Addicted (22 page)

And then I’m punished for it. A ribbon is wrapped around that place I’ve just quivered over – thick and silky and too tight around my breasts. So tight, in fact, that for a second I can’t breathe … though I’ll admit it might be more to do with the situation than anything else. I’m all jumbled and conflicted, wanting more of this then needing to back down.

Just say, I think.

Dillon, we need to talk.

But it’s easier thought than done. Of course it is. Everything is always easier in my head. In my head, my heroine didn’t feel trapped by this act. She didn’t want to say the safe word – she didn’t even
have
a safe word. She just went along with everything like a good little lamb, and I confess: I kind of hate her for it now.

I hate her for being so selfish and so accepting at the same time. I hate her for moaning the moment he ties her hands behind her back – though I’ve no idea how I can be so unforgiving. Because I do the same thing when he does it to me. I moan his name when I feel him lacing that ribbon over and over around my wrists in an endless loop.

And when he leads me to the bed by the length of material he’s left, I let him. I go willingly. I bare my throat for the ribbon there, too, though naturally I know what that means. I understand the connotations of a collar, even if I’ve no idea what I’m collaring myself to.

Mindless, mind-blowing sex, for ever? Awkward moments when he almost seems to know what a relationship should be?

Perhaps, perhaps. But in that moment I don’t care as much as I should. I’m too busy enjoying the sensation of the silk sliding against my skin. In the story, it was more about the bite of those thick edges, the sense of being bound. But in reality it’s so much sweeter than I would have thought. It’s slippery and slick against my stiff nipples and the sensitive skin of my throat, and when he runs it between my legs, briefly …

Ohhh, my clit jerks at the feel of it. My back arches without having to be told to do it. He’s got me on hands and knees on the bed, but it’s me who puts myself into the right position. It’s me who gasps and rocks back to feel the heavy press of him between my legs.

He’s going to take me right away, I think – not like in the story. In the story the Master waited, because he could. But maybe … maybe Dillon can’t. Maybe he’s so turned on he just has to have me, now, and the thought is desperately exciting.

Until I realise what it means.

I’m panting after his every tiny reaction, just as my heroine did. I’m sifting through him constantly, waiting for a sign of something. And though he gives me more than the Master ever gave her, though he shakes for me, and flushes for me, and tells me he can’t wait, it’s all just nothing, without the core of him.

It’s nothing, I think, as he slides into me.

Even though my treacherous body believes otherwise. It always reacts the same way when he fills me with his thick cock – excitement slithers down and sensation slithers up, and both things meet in the middle in a big burst of pleasure. I gasp at feeling it, and immediately do what I hardly dared to before.

I fuck back against him, with all the desperation I’m currently feeling. I jerk and work and go for it, pushing him the way she pushed him, refusing to stay still. And when he gives me nothing but:

‘Yeah, show me what you want. Tell me what you want.’

I think something cracks inside me.

And it definitely smashes into smithereens, once he’s followed it with this:

‘Why can’t you tell me, huh?’

Why can’t
I
tell
you
, my mind bellows, and then I do something my heroine never ever did: I rip the blindfold off. I turn without permission, and stare at him with all the incredulity I can muster. It’s molten hot, this incredulity. It’s burning inside me as hard as the edge of my orgasm is, and it doesn’t take much to get it out of my mouth.

‘I have. I did. I do, all the time,’ I say, but that’s not enough. I’m not satisfied with that. I have to move away from him and sit up, and maybe bunch his shirt into my fists, too. I have to wrench him down onto the bed, and once I have the rest comes out easier: ‘But you don’t.’

I think I intend it to come out quite accusatory, or at least to have a hint of detachment. But somehow I find myself kissing him in-between the words. And he kisses me back in return. He kisses me with the greed of someone who knows they’re going to be starved soon, and I just can’t help responding.

But I do my best to stay true to my course at the same time.

‘You never say a thing,’ I tell him, as he runs both hands down my body and gets a fistful of my ass. Before I know it I’m almost over him, his cock pushing against my belly, his mouth against mine.

