The Things That Make Me Give In (9 page)

And I oblige. I oblige in a way that tortures him a little – I tell him to fuck my face.

He doesn’t want to, of course. Once he got a little carried away and did just that, and then afterwards he panicked. He had been sure I’d hated it, and hated him, and seemed even more distraught when I told him I liked it. I remember clearly what he said: that he didn’t like being rough, and he didn’t like me enjoying him being rough.

Before I explained that it wasn’t the roughness. It was the fact that he lost control.

‘Go on and lose it,’ I say to him now. And he tells me, ‘Yes. Yes.’

At first I crouch, but then I kneel. After a moment of licking and lapping and beating around the bush, he really starts to give in and I relax my jaw and throat and let him buck and thrust unevenly. Occasionally he even dares to hold the back of my head to keep up as much contact as possible, but that all falls by the wayside when I reach between his legs and give that blue thing a twist.

His hands immediately go behind himself to grip the sink and he grunts for me. He grunts and saltiness seeps from the tip of his cock. He tastes like fucking me and excitement. He feels meaty and tense in my mouth. When I run my tongue over and along the underside, he jerks and swells.

His grunts and then his awkward little sounds are all running together. Words emerge in between, too, electric words that make me squirm and grow even slicker than I already am. Sometimes he can get me close to coming just by saying the things he does, and he puts in a good effort here.

‘Lick there – oh, yeah, that’s so good. Your mouth looks amazing. So wet and red.’

So wet and red that it’s leaving trails on his flushed but still pale skin. It looks dirty and sinful.

‘Twist . . . twist it again – oh, Jeez. That feels so . . .’

He doesn’t have to tell me how it feels. I can tell, just by the way he’s jerking his cock in my mouth. His hands flutter from here to there, sometimes stroking restlessly over his nipples, or over my cheeks and my parted lips.

It’s when I clasp my hand over his around the parts of his cock I can’t reach with my mouth that he starts to shake. I make him tug roughly at himself, and he moans loudly. Too loudly. His words vibrate.

‘Suck me. Suck me hard – I’m close,’ he says, and I know he is. And so it’s time for the
coup de grâce.
Another little thing, that he never likes to do. Not so unusual, really, but something I’d like, for all its newness between us.

I pull away, breathless and fuck-flushed, just as he swells and judders on the brink. I keep my hand on him, however, clasped over his. And then I tell him, I
order
him: ‘Come on my face.’

He doesn’t even get a chance to say yes. His hips and cock lurch as I rub our hands over him, massaging every bit of pleasure from him that I can get. He spurts immediately, thickly, as though on cue, shocked sounds of complete pleasure gruffing out of him at the same time. Fat ribbons stripe my cheeks, my just closed eyelids, and when I open my mouth he obliges and gives me a little taste, too.

I picked the perfect time. He’s very generous with his love.

And then while he’s still weak and sagging against the sink, he tells me that I’m very, very bad. So bad that he’s going to have to think up some incredible ways to punish me.

They probably won’t be the sorts of things I think of, when I think about punishment. It’s probably going to be stuff I can’t even imagine.

But then, I don’t want to be able to imagine it. I want to be as surprised as I’m sure he is, when I turn my prettily decorated face up to him, and order him to clean it with his tongue.

MY HUSBAND IS
unavoidably handsome. He’s so handsome that every woman in any restaurant we go to will stare unashamedly at him. He’s so handsome that he transcends being ashamed.

And it isn’t just that he’s handsome. God, no. He’s also firm and fit, tall, perfectly balanced – not too muscular, not too thin. He wears gorgeously tailored suits that close themselves around him like a lover, and his hair is lush and immaculately cut. There are no adverbs too many for him: he earns two hundred thousand pounds a year, he is square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he is flawless.

By contrast, his friend Colin is an absolute fucking mess. He doesn’t even need the contrast; you can identify the mess right away.

Colin is five-nine. He has hair that, even when brushed, will not sit down and shut up. Mostly it just looks like someone grabbed him and raped him with perm solution. He never shaves, I’m unsure whether he showers, his clothes are never ironed. His face is too pointed, so that he looks sort of like an imp crossed with someone who might work down the chippy. Once, I saw him wearing not just odd socks but
odd shoes
.

