How Not To Fall (10 page)

“I'm terrifying?”

He withdraws a little. “To the unworthy.”

“I don't want to be terrifying.”

“Then only spend time with those who are worthy of you.”

“I think you might be trying to give me a compliment, but it's a pretty conditional one.”

“I'm saying you're a powerhouse, and not everyone is comfortable around that. Look, if you actually believe, against all evidence, that there's anything about you that falls short of perfect desirability, there's nothing I can do that will convince you otherwise.”

“You could fuck me tonight.”

His eyes search mine. “Would that work? Would having intercourse now instead of thirty hours from now convince you that you are what I see when I look at you? Stunning? Warmhearted? Disturbingly intelligent? Is that all it would take? If I put my penis in your vagina now, rather than waiting another day, you'd feel certain, from tonight on, for the rest of your life, that any man who doesn't fall to his knees before you is a fool and a criminal? Because if it will, I'll do it. Frankly, I had no idea my cock had magical powers, but if it does then, by god, I'll use it as a force for good.”

I laugh a little then, as I know he wants me to.

“Is that all it would take?” he asks again. He's being Socrates, and I play along.

I shake my head. “I guess not.”

He smiles, sympathetic. “Then what should we do?”

“Wait another night.”

“I think so too.” He lifts my foot with both hands and kisses the toe of my sock, then presses my foot to his chest.

“On one condition,” I say.

“What's that?”

“Stop breaking the rules. It's not fair.”

“Done,” he says solemnly.

“And tonight I want—”

“You said one condition!” he growls with a grin, and then I barely have time to shriek, and he's on top of me and wrestling me to my stomach. He grabs my wrists and pins them behind my back. With his lips against my ear he whispers, “Now, what was your ‘condition,' Miss Coffey?” But I'm giggling too much to answer, so he nips my earlobe and then kisses my ear until my giggles fade into sighs.

“It's not a condition,” I finally manage.

“What's not? Oh right,” he says.

“It's a request. Tonight I want to go down on you, without you going down on me.”

“Well, that's asking a lot,” he says, a crooked grin against my ear. “But I suppose I can sacrifice myself.”

And then we watch the movie. We lie on opposite ends of the couch, our feet tangled together, not really paying attention to the screen, but taking turns rubbing our feet on each other's shins and up thighs and generally teasing each other. And when the movie is over, we go to bed. Charles detours to the bathroom, and when he returns, I'm naked, sprawled on the bed, my hands behind my head. He stops beside the bed and lets his eyes roam over my body.

I say, “Take 'em off.”

“You can have no idea,” he says, “what seeing you like this does to me.”

“If you'd take off your pants, I'm pretty sure I'd get
some
idea,” I say, raising an eyebrow.

He takes off his clothes like it's nothing. But it's not nothing. He is beautiful. He is golden and strong and firm everywhere. Everywhere. I bite my lips between my teeth as I watch him walk to the bed.

He turns off the light, lies down beside me, and pulls me into his arms. We're all the way naked together now, for the first time. I kiss him and rub my skin against his.

“How do people ever get enough of this?” I breathe as he moves his lips to my ear and jaw and neck. How can I have missed this, missed him, when it's only been a few hours since we were here? I run my hands down over his skin, down his back, over his ass, feeling the firm muscle under smooth, peach-fuzzy skin.

“Oh god, your body,” I sigh.

“Your body,” he says, and he kisses under the slight curve of my breast.

But I'm determined not to be distracted. “I want to go down on you now,” I say. “Can I?”

He lies on his back beside me, not touching me, not making the “I don't know, can you?” joke. He says, “I'm all yours, termagant.”

I move to the end of the bed and start at his feet. I suck his toes, swirling my tongue around each, and listening to his breath and the little noises he makes. I kiss and lick and bite his insteps. I scrape my fingernails from the middle of his thigh to his ankles, listening to the changes in his breathing, the little hitches, the deep exhalations and sudden inhalations. I make my slow way up his body, and then I use my hair to caress his hips and abdomen and chest. His breath is uneven.

I put my hands on his hipbones and barely touch my parted lips to the shaft of his penis—he makes a sound, and it twitches under my mouth. I inhale the scent of him, and I like it.

I turn my head and look up at him. “I can do anything I want, right?”

“Right,” he says with some effort.

“And you'll tell me what you like or don't like?”

“Yes,” he says.

“And you'll ask for what you want?”

“No,” he says.

I lift my head up abruptly. “Why not?”

