The Things That Make Me Give In (18 page)

She goes to sleep trying, really trying, to remember what his face looks like.

The laptop hasn’t quite almost fallen off the bed. First, he says something completely unexpected just as she’s about to switch on
Poirot.
He says, ‘Have you written anything else for
Scandalous
magazine? Read me it before we get to
Poirot.
We can always watch it . . . you know . . . later.’

She wonders why the words
you know
are in there. They seem to almost have sinister connotations, like the dead body she should have been aware of in the cellar. Not that either of them has a cellar or there’s anything actually sinister about
you know
.

It’s probably just his tone of voice. Suddenly low and crafty.

‘Are you sure? Because this is the one with Damian Lewis in and –’

‘I’m sure Damian can wait. Damian would probably want to listen to your fake-true tales if he was given the choice. He’s fine about you forgoing him. He’s probably got his ear pressed up against the wall right . . . now.’

‘His life is probably
like
one of these stories.’

‘Well, then, don’t deny the rest of us. Our lives aren’t like
Y Tu Mama Tambien
, with lots of older women suddenly wanting to have sex with us.’

‘Is that what you’ve been watching for the website?’ she asks, but really she thinks:
he said ‘deny’. As though I have the keys to some magical kingdom
.

‘How did you guess?’

‘Just a hunch.’

She thinks she can hear him smiling through the phone. Sometimes it’s like that. Like his physical self is almost upon her.

‘OK, so this one is about two strangers on a beach.’

‘Does it start off, “Dear
Scandalous”?’
he asks.

‘It does. They all do. Listen.

‘“Dear
Scandalous.
I’ve been an avid reader of your magazine for five years, and finally decided that I should write in and tell you about this rather filthy thing that happened to me.”’

‘I like that you used the word “rather”.’

‘Thank you. So anyway, back to Mrs X from Brighton.’

‘Oh, Brighton is a really perverted place.’

‘It totally is.’

‘And Mrs X is a great name for a completely non-fictional person.’

‘I’ve often thought of changing my name to just that.’

‘Can I marry you and be Mr X?’

‘Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way. Too bad, sorry. If we married I’d just be Olive Meadows. You’d steal my delicious X.’

‘I’d never take your X. On pain of death.’

‘OK, so this isn’t sexy at all. Death is only sexy when you’re offering to fuck someone to it.’

‘Does someone get fucked to death in this story?’

But before she answers, this time, an odd feeling bristles through her. She tries to think if she has ever heard him say ‘fucked’ before, and is alarmed to find that she hasn’t. He never swears. In truth, he never says anything even remotely . . . naughty. The closest she thinks he’s ever got is innuendo and euphemism-laden descriptions of the sex scenes he’s just finished cataloguing. And then he does his business all over her hoo-has, that sort of thing.

‘Someone might. Just listen.’

And he does. She tells him the whole thing, including the bits that might be about his fog-covered face that she can’t quite remember. Though she didn’t intend it that way at all. She doesn’t think of him like that. They’re just friends. It just so happened that, after she’d described the man who fucks the intrepid heroine in the sand dunes, she had found the description somewhat familiar.

When she finishes, he doesn’t say anything. All she can hear is his breathing, soft and slow.

‘Are you still there?’ she asks, and is sure she can hear him smiling again.

‘I’m still here, Ol.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I did. Hey, remember that time you and I went to the beach?’

She does. They ate swirly ice-creams and built a sandman, eight million lifetimes ago.

‘I do.’

‘That was great. We should do that again sometime,’ he says, though she’s sure he knows they never will.

‘Sure, Roy,’ she replies, though she too knows they never will.

‘Good night, Olive.’

‘Good night, Roy.’

It’s halfway through the third story. It’s just as she’s getting really comfortable with reading them aloud, these little pieces
of herself. These burning bright secrets that grow in her heart and in . . . other places.

It’s as she says the words ‘Oh, fill me with your hot come.’

Of course, it isn’t really her saying the words. It’s the slutty next-door neighbour, getting ploughed by the boy next door. Every Sunday he comes around and gets her to point her legs skyward, so that he can dive between.

