The Things That Make Me Give In (27 page)

‘Isn’t this what all women want?’ he asks, as he crosses her wrists, one over the other. She thinks he’s going to bind her, but he doesn’t. He just presses and pushes down on her, and sounds disgusted and distraught about what all women might want.

The urge to tell him no is so strong in her that it cuts her in two, but she stays silent. He doesn’t need to know that she loves biting him and tying him up and seeing him blindfolded so hard that she could marry all of it. That it’s so new and strange that it eats at her, day and night.

But it isn’t out of fear that she wants this new strange thing. And though it may not be fear, exactly, that’s making him only want to fuck her when bound and gagged and made to pay for it, it’s not exactly something else, either.

She knows what that feels like. That dread of turning into something you’re not. Of being an animal, of being weak, of never having that old mysterious cold love return to you, and having to go on living into nothing and beyond without it.

‘Yes, I want it. Go on, fucker, fuck me,’ she says, and it’s true. She aches in every part of herself to have him wild and relentless over her, because she isn’t afraid of whatever way she wants it.

And she wants him to not be afraid, too.

When he clasps her wrists one-handed in a bruising grip, relief threads through arousal. Both hum together and then get louder when his cock shoves roughly between her legs, sliding through her slit and kissing her clit, briefly, before rutting into her hard enough to make her buck.

But she can’t do anything more than buck, because he is restraining her. She twists against his grip but he holds her fast, nothing but his harsh unsteady breathing and the slap of his hips breaking the silence.

So she breaks it further, for him. She tells him how every little bit of this feels, how wet he’s making her, how much she loves it when he fucks her with his big thick cock. It isn’t hard to do it for him at all, and even less so when his thrusts grow unsteady and he whines for her.

‘Oh, go on, more, more – I want it. Don’t you want to give me what I want? Don’t you want to come in my juicy pussy? Or do you want to do it in my mouth, or on my face, or my tits? Whichever way you want it, Packs, whichever way you want it.’

He breaks, she thinks, when she talks about her mouth and her face and her tits. But it could be a combination of a number of things. At any rate he jolts against her hard enough to make the bed crack against the wall, and her nipples rub roughly against the scratchy sheets, and her pussy creams and contracts around his swelling cock.

His hand leaves her wrists and latches on tight to her ass cheek, the tenseness of the grip singing through her and joining every other sensation. She can barely hold on to all the feelings in her, they stutter through at such a speed. Relief and joy and the shivering pulse of her orgasm.

The sound he makes, like someone giving themselves up.

And then all is quiet, and still.

He lets her go but doesn’t move completely away. No, he only moves away when she turns and finds that her arms are stiff. She thinks he sees the look on her face – a look of something like pain, though really it’s just bone-deep satisfaction.

And then he pulls away. She tugs the blindfold all the way off, and sees that he has covered his eyes. His jaw is tight and he presses back up against the wall when she reaches for him.

Too far, she thinks, oh no, too far.

Just before she reaches for him again, and this time he gives in. She knows he fights it, but he gives in anyway – at first to barely anything, but then a quick and brutal hug. He clasps her to him, almost making her ache in that same way as the hands on her wrists, the punishing fuck.

But it’s a good ache.

‘It’s all right, Packs,’ she says, when he pushes his face into her hair. He sobs once – he was never much of a crier. Not even when Davey Waites trapped his hand in the lunchroom door.

She strokes his hair.

‘It’s all right. No matter what you do, you’ll never hurt me. You know that, right?’

He clutches her tighter to him, tighter.

‘And I know, I know I can never make it go away. But I can try. I want to try. I want to keep trying, always.’

And then he whispers against the soft and still unbitten skin of her throat, ‘Don’t ever stop.’

HE’S WITHIN A
mile of his grandmother’s home when the engine cuts out. And, of course, no amount of cursing it and putting pressure on the key in the ignition helps. So he has to walk, with a cooler the size of a barge in his arms, darkness falling swiftly, and nothing but trees for miles around.

Someone will no doubt come across his seven-hundred-year-old Jeep and strip it for everything it’s got. He’ll be accosted by hillbillies. He gets to the halfway point before he realises that he could have just called the auto club and waited in comfort.

