Telling Tales (5 page)

Or at least, he was probably reading it at some point. Now he’s just got it half-crumpled in one white-knuckled fist, and for too long a moment it’s this that I focus on. I can’t take my eyes off it. His hand is just so big, and with everything tensed in such a way it looks as though he could punch through brick. And for some reason that’s all I can think for a good while—about him punching and punching something until his knuckles turn red and a great hole appears.

But then I’m forced to look at other things, as though I’ve somehow been transformed into a perverted voyeur over the course of one night. Someone’s erected a pane of glass between me and my friends, for reasons unspecified, and now I’ve got to walk around with it between us, watching them do weird things I never thought they’d do, my face pushed up against it like a kid outside a candy store.

I don’t even know what the candy actually is, in this simile. I don’t even know what’s going on—was there ground-up tiger blood and ten tonnes of oysters in that wine we all drunk? Or am I just in the middle of the most crazy sex-dream of my life? Because God knows I never thought I’d live to see Cameron Lindhurst doing anything like this.

Kitty and Wade was bad enough. This is just…overkill. He’s twisted sideways on the couch, long body spread out like a great diagonal slash, still in the clothes he left the room in earlier on. Which I suppose should make the scene before me seem less lewd, somehow, because it’s not as though I can see a great deal of skin. He’s got his jersey ruffled up and I can see the hairy and solid expanse of his stomach, and the sweatpants are tugged down enough to give me a glimpse of the almost coppery fur down there, but other than that he’s completely covered.

Though I confess it’s not the idea of naked that’s exciting me. It’s the hand he has, between his legs. I can see it, even through the barely there light. He’s got a hand underneath the material of his sweatpants and he’s tugging and rubbing at the second shape I can just make out, and whenever he gets just a touch too frantic with it he presses his mouth into the leather of the couch and, oh God, he
moans
.

I can hear Cameron moaning. Cameron. Moaning in sexual ecstasy. It seems impossible but he’s doing it, and then even more shocking he suddenly takes that hand out of his sweatpants and
licks
over
his
palm
. Before returning to the furtive dirty stroking he’s doing, faster this time, fiercer.

I think he might actually be close to coming. He’s rocking his hips into his own touch and he’s practically biting at the couch, and now when that hand slides downward beneath the material, his whole body shudders.

“Ohhhhh God,” he moans, and that’s it. I don’t know who this person is. This person apparently reads a story of mine and then masturbates in a place he could easily be caught in. None of it even remotely seems like Cameron, and the more he moans and gasps and seems almost tortured by desire, the more my paradigm shifts.

Has he done this before? Masturbated where someone might catch him? I think of the story Wade read out, of course I do, but then I realize with a little jerk that
I’m
the pervert in this particular scenario. I’m the spy, watching him fuck his own hand and moan and strive frantically for his orgasm, which is going to be utterly glorious when it comes.

I’m practically on tenterhooks waiting for it, like the true dirty little fucker I am. Is he going to tug his sweatpants all the way down before he does it, come into the cup of his hand, maybe? The thought is enough to send arrows of pleasure directly to my groin—as though I’m going to meet my orgasm just by standing here, watching him be this amazing and lustful and disgusting.

Because it seems like all of these things, when he does it. Wade didn’t even seem that disgusting when he winked at me and beckoned me over. But Cameron doing this is beyond the pale; it’s deliciously decadent, it’s too much to take. I can feel my clit swelling and begging for my touch, but the tense feeling it provokes isn’t just localized to that one area this time. It spreads upward through my body, burning as it goes, and the urge to masturbate, to join him, to just go there and suck his cock into my mouth is so overwhelming suddenly I’m stunned by it.

He hasn’t even beckoned me over, but I realize with a start that he doesn’t
need
to beckon me over. I just want to go to him like some sort of lust-starved maniac. I want to slide down on that cock he’s so desperately stroking, but more than that I want to see it, taste it, touch it.

I can’t stop wondering if it’s as big as the rest of him. It looks it, even though I can barely see more than a ridge beneath the material. When he starts working his hand over the head, licking his hand again before he does so in such a lewd and wanton way I can’t stand it, I can see the heavy line of the rest of it pressing heavy against his sweatpants.

