Telling Tales (20 page)

I swear, I only meant to fuck him with one tiny little finger. I’m not sure how I end up pushing two in, until his face goes slack and his body judders from head to toe and he says to me, all in a rush: “I think I’m going to have to take you now.”

God I love how he uses the word
take
. There are many, many things I hate about his old-fashioned politician vibe, but using a word right out of the porno Cary Grant never made is not one of them. Talk about
having
me
, I think at him. Talk about what a
loose
woman
I am, a fallen woman—I’ll do my hair like Bettie Page and we can run away to the fifties together.

And just in case it wasn’t clear enough by now: I have absolutely no idea what I’m thinking anymore. I’m delirious, lost on a tide of syrupy-sweet pleasure, and I show it when he finally, finally sinks into me.

He does it slow, so slow, while I make a sound like something dying. He just feels so solid, going in, so like something scratching a low down deep itch inside me, and then once he’s there he rolls his hips all easy and languorous.

“God, Cam,” I moan, then louder when he really goes for it. He can’t seem to help it—which is even better, I’ve got to say. His eyes are half-closed and his body is jerking almost constantly, as though I’m pulling tight on some unseen strings without really knowing how I’m doing it.

Though I suppose I actually do know, in truth. I’m doing exactly what I said I wanted to—fucking him while he fucks me—and it’s clearly too much for him. All efforts at suppressing the sounds he wants to make are gone, and he’s grunting and gasping almost constantly. And when I shove my fingers into him hard, he lurches forward as though I struck him.

“I’m going to come,” he tells me, so flat and matter-of-fact and yet somehow even more unbearably arousing than if he’d babbled it. It’s like his whole sense of self is just accepting all of this now, like he’s able to take it on board and let it out—no big deal.

And I love him for it.

Of course I love him more when he licks two fingers and slides them between our bodies—working hard to get into a good position for it, but getting there just the same—to worry and rub at my clit, but that’s a given. I’m so swollen and so on edge that even the slightest glancing contact pushes me close, and then I feel him clench around my fingers.

I can actually feel it.

He’s coming
, I think, and the realization strikes through me, hard. My clit swells beneath his slippery touch and that’s it, that’s all it takes—my body bows and my cunt grips at his cock hard and I shout out his name just like I did the night before.

Only sweeter here, now. Oh God it’s so much sweeter.

“Cam!” I say, and he pants and groans my name right back at me, cock jerking in my spasming pussy, body one solid, rigid mass between my legs. And he’s so big too—so big I can almost feel it when he swells inside me and spurts, the thought like fire burning over my own orgasm.

It goes on for too long. I have to stop him—I have to dig my nails into his arm and force him to let me go, though when I do he doesn’t seem to mind. He presses a hot, breathless kiss to the side of my face, instead, that amused sound he made for me earlier still thrumming through him.

Only then he says: “Sorry.”

Just like always. As though we’re right back to that place where sex is something to be ashamed of and he’s always got to apologize for everything and, God, I could just kill him sometimes. Doesn’t he know how great that was? Doesn’t he understand, by now?

He can’t possibly because he says it again, and I swear I’m just about to punch him when he finishes with: “Usually I can go a lot longer.”

In so amused a tone that I can’t fail to take only one idea away from it: If that was quick for him, what in God’s name would slow be like?

***

When I come around from this doze I seem to have sunk into, he’s reading again. One hand behind his head, as naked as a lord, pages clutched almost as tightly in his hands as they had been when he put on that little show for me.

The one I feel compelled to ask about, right now.

“Which bit did you do it to?”

He still jerks as though I’m catching him up to something. Even though we’re in bed together, and the room smells like filthy, dirty sex.

“Do what to?” he asks, but I think he knows. I can tell by the way he turns away from me, as though, yeah, being caught masturbating is worse than having someone’s finger in your ass. I mean seriously—where are his priorities?

“Which bit did you jerk off to?” I ask, and this time he answers more sensibly.

“When the Queen has Corin tied up, then does all of that…stuff in front of him.”

I’d be disappointed that he still has to occasionally use one word in the place of another, but I can’t be. It’s part of his charm, I think. It’s part of who he is, and I adore who he is.

“You like that part, huh?”

“Very much so.”

“Because she torments him?”