He likes to stripe her with his love-juice. By the end of the story she’s covered in it, sticky with it. But she doesn’t get a chance to get to the sticky part because, just as the boy next door is pounding into her and she’s saying all sorts of filthy things, Roy says something, too.

Though not in words.

The laptop slides. The phone heats up and glues itself to her ear. When he pauses in the middle of all of that fluttery breathing and those suspicious slick noises and faint sounds that seem to spell out the words
don’t stop
, she finds that she has to.

‘Are you . . . are you still there, Ol?’

He sounds nervous, though not half as nervous as he probably should be. She tries to think of an answer that would calm him and calm herself but all her words are devoured by three completely wrong ones: ‘Are you
masturbating
?’

Thankfully, it comes out incredulous and funny, rather than incredulous and disgusted. It’s shocking that a man who never swears is jerking off while she reads him smut, but it isn’t disgusting. She feels as though someone has been pressing down on her shoulders, and suddenly the hands aren’t there any more. It’s as if she was actually walled up in that tunnel, and now there’s an escape hatch.

The pause he spins out is the longest of her life.

‘I . . . might be. What of it?’

‘Nothing, I –’

‘It’s a perfectly healthy pastime. Ninety-nine per cent of all adult males partake of the activity seventeen times a day, and
the other one per cent is lying. Though I accept that the seventeen times part may just be me.’

‘Seventeen times a day seems excessive.’

‘Said the girl who is reading me stroke material. Please continue, by the way.’

She considers. She considers his prior silences. They were silences made by the stun of excitement. By sudden excitement, like the excitement that is warming her cheeks and threading through the rest of her body. Her body is happy to have it.

She tries again to picture his face, and instead sees his hands. His big, strong hands. His long, long legs as he strode towards the ice-cream parlour. The way his dark jeans hugged his arse.

What would it be like if he was the boy next door, and she was the slutty neighbour?

‘Are you imagining that you’re the boy next door?’

His reply comes out in a frank sort of burst.

‘Yes.’

She was wrong. They were never honest with each other. She knows, because that one word is what his real honesty sounds like. Quavering up and down and sad through the middle.

‘What does she feel like?’

‘Who?’

‘The neighbour.’

‘Good. Soft. Like she really, really wants me.’

‘Are you jerking off again?’

‘I couldn’t stop now even if sudden paralysis descended. I’ve been doing myself every night after a story. I imagined I was the stranger on the beach, too.’

‘Oh, I bet that was nice.’

‘It was.’

‘Did her pussy taste good?’

‘Oh, it did, it did. I can’t even remember what a wet pussy tastes like, so it was nice to revisit.’

‘I didn’t realise that the stranger on the beach liked it so much.’

‘He does. I did. I love eating out – you know that.’

‘Yes, but only in the non-euphemism sense.’

He groans, but she knows it’s a frustrated sound rather than the other type.

‘Go back to the beach,’ he says.

It’s very easy for her to. There are unanswered questions.

‘Would you have fucked her differently?’

‘Yes.’ The phone clacker-clacks, as though he’s shifting positions. ‘I would have . . . I want to have her in my lap.’

‘Why?’

‘So that I can press myself right up against her. So that she can move against me.’

‘I bet . . . she’d like that.’

Olive wants to swap the word ‘bet’ with a different one. ‘Know’, maybe. To wrap her legs around someone’s waist and press them to her and have them press back and be able to rock into lovely great thrusts . . . It makes her keep clutching at her pyjama top. She clutches at it until it’s a big sweaty mess.

‘Don’t say she,’ he says, in a voice now so hoarse it sandpapers against her skin. ‘Say I.’

She presses her thighs together and manages to get it out: just that one word.

‘I . . .’

It seems to be enough for him. He pants a yes and then another right into her ear. The panting makes her want to change the words completely.

‘
I’d
like that,’ she tries. ‘I’d like that.’

‘What else would you like?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you like me to stroke you as I fuck you?’

‘Are you fucking me right now?’

‘Imagine that I am. Tell me what it feels like.’

‘Hm. I . . . good. It feels so good. You feel good and . . . big.’

