs, and started paying avid attention to that, instead. I mean, I can practically feel their avid attention crawling all over me. It’s dense and sticky, and it’s also a lot like being accosted by Wade in the dark, in just my underwear.

Come
on
, he had said.
Show
me
where
that
little
secret
room
is, under the stairs.

And of course I had wondered if he’d heard us. If he’d known I’d go to that place, and followed me there, and heard me doing something with someone who is not him.

Good
, I think, suddenly and surprisingly vicious in my own head.
Good.

“Something you want to tell us?” Kitty says, and she has this absolutely wicked look on her face. So wicked, in fact, that it matches the
good
my mind spat out only moments earlier.

“No,” I say, but I can feel the heat spreading across my face. The only thing that halts its advance is how prickly Cameron looks, suddenly, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t and needs to rein himself in.

It makes me want to grab said reins and cut them. Or maybe yank on them. I can’t decide which and, even if I could, I’m far more concerned with how much this might make him pull away. Do I get ten less kisses for every humiliation he has to endure? Will he refuse to talk to me for another week if I let Kitty or Wade embarrass him over a blowjob in a cupboard?

I can tell he hates it, you know—the idea of being a joke. Of being exposed, somehow.

“Great breakfast, Cam,” I say, and when he looks up this time his gaze isn’t stuffed full of hidden sensuous meaning or longing or anything else so delicious.

But it is full of gratitude, at the subject change I just initiated—and somehow that’s even sweeter.

Yeah, it’s even sweeter by a million miles.

***

I think it’s the sense of trust or the hint of his smile or the feel of his fists at his side that gives me a long stretch of freedom. Whereas before I felt nervous about going to him and demanding he talk to me, it’s easy now.

Or at least, it’s
easier
. My heart’s still beating a little high and fast when I finally catch up to him, by the lake. And though I know he slowed down to a barely-jog in order to let me catch up, I can’t really pull off casual as I pick my way through the long grass and the sudden flood of wildflowers to the place where he is.

He watches me coming in fits and starts. Picks up a pebble or two and skims them across the glossy surface of the water, as he waits.

God he looks like a Gap model, when he sends the pebbles out. Like one of those outdoorsy sorts of pictures with a cagoule-clad hunk in them, doing outdoorsy sorts of things. Arm whipping out, eyes scanning the horizon, all the copper highlights in his hair suddenly flashing bright and beautiful in the early morning light.

“Hey,” he says, and the way he does so is just completely at odds with the way he looks. His words
bristle
. They have thorns all over them and they’re so unsure, as they creep out of his mouth.

The contrast is unsettling for a moment. Mind-bending. Why didn’t it so impress itself upon me before? All I can remember thinking is how funny it was, to be so handsome and so awkward, at the same time.

“You wanna toss one?” he asks, and all I can think is
No, you idiot. I want to
kiss
you. Don’t try to hand me a pebble. I want to
kiss
you.

“Sure,” I say, then just as I take it from him and he turns to throw another, he goes for it. Just like that. Right into awkward conversation. No awkward pause.

“Did you tell them?”

So maybe he doesn’t trust me, after all, worse luck. He thinks I’m a blabbermouth instead.

“No,” I say, and intend to leave at that. I do. But then other stuff blurts out with it. “Though they’ve probably figured it out. It’s not as though you were really quiet and discreet.”

In truth, I’m sure he thinks of himself as the very soul of quiet discretion. In truth, I do too. But I say it anyway and once it’s out he blushes, of course, and does that little eye flicker thing. The one I found so charming in his bedroom, and the one I can’t get out of my head. It’s like he thinks he’s a disaster in some way, and can’t disentangle himself from that feeling.

I want to rob him of it, before he struggles himself into an even deeper mess.

“I don’t know whether I’m happy about that or not,” he says, then seems to consider. “Though it would have been nice to have you as my secret, for a little while.”

“Then spring it on Wade, right out of the blue,” I suggest, and am honestly not sure how I dare. I mean, it implies all kinds of things about myself that I almost never believe in—that I’m worthy of jealousy and deception and intrigue.

Only then he says: “God, yeah.” And gets very close to grinning, as he does so.

Though it only makes me want to dig deeper, to see this pleasure written all over his face. To see him reveling in the demise of someone I’d always thought of as his friend.

“Why do you hate him so much?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer for a long while. And when he finally does, he looks…conflicted.

“I don’t,” he says, which is an absolute lie and we both know it. “I don’t…
hate
him. I have…mixed feelings about him.”

Another pause, and this time when he speaks it’s flatter. More honest, I think—or at least, he believes it is.

“He’s not worthy of every second you spent pining for him.”

It crackles in my blood, to hear him say something like that. It really does. But I think he’s being hard on himself, in all honesty—painting his animosity toward Wade as simple jealousy. As a fault of his own, and not of Wade’s.