And this sexual distraction isn’t his only weapon, either.

He has other ways of making me not talk.

‘I say plenty,’ he tells me, and how can I say that’s not true? He does say a lot – during sex and outside it. He’s got the ultimate defence: ‘I want to talk all the time.’

Though I’m starting to see that need to chat in a different light now. Maybe it’s just what he thinks he should do, rather than what he can do. Maybe it’s just more deflection from the real matter at hand.

‘Yeah, but not about you. Not about things you want, and the things you fantasise about. Where’s your book, huh? Where’s your book for me to read?’

‘I told you. I’m not that deep.’

‘You’re so shallow you can’t tell me what you want?’

‘I want you to fuck me.’

‘You can’t tell me what you need?’

‘I need you to fuck me,’ he says, and though I try I can’t resist that. It’s so close to what I’m asking for that I can’t possibly deny him. In truth, it’s so close to what
I
want that I can’t possibly deny him. My body’s still buzzing from the feel of him, and it buzzes harder the longer we kiss like this – so fierce and wet. And the longer we talk like this.

Like we’re going to take each other apart with words.

‘What else?’ I demand, as I take him in my hand. He’s still slippery with my slickness, and so hard it’s impossible to resist. Only the struggle of straddling him – and the sudden sense of just how big he is, like this – stops me sliding right down on him immediately.

I have to work for it … but that’s fine.

Because working for it gives me a real chance to turn us both inside out. It makes it easy to keep this conversation going, with him all eager to feel me again and me all eager to feel him. All I have to do is keep doing this, I think. Keep teasing.

‘Fuck me like you mean it,’ he says, which isn’t quite enough to warrant the long slow slide I’m dying for. It gets him a stroke through my slit, and nothing more.

Much to his consternation.

‘Come on, Kit.’

‘You want me to come on, you share.’

‘And what if I don’t have anything
to
share?’

‘You did it well enough when we first met. You did it well enough in group.’

‘That was different,’ he says, and in a way I know he’s right. Of course I know he’s right. I even know why he’s right, though I can’t quite accept it until he spells it out, as clear as day and twice as large:

‘It was just about meaningless sex,’ he tells me, with the unspoken words left hanging in the air afterwards.

And this isn’t any more
.

This isn’t some jokey anecdote that he can tell some stranger about one day. It’s a river of murky water, full of sharp things and creatures with teeth. It’s crazy and compulsive – to the point where I can’t even stop him rolling me onto my back. I don’t want to stop him rolling me onto my back.

I’m just as lost as he is, I think, feeling blindly through physical sensation, instead of dealing with anything deeper. I let him take me like that, roughly, passionately – until we’re both drenched in sweat and criss-crossed by nail marks, and I don’t say a single thing. I don’t try to make it anything other than meaningless, even though I know it isn’t, somewhere inside me. And I know we could see that, too, I know we could if we tried.

But I also know that we won’t.

We can’t.

We’re too hopelessly addicted to everything else.

He says that he’ll call me, afterwards. But it’s the first time that I really suspect he won’t. And I’m right, it seems.

He doesn’t call, or come to my place of work, or stop by my apartment like I sometimes fantasise about him doing. Because we’re not that sort of people really, and even if we were … even if he was the kind of guy who
could
come to my apartment and have a movie night with me and eat dinner and take a bath and all of those normal things … I’ve stripped him down to the bone now.

I’ve made him think about that word ‘meaningless’. I’ve forced him to put it in front of ‘sex’. He’s probably at the sexual healing group right now, talking frantically about this chick he banged one time in a confessional, just to make absolutely sure that I’m not anything more.

And I’m right about that, too.

I wait outside the building and he comes out a little while later, like a sign I should have paid attention to all along. He’s a sex addict. He’s crazy for wild fucking, not fun-time sharing. I’ve probably been making him worse all this time – all of this lovely, lovely time of sexual exploration, and it’s actually been a total nightmare of confusion for him. It’s like I befriended an alcoholic by partying with him every weekend.