‘I bet you say that to all the guys.’

‘I say it to you because you’re inside me, fucking me hard with your big thick cock.’

Unintelligible sounds garble down the phone at her.

‘You are big everywhere, aren’t you?’

‘My dick feels like it’s strangling my hand.’

‘I bet I could hardly get my fingers around it.’

‘Oh, I’d love to see you hardly get your fingers around it.’

‘Do you jerk it hard, or soft? Fast or slow?’

‘Both. One after the other. I’m doing it slow, now, really slow ’cause I don’t want to come while you’re talking to me like this.’

‘I thought that was the idea – to come while I’m talking like this.’

‘Not yet. I want you to touch yourself, first. I want us to come together. I’d like nothing better than fucking you into a great . . . big . . . orgasm.’

‘Say orgasm again.’

And then he stretches the word out like taffy.

‘Your voice is so . . . so . . .’

But her body finishes what her vocal cords can’t. Her hand moves all on its own to the material of her pyjama bottoms, pulled taut over her achingly plump sex. She presses down, and the pressing and the feeling that follows say enough about how his voice sounds, and what it does to her.

Maybe it’s been doing it all along.

‘You like my voice?’

She likes his voice so much that it’s always him who whispers in the ear of the salesgirl slut that he’d like to have her over the counter. It’s him who tells the girl on the bus to lift her skirt. Really, lift it. No one will see. And all her
Scandalous
story girls always obey, because his voice is just that compelling.

‘Ol, do you like my voice?’

She can’t do anything but nod, helplessly. Of course, he can’t hear her nodding. But he continues, ‘I could tell you any number of things with this voice. I could tell you about how hard I am right now, just for you. How when I stroke myself with my hand all slick with spit I can just about imagine what
your mouth would feel like sucking on me nice and slow. I want you to spread your legs over my face and suck me while I lick your clit, your pussy . . . tell me how your pussy feels.’

She hesitates. Her fingers are already delving under her pyjama bottoms and her slit spreads easily beneath her greedy grasp. The words are there. But they’re getting clogged up by the pounding of her heart and the blooms of arousal that keep spreading through her. They begin at her clit and circle outward, over and over, until she’s dazed.

It’s too much to touch herself. Her fingers just rest in the groove of her sex, the feel of her own juiciness exciting her and making her juicier yet. And then on and on in a never-ending spiral of lust.

‘Are you still there?’

His voice stirs her words and forces them to slide out from the place they’re hiding.

‘Satin-smooth,’ she blurts, and then things seem to come easier. ‘Plump and slippery – my clit’s really . . . really stiff.’

‘Oh, that’s good. That’s really good. Say more things like that. How wet are you?’

‘So wet that I’ve barely touched myself but it’s all over my hand.’

‘Ohhhh. I don’t mind hearing that
at all
.’

She doesn’t mind hearing his long drawn-out
ohhhh.
It burrs through her entire body.

‘And are you hot? Is your pussy really hot?’

‘So hot that it feels as though it’s heating me up everywhere.’

‘Tell me what you look like everywhere.’

She tries to focus enough to obey him, but the sound of his slick hand on his cock – now quick enough to hear and prompt some interesting visualisations – makes it difficult. She can see his hips lifting towards the clasp of his hand. His body rocking the way hers is. It continues to rock even when she refuses to directly touch her clit.

She refuses because, if she does, she knows she’ll come.

‘You know what I look like,’ she says.

‘I can hardly remember. Tell me. Tell me about your thighs.’

‘Plump. Soft.’

‘Would my grip leave marks on them?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes. Dig your nails in.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘I do. I love to feel nails biting into my skin. And your teeth –’

‘I’ll bite you anywhere you want me to. Tell me about your shoulders. About your neck. Tell me and I’ll bite you there.’

‘They stand out straight and square, for a girl. The skin there is very thin and pale, I’m pale all over.’

‘Like me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

She can’t remember anything at all, amidst all of these things that he’s saying. Her own name seems like a vague and obscure word. His panting breaths are making the spiralling circles of pleasure bigger, more frequent.