And this idea goes through me especially hard, when I remember a little glimmer of what he’d said the night before.

“So…nothing to do with the thing you said he did to you,” I say, and though I’m certain it means nothing when I set out to bring it up, he flinches.

His shoulders go back, the way I’ve seen them do a thousand times.
Thorns
around
his
words
, I think, but he answers more honestly than I expect.

“I wondered if you’d get back to that.”

“I’m like an elephant. A shameful secret–remembering elephant.”

“It’s not that shameful.”

“Really? It sounded shameful.”

“Everything I say sounds shameful.”

Oh God, yeah. That one sentence sums him up so perfectly it’s like cracking open his psyche and getting a peek inside. Which is no mean feat, I have to say, because he’s sewn himself up so tight you can barely see the seams.

“Sounds like heaven to me,” I say, and he flashes such a look at me then! I think I burn alive. I think he melts me on the spot.

Christ I need to fuck him.

“Haven’t you guessed yet, what he did?” he asks, instead of saying all the lovely dirty things I can see, simmering behind his cool gaze.

Of course I try to think and go over everything we were talking about.
The
story
, I think,
he
was
mad
about
the
story, and me reading it out, and the idea I might have used it as a taunt or a tease, just the way I’d kind of known he might do. As though I knew him so well already, and just didn’t have any faith in my own “interpreting Cameron” abilities.

But in all honesty, I think my abilities have improved since then.

“The story Wade read out, that first night,” I start, slow, slow. Man, it feels like an age ago now, though in reality it’s only been a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks of packing away Professor Warren’s things—his shirts smelled of pipe tobacco, oh they did, they did—and re-plastering the study and avoiding all the things we all long to say but can’t, God we just can’t.

“Yeah,” Cam says, and boy howdy does he sound bitter.

“Was it yours?” I ask, because that’s the most logical conclusion. Wade found a story of Cameron’s, and read it aloud. I mean, it didn’t sound like Cameron’s style—or at least, the style I discovered in his green book of magical sex stories—but I’m not expert enough on things like that to know for sure.

And what Cam says next only confirms my blundering ineptitude in the field of style matching.

“No,” he says.

Which is a relief. Or it is, until he follows it with: “It really happened to me.”

And then he keeps talking.

“I confided in Wade, and he took it, and put it in a story.” I think maybe that tight seam just bust.

“He’s so…smooth. He makes it easy to tell him things but then, by God, you wish you hadn’t.”

Oh, how familiar that sounds. How silent I used to keep myself, for fear of that
wishing
I
hadn’t
. It was like torture, it was like madness, but I knew—or thought I did—that he should never know the way I felt about him. Back then he would have laughed if he’d known, I’m sure, and now…well. Now it’s a different kind of agony, as he does his best to tangle me in the mess of himself.

I’ve never felt so chased as I did last night, running down endless corridors away from him. I’ve never felt so crazy, knowing I was running away from something I once wanted so bad.

“You watched a girl,” I say, and mean it to come out matter-of-factly. But somehow it comes out full of wonder instead.

“Yes.”

He tosses another pebble, true and strong.

“She didn’t know,” I say.

“Yes,” he tells me. “But she knows now.”

It’s obvious he doesn’t want to say that. It shows on his face, and in the color that spreads up over his neck, and in the way he whips the last pebble he has, so hard it simply shoots right through the glassy surface and into the depths beneath.

But he goes with it anyway, as though he can’t help himself. Like maybe I’ve got hold of a thread inside him, and I’m pulling and pulling.

“Jesus,” I say, but only because it’s shocking. Not because I’m appalled, or anything—quite the contrary.

“I never meant—” he starts, but I cut him off.

“Did he get it right?”

“What?”

“Did he get it right? Did you really want me that much?”

He breathes out through his nose, just once. Harsh, like an out-of-breath pant.

“Some things were…a little strong,” he ventures.

I think of the view he got of my pussy.
My
pussy
, for God’s sake! Good Lord, he’s a maze of secrets.

“But you spied on me?”

I feel like I’m accusing him. Like he’s on trial. But I can’t help the words slipping out. They just need to be aired, to find fresh pastures, they’re jostling for attention in the heated mess my brain has become.

“Don’t say spied,” he says. He’s squirming, and that’s even more delicious and intriguing than this whole new revelation.

Or maybe not quite.

“And then you masturbated.”

“Oh…fuck. No. Yes. Sort of,” he says, all in a rush. Then after a moment he sets his shoulders, and continues in a more orderly fashion. “It wasn’t exactly the way he described—I don’t even really like to…do…that. On my own. With no one else around.”

Is it weird that even a fact like the one he’s just uttered sends a flush of heat through me? What does he mean
I
don’t even really like to
? Like—never? He never likes to masturbate? My God, how horny
is
he?