But I don’t even wish that I could stop fucking him.

I’m cheating on my husband with a man who has holes in his underpants. A man who eats Rice Krispies in bed – Rice Krispies that are often left in said bed. I know, because I’ve fucked him with them pressing into various otherwise clean and perfumed parts of my body.

I mean, it’s not because he’s charismatic – because he isn’t. He’s sometimes pathetic and sometimes too loud and you can count on him to say the stupidest, weirdest thing at a party. Probably about mopeds throughout history.

But oh my Jesus, I’ve never felt what he first made me feel in his falling-down flat on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I only went round to drop off the files. He works as a freelance consultant – advising on all sorts of technical business matters that you wouldn’t think he’d be any good at – and he does a lot for my husband’s company. So I was asked to drop the files off for Monday.

I often drop things off. This is my life – files, dry cleaning, my dignity.

I suppose my dignity should have flown even further out of the window when I got there, because he answered the door in only his underpants. While brushing his teeth, too.

I guess that isn’t very sexy – his underpants weren’t sexy, blue Y-fronts – and yet . . . I must have felt something right then and there. I remember thinking, God, he really is just so disgusting, coming to the door with hardly any clothes on. What an absolute arse.

But I also must have noticed how well he filled out the Y-fronts, because I recall that I was not in the slightest bit surprised that he had a huge cock, when he fucked me with it. I feel I would have been, otherwise, because he’s only short and slightly built.

It’s just all so implausible. The whole thing, from A to Z. What he said to me – I don’t know how it made me let him . . . do that. I don’t even know what possessed him to say it, but then he always was a blundering weirdo. An uncaring-about-what-he-says, confident, blundering weirdo.

He never seems to mind when people roll their eyes. He wasn’t perturbed when I did, after I bent over to pick up something I had dropped and he said, ‘God, what lovely tits you have. I’d just about love to fuck those tits.’

I did more than roll my eyes. I whacked him with what I had salvaged of the files. And then when he did not appear contrite in the least – only put his elbow up to protect himself and half-laughed. ‘’Ere, get on!’ – I whacked him again and called him a filthy little beast.

‘Go on, tell me off in that posh accent, milady,’ he replied.

Up to that point in my life, I hadn’t been aware that I possessed such a thing. I almost laughed with him, when he called me milady. It was such a ridiculous thing to say, a nonsensical, typical-him thing to say.

I whacked him again, just to see if he would say other things. And of course, he did. He voiced many opinions, and asked numerous questions:

‘Does he ever get you on the bed and cut off those fancy stockings and skirts with a pair of scissors? I’d give my right eye to cut them off you. Do you fuck him with those shoes on? I bet you do, you dirty bitch.’

And he voiced and questioned while I stalked him around the room, trying to whack him with my husband’s files. But he was just too nimble, you see. He was and is as quick as a bird, and the thing I think of most often, when remembering him gleefully causing me offence, is how he reminded me of those wicked carnal fairies in the gritty myths you only read later, when you’re an adult. In that weird half-naked moment, there was something godlike about him, as if he knew he was tormenting me and in his secret heart felt above me. What fools these mortals be, it seems.

I told him that he was making a fool out of me before I even knew I wanted to say it, and then, then he was contrite. He told me, ‘Oh, I was only messing, Cleo. I was just messing. It just seems like you never have any fun, that’s all.’

How they stuck in my throat, those last words. He thought it was the fooling with me that stopped my voice and made me press my lips so tightly together and look up so that all of the crying stayed inside. But it was those words. I hate those words. I still hate him for saying them.

He tried to put an arm around me, then. A naked arm! He smelt richly of perspiration and toothpaste and all the gallons of shampoo he must have to use on his masses of curls, and I shoved him away.

It thrilled through me that he looked suddenly pained. He has very big eyes, so you’d think he’d always be exposing his feelings, but really he’s just so blithe and uncaring about what people think that there’s nothing to shine through. Something did then, though.