It seems like a logical conclusion to come to. His masochistic streak isn’t exactly well concealed anymore, and even if it was there’s other stuff in that chapter. Stuff about being forced and subverting someone’s will and all kinds of things that he seems to have a fetish for.

But as ever, he surprises me. He turns just when I think he’s going to shy away, and gets his mouth real close to my ear. His breath gusts hot against the side of my face, and I feel a low ache start up between my legs. A good ache, that both reminds me of how thick and solid he’d felt, sliding in and out of me, and of how much I want him to again, right now.

And then he tells me, he tells me, so low and deep I can hardly bear it: “Because it’s then that you know she loves him.”

I have to say, I feel bad. I never thought I’d feel bad about something I did to Wade—ever since this whole thing started I’ve been sure I’d wind up hurting Cameron, somehow—but it’s happened all the same.

He seems…unsettled. He won’t eat breakfast with us. I was getting used to making massive omelets and now there’s a whole big chunk of the thing we make in Professor Warren’s huge frying pan left over, every day.

He seems prickly when I corner him too. As though the more relaxed Cameron gets, the less relaxed he is. Makes me want to blurt out something stupid to him, like—it’s OK that you fucked a guy. Nobody’s going to think you’re gay.

Because by this point, I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s troubled about. He’s having a crisis of sexuality, and is now just waiting for me to say some clumsy things to him about his issues—the way I did to Cameron, not so long ago.

I’m like the Love Doctor. Only hopeless and incompetent and unable to actually use that word to anyone in existence.

I’m the L–e Doctor.

“Hey, Wade,” I say, and he jumps as though I ran into the room and hit him with a giant cock. Which I suppose is technically what me and Kitty actually did, two nights ago.
He
didn’t need any prompting
, she said to me yesterday, when I told her I felt bad.
I
just
handed
him
the
condom
and
he
went
for
it.

And then she had spelled out the word
gay
in the air, with her fingers. I’m not even sure how she did it, in all honesty.

“Hey,” he says. He’s busy cataloguing what looks like a bunch of the Professor’s old student files, and he doesn’t stop being busy when I enter the room. The Box Room, we call this one—though I don’t know why. It has no boxes in it—just filing cabinets and the remainder of someone’s class project.

A store mannequin with feminist theory buzzwords written all over it.

“You OK?” I start out, then wince. Apparently, Cameron used up all of my tact, along with my ability to make someone feel better about themselves.

Though I suppose the fact that I’m not sure I
want
to make Wade feel better about himself has something to do with my sudden lack of interesting things to say.

“Sure,” he tells me, but he doesn’t turn around. And all I can think is
OK. This is the way things are going to go, I guess. I did that stuff, and now he thinks he’s gay and we can never be friends again, for reasons as mysterious as where that one sock went between wearing and the laundry basket.

Only then he surprises me. He surprises me all in a giant rush, while I do something weird like clutch my chest.

“I’m jealous, OK,” he says, which is enough on its own. It really is. I could die happily if he stopped right there and never said anything to me again—but he keeps
going
. “I know I shouldn’t be. I know what’s gone down between us—I’m not a moron, Allie. You fucking hate me because I was a douchebag in college who didn’t appreciate how amazing you are, and now you want to punish me. Well that’s fine, OK, that’s fine—go ahead and make me do any crazy fucking thing you want. I’ll fuck some guy’s ass, I’ll be your little bitch—whatever, OK? Whatever.”

I think I kind of seize up. As though I’ve just eaten a tonne of ice cream, only it hasn’t just given me brain freeze. It’s given me all-over-body freeze. I can’t feel my toes. My good sense is melting.

Did he seriously just shove all of that out of him? It sounds like the ravings of a lunatic, not the smooth moves of an impenetrable stud.

Which Wade was. Until right now.

I don’t know what to do. It’s like he just compressed everything I always wanted to hear him say into one twenty-second babble—I should feel exultant, vindicated, relieved. So how come I just go limp, and lose the ability to speak?

And apparently this limp inability is bad enough that he has to comment on it.

“You’re not going to say anything to that?”

He turns around at the same time, so I can see the expression on his face. Unfortunately, it’s no more explainable or readable than the things he’s just said—which is probably how I end up going with: “It was definitely better than a shrug.”

