Telling Tales (15 page)

I roll my body in an effort to get closer, get more contact, but he edges away at the last second—like some goddamn tease. I don’t even know where he’s getting the nerve from, to be honest.

But then I realize. It’s not
nerve
. It’s him urging me to tell him, to force him, to get a handful of his hair and yank.

Of course he gasps against my heated flesh, when I do.

And the gasp folds down into a moan, the moment he hears me do what he so obviously craves.

“Lick my clit,” I tell him, then louder and more desperate: “Fuck me with your fingers and lick my clit, hard and fast.”

It sounds filthy, even to my ears. But he’s pretty far from the politician now. He’s so far away from it that he sits up for a moment, panting and slick-mouthed, his fingers still in me and everything about him saying that he just wants to
watch
.

He wants to see what it looks like, when he fingers me. And he wants to flutter a hand close to his clearly raging erection too.

God, it looks gargantuan, by this point. I can almost see it throbbing through his sweatpants, and it just makes me wonder why he’s not doing what he so obviously needs to do.

Only then I remember what he said—what he’s said several times to me, in fact, as though trying to impress a really important idea into my lust-addled mind. About how he doesn’t really like to touch himself, how he doesn’t really
need
to, and Lord just the thought makes my tongue loose.

“Touch yourself,” I tell him, and his foggy gaze flicks up to mine. He still has two fingers in me, sliding back and forth, slow and easy. And yet
this
is the thing that startles him.

As though I wasn’t going to take the hint.

“Ahhhh,” he says. Probably because he’s forgotten how to make real words. Instead he defaults back to the mediating politician, trying to come up with a safe middle ground without really refusing me. “I really think…”

“You really think what?” I ask, and as I do I work myself on those big, thick fingers. Just a little undulation of my hips—nothing serious.

“I really think I’d rather do this,” he says, sure of himself now. Closed off I think too.

“And if I’d rather you slide your hand over your cock?”

His eyes flutter almost-closed—it’s that embarrassed expression again, only this time it has a hint of dread about it.

“Don’t,” he says, and it’s so heartfelt, so full of a weary sort of pleading, that I’m pulled up short. I mean, I’m not going to force him if he feels so wretched about it, you know? I could never do that to Cam. I could never, I could never, or at least I’m sure I couldn’t until he says: “Don’t make me.”

My breath catches in my throat. And it’s not because he twists his fingers in a very specific and very pleasurable sort of way as he says those words, either. It’s because the embarrassed, torn sort of look leaves his face, and a strange, flat kind of expression replaces it.

I want to call it
deadpan
, but it isn’t exactly. It’s more like…more like all the will rushes out of him, all of his sense of self, and instead there’s this vast void that he’s just waiting for me to fill up.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that he said
Don’t make me
. I mean, if you really don’t want someone to do something, you don’t leave those two little words on the end there—as though the person
could
actually force you, if they wanted to.

Or if he wanted them to.

I reach toward him slowly. It has to be slowly, because he’s crooked a finger and is rubbing very insistently over what I’m now certain is my G-spot. I’ve got no clue how someone like Cameron knows where it is—when I think of him in bed with someone it’s still under the sheets and with the lights off, despite the stories—but he definitely does.

And it’s making it very hard for me to think straight, or test my many theories about him out.

“Touch yourself,” I say again, and this time I clasp a vice-like hand around his wrist, as I do.

He goes rigid automatically, and for a second I’m sure I’ve done the wrong thing. He didn’t want me to push him further. He really did want me to stop, and not make him.

Only then he makes that little breathless sound again, and it turns into a strangled sort of moan. His fingers jump inside me, suddenly frantic and fumbling, and when he starts shoving down his sweatpants with his free hand I get very close to coming.

A great swell of sensation goes through me, thick and oppressive, and then I can see his swollen erection. I can see the slickness at the tip, all of it spilling over to run down the length of his shaft.

“How?” he says, so breathless it kicks another arrow of pleasure down into me. “How do you want me to?”

My mind reels. Are there really so many ways to go about this?
Just
fuck
yourself
, I want to say, but somehow I doubt either of us could take it. He’d probably come just hearing me say the words, and then I’d come from watching it happen. I can almost see it with my mind’s eyes—lovely thick streamers of his spunk, marking my spread and swollen cunt.

“Just grab yourself and stroke,” I tell him, but only because that’s all I can manage. He has his thumb on me now, sliding ever so slightly between my labia and my clit. Not quite touching, oh God no, not quite touching, but really—does it matter?

“I’m gonna come,” I say, then add what I need to: “Quickly, baby. Do it.”

His eyes roll upward, this time, as he lets out a choked, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” And then finally his hand goes around his cock, while he’s busy not looking.