It’s unbearable. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a precipice with him, just waiting for him to swell and push into his hand and let go of all that pleasure. And then he does and I almost feel myself go too—a great wash of sensation runs through me, as though someone licked between my legs. As though I’m finally getting what I’ve been needing all night long, just from hearing him groan that he’s coming, he’s coming.

Just before the grip he’s got on himself gets audibly slicker.

It takes me a moment to realize it, but then it comes to me.

He’s working his own hot liquid down over his shaft. Like he just wants to draw it out and can’t quite bear to have it finish yet. Like he needs more and more and if he just keeps writhing and rocking into it, he’ll get it.

I almost moan with him. It’s the strangest, hottest thing I’ve ever seen, in a night when I also watched my best friend fuck my other best friend. That fact alone seems remarkable, but it’s worse when I get back to my room on shaky legs and realize something insane:

I don’t want to masturbate right now, and think about Wade. I want to masturbate right now and think about Cameron.

When Kitty comes and joins me at the breakfast table in the kitchen the next day, my face doesn’t go red. I think she knows—she gives me a very pointed, “Did you sleep well?”—but it’s not as though it’s unusual between me and her. I’ve seen her fuck before. It’s no big deal.

It’s not even a big deal when Wade comes in and he’s sort of, you know…pretending he and Kitty are like business partners now. How are you today, weather is fine, have you seen last night’s stock reports, etcetera. It’s all very clinical and normal and I don’t even find myself blushing when he gives me this mischievous look. Eyes narrowed just ever so slightly, almost-smile touching his lips, all of him just quivering for a reaction from me, I can tell.

But somehow, bizarrely, I
do
blush when Cameron comes in. I more than blush, in fact. I feel it right to the roots of my hair, this King Kong mega blush from the planet beyond. I don’t even know why, either, because what he was doing was far less than what they were doing, but somehow it’s worse even so and then he says, “Hey, Allie,” and I mumble something back, into my cornflakes.

For the barest of seconds, I’m sure he looks hurt. Not hugely, or anything, but something definitely passes across his face. As though he’s used to me being silly, sweet Allie and now that I’m suddenly not being, he’s sorely sensible of the change.

It makes me wonder if he’s thinking about last night, and suspects something. It’s the first thing I’d think of if someone’s demeanor changed toward me—that I did something wrong and now I have to pay for it. And although what he did wasn’t wrong, exactly, I’m pretty sure someone like Cameron feels it is.

I mean, he masturbated after going through my things. That’s almost as bad as Wade’s story, and it gives me a little shiver thinking about how close we both were to mirroring those fictional events. He went through the stuff, and I played the voyeur. He masturbated, and I thought long and deep and hard about masturbating.

I didn’t do it, however. I felt the way I do now: electrically embarrassed. Kitty watches me slosh my cornflakes and eventually asks me if I’m OK, but I can’t deal with that right now, either. It’s obviously starting to dawn on her that maybe I’m not quite OK with her fucking Wade, but it’s the least of my concerns right now, it really is.

Instead I look up at Cameron, now he’s sitting down with his eyes on his own breakfast. What’s going on in that head of his, exactly? Why was it my stories he was going through? I feel almost as though I’ve caught a thief, but I can’t confront him about it because the thief is way too nice and kind of weird.

Plus, what if his answer is something bizarre, like:
I
have
a
fetish
about
people
being
sucked
into
walls
? Maybe my sex- ghost story affected him more than I’ve ever suspected, and he’s just been waiting all these years for another chance to read it. I mean, there’s not much else it can be, realistically.

It’s not like he’s going to be secretly in love with me, or anything.

I glance across the table at him and see the way his eyelashes curve so darkly against his cheeks when he blinks, as though everything is in slow motion suddenly, everything is so brilliantly clear. Did I notice before now how beautiful he is?

I don’t think so and yet I can’t escape it, right in this moment. His lips are so perfect—the lower one barely there and the upper like a soft bow, like a woman’s mouth in a face that’s otherwise so masculine. His face is heavy, I think, as though he held a lot of baby fat when he was a kid and suddenly shot right out of it, and now that he’s older and taller and handsome, he doesn’t quite know what to do with any of it.