“Because this isn't about what I want,” he says, a little breathless, but looking right at me, one hand delicately caressing my hair. “It's about what you want. I'm yours to do with as you please.”

“Okay,” I say, considering. I tilt my head and look at his face. “What pleases me is turning you on.”

“And what turns me on is your pleasure. Do what you like.”

So I do—or rather, I explore. I try things. Do I like pressing kisses up along his shaft? Why, yes I do. Do I like putting just the head in my mouth and sucking on it like it's a Popsicle? Yup. Do I like burying my face at the base of his shaft, inhaling the scent of his body, sucking on his skin, holding his scrotum hot in the palm of my hand, running my lips and tongue up and down the shaft? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I love the taste of him and the smell of him and the feel of him in my hands and in my mouth. I love the way he twitches and gets harder, I love the way his breathing changes and the way his face, when I look up at him, is out of focus, his lips parted, his eyes on me. And I love the way his belly tightens when I use my mouth and my hand together, one rhythm, one movement.

“Jesus, fuck, Annie,” he says.

I stop. “Would this make you come?”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Uh, yes!”

“Then keep going.”

I keep going. The tension in his belly increases. His breathing changes. Somehow he gets even harder in my hand; his whole body is tensing like a stretched spring. Only his hand, stroking lightly over my hair, is relaxed, and eventually that, too, goes rigid as he gasps.

I pull my mouth away, leaving only my hand stroking steadily up and down on him. With my lips hovering near the head of his cock, I say, “What would you do if I stopped right now?”

“You
have
stopped!” he says in a tight, cracked voice, and his hands grip the sheets. “You vicious, wicked, heartless—”

I laugh out loud, amazed, delighted at the unexpected pleasure of giving pleasure. His abdomen contracts, and his eyes and mouth open. “Oh god,” he says, and he pushes his hips to thrust in my hand. I see the spurt and pull my face away, out of sheer surprise, then watch the jet of fluid that shoots up his torso to his shoulder.

“Whoa!” I say, impressed. I'm grinning like a fool. I did that! I made that happen! “This is fun.”

He laughs and says in an unsteady voice, “This
is
fun.”

S
unday morning I learn how complicated it is to split my attention between the sensation of Charles's tongue and mouth on my genitals and the sensation of my mouth and tongue on his genitals. Charles wakes me up with his mouth on my clit, and rolls me on top of him. I kiss and suck and stroke his cock in a lazy, half-asleep way as he licks me and presses into my vagina with a fingertip. The harder he sucks on my clit, the more aroused I feel, and the more aroused I feel, the harder I suck on his cock. But by the time I come, it's all I can do to grip my fists around him and hold my open mouth, breath suspended, against him.

After I come, I try to suck him some more, but he moves out from under me and pulls me up until I'm straddling his face and he licks me again. I feel his hands gripping into my thighs as he sucks hard on my clit. When he sucks this way, directly, in a steady, pulsing rhythm, I escalate right to the brink. I press my forearms against the wall and shudder over him. My thighs shake, my belly flexes to concavity, and I come almost against my will while his fingers press into my thighs.

He tosses me down onto the bed, even as the pulsing is still fading. He moves over me and rubs his cock against my labia, up and down, as he mutters in a gravelly whisper in my ear, “Do you want me to fuck you?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Right now? You want me to fuck you right now, now that you're wet from my mouth and hot with coming and—”

“Yes. Now. I want you.”

He growls and bites my earlobe and, with three hard thrusts he comes on me, heat and wetness coating our pelvises.

“Tonight,” he breathes, his voice dark and muffled against my throat.

“We have got to get out of this apartment,” I moan.

We do. Sunday afternoon I learn that it is much easier to let go by choice than it is to fall. Falling off the rock wall is a messy, noisy, humiliating experience that for me involves skinning my knee and shrieking like a little girl. Charles has me, of course—I'm dangling morosely from the top rope, which he has locked off securely. There was never any danger. I just feel and look and am stupid. That's all.

This all started because I was ambitious/arrogant/dumb enough to agree with Charles that yes, it might be fun to try climbing some of the marked routes, to challenge myself. I start with one he says I should find “pretty easy.” It's marked
5.3
on the red tape that indicates the holds, and now that I'm used to the height, I go right up it, no trouble.

Then he climbs one marked
5.10c,
and that's when the trouble starts, that's when I start getting competitive.

My next route is a
5.5
—again, pretty easy. When Charles lowers me to the ground, I say, “This is
awesome!
” It is. I'm gaining ground fast.

Then he climbs a
5.10b
. He struggles a bit with it. I feel myself inching up behind him.