But then, thinking was never his strong point.

Not that he’s stupid. He knows he isn’t. No one gets to make partner at the tender age of twenty-eight without having something about them. It’s just that often his somethings get in the way of other things, and other things make him seem kind of . . . gauche. His head is in the clouds and the clouds read naive. He understands that he’s the kind of guy who often falls for ridiculous pranks.

He knows it even before the woman from the woods joins him on the path, and smiles, and says, ‘It’s getting awful dark. What’s a sweet, soft-looking guy like you doing walking this way alone, at night?’

He supposes she’s right. It
is
getting dark. And also about the sweet, soft-looking stuff. Oh, he’d like to pretend that he’s big and macho, but in truth he’s big and macho enough to admit that he looks like a huge puppy dog.

This weird chick is looking at him as if he’s a huge puppy dog. She smiles again and this time bares her little rounded teeth. They gleam in the lowering light.

‘So, fella. What’s your name? Can’t travel together on this lonely little path without knowing each other’s name.’

He considers laughing at her. Why does she have her hands in her pockets like that? All weird and jaunty, sort of. And what kind of clothes does she think she’s wearing? She looks . . . she looks sort of like a dude from the eighteenth century – with the long, long blue coat and those odd, tight legging things. And boots, too. Boots right up to her knees, as shiny as new pennies.

But the laugh turns into a half-snort, and he glances back over his shoulder. The only other sound he makes is to say, ‘Where did you come from?’

The amusement in his voice is satisfactory. It makes this little meeting comfortable. He is comfortable. Can’t she see he’s comfortable?

She shrugs. ‘Oh, you know. Here and there and roundabouts. Say, chief – how about you tell me where
you
came from? And maybe where you’re going to.’

Her smile looks genuine, but he could swear that her eyes narrow. They flit over the now too heavy cooler in his arms. And then just over his arms. A little pink tongue pokes up, and slides briefly over her upper teeth.

‘My car broke down,’ he finds himself replying. It’s not that he wants to. It just happens. Her gleaming great eyes brook no disobedience.

‘I see, I see,’ she says, and the musical tone of her voice brooks no disobedience. It’s weird and hypnotic and it makes him want to laugh.

Maybe in a bad way.

He glances at her again and feels little prickles run all over him, to see that she hasn’t
stopped
looking at him. One of her eyebrows – far too thick for the kind of women he’s usually
into – seems permanently raised, and her eyes are at first one colour and then another. And her hair – it just never fricking ends. It’s like a giant wild bush. It sprawls down her back and kisses her pale cheeks.

‘By the by, I’m Wendy,’ she says.

She does not look like a Wendy. But he can’t imagine why she’d lie.

‘Tobe,’ he tells her, and then wishes he had lied. Or at least wishes he had gone with something less familiar. He thinks, bizarrely, of all those warning videos played in school when he was a kid. Beware of Strangers. Don’t Stop To Take Candy From Women In Shiny Boots.

And so on.

You shouldn’t tell women who don’t actually have candy, like her, your nickname. He knows without a fleck of doubt that he should have been more formal. Tobias Hood, he should have said. Attorney-at-law.

But instead he’s just an ungainly idiot with a cooler, taking candy from Miss Gleaming Teeth.

He wishes he could stop imagining her with candy. It doesn’t help when she actually produces some. Or that she proffers the little paper parcel, and names the sticky green mass inside – apple sherbets, she calls them.

Though he doesn’t think they are.

And none of these facts stops him wanting one. Just looking at the glistening mess of sweets inside makes his gums ache and his mouth fill with juice.

Instead of the sweets, he tries to think of the pies he’s going to pretend he made, in the cooler. The half of a watermelon he so neatly wrapped. Everything in there is neatly wrapped, in fact, because, although he’s a terrible cook, everyone says he’s really neat, for a guy.

And this weirdo Wendy is making him feel more so. She looks as if she wants to ruffle his hair. She is jaunty and in control, playing some game he doesn’t know the name of. Her
sly smile looks like something that should be painted in red, and it suggests queasy things. Things cut into flesh.

