Addicted (4 page)

Which is probably why I go with the latter. I paint a vague picture of Kit the lonely one-night-stand addict, hopping nightly from bar to bar in the hopes of making some connection. And though it kind of sounds like hokum, while I’m saying it, that last word leaves me feeling … I don’t know.

Unsettled?

I find myself thinking back over my life, sifting through various relationships and friendships … things that should have stood me in better stead than trawling night spots for tail. But really, when I consider it … when have I ever connected with anyone?

I haven’t. And that slight sinking of his oh-so-amused expression confirms that much. He can see it in me, I think. He can tell that I’m being honest, in some tiny way – that I’ve just exposed a part of myself I didn’t want to give.

And now he’s sad for me.

Christ.

‘I can’t really say any more,’ I say, to the circle. At which, they all nod sympathetically and give me reassuring pats on the back, and the kindly Scottish aunt says, ‘Well, why don’t we move on to some healing, wholesome one-on-one time?’

I’m almost relieved, in the few precious moments before I realise what that means. In fact, I make it all the way over to the squash and cake table, before it comes to me. I’ve got a cookie in my hand and I’m thinking, Hey, at least I’ve got some kind of epiphany out of this. Maybe I can ask Tom from the library out, the next time he rubs against me between the stacks. That’ll be some kind of connection, all right. Or at least it’ll prove I’m open to connections.

And then I see him, out of the corner of my eye. I see Dillon Holt, strolling towards me, in a way that makes me want to glance over my shoulder. You know, just in case there’s a sexier, wilder sort of chick behind me, and she’s actually the one he’s aiming for.

This imaginary woman has to be the one he’s aiming for.

Right?

Only I don’t think I’m right at all. The kindly Scottish aunt said ‘one-on-one time’, and this obviously does not mean what it did in my head thirty seconds ago. My head thought she was suggesting we have a deep, meaningful discussion with a slice of ginger cake, but I can see now that I was wrong.

‘That’s right,’ she calls out, over the mostly paired-up room. ‘Hold your partner in your arms, and show them that you’re there for them.’

And then it clicks in my mind. Dillon is coming over here because I’m the person he wants to hug. He was touched by my lack of any kind of connection with fellow human beings, and is reaching out in his own lunkish way. He wants to show me it’s OK – but unfortunately, he wants to show me it’s OK by
putting his massive arms around me
.

I can’t have that. There’s a toilet somewhere beyond the double doors into this hall, and I need to feign interest in that place immediately. But how best to do it? If I raise my hand and ask for a bathroom pass, I’m going to look like the biggest fool on the planet. And if I don’t ask, then it’s not going to be clear what I’m doing. When he gets over here I won’t be able to politely excuse myself, and I’ll just have to walk away.

He’ll think I’m an ass. He’s going to think I’m an ass. And by the time I’m finished panicking over what an ass I am, it’s far too late. He’s already upon me – and, Jesus, he’s even bigger than he’d seemed across the circle. He has to be at least six foot two, if not more. His shoulders are so immense I can’t see the ends of them, once my eyeline is level with his chest.

You can’t even call what he does standing. It’s more like
looming
. I’m being loomed over by the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in real life, and once he’s there I don’t have a chance of escaping. It would take me seven years just to run from his left bicep to the tips of his fingers – though running isn’t even an option. The moment I think of it – like a desperate light bulb going off in my panicky head – he leans down and enfolds me in those enormous arms.

He
enfolds
me. I didn’t even know I could
be
enfolded. I’m not sure what to do, once it’s happening. My own arms go really stiff and sort of stick out on either side of his body, and I forget to turn my head when his chest angles down – which just leads to a kind of awkward face-mashing against his left pectoral muscle.

Though, in my defence, I’m not used to men having something in that place. Typically it’s just skin and chest hair, or maybe gigantic pillows of extra sweaters. Some of the guys I’ve dated weren’t really keen on hugging full stop, so there’s no helpful comparison there.