And then he looks right at me with those eyes of his—such a different shade of blue than Wade’s—and I forget everything I was just thinking. I forget about Wade and the night before; I forget all my fears of coming here. I just stare at Cameron like I’m seeing someone for the first time, and all the sound in the world boils down and down into nothing, as though I’ve found myself in a long tunnel beneath the ocean, all the waves crashing above but none of them reaching me—“Allie! Jesus Christ. Are you alive?”

I jerk to Wade immediately, and out the corner of my eye I see Cameron do it too. Somehow it’s like we were both caught with our hands in the cookie jar, but I can’t think what, exactly, the cookie jar is in this scenario. It’s not as though we were fondling each other or kissing or any of that stuff, after all—and not as though I actually
want
to, either, because you know, I don’t. I’ve never even thought about Cameron that way, and have no idea why I’m thinking of it now.

“I was just saying,” Wade continues, and there’s something steely in his voice. Something he’s grown since college—an insistence about himself. Like the night before when everyone had to look at him and hear his story. Like the night before when he seemed so sure I would come into the bedroom and do fuck knows what. “Maybe we should all go down to the lake today. Have a swim.”

It makes me want to say to him, weirdly:
You
don’t look like you swim anymore. You look like you run. You look like you
power
run.

Though I’m not sure why he does, exactly. Something about the way he slicks his hair back, maybe? Something about the way it looks almost dirty blond now, as though he dyes it, though I’m not certain he does. I just remember him saying to me that he hated being so cute in a family of big dark-haired men, and it seems awfully convenient that now, he’s almost a big dark-haired man. He’s slick and efficient and bristly, and he’s just waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I say, though I wish I hadn’t.

***

The trouble is, we always used to come down here in our clothes. In the night. Never in broad daylight with everybody suddenly half-naked and me looking like a prized idiot because I’ve got three jumpers and a pair of dungarees on.

And OK. Maybe not that bad. I’ve got a swimsuit on underneath these shorts, I swear to God.

But the swimsuit is absolutely gargantuan compared to Kitty’s swimsuit. Hers isn’t even a swimsuit, really. It’s two specks of cloth over her nipples and one speck of cloth over her vadge and I must really be an old lady inside because all I can think is
Dear
God
it’s March. She’s going to die in this freezing disc of gray-blue water.

I’m dying already, just looking at it. I mean, it’s as beautiful as I remember it being—surrounded by misty open fields and clumps of trees here and there, the sun just skating its surface—but I can almost see ice forming, in places. The grass around its banks has frost on it.

“I think we’re going to die,” Cam says, but then I have to look at him, so really dying is the least of my issues.

God, he’s big. Just really, really big. I even see Wade casting a weird look at him before he takes his own shirt off, because I’m pretty sure Wade was expecting to have the body, you know? He obviously goes to the gym now and everything is just as bumpy and firm as it was last night, when he put on his little fuck-show for me.

But somehow he’s not quite as…immense as Cam. Cam is…huge. And not just in a freakishly tall, six-foot-five sort of way. His shoulders look heavy and substantial, as though he spends his days with a yoke over them, climbing up some never-ending hill. His chest is broad and weighty, muscular but not in a gym-bunny way, like Wade’s is.

This is more like…I don’t know. I want to ask him what he’s been doing to get his body like this, but just the idea of posing the question makes my face heat. Asking would only suggest that I’m looking and that I
like
what I’m looking at and both things seem impossible, suddenly.

I might have said it before—
Whoa, hey there stud
, something like that—but I can’t now. Not after…he did that thing. I can’t, I can’t.

Unfortunately, however, Kitty
can
.

“Jesus Christ, Cam—get
in
me. Wow.”

I do not like the fact that, when she says this, I have the sudden urge to shove her in the lake. No, I do not like this feeling
at
all
. Where is it even coming from? I didn’t feel like pushing her in the lake when I saw her fucking my one true love. Thinking it now is just weird and insane and then I glance at Cam and his face has gone bright, bright red and he’s fingering his T-shirt like…I don’t know. Like he wants to put it back on maybe?

Yeah, he looks like he wants to put it back on. As though she’s being sarcastic, or something, and he should cover up quick before anybody else sees the rest of his grotesquery.

Makes me want to put a hand on his arm and say something good and reassuring like
I’ve never seen a better body on any actual person
, only I can’t. I can’t because it would be the absolute truth. He looks better than I’ve ever seen any other person look, and thinking about it makes my face flush and my body go all weird and, Jesus Christ, I’m turned on again.