My next route is a
5.7
. This is not easy. This is very, very hard. It doesn't help that I've started to get tired. But I do actually stick to the wall perfectly well. I just stop to rest a lot.

Charles calls, “Take a sit. You can let go and not burn your arms out.”

“No, I'm good,” I call.

I'm not good. I'm in pain and I'm panting like a dog in summer, but fuck you, wall. Fuck you.

Which brings us to the
5.8
route, on which I have left a not insignificant quantity of skin from my knee. I'm hanging in my harness, holding my knee and feeling sorry for myself. “Can I come down now, please?” I call to Charles.

“You don't want to finish the route?”

“Yes, I do, but I can't. This one is too hard.”

“Bollocks. Try again.”

“Dude, I fucking hate you,” I say.

“Good,” he answers calmly. “Use it.”

I try again. And I finish it.

“Nice,” he says.

And I bite my lips together to keep from smiling too stupidly.

 

“Pizza and beer?” he suggests when at last he allows me to surrender.

“Oh my god, yes,” I moan.

We go to Upland and split a pitcher of beer, but we order a whole pizza each.

As we eat, I say, “I don't fucking hate you, by the way.”

He smiles. “I know.”

“Hey, so, your turn,” I say, remembering. “Story of your life. Go.”

“Er. All right, only fair I suppose. Born in '88, birthday March twelfth. Er, ordinary, ordinary, mostly the usual thing for the first decade or so. Went to a boarding school—Eton, if that means anything to you.”

“Oh yeah, Bertie Wooster went to Eton!” I say.

He laughs. “Yes. I went to the same school as Bertie Wooster.”

“I remember because there was that episode where they wanted to break into a safe, and the code was the year of the Battle of Naseby, and Bertie didn't know when that was, and the woman asked him, ‘Where did you go to school?' and he was like, ‘Eton.' So I asked my dad, ‘What's Eton?' and he said, ‘It's a very good school in England.' When
was
the Battle of Naseby?”

“1645. Next time look it up if you want to know. Hang on—
‘that episode'?
”

“Yeah, the miniseries with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie? My parents have it on DVD.”

“Oh, you appalling, appalling American. When we get back, I'll point you to the Wodehouse shelf. You shall not leave Indiana without reading at least three novels. Anyway,” he says. “Where was I?”

“School. A boys' school?” I ask with a cringe.

“Yes. A load of spotty, insecure arseholes with a pathological need to prove themselves. Me included,” he says. “I was small and swotty and basically a total wanker. I was younger than the other boys, too, because my father insisted I was a prodigy—”

“You
are
a prodigy,” I interrupt. “You finished college at the age I
started!
”

“I'm really not.” He drains his pint. “Anyway, once I was away from home, I'd get bored and want attention, and so I'd start trouble.”

Well, that's irresistible. “What kind of trouble did you start?”

“Just ordinary things,” he shrugs. “Practical jokes. Clever dick nonsense—in the end it protected me, I think, from some of the bullying I might have experienced, because boys would vie to take the blame—or the credit, I suppose—if a trick was clever enough. Everyone knew it was me, beaks all knew it was me, but when you've got five other boys all saying, ‘I did it, sir; sorry, sir, it was me,' there's not much you can do. My tutor confronted me directly once. ‘Douglas,' he said, ‘for my own edification and entirely off the record, how, hypothetically, might one have managed to get a pie to fall from the rafters at precisely the moment the headmaster walked under it?'”

“And how did you?” I ask.

He only winks at me over his pizza and says, “Flying buttresses, my girl, flying buttresses. Anyway,” he continues, “apart from that, I climbed and played cricket, and that's about all. Then I went to Cambridge, and I more or less stayed there until I came here.”

“Did you always want to be a scientist?”

“No, I always wanted to be a doctor. When I started as a research assistant at the BRC and developed—”

“BRC?”

“Stands for Brain Repair Centre, sort of.”

“Seriously, it's called the
Brain Repair Centre
?”

“Well, no, mostly it's called the BRC,” he grins. “Anyway, I was working on traumatic brain injury and got more and more interested in how nonbrain trauma affects brain functioning, and that really became my focus.” He shrugs. “I met Diana at WCP about five years ago, and she suggested I come do the fellowship if I could get the residency in the School of Medicine. And here I am.” He chews his pizza.

“And how about family? Are your parents together?”

“Yes,” he says.

“And . . . any brothers or sisters?”

“Yes,” he says, “Elizabeth is nineteen, and Simon is twenty-two. Your age.” He says it as if he's just realizing.