Is it weird that I actually feel the relief I need to when he laughs at that? He looks like himself again too—like the guy I used to moon over, with the curly blond hair and the eyes like electric sparks, and everything about him so easy and charming.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me out?” I ask, because it’s easier, now. Of course it is. I’m looking backward through a telescope at the person I was, and suddenly she seems very small and very foolish.

So what if he turns around and says to me, now, that he just didn’t feel anything for me. So what if I wasn’t enough.
I’m
enough for me.

Only he has one more surprise up his sleeve. One that I don’t account for and can’t prepare for.

“I don’t know,” he says, and as he does he hooks a lock of my hair over my ear—the way he used to sometimes, when we were busy poring over stories and all of my curls got in the way. “I guess I just thought you’d always be there.”

Of course I know what he means. I was his spare—his just-in-case girl. He got to sleep with everyone under the sun, while I lingered in the back of his mind as some far-off and completely safe possibility. Like maybe we could have finally gotten together and had the marriage and the kids he’d always sort of imagined himself having.

Something like that.

“I almost was,” I say, because that’s the truth. It’s what I came here for—to finally be with him. It’s just that it all looks so different now, like something I need to escape from rather than something I want to run toward.

He assumed I’d wait, and that assumption feels stifling, sticky, not like me at all.

“But not anymore, huh?” he asks, and I don’t even have to nod. He does it for me—a slow up and down of his head.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though it sounds kind of stupid coming out. He seems to know it too, because he snorts out a laugh and waves his hand, then finally manages to get out a few more surprising words.

“You’re not the one who has to be sorry. I need to be sorry.”

I think that’s the sweetest thing he’s ever said to me. And it definitely lessens the impact of his next confession.

“I knew, you know. I knew Cameron loved you.”

I don’t know what’s more troubling about him saying something like that. The fact that he obviously kept the truth from me for his own nefarious one-day-we’ll-have-a-picket-fence purposes, or that he uses the word
loved
.

Though I do know that I can’t focus on anything but said word, for the next eight thousand years. He has to snap his fingers in front of my face to bring me back to reality, and away from the sudden image of me and Cameron, frolicking through fields of daisies, hand in hand.

“Did you just hear my nightmarish confession?” he says, and I try to break it down. Was it really so nightmarish? I mean, one guy wanted to keep me as his spare so didn’t tell me that another guy possibly loved me. That’s not so bad, is it?

“You’re an ass,” I tell him. Mainly because it probably is so bad. I just feel less bad about it due to this weird swelling sensation in my chest.

Cameron
, I think,
Cameron
.

“I know. But you forgive my ass-i-ness, right?” he asks, and oh he grins that shark’s grin of his. It makes me want to punch him and hug him, all at the same time.

Instead, I go with a verbal mixture of both.

“Can you give me back the seven years I lost, mooning over you?”

The punch doesn’t hit too hard. Only about 20 percent of the light goes out of his eyes, and when he bounces back he does it with the same easy charm he hooked me with, all those years ago.

“Probably not. But I can do other things—write you a sonnet. Finish packing up this insane room while you lounge around in another man’s bed. Do some more ass-fucking.”

Is it wrong that I kind of love him all over again for ending on those words?

“I’ve got to confess—I thought you’d be more troubled by the ass-fucking.”

He lifts one shoulder, like
Hey, what can I say?
And then the look on his face…dear God, it’s so
filthy
. As though he’s just packed full of all the things I never knew he could possibly do, and now they’re spilling out of him.

“I got to see you, didn’t I?”

Oh Lord, why is
that
the thing I blush over? I mean, I was aware prior to this conversation that he’d seen most of my boobs and my pussy. It’s not as though you can watch another man eat out the girl you want to fuck without getting an eyeful.

But even so. I’m bright red.

“At this point, I’ll take whatever I can get,” he says and then oh, I blush even harder. I blush all over, even though I swear to God I don’t feel the same way about him as I did. It’s just—
man
alive
—hearing Wade be this full of affection for me, hearing him be so open and apologetic…it’s like seeing the face of God.

“Plus, I’ve got a lot of things to make up to you.”

And that’s before we’ve even gotten into his sudden need to be generous.

“No, really,” I tell him, but I know that look in his eyes.

