Telling Tales (8 page)

Then
after
a
moment
she
tells
her
friend
to
hurry, and he understands in an arousing rush that she means to take her turn next. They’re both going to use him for a quick, hot fuck, and something about that makes him almost delirious.

They
don’t like him enough to talk to him or share themselves with him or ask him how his day was. But they like him enough to pin him down and fuck him like some loose little slut.

“Oh fuck he feels so good,” Mindy pants, and he can see her tits jiggling underneath her T-shirt as she bounces up and down on him, and her little porcelain doll face is creased with concentration, and sometimes, sometimes he can see flashes of her slick, red pussy as it parts and slides around his cock.
All
of
which
should
have
been
more
than
enough
to
get
him
off. He’s tugged himself to far, far less—just the thought of Lydia running a rude hand over his covered cock has been enough, in the past, to make him come.

But
right
here, now, his orgasm is a distant, waiting thing. It coils, in anticipation of Lydia being where Mindy is right now. And even when Mindy moans that she’s coming, she’s coming, and Lydia says something that makes him flush, like
I didn’t think he’d be this good
, he doesn’t let his orgasm off the leash.

Not
yet. First he wants Lydia. Even in these mortifying circumstances, with Mindy hopping off him as though he’s suddenly become the latest ride at Disneyland, he wants Lydia. He can practically feel his body straining toward her as she takes Mindy’s place, those creamy thighs straddling his hips, her eyes all over him.

He
gets
just
the
barest
flash
of
her
cunt, and then her hot little hand is on him. Stroking, briefly, before she aims the swollen head at that wet space he wants to be in most of all.

“Go on,” Mindy says, and as she does so she threads a hand through his hair and tightens it, tightens it. Almost like pulling, but not quite. “Just slide it in slow.”

For
a
moment
he
wonders
what
she
means, but then it occurs to him why Lydia is hesitating. It’s because he’s big, much too big, and though her cheeks are flushed and her nipples are stiff and poking through her vest and she’s obviously, unbearably turned on, she’s hesitating.

And
of
course
there’s some sort of misplaced surge of pride about that, but mostly he just hates his stupid, oafish body. Hates it hates it hates it until she notches the thick head of his cock against her warm and waiting hole, and slides down on it one breathless inch at a time.

She’s incredibly tight—more so than Mindy was—but it’s not the feeling of her enveloping him that sends a spark of sensation all the way through his belly. It’s the words she says that really get him, the words—
oh God Ben
—because she uses his name as though he really exists and she sounds so desperate. So incredibly lust-choked.

“I told you,” Mindy says and then he has to close his eyes, briefly, because he’s going to come. He’s going to come just thinking about them discussing him like some kind of sex object, like something they could use and discard. He’s going to come from feeling Lydia surrounding him, so slippery and delicious and, oh God, the sounds she makes…

She
doesn’t hold back, the way he always does. Mindy doesn’t even have to put a hand over his mouth, because he can’t get the words he wants to say out. Lydia just works herself on his cock, moaning and panting his name as she does, those glorious breasts of hers shifting beneath the material of that maddeningly thin vest.

“Feels amazing, right?” Mindy says, but Lydia doesn’t answer. She’s going to come, he knows she is. He can see her shivering, and she’s staring at him with heavy-lidded, too-far-gone eyes, and when he arches up into her shallow, rocking movements, she gasps.

More
than
anything
he
wants
to
put
his
hands
on
her, but there’s this weird feeling threading through him. It’s been there since the start, but it’s intensified as this whole thing has gone on—as though he’s not allowed to touch. He’s not allowed to move an inch, and if he does, they’ll stop. They’ll leave him like this, cock still hard, everything in him just hovering on the edge of orgasm.

Which
is
awful, it is, he knows it is, and yet somehow it’s also…kind of darkly exciting. He can feel this dark excitement making a fist low down in his gut, and when she leans forward and wraps her hands around his wrists, it gets stronger.

And
what’s more, it’s like she
knows.

“You like that, huh?” she asks, and then she fucks down on him harder, fiercer, fingernails digging into his wrists. “You like that, don’t you, baby.”

It’s the word, he thinks. The word
baby
, as though he’s somehow a woman again—being taken, rather than taking someone else. It makes him surge up against her, and when he does she gasps out his name and her eyes stutter closed. For one brief, delicious second he can feel her cunt clenching around his cock, and then he’s spurting thickly inside her, great spasms of pleasure wracking his body and everything shot through with the sure and certain knowledge that this will never happen again.

She’ll never do it to him again now that she knows. He could have gotten away with it if he’d maybe just let her fuck him and use him up like this, and not said or done anything in response to it. But he can see when she looks into his glassy eyes and then down his shuddering body that it’s not just a matter of him failing to protest. No, no, it’s worse than that.

He
enjoyed
it. And now the girl he loves best in all the world
knows.

She
knows.

***

I think I sit there for a hundred years or so. I have to, because my ass has rooted itself to the chair. My brain has ceased functioning. I can’t even feel the cool air on my still only-covered-by-a-towel body, and though part of me is sensible that my hair is drying into a weird frizzy mess, and that I’m clutching this damned green book so hard my fingers are starting to bleed, there’s nothing I can do about any of it.

This is
Cameron
. He actually wrote this thing in my hand. Of course, it could be that some troll from the X Dimension jumped inside his body at some point and started going for a career in erotica writing, but it seems unlikely, at best.

Though not as unlikely as Cameron Lindhurst actually picking up a pen and scribbling these words down. They’re not even really scribbled, in truth. They’re written calmly and smoothly with barely any crossing-outs, as though he had the time to think long and hard about a story like this before he ever put pen to paper.