“Come on, you doof,” Kitty says, and grabs his arm, and even though I can see she’s trying to make up for whatever weird discomfort she caused him, I feel that little flash of something again. That urge to shove the girl I love best in the whole world right into the lake.

“Why can’t we just use boats, I need a boat,” he says as he trails after her to the water’s edge, and I find myself thinking:
Is
that
how
you
do
it? Is it the rowing that makes you all big, do you still row after all these years, do you still stand around in a boathouse somewhere in those tiny Lycra shorts that show just about everything you’ve—
“Hey. Earth to Allie. Seriously, what’s going on with you? I talk, you’re off in some other world.”

I manage to tune back into Wade again and I don’t know. I guess I’m expecting him to be half-laughing or not that bothered. But when I actually look he’s kind of pissed. Yeah, there’s definitely something angry in his expression, like before when I thought about him being
insistent
somehow.

Was he this way before? All I seem to recall is me begging for
his
attention, me feasting on the tiny scraps of his laid-back love, though that’s not what I’m thinking about right now. Instead I find myself wondering just what his expectations were for this little get-together.

Everyone pledging undying sexual allegiance to him, maybe?

“No, I was just…” I start, but then I stop. Mainly because the words coming to my lips were definitely going to be about Cameron, and they were going to be something along the lines of
Did
Cameron
ever
talk
to
you
about
my
stories? About maybe liking them a whole huge lot?
And I realize I don’t want that. I don’t want Wade to know what I saw, or how I felt about it, or anything of the kind.

Which is weird, when you really think about it.

“Nothing. I guess your story last night really threw me for a loop,” I finish, though it’s no better than what I was going to say, in all honesty. It sounds as though I’m talking about something else altogether, and when he grins I know he’s thinking that.

“Yeah?” he says and I brace myself. I know what’s coming. Or at least I kind of do until he does it, until he gets right up close to me suddenly and breathes all of his hot breath on me and murmurs in that husky way of his. “Well I thought
you
were going to come to my room last night. And maybe if you had, I could have told
you
a story instead.”

Ugh. Ugh. When did he become this Master of Seduction type of guy? Was he always like this? Did I always like it? Because I’m liking it now even though I don’t want to, and my body feels all hot and my face feels all hot and this close up he’s
so
good looking and so wolfish. Predatory, I think, even though I always used to consider him gentle. Kind, and gentle.

“Oh yeah? Is that the one about the amateur gymnasts in the middle of the night?” I say, only I mean it to be confrontational and aggressive and it comes out like I’m flirting instead. Like I want him to lean even closer toward me and whisper in my ear about all the stories he just can’t wait to tell me.

I won’t deny, it makes my heart speed up. I mean, I have no idea if he’s serious or not—in truth I don’t even know what we’re really talking about anymore—but I can feel myself leaning in to him, anyway, and though the morning mist is making goose bumps prick out all over my flesh, I’m syrupy warm inside. I feel like I’m glowing, like you could see me all the way from Scotland.

And I kind of hate myself a little for it. Not in a huge way, but it’s there nonetheless. He just walks right up and talks all low and seductive to me after I’ve spent years agonizing over all the things we didn’t do and how much he didn’t want me back in college, as though it’s all just that easy.

Why wasn’t it easy before, huh? Why couldn’t it have been easy all those years ago? It seems almost like a kick in the face that he seems to find it easy now. I want to ask him, really loudly, what’s changed, but the truth is—I’m afraid of the answer.

“I’m gonna go swim,” I say all in a rush, and then I dash down to the water like a massive galumphing idiot. Though I suppose this technique would have at least worked—it’s a great way to avoid awkward, sexual tension–fraught conversations to just suddenly jump in freezing cold water in the middle of them—if he hadn’t followed me.

He actually follows me.

Though what’s stranger about this is my reaction. God, I would have
killed
to have Wade follow me, back in college. I was always the one splashing or running or tripping up after him. But this time I wade away from him into water that sets my teeth on edge, ploughing on determinedly even as the cold gets its claws into me, sinking right into the murky depths when it gets deeper and stroking out in my own clumsy fashion. And I’m not even looking back at him, particularly, as I do all of this.