It’s as dirty as the expression he gave me a moment earlier, and it makes my mind go to all sorts of interesting places. Like Hamin-Ra, where everything is always sultry and dream-like, and pleasure is the greatest aim of any day.

“You sure there’s nothing I can do for you?” he asks, and this time I think of Cameron. Cameron saying
This
is
my
favorite
part.

“Well, actually…” I start.

And now
I’m
the one with the shark-like grin.

***

I go to tie his wrists loosely, pathetically, but of course he has something to say about that. His hooded gaze hangs all over me, and he pulls at the scarves I’m using to secure him. As though to show me how easily he could get free.

Though isn’t that the point? Corin gets free easily, in my story. He tears away the bonds and takes the Queen for his own, roughly, and it’s all I can think about now—even as Cameron tells me: “Come on, Allie. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

I know it. This whole thing had seemed like a good idea when I spoke to Wade and Kitty about it, earlier on, but now I just feel knock-kneed and weak through the stomach. What if Wade’s promise to make it up to me were just the ramblings of an insane person?

It certainly sounds like it, when I replay the whole conversation in my head. And when I watch him pull his T-shirt off to reveal that rock-hard body beneath, I can’t help remembering how smug and arrogant he sometimes seems.

Smug, arrogant people almost never agree to something like this, do they?

“Tighter,” Cameron says, and I obey. I get him right up against the bedpost, arms linked behind his back, around it, and I cinch the scarves so hard I can see the backs of his hands turning white.

And then, just for good measure, I run my tongue over somewhere sweet on him. The heavy curve of his bicep, maybe. The smooth shape of his shoulder. Of course he moans and wriggles and tries to get away, but that’s the beauty of this one last lovely tale.

He can’t.

“You’re getting good at this,” Kitty says to me, from the place she’s found, all curled up at the head of the bed. And it doesn’t sound anything like the words the Queen’s little sylph-like assistant says, as the Queen prepares to torment Corin. It doesn’t sound like anything the Queen needs to hear, because she is already flawless and fully formed and so aware of her own power that I’m envious of her, even though I created her.

But it’s something
I
need to hear. And especially so when Wade saunters over to me, and gets me by the back of the neck.

He doesn’t do it roughly, exactly. But I hear Cameron’s intake of breath, behind me, and when I glance over at Kitty she has this deadly, dangerous look in her eye. Like the one she got when Wade demanded her cunt, and she offered him something else entirely.

But it’s OK, it’s fine, it’s all totally fine—even when he kisses me with that same rough, almost proprietary sort of pressure. He forces my mouth open and his tongue fucks over mine, and this time Cameron makes a deeper sound. A lower sound, caught somewhere between a sigh of protest and a moan of deep pleasure—of the kind I can’t hope to understand.

Does he really get off on seeing me with another man? Or is it something else, something hot and twisted and all mixed up in this story I didn’t even mean to write? I didn’t know what I was doing when I first blasted out “Hamin-Ra,” and I still don’t, all this time later.

So I just hold onto Wade and let him kiss me, while Kitty voices all the things I can hardly bear to hear.

“She looks good, doesn’t she?” she asks, and I know without turning around that she’s talking to Cameron. It’s almost the exact thing that the little assistant says to Corin, as the guards maul and kiss and lick the Queen.

And though I’m not sure it applies to me, I sure do appreciate her saying it. I just feel so naked right now, so exposed, even though I’m wearing a cotton nightie and it hardly shows anything at all.

Though I’ve got to say—I’m pretty sure anyone would feel naked, with one man’s eyes all over their back and another man’s hands all over their body. Wade gets a handful of my ass, briefly, and I think I go up on tiptoe, but then I turn a little and I can see Cameron looking. I can see him wishing that those were his hands, that he had hold of me in that same way, that he was as bold as Wade suddenly seems when he pushes me back onto the bed.

“Hold her wrists,” Wade says to Kitty, so hoarse and breathless seeming—and with this look on his face too. A mean look, I think it is, while that stomach-twisting feeling comes back to me.

I didn’t know things were going to go this way. In the story, no one pins the Queen down. But then I think in a bleak flash—
I’m the Queen of nothing
—closely followed by something else. A sweeter thought, that stings as much as it turns me to liquid. It’s one I had not long ago, and it’s just as powerful as it was then:
This
isn’t a story. We can do whatever we want.