The Things That Make Me Give In (30 page)

Yeah. That’s why I gave in with M. That soft melting chocolate in a core of iron. That, and the fact that it took nothing to drill through that core. I just asked. I just talked to him. He seemed amazed that anyone wanted to.

Most girls, he had told me, just wanted to bounce.

I told him I didn’t blame them. It was just unfortunate that they only wanted to bounce because of his arms like trucks, and not because he wrote poetry that wasn’t half as po-faced and awful as you’d imagine it to be.

He had a sense of humour, did M. He could see the funny side of his predicament.

It took far too long for him to growl out with that gravel voice of his: ‘So you wanna see what I got?’

Good Lord, did I ever. The soft centre made me cave, but it was the agonising patience I had to employ that sent me into do-anything-land – the constant waiting so as to never give him the impression that I only wanted him for his body. I had to wait and wait and wait until I knew he was teasing me, until he said those words with a wicked smile curving his mouth that was just a little like a girl’s, and I collapsed under the weight of my own desire.

He had to drag me to bed like a caveman. He had to throw me over his shoulder – and he could. I remember, clearly, him lifting me with just one hand. Palm to my stomach, bench-pressing me as though I was made of nothing.

He is still the only man who regularly fucked me up against things. Sometimes not even up against things – he would just stand in the middle of a room and have me wrap my legs
around his waist. Sometimes he would push me higher and make me dangle my legs over and around his shoulders, his hands on my ass and my pussy kissing his face.

I still dissolve at the thought of what I’ll probably never feel again: the stubble on his head sizzling against the insides of my thighs.

With N, it was the eyes. Or maybe the fact that he is the most beautiful man alive.

But no, the eyes. His strange, wide-set, perfectly green eyes.

I was frightened by how attractive N was. Sometimes I hardly dared look at him, in case he dissolved right before my eyes. And he had a weird job, too, which meant he did often dissolve. He would be gone for long stretches of time and then suddenly turn up, swathed in black and smelling of engine oil, as mysterious as fuck.

And, oh, Jesus Christ – he could speak fluent Russian, too. How could I have almost forgotten that? He spoke Russian – which made my lust-addled mind often go to insane KGB-like places – and he would slide into bed still dressed in leather and gutturally mutter into my ear.

Sometimes he’d fuck me while naked. But I won’t lie: I liked it when he kept his clothes on. I liked feeling him creeping under the covers to me – my body warm, his still freezing – the rough burr of his jeans against my thighs and the slick leather of his jacket slithering over my nipples. I’d be moaning already just at that feel, but then, oh God, then his cat’s eyes through the darkness and his stranger’s smell and sometimes . . . Jesus, sometimes there would be gloves.

He’d be wearing gloves. And he’d press these unfamiliar hands over my breasts which I would always arch into his grasp, and he’d say lewd words in Russian that always sounded far lewder than they probably were, and he’d get all hoarse and frantic and, oh, N.

It was worth it to go through those long stretches without
him, for the intense moments with. And the moments got more and more intense, naturally.

Once, he broke into my apartment. I hadn’t left a key for him as usual – perhaps knowing what he would do. Perhaps not.

Either way he broke in – so skilfully that in the morning I couldn’t tell how he had done it, though I knew he had come in through the window – while I lay shivering in bed, half-sure that it was him.

I smelt engine oil. I still screamed when he put a gloved hand over my mouth. Screamed, but moaned at the same time.

I can still see the way his thighs and his cock looked, with his jeans roughly shoved down. Hand still over my mouth, getting everything done so rudely. He had been angry with me, I think – impatient. He didn’t like things not being in the right order, the key not in the right place, me making him climb up and break in, and now me screaming.

But he made me scream, and he made me moan, and he made me suck his cock with a leather-clad hand in my hair.

He was wound tighter than a clock, too, my Russian spy. He could last for hours, unable to let go. After the hand over my mouth and the sucking he made me give him, he fucked me – my clothes off first, of course. He liked me naked while he remained in darkness, hidden, and I remember that time in particular because he spread me out completely: legs as wide as I could get them, arms pinned to the bed.

Like a butterfly.

I didn’t need to understand Russian to know what he husked at me as he pressed his cock to the split lips of my sex. The river between my legs needed no translation. It was one of the few times in my life that I came within moments of a good hard fucking, and purely because of that fact.

Later, though, later he loved me all over. He knew everything inside and out as though he’d read a manual or been on some sort of fantastic course. It was an elective in spy school. How to lick and lick and lick a woman until she’s delirious.

He always stayed until he got the job done, and by job done I mean all areas of the experience. He liked fucking and he liked thrilling passionate feelings that people generally try not to feel in case they’re caught out with everything on the line, but then I think he already had everything on the line.

I honestly do. I mean, I could say he was probably a melodramatic idiot who really worked for FedEx or something like it, but in my true heart I don’t believe it. Sometimes he’d look as if he’d seen the world end.

And one day, he just never came back.

I guess you know that there was J.

I’ve saved him until last, because he was the one – yes, I know – the one who looked most like you. He’s a toughie, J. I loved him deeply – more deeply than any of the others – and it was this love and his resemblance to you that made me give in with him.

Of course, others who looked like you have come and gone. Sometimes I feel more than other times, or am willing to do more or stranger things. Sometimes not. With J I led a nice suburban life and I suppose that suggests we were boring together. No passion, no sex.

But God, that’s not true. If anything we were worse. It’s hard to bend every which way with someone you don’t know that well. Give me five years with someone and I could map his anatomy blindfolded.

I trusted him, that’s the thing. I trusted and desired him at the same time, even when he started to look old – he was much older than me – and he wasn’t quite as sprightly as he once was.

But we still made love more often than any other person in the neighbourhood. Those sad wives who didn’t even seem to like their husbands used to chitter-chat about how often they could get away with not screwing them, and I would sit there feeling something keenly wrong with me.

I did want to screw J. I wanted to so much that I wore him out. Our curtains would be closed at three o’clock in the afternoon, because he was making love to me on the bedroom floor, or in that sauna-like cupboard at the ass end of the house, or in the shower, or, once or twice, in the garden while the neighbours barbecued.

I guess I was disturbed by being so different from everyone else, but I also know I liked it. I liked wanting J.

But mainly because I hated wanting someone who looked just like him.

And so finally I come to you. There is no giving in with you. You just are: the alpha and the omega. I begin and end with you, and, even though I’m sure I should have left you by now to the dust of memory and silly fantastical youth, I never quite have.

I still think of your name every day, and wonder. I wonder mainly because I would never have written this without you. Or, at least, part of me would never have been the way it is, if it were not for you. You started the fire for delicious dark men, so to speak.

But really, I know better than that. I know that it’s not they who make me give in. It’s not even you.

It’s just me. I’m the one who makes me give in. It always and ever shall be: just me.