You can tell he thought long and hard about it. And what’s worse is…I’m pretty sure the girls are not really called Lydia and Mindy in his head. I mean, Lydia’s identity is debatable—yes, I have almost-green eyes and, yes, I have dark hair but, no, I’ve never thought about making a guy feel bad about his predilection for domination—but it’s pretty clear that Mindy is Kitty. The names even sound the same, for God’s sake.

So maybe it’s not me he likes at all. Hey—it could be the case. Maybe he just thinks of me as a friendly buffer in the ultimate battle for Kitty’s heart, and soon I’m going to hear and see him banging her in the middle of the night too.

God,
God
.

“Allie?” Oh
fuck
.

Of course I knew I’d sat here too long. If they’d spent much more time out in the lake they would have all died of pneumonia. And yet still, my stupid brain wants to be all shocked that Cameron’s suddenly at the door to his own bedroom, and I do even more ridiculous things like trying to pretend I don’t have this book of writing in my hands. I totally don’t.

Why are you looking at me like that, Cameron? I
don’t
.

“Oh my God,” he says, and then I have to watch in tormented silence as his eyes slide over the clearly moved copy of
Tehanu
on his desk, and the writing in my hands, and probably the fact that I’m just in a towel too. I mean, it’s not the biggest problem with what’s going on here, but the towel-wearing has got to look strange beside the other stuff.

“Cam—” I start, but I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to finish and he knows it. He cuts me off before I’ve gotten past the first word.

“What are you
doing
in here?” he asks, and oh he sounds pissed. You can really hear it in him too, because usually he’s so calm and still. It’s like a pool of motionless water suddenly taking out a small city.

“Well, the thing is…”

I do not know what the thing is.

“I can’t believe you’d do something like this, Allie.”

Oh God, he’s disappointed in me. Oh no, I can’t breathe.

“No, look—see, the thing is,” I say, but I still don’t know what the thing is. I stand up in the vain hope that doing so will help me find it, but it only makes it more obvious I’m holding his book full of writing.

His eyes flick down to it and I actually
see
the flush spread up and over his cheeks. Like, literally see it. I didn’t even know such a thing could happen.

And then he looks back up to me and those glacial eyes of his are suddenly not very glacial any more. Instead they blaze hot, and his upper lip has gone all mean and thin the way it did the other night when Wade read that story out loud, and I just know something good isn’t coming.

I’ve never seen Cameron like this before, and it’s unnerving.

“How could you go through my stuff like this? I trusted you,” he says, and then he gazes at the mess I’ve made again as though he can’t process it. “This is just…this is just disgusting, it’s—”

In my defense, I do not mean to butt in, here. In fact, up until the point where the words actually come out of my mouth, I didn’t even know I wanted to say anything at all. They just rise up like some unstoppable tidal wave, and once they’re out there I can’t take them back.

“
You
went through
my
stuff!”

God I wish I could take them back. His head jerks up and he looks, quite frankly, stunned. He looks as though I slapped him, even though I totally didn’t, I swear to God. I didn’t mean to metaphorically slap you, Cameron, I promise. Oh Lord, this is dreadful.

“I don’t know…” he starts, and I am completely aware he wants to finish the sentence with
what
you’re talking about
. It’s obvious. His eyes even slide to one side, the way the eyes of all truly bad liars do.

I try to take a breath and think about how I can mitigate this.

“Look—you know what? Let’s just forget about this. Let’s just forget all about it. I’ll forget what I saw and you can forget what you’ve seen here and we’ll just go about our business, OK?”

Fuck knows how that’s going to happen, but I figure it’s worth a shot. Until he puts a sudden hand over his eyes and moans: “Oh God you
saw
that.”

Then we can’t pretend anything, unless there’s a doctor around to perform two handy lobotomies.

“Cam—seriously. It’s not a big deal! I hardly saw anything—”

He backs away from me—he actually backs away from me!

“Please—I can’t talk about this, I can’t.”

He’s almost out of the room, by this point. The urge to drag him back in and shut the door is strong—because God only knows where Kitty and Wade are—but I resist. I don’t want to scare him so badly he becomes a vegetable.

Hey—I’ve seen it happen. People become vegetables all the time when I lay my hands on them.

“I think at this point we kinda have to, don’t you?”

He lets the hand drop from his eyes and that fierceness is back, suddenly, in his expression. Gotta admit—it’s intimidating. He’s just so
big
. And then he says something that crushes my soul, on top of all the bigness.

“Maybe I should rephrase—it’s not so much that I
can’t
talk about it, it’s that I
don’t
want to talk about it with
you
.”

It’s weird, how much everything sinks inside me. I mean, if Wade had said something like that to me I’d be devastated, but that’s understandable. I
love
Wade. It’s not as though I love Cameron. I just had a different idea of him, that’s all—one where he’s gentle and calm and would never lash out like that.

But then he puts a hand to his face again—this time to squeeze at the bridge of his nose—and I can see how much pain he’s in. It’s not every day your friend discovers all of your secret possible crushes and hidden sexual proclivities.

Plus, he then says: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that…the way it came out.”

So, you know. I can’t hold it against him. Especially when he then goes to the door and closes it, shutting us both inside. I don’t mind admitting—a little frisson of excitement goes through me. Even though it hurt when he shut me down I kind of expected it, so this…this is like an illicit little treat, suddenly.

Is he actually going to have a chat with me? About something other than computers?

I watch him walk over to the bed and sit down, nerves written all over his face. Hands clenching and unclenching. It’s like the bit in
Poirot
when he gathers everyone together in the room to root out the killer.