This guy hugs like his life depends on it. He hugs me so warmly that something embarrassing starts happening in my general eye area – something that stings a bit and mortifies me to my very soul. Apparently I’m so starved of affection I tear up when a random bloke squeezes me a bit.

I’m like a tube of toothpaste that’s never been used. My destiny in life – to have people compress me – has not been fulfilled.

Until now.

He has a hand on my back, and he’s kind of rubbing it up and down. Not in a sexual manner, you understand. Just in a nice, soothing, warm sort of way. He’s so full of heat that he’s got a ton of it to spare, and he just hands it around to random strangers, whenever the mood takes him. He can afford to, after all.

Women hurl themselves at him while he’s eating a cheese sandwich. He’s not going to nearly cry because he’s being hugged – but I think he understands that I might.

‘Yeah, that’s nice, right?’ he says, and I just sort of nod helplessly. I don’t want to; because if it turns out that he is an arrogant ass then this is only going to make him worse.

But I just can’t do anything else. He feels
incredible
. And he smells much, much better than I thought he would, when he was sat all the way over there like some half side of beef. I thought he’d have a musky tang, but mostly he’s made up of shampoo and fabric softener. He’s like a big pile of laundry, fresh out of the drier – and I don’t mind admitting that I kind of want to bury my face in him.

In fact, I’m almost comfortable enough to do that, by this point. My limbs have gone all loose and lax, and I’m pretty close to returning the favour. All I have to do is make a loop around his broad back, then squeeze gently.

Seems simple.

And then he whispers one word, in my ear. One shocking word that makes my hair almost stand on end.

‘Faker,’ he says.

I know he’s behind me. It’s like his presence is pressing against the fabric of the universe, and I’m forced to notice it whether I want to or not. Plus … you know. I can also actually
see
him in the flat-black gaze of the shop windows across the street. He’s about ten paces back, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of the hoodie he’s put on.

I’ll admit: I kind of expected him to brave the elements in just that ridiculous T-shirt. But it makes him more human to see him with some layers on. He’s not some sexual superhero, swinging through the November-washed streets in just his undercrackers.

Even he has a line of normalcy drawn in the sand of his insides.

It’s just that this line includes following me – because come on, now. He totally is. I stop when I get to the window of a newsagent’s and pretend to be examining a sign for someone’s missing cat, just to see if he’ll stop too. And when he does, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’s only doing so because I did. He has to feign interest in the contents of a store that sells orthopaedic trusses, for God’s sake.

I almost want to shout back at him that he’d look great in a girdle.

But I refrain. Jokey comments about his gut-restraining needs will only encourage him – and after I did so well to evade him back at the hall. Out here, I’m never going to get away with declaring loudly that I need a wee. There’s no one here to frown at him for stopping me visiting the toilet.

He had to let me go, then. He doesn’t have to let me go now.

Unless this isn’t actually a thing – which could be the case. Maybe I’m just imagining him all hot on my trail, ready to take me down for the terrible crime of sex-addiction fakery.

‘Hey, Kit – wait up!’

Or maybe not.

I try walking faster, but to no avail. You can’t block out sound by moving your feet more rapidly – and even you could, he’ll soon be close enough for me to read his lips. Two of his strides make up seventeen of mine, and he makes short work of the distance between us. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if his speed and persistence mean something else.

Maybe he
kills
people for faking sex addiction. He’s the fabled Fake Sex Addiction Killer, and I’m about to be horribly offed in the doorway of a Burger King.

‘This is a
really
long way around to the bathroom,’ he says, which at least reassures me on the murdering front. If not the
anything else
front. He’s going to want to have a discussion, now, about that one word he whispered, and I am not at all prepared for it.

I didn’t bring my conversational shotgun.

‘Are the facilities not seven streets down? Oh, that’s pretty foolish of me. Well – I’m here now. Might as well keep going. Goodnight, Dillon!’

I say ‘Goodnight, Dillon’ far too hysterically. Even I know that, and I’m the person who never realises when I’m being hysterical. I just discover that
Masterchef
didn’t record and then hurl the remote control through the television.

‘Hey – you remembered my name.’