‘So where are you headed, chief?’ she asks, and he feels all those little hungry places in his stomach kind of smoosh into each other. If he could just have a slice of pie, then maybe he could stop thinking about the candy. And her gleaming teeth, and her colour-changing eyes.

‘To my grandmother’s house,’ he says, but his vocal cords really want to try out one of two things: ‘Give me the candy’ or ‘I need to go back to my car’. And maybe eat a lot of pie and watermelon.

But when he glances over his shoulder to where he’s just come from, and then glances back again, he finds that she has gone.

It’s thickly dark and cold enough to make him want to hug the cooler for warmth by the time he gets to his grandmother’s cabin. The moon did nothing to brighten his way though it’s high in the sky – it shines stark and silvery on the overgrown jumble that is his grandmother’s garden. The shadows are deep between the matted layers of roses and weeds, and the path is entirely hidden.

He steps cautiously, thinking of the pies in the cooler. Thinking of himself sprawled amidst the thorn-thick roses, waiting for someone to come and find him there. He imagines the tiny-toothed woman, with her changing eyes. Reaching down to cover his cuts with sly kisses.

Then he shakes himself, and rings the doorbell. And rings it, and rings it, and rings it. He calls out, ‘Grandma’, and then ‘Irene’, and then, ‘Hey, are you dead?’

Though that last one doesn’t seem funny when she’s still not answering. It wasn’t funny when she pretended to be dead rather than asleep at his parents’ silver anniversary, and it isn’t funny now. Especially not when he’s freezing and unnerved enough to keep glancing over his shoulder – as though something’s going to be there!

Like what, exactly? Like sly smiling girls who are probably con artists or thieves or –

He tries the door. Of course his grandmother always keeps it locked, and sometimes even locks it and then sits in front of it in a rocking chair with a gun in her hand. So it’s not a comforting thing to find it open. In fact, all of those nerves find new ways to
un
themselves. He even shivers, though he doesn’t think he’s the sort of person who does that. His friends hide behind pillows when watching horror movies, and nobody ever likes going down to the third-level parking garage.

But he doesn’t need pillows, and the parking garage has cameras, and it isn’t like here, out in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by trees and the cold moon and sweet, sticky candy.

‘Hello?’ he calls out, and no one responds. He’s sure, however, that the house is creaking. Everything seems too still – there must be creaking. There must be something, some sound, some movement amidst the glowing strange stillness.

When something pops in the still-lit fire, he almost drops the cooler.

That’s what the strange stillness is about. It’s that stillness which only comes when a room has been suddenly vacated, and you’re just waiting for that person to come back. And then waiting, and waiting, and . . . maybe they never come back.

It’s the stillness of never coming back.

More shivering creeps up on him. He puts the cooler down on the floor and shuts the door behind himself, but then of course he’s shut in with the quiet and the popping fire. It seems like the time to call out again, but somehow he doesn’t. Instead he climbs the stairs with his heart thumping thick and slow in his chest.

The door to his grandmother’s bedroom stands open, easy to see in the cool glow that the moon spreads in through the window at the end of the hall. Usually the blinds are down, he knows, but someone has left them open. Or opened them.

When he gets to the doorway, however, the blinds in there are shuttered. It’s as dark and close as a cave.

Though he can still make out the shape of his grandmother, in the bed. Dead or unconscious, most likely. Certainly not responding to his footsteps on the polished wooden floors.

He gets all the way to the rug – a moment from the bed – before she turns beneath the piles of covers and blankets and other strange shapes.

All he can make out is the white of her teeth, which look . . . odd.

‘Gran . . .’ he begins, but he can already see that it’s not exactly who he’s thinking. ‘Gran, did you get different dentures?’

And then she peels away the covers and almost seems to prowl towards him – when all she’s doing is leaning – before drawling, ‘I don’t think so, chief.’

His thudding heart turns over and a sound of shock is forced up inside him. It doesn’t make it out, however. Instead her sly smile comes close to prompting a laugh – what an incredibly weird little creature she is. How she stares at him with those amused and ever-changing –