Not that he needs to. I’m doing enough staring for both of us. I watch him stroke, and it’s a sight to see—if a little slow and ineffectual. He’s not grasping himself tight enough—anyone would know that—and he’s sort of slackening off when he gets to the head too. As though he knows he’ll go off if he lets his palm graze that slippery red tip.

But that’s OK, because then he blurts out: “Say something else.”

And after a moment, he manages to get out the magic words—the ones that have so obviously crystallized inside him.

“Force me.”

They crystallize inside me too. I tighten my hand around his wrist—the one that ends in his pumping hand—and I urge it back and forth—faster, harder. I order him to make his grip narrow and brutal, then bloom bright with pleasure when he starts moaning on almost continuously.

“I’m close,” he tells me, and as he does he runs his thumb right over the tip of my clit, just brushing it. Almost as though he didn’t mean to at all, and it was just the aftereffect of the feeling running through him currently.

He’s jerking and shuddering with it, and the hand he has on himself is making the lewdest sound. So wet and sloppy and like he’s somehow found a gallon of baby oil to douse himself in, even though there’s nothing. There’s nothing and, oh God, oh God, when he pressed down on my clit like that—when he worries it beneath his thumb and groans that he needs to do it—I stutter under the pressure.

“Ohhhh God I’m coming, oh God, right there,” I tell him, while he gasps almost identical words. He forces them out and then the first spurt hits my inner thigh. Another gets all the way to my pussy, to the place he’s rubbing and stroking through the most glorious orgasm I’ve ever experienced.

It goes on forever—and by the looks of things, so does his. For one long moment he really gives in to it, massaging his cock through his protracted climax, coating me in thick strands of his come.

And I watch it all—I watch his cock as it leaps and jerks in his fist. I watch his face, when it slackens and goes blank with pleasure. He’s so beautiful, in that moment, so not himself. Lost in a maze of sensation he didn’t want to experience, and unashamed about wanting to coax every last drop of it out.

Though it’s easy enough to tell, when sense comes back to him. His hand drops from his cock almost immediately, and his eyes take on this busy, where the fuck did I put my sack and washcloth look.

That’s Cam, I guess. Not even able to enjoy the afterglow.

“Come on,” I say. “Just lie down with me for a second.”

And I confess, I do it more out of frustration with him than anything else. I just want him to relax, to give in, to stop being so uptight about everything, but it’s only when he goes very still again, that I realize something both shocking and delicious.

He doesn’t just want me to have power over him sexually. He wants me to have power over everything.

“Why do you like it?” I ask, before I know I’m going to. He’s lying on his back, almost sprawled—but it took him a good ten minutes to do so. At first he had put his back up against the headboard and hugged his knees to his chest, as though doing so really counted as “lying down.”

Then gradually I had coaxed him into a slouch, and then a leaning-on-one-elbow kind of thing, and finally this. Sprawling. Of course he had pulled his sweatpants back up and so he’s still fully clothed—which had definitely made me want to test out my newfound authority, I have to say.

But hey—baby steps. Baby steps.

“Like what?”

I’m surprised he asks. I mean, there’s only one answer to that, isn’t there? And judging by the way he’s stroking his thumb over his brow—almost shading his eyes in the process—I think he knows what the answer is going to be.

“Being forced,” I say, but to his credit he doesn’t flinch. And he doesn’t look away either.

“Is it really that big a deal? I mean—I wouldn’t call it a…ah…fetish, or anything.”

“You think there’s something wrong with having a fetish?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It kind of is.”

He does look away this time. Pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and makes a little unhappy sound.

So it’s surprising to me, when he answers anyway.

“It’s easier,” he says, then with more conviction: “It makes things easier.”

I have to ask. My better judgment is telling me no, but then again my better judgment just received a glorious, world-beating orgasm from him and all of his hang-ups.

We’re going to this place. I need to know.

“What was it that made fucking so hard for you, in the first place?”

“It’s not hard for me,” he says, but he’s lying.

“Come on, Cam. Who am I going to tell?”

He glances at me then, and there are whole vast worlds in his eyes. Great and terrible things he’s probably imagined, a thousand times.

“Wade and Kitty.”

I take his face in my hands then. I have to. It’s a necessity.

“Hey. Hey—you can trust me, OK,” I say, and then I realize how easily I can turn it on its head. How I can make an order into something sweeter—a soft pull on him, as though my fingertips are on that mythical-beast-ending thread inside him and all I have to do is tug a little to get him to unwind.

“You can tell me anything. Tell me anything.”

“It’s not that easy,” he says. “There’s not one thing that makes someone the way they are. I just
am
this way.”

“Ashamed,” I fill in, for him, but he won’t say yes or no. I suppose he doesn’t have to really.

“Sex isn’t something to be ashamed of.”

“Really? Do you wanna maybe stop by my mom and dad’s house, and share that with them?”