He liked me more than was appropriate. The word
appropriate
painted itself in giant red letters on the insides of my eyelids, shortly before I grabbed him and tried out his toothpaste mouth.

We only just made it to the bedroom. I don’t even remember how we got there, or what I was thinking. I believe I thought of nothing.

So here we are now, sitting on the train to Holtley. My husband doesn’t suspect that I’m riding up with Colin to meet him at his big conference. I didn’t even suspect that I’d be riding up with him until my mind on auto-pilot planned it that way, through the devilish use of innocent questions –
so, is Colin coming to this conference?

He always looks thrilled to see me near him again. And he always has something new in mind – I know he does. One of the things that keep me debasing myself like this is that he’s endlessly inventive, and comes right out with all this dirty stuff so directly. Nothing like my husband, who wanks to perverted porn but won’t share his perverted secrets with me.

I have to pretend I don’t know he wants to fuck someone in the arse.

Colin just says it right out in the open: ‘I want to bugger you.’

I blush when he catches my eye in the dining car, and think of him saying that to me, in the dark with my knickers already around my ankles. On my hands and knees, him over me and
whispering in my ear. I hadn’t answered him. I never answer him. If I answer him I might say no.

Instead I gasped into the pillow and tried to think of other things. Though it’s very hard when someone’s circling your arsehole with a slick finger. Oddly, it’s recollecting the things he said while teasing me in that place where no one else had ever touched me that lit me up the brightest. All of the you-can-tell-me-to-stop-any-time-you-likes. And then later, much later and after an agony of delay and teasing and awful comments like ‘You’re so tight and hot – has he never fucked you here? I bet my arse has been fucked more times than yours.’ Later, once he was actually shoving his cock into me and groaning to hear my shocked groans back, he said, ‘You never want me to stop, do you, dirty girl?’

No. No, not really. Maybe. Maybe, God, oh, I don’t know. I let my husband’s best friend fuck me in the arse. I let him hold me afterwards, too, though mainly because I was all keyed up and juddering as though I’d just survived a fifty-foot fall. And also because he had been so . . . so like someone comforting a person who really has just fallen all that way.

He put his arm around me, and petted me, and said, ‘There, now. There now, it’s all right. What’s the matter? It didn’t hurt that much, did it?’

No. It didn’t hurt at all, really – I suppose because he was so gentle. His words are sometimes rough and dirty and direct, but still. He’s so gentle.

And somehow, this realisation makes my heart start making a racket. It pounds, it actually pounds. I think I’m about to start shaking just as I did after we did . . . that. So I’m grateful that he threads through the crowd towards me, drinks for two held over the sea of people, looking as hopeless as ever. One of his shirt-tails is untucked.

‘Drinkie-poos,’ he says, and the pounding recedes. ‘Have you got a seat?’

I do have a seat, inside a little carriage. ‘First class, of course,’ he says, in a mock-posh accent. ‘Nothing but the best, what-ho?’

‘Cheers,’ I say, and we blankly bang our glasses of awful wine together. I don’t look at him. I look out of the window.

‘Are we playing this game again?’ he asks, after a moment, and I’m glad that he doesn’t see me briefly glance at him, because then he would know that I had caught him with that pained expression on his face again.

‘Which one?’

‘The one where you pretend you don’t like me and I have to talk you into something.’

It’s the bitterest I’ve ever heard him be. Though I’m not sure if it really is bitterness. It sounds more like he’s goading himself into a challenge. Or maybe he’s goading me.

His leg brushes against mine, and it’s terrible but I like it. I think about last week in the cinema, watching pinkly sweet bodies pretend to enjoy each other on the screen, the screen then fading to black just as it got to the really good bits. And him whispering through the darkness at me:
Do you want to make our own good bits up
?

I did. I do. But then he asked me to touch myself and I couldn’t do it. I told him so, too, and he laughed. Though he hadn’t laughed at all when I told him that I’d never touched myself. Not ever.

The look on his face! As though a grown woman who never masturbated was the equivalent of a straight man never looking at a big pair of tits. That shocked, slightly condescending expression made me say some spiteful things to him, but none of them landed. Or, at least, he never made me feel bad for saying them.