“Do you get along?”

“Well enough. I haven't spent much time at home.”

“You mean, since you came to Indiana?”

“Since I was ten,” he says.

I don't want to say the only thing I can think to say—
Like Harry Potter?
—so I just sit there with my mouth hanging open.

“It's been my choice, for the most part,” he says. “My father's fairly unpleasant, and I prefer not to live under his roof.”

I want to ask about his dad, but I can tell he doesn't want me to—I'm getting a “police line, do not cross” vibe. So instead I say, “How about your mom?”

He refills both of our glasses from the pitcher of beer and says, “Mum's all right. She comes to see me sometimes. She was here last summer. Brought me the Wodehouse collection, actually. I took her to the Lion and fed her coddle. She loved it.”

“You didn't take her to the lab to meet people?”

“I did. It was in July. You were away. She would like you,” he adds, smiling at the remains of his pizza. “She'd be intimidated by you though.”

“Why would I intimidate her?” I'm worried about a meeting that's unlikely ever to happen.

“You're . . . very American, I suppose. Confident. Sure of yourself.”

“Am I?”

He nods and sips his beer. “And she's very British. Terrified of accidentally saying the wrong thing. Certain that she already has.” His face grows dark suddenly, and he says, “Let's talk about something else. What time is it?”

I pull out my phone. “About eight.”

“Four hours, then,” he says, lifting an eyebrow. “What shall we do with the time?”

We go back to his place.

In a stroke of genius, I ask to take a bath. “On your own,” Charles says. “There's only so much of you naked and wet that I can stand.” While the water's running, he hands me a P. G. Wodehouse novel to read while I soak, but when I crack a joke about dropping it in the tub, he takes it back from me, looking affronted.

“Go on.” He waves me into the bathroom, following me like a sheepdog with a stray. “Get in,” he says, and I undress and step into the hot water. As I settle in, he sits on the lidded toilet, his ankles crossed on the edge of the tub, and clears his throat and reads, “
Very Good, Jeeves!
by P. G. Wodehouse. Copyright 1930—a first edition, you'll notice, not to be dropped in the bath by any careless young harpy who happens along. Where were we? ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom. It was the morning of the day on which I was slated to pop down to my Aunt Agatha's place at Woollam Chersey. . . .'”

And he reads to me. He does different voices and everything—an exaggerated bass for Jeeves and a floaty, silly voice for Bertie. Aunt Agatha herself gets a wobbly falsetto that cracks me up so much, Charles has to stop and wait, smiling, for me to stop laughing. Eventually he gives up on me and gets on his knees by the tub and kisses me while we're both laughing, and then the kiss turns serious, deep. I put my wet hand on his face when he bites at my lips. When he pulls away, he says, “Christ, woman.” I bite my lip and look up at him.

He goes back to his seat and opens the book again. “Where were we?” And he begins reading again.

“Eton!” I interrupt when the book mentions it. “You went to the same place as Bertie Wooster
and
Bingo Little!”

“And that is a source of great pride to my family, I can tell you,” he answers with a grin.

He stops too when I interrupt him for translations—

Like, “A cabinet minister is a government thing?”

“Yes, a government thing.”

Or, “What's a soup and fish?”

“Dinner jacket and black tie, referring to the first courses of dinner.”

Or, “How much is a couple hundred quid?”

“Er . . .” He stops and scratches his head, counting. “Maybe . . . I dunno, ten thousand dollars? Twenty? The joke is, it's a lot.”

“You know many things,” I say in response to this last one.

“ ‘And to all this he must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of his mind by extensive reading,'” he answers.

“I know that one—Colin Firth unites all women, everywhere.”

He shakes his head sadly. “I quote Jane Austen, she names an actor. Honestly, what is the world coming to?”

I look at him from the tub, where I'm lying up to my chin in hot water. “I'm pretty sure it's coming to streaming video on the Internet.”

He gives a dignified snort. “Right. That's enough of that, miss.” He closes the book and stands up. “I'm taking this out of harm's way, and you can get on with whatever it is women do in the bath.”

He has his hand on the doorknob when I say, “Hey, Charles?”

He turns and looks at me, an eyebrow raised.

“Thanks for reading to me.”

He smiles and leaves me to my bath. I run more hot water and let myself soak in the heat, relaxing my climbing-fatigued limbs. In the end, I feel too lazy to wash my hair, so I make do with a quick soapy wash, and then I pull the plug, get out, and dry myself off.

Wrapped in a towel, I make my way to the bedroom. I lie down to wait for Charles.