I find a little curl of hair close to his ear, and wrap it around my finger.

“They live in a huge red brick in Connecticut. You can’t miss it.”

He’s trying to make light of it, I can tell. On Cam, it’s almost terrifying, and it makes me want to change the subject. I have to change the subject—and in fact, I’m sure I’ve done it very neatly when I say: “What was it they wanted you to be again? Was it a politician?”

Only then I realize that I’m just talking around in circles, drawing back to the same thing over and over again.

“Is the president a politician?” he asks, and I have to giggle. I giggle even though I feel dreadful inside, suddenly.

“They wanted you to be president?” I say, still half-laughing.

But only half.

“My mom used to say—people vote with their eyes. I think it was her way of telling me I was handsome, in between all of the
Don’t slouch, be polite, be perfect
.”

“You are perfect,” I blurt out, and after I’ve done it I realize I’ve never actually told anyone anything like that before. It’s the first time I’ve ever said to someone—freely and quite easily—that I think they’re incredible.

I don’t even blush over it either.

“It won’t go away just because you say something like that to me, you know,” he says, but I can see him bending.

He bends even further when I kiss him softly.

“You are perfect. You’re perfect to me,” I tell him, and by God I mean it. I actually mean it. I look at his gorgeous eyes and his full mouth and his amazing half-curled hair and I want to say more than the word
perfect
—I want to make up a new word that encompasses everything he is.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited to hear you say something like that? Scratch that—I
never
thought you would say anything like that to me. It’s like you’ve started speaking an alien language.”

“Aishalem,” I tell him, and secretly I know that’s the word. The word beyond perfect. The one that’s just for him.

“You know why I had that picture of you?” he asks, in the spaces between the smile I seem to have opened up on his face. “Because you were all the things I’d always wanted, and everything I couldn’t have.”

“I’ve gotta tell you, it’s a pretty big deal when someone as handsome and amazing as you says something like that to someone like me,” I say, but he just laughs—properly, this time. No faint smiles. No half-measures.

“You’ve got it the wrong way around, Allie,” he says.

“You’ve got it completely the wrong way around.”

***

It occurs to me much later, while I’m sitting under the window in the boat room, writing. In fact, I’m writing so much that my finger is starting to ache and I’ve made a mess of papers around me—all fragments of stories I was sure I’d never work on again—and then it comes to me.

This little kernel of realization. This little nudge into the brave new world I’ve found myself heading toward.

We
need
a
safe
word.

Oh God, we need a safe word. That’s what people do, isn’t it, when they plunge into things like this? He wants to be forced, and I’ve got to admit that I want to force him, but the fact remains—what if I take it too far?

I’m not even sure what too far
is
. He seemed to find masturbation a stretch, but since he’ll barely talk about his stuffy, fucked-up family and his obvious issues, I’m guessing he’s not going to go into detail about what he does or does not like in bed.

I’ve got to feel him out. Test his boundaries. Get him to give me a safe word.

Of course when I catch him later in the kitchen and just come right out and ask, he looks at me like I’m mad. Like he hadn’t even considered, and if I’d had a mind to it I could have made him strangle himself to death with a pair of my own tights.

But I swear to God—it’s not going to come to that.

“We have to have a safe word,” I say, and his expression freezes in place. Mouth slightly open, as though he just tasted something bad. Gaze sliding off to something that is not me.

For a long, painful second I’m sure he’s going to tell me how ridiculous I’m being—that he hadn’t even thought of having sex with me again and even if he had, he’s certainly not going to do anything that requires a safe word.

Only then he says: “Tehanu.”

Quite matter-of-factly. As though he’d considered and weighed all of this out long before, and now is the time to just be practical about it. Or at least, I think he’s being practical about it until he adds, without looking at me: “You can do anything you want to me. Anything at all—just don’t let it show.”

And then he walks right out of the kitchen, as though we had chatted about the weather for five minutes and now he’s just going to check if it’s still raining.

I think my heart is pounding in my cunt. My head spins with all the possible interpretations of the word
anything
, and then worse than that: the words
don’t let it show
. I mean, for God’s sake. Don’t let
what
show? Does he think I’m going to bruise him somewhere?

Does he
want
me to bruise him somewhere?

I’ll be honest—I hadn’t even thought about pain. I had thought of simple sex shame—that he was troubled about getting from some basic A to B. Not that he wants me to spank him or hit him or, God, maybe he wants me to do it with something?

You know, like a flogger or a whip or…Lord, we’re getting into some strange areas. It’s bad enough that he’s obviously got all these deep-seated shame issues about sex due to his perfect-crazy mother and his probably uptight starchy dad. But add in some actual
punishment
for whatever lewd things he’s feeling…

I don’t know. I don’t know.