Which is probably what all the
trying to talk about ordinary things
was about. He can’t go deeper, but he did try to go sideways. He tried to be ordinary, and I’ve just made him even weirder. I’ve fucked him up, I think.

And then I put my head on the car wheel, in utter despair.

Utter despair that comes with a side of car horn. A really, really loud and inappropriate car horn. I mean, let’s be honest here. When people think of abject misery, they do not think of a big toot from a clown’s nose, do they? No. They think of haunting cello music and maybe some sad ethereal girl moaning about the winds and the seas in Gaelic.

But of course, good old Kit Connor can’t even get that right.

My life is a goddamn clown nose, I think – and naturally, just as I do so, it starts to get even worse. I glance to the right and there’s Dillon Holt staring over at me. He even has a look on his face like I’m a slightly insane person, which, in all fairness to him, is probably true. After all, I did just follow him to a sexual healing group. And I am physically and mentally incapable of working any of this out, on any level whatsoever.

I can’t understand my sexual responses. I don’t get why I’ve done any of the things I’ve done. I don’t know what my feelings are, or what his feelings are, or why it seems so desperately important to start the engine right now and drive away like I was never there.

There are several contenders, as an answer to the latter. But all of them just make me panic more. Behold:

• You have to leave because now you look like a sad, pathetic loser who chases around a hunk when he doesn’t call.
  
• It might be best to leave, because he’s clearly in pain and you put him there with your hunger for actual sex.
  
• You just tooted a big clown nose. Well done.
  

See? All of them are awful, are they not? And they’re making me sweat, and flood the engine when the car won’t immediately start. They make me grind the gears like a maniac, and beg silently for someone to save me from what is undoubtedly going to be a horrible confrontation.
YOU MADE ME TRY TO SHARE!
he’ll scream at me, while clawing at my window.

And then I’ll have to kill myself, for crimes against humanity.

I’ll have to kill myself, for crimes against Dillon Holt.

Or, at the very least, I’ll have to kill myself for being this embarrassing. I think I’m crying a bit, and I don’t even know why. It’s not as though I expected myself to be successful at being with another human. I didn’t really believe that we could work things out and talk things through.

I guess it’s just … it’s just that I’d
hoped
.

I’d let myself hope, I think, for a little while – though I know that hope always ends the same way. It ends with books at the bottom of the drawer and friendships fucked beyond repair. It ends with:
You’re useless and
awful
and
I never want to see you again
.

I know it does.

So why am I getting out of the car?

‘I’m so sorry!’

Probably because I want to do that. And then maybe cry a little, very manfully.

Or, if I’m really being honest: blubber a lot, absolutely ridiculously. In fact, it’s so ridiculous that after a second he laughs – though I’m not going to put my name to that assumption just yet. I’ve covered my face with my hands, so it’s entirely possible that what I’m hearing is his death rattle, as he dies of horror.

But then I dare to peek, and no, no.

He’s actually laughing at me.

And that’s not even the strangest part. No –
this
is the strangest part:

‘What are you sorry for?’ he says, and then quite suddenly grabs me by the back of my head, and yanks me into a bear hug. I get my face smushed against his left pec, which in general circumstances would probably be really uncomfortable.

But of course it’s not, here. It’s feels
wonderful
, here.

‘Kit, you’re such a goof,’ he says, and that feels even better.

‘I know I am.’

‘Why are you so intent on thinking you’ve done terrible, wrong things when you haven’t done anything at all? I’m the one who … who …’

I force myself away from him then. Because I’m strong, OK? I’m strong and good and I can do this. I can tell him that we can’t party any more. Hell, maybe I need to not party any more. I’ve had more sex in the last two months than I’ve ever had in my entire life, so clearly something is going wrong.

He needs to know that I know that something is going wrong.

‘Yeah, but I’ve pushed you there with all of my … need for shenanigans.’

It sounded better in my head, I have to say. But even so – I don’t expect the level of
what the fuck
on his face. It’s sent his left eyebrow into the stratosphere. It actually makes him ugly, for a second – which is testament to how scrunched-up his expression is.