I don’t look at him when he speaks. Sensing the weight of those beautiful eyes on the side of my face is enough. I feel like I’m basking in the light and heat of some sun from a distant galaxy, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

‘I think anyone would remember your name.’

‘Huh. Really? Why’s that, then?’

Because you delivered a ten-page essay to the class:
Why I Like Oral Sex
, by Dillon Holt. Because you look like the picture they put under the word ‘memorable’ in the dictionary. Because of a million things, a billion things, all of which cannot be said by someone like me.

‘Because you went to a sexual healing group to
brag
,’ I say, finally – though I immediately regret it. It’s the only answer I had in my head that doesn’t feel true, and now I’ve slathered it all over him. He’s going to nail me for it, I know.

And he does. He just does it with more gentleness than I expect. He actually sounds as light as air and like he’s half-laughing when he says:

‘Is that better or worse than going to a sexual healing group with a fake sex addiction?’

‘I didn’t fake anything.’

‘Oh, honey. Come on. Nuns could have told you that you were faking. I’ve heard more convincing tales of sexual excess from my elderly grandfather.’

Christ, I
knew
I shouldn’t have said that thing about the leather miniskirt. I bet true sexual adventurers haven’t worn leather miniskirts since 1982. And besides … he’s got to know what that would look like on me. I couldn’t land a fish in something that showed my thighs – never mind a man.

It’s no wonder he’s sceptical.

Though, lucky for me, he doesn’t continue this line of questioning. I’m already cracking under the pressure, and he’s barely begun his cross-examination. Thank God he changes the subject, to something even worse.

‘Did it really seem like I was bragging?’

I have to look at him then. That note of sincerity in his voice kind of makes me do it – but his expression doesn’t contradict what he’s saying. He’s almost wincing, with one thumbnail caught between his teeth. As though he truly didn’t realise how he was coming across. He just said what he was feeling – in the exact way he does now, while I’m all naked and unprepared.

‘Guess it did, huh?’ He shakes his head. ‘Really didn’t mean it that way. Just never revealed stuff like that before … kind of felt like I was talking about someone else’s life. But nope – that’s me. The guy who ran to a hospital wearing a cardboard box.’

He sounds rueful, now, and it makes me wonder: was he really aiming his amusement at the whole idea of sexual healing? Or was he laughing at himself, for being such a fool?

‘But enough about me. What about you? What made you fake being a sex addict?’

Shame,
I think, but I can’t say that.

So it shocks me when he does it instead.

‘You embarrassed about how you really are?’

‘No.’

Yes
.

‘You don’t have to be – there’s no crime in being a little shy. Is that why you went there in the first place? To maybe get you out of your own shell for a while?’

For a second I’m too stunned to speak. How does he get something like that? It isn’t even the actual reason, and yet somehow it feels more real than anything I tell him next. I make my voice strong and firm, and I go with the party line. But inside I’m still that fumbling fool who couldn’t even hug a man properly.

‘I’m doing research for the book,’ I say, and he buys it. Why wouldn’t he? I bought it, and I’m the one living this life. I believed it right up until the moment he called me out, and if possible I’m going to keep doing so.

I’m not timid and tentative and unable to look him in the eye.

I’m Kit Connor, sultry sex bomb. Who flushes red when he says:

‘A dirty book?’

‘Yes.’

‘About insane braggarts like me?’

‘No,’ I say, but there’s another version of that answer in my head.

Yes. Yes. I could devote an entire book to you. I could tell tales of your eyes for ever, and never stop writing lines about the laundry-sweet scent of your amazing skin. You, Dillon Holt, are all the things I’ve always wanted as inspiration, and never quite found in anything but fantasy land.

Thank God I don’t go with it. My head sounds like a drooling moron.

‘You’ve gone all quiet.’

Because I’m busy being mortified over things I didn’t actually say aloud. That’s how big my capacity for embarrassment is: I go all red over non-existent gushing about hot guys.

‘I’m just thinking.’

‘About what?’

Oh, now I’m in trouble. Why did I lead him down this path? Now I’ve got to come up with an actual reason for my sudden lapse into silence.