I
do
know that I’m turned on. Hugely. Wade even notices it, when he comes into the kitchen and finds me leaned against the fridge, grateful for the cold and with my nipples sticking out like fingertips.

He leans in and I feel that old twinge, that sweet little ache at the thought of all things Wade. Before it sinks down below the surface of me again, and all I can see is the smug look on his face, like he’s got me.

I mean, of
course
it’s him who’s making my nipples hard. Of course it is. Who else would it be? He’s handsome and hard-bodied and when he leans in he smells of the piney smell at the back of the wardrobe he’s been clearing out. It’s weird—I always thought he wasn’t the kind of guy to get stuck in, you know. He was always more the sort of person to drift on a sea of laidback-ness. But his hands are rough with little bits of plaster and I’ve seen him going about the house with his little measuring device, judging the square footage and the value of this thing that will now be ours.

He’s become business-y, hands-on Wade—which is good. But he’s also become predatory, I-want-to-fuck-you Wade.

Which is bad. I never thought it would be, but it is. It’s bad.

“How come you’re still not finding your way to my room at night?” he asks, and I do my best to maneuver my way out from between the arms he’s put either side of my body. It’s sort of like limbo-ing, only without the catchy music and the sense of fun.

“You say it like it’s an obligation,” I tell him, which sounds too mean even to my ears. And though it looks like he doesn’t falter, on the surface of things, I see him kind of jerk a little. I see that golden face of his snap to surprise, then right back out again.

Which is just him all over, when I really think about it. Don’t let anything go too deep, don’t let anything mean too much, just keep things calm and casual and no big deal.

“Oh, hey, no,” he says, then makes a little noise. A little funny
brrrpppt
sort of noise that I would have laughed at before right now. “You? Obliged to do stuff with me? No way. You’re obliged to look that good in a tight T-shirt—but then, that’s always been the case.”

I wonder if he knows he’s given me the perfect opening. Probably not. He probably doesn’t even know I
need
an opening.

“Really? Funny that you never found the time to tell me things like that back in college.”

It comes out in direct contrast to the way I’d always imagined saying words like those. In my head I had blurted it a thousand times, been embarrassed and sweaty palmed about it then borne the weight of his anger. I’ve no idea why he usually decides to be angry, in my head, but there it is all the same.

And here it isn’t.

I just say it, blandly, mildly, and he can only find the wherewithal to shrug. While my mind goes to the picture I discovered, Cam’s confessions, how much my heart had pounded and wrestled with me throughout all of it.

My heart isn’t pounding now. It hasn’t even fallen down inside me, the way it sometimes used to whenever I thought of Wade. Instead he says: “I want you now. Isn’t that the main thing?”

While I feel nothing, nothing at all.

“Keep wanting,” I tell him, and then I just walk away. I walk away.

***

We swap. It takes some doing, but that’s the good thing about Cameron. He always gives in, in the end. In truth he doesn’t even give in. I just tell him that this is the way things are going to be, and he obeys with his face all red and his mouth all tight and the green book practically super-glued to his hands.

Even after I order him to swap my stories for his, I have to wrench it from him. And then I sprawl on his bed, as comfortable as anything in my little sleep shorts and vest—something I’ve never been with any other guy—and I flick through the pages greedily.

“Is this all you’ve ever written?” I ask, as I take in snippets of the stories: “Pepper,” “The Girl Who Wouldn’t,” “Comfortable Distance.” To me they all have the ring of words long developed, of stories built on the confidence of other pieces of writing, but I can’t be sure unless he says.

And he does.

“No.”

I glance at him side-on, and find him still standing by the end of the bed. Half-leaning on one of the gloriously ornate posts, with my own mass of papers still in his two hands. None of it gone through, none of it touched.

Instead he just stares and stares at various parts of me—the too-rounded hump of my ass, when I spread out on my belly. The smooth line of my cleavage, when I prop myself up on my elbows.

“So where are the rest?” I ask, and he shrugs. Kind of like Wade did in the kitchen, only with more meaning behind it. I can read Cameron’s shrugs, and, by God, they say a lot. This one tells me that he has a gigantic cupboard/filing cabinet/wardrobe full of them at home.

“You ever thought about sending them somewhere?” This time, he does more than shrug.

“I can barely let you read them, never mind some guy behind a desk with a big important brain and loads of important things to say.”

It sounds so much like something I would say that I’m startled briefly. But then I recover and kick a leg out at him for being such a numbnuts—just playfully, you know. No real connection.

Though I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that he doesn’t dodge. He just lets my foot nudge against the solid meat of his upper thigh, and when I do it a second time—a little harder—his expression visibly changes.

“You don’t just like being forced, huh?” I say, so low and dark that the room seems to hum with it. He seems to hum. He’s looking at my body again, but it’s with more intensity this time—as though his eyes have grown hands and they’re pawing all over me.