Run To You (8 page)

This is the truth:

His hand making a hot stripe right down the centre of my naked body. My body arching to meet that sizzling touch. I feel as though I’ve waited for ever, and yet somehow it’s no time at all. It’s too soon, it’s … wrong. He didn’t mean to do this, I think, though, God, I’m glad he does.

It’s like getting early parole.

No more languishing in a prison of my body, afraid to be seen and touched and handled. There’s just him and his hands on my thighs, and then the electric sense of him kneeling down somewhere just past the edge of the bed.

So he can look, I think.

But oh, it’s so much more than that. I was wrong about him and his restraint, his clinical approach, his ability to be aloof. In one sudden swoop he’s an animal, wanting me to spread for him, wanting to see, wanting to touch. I feel his thumbs press deeply into those sensitive spaces that surround my plump sex, and I know this is going to be too much.

He’s going to take me apart with his hands, clearly. He’s going to map out every part of me the way he mapped me out with his eyes, so he can use the information at a later date. He’ll probably put it in his little notebook of me: she likes having someone run a finger down through her wet slit, so everything is nice and exposed.

Only
finger
is the wrong word there.

He doesn’t do anything with his fingers, the way I imagine. I guess that would be too easy, really, to attribute to someone like him. You can clearly imagine him searching all over someone with those strong, forceful hands, maybe while wearing a pair of leather gloves.

But you can’t see him pushing his face between someone’s legs.

I can’t see it. I don’t expect it. I’m waiting for something else, and I get the sudden jolting press of his hungry mouth against my spread pussy. And when I try to sit up – more out of shock than anything else – he puts the finishing touches on this tableau.

He spreads a hand over my stomach, and pushes me back down.

I won’t lie: it’s possibly the most arousing thing to ever happen to me. Not the press of his lips, or the idea of him doing it. Just the feel of that hand on my stomach. The way it looks spread out of my skin, fingers splayed and arm tilted – like he’s about to exert some serious pressure, or at least wants the option of it.

He wants to keep you here, my mind whispers, but oddly my body doesn’t revolt at the thought. Far from it. My body revels in the idea of him wanting something so badly – and after something so pathetic, too. I offered him a striptease a clown could have done, and his response is this.

I can’t get over it. I’m still processing it when my body suddenly reminds me: someone is going down on you. That’s what this is: he’s licking your pussy, and you know what? You’re loving it.

And oh, I am. Ohhhh, man, just the long, slow stroke of his tongue through my slit. Just the feel of him kissing and rubbing and making a mess all over his face … it’s more than enough to make me crazy. I squirm beneath his hand and almost let out a sound, even though I’ve never made sounds before.

I suppose I’ve never needed to.

No one’s ever gone down on me before. Or at least no one’s ever gone down on me like this. I’ve had a couple of guys almost graze my thighs with their lips, and once I think someone got a little lost on his way to my belly button. But nothing so intimate and obvious and nerve-jangling. I can actually make out the shape of my own clit, just by the way he slides his tongue around it.

And I know why he’s urging my thighs wider with his free hand.

It’s so he can get at me. It’s so he can lick right into my hot, wet sex, while I pant and wriggle and half beg him not to. ‘I can’t bear it I can’t bear it,’ I tell him, and in response he goes after everything even harder. He devours my pussy, teeth grazing over skin so tender it could be made of tissue paper. I actually worry about it, until I realise how it feels.

Divine.

The spark of pain is like throwing a firework into a tank of gasoline. It shoves everything higher, makes everything sweeter, pushes the pleasure to new places. Once he’s made a faint mark he licks over it with that soothing, slippery tongue, and my body can hardly keep up with the switch.

I’m electric with sexual confusion. Wires cross and nerve-endings misfire, and though I want to be calm and cool and composed I can’t be. I’m going to come, and so quick it’s embarrassing. It’s barely been a minute, but my thighs are starting to tense. My breath is starting to catch in my throat.

I’m going to do it all over his face, and there’s just no way of stopping it. Not even the humiliation can hold me back – in fact I think the humiliation makes it worse. I imagine him telling me off for being a teenage boy, tumbling into orgasm while he’s still standing on the sidelines, and my clit actually jumps against his sliding tongue.

I’m so wet I can hear it, as he laps at me greedily. And everything is so hot down there, so swollen and soft and ready. He could fuck me with very little trouble – just keep me pinned like this and unzip, then slide right into me. And in the state he seems to be in, I think he could do it. He’s actually making noise into my slippery flesh, rough and close to grunting. It makes me wonder if he’d let me hear if I was doing the same for him, and it’s this thought that puts me over the edge.

I think about him moaning as he takes me, and I just crumble completely. My body tightens like a fist, sensation ebbing and flowing through parts I barely knew existed. I feel it on the insides of my elbows and just under my ears, before it finally, finally gets to the hot spots. My clit pulses once, heavily, beneath his still working tongue, and I’m just gone. I fly away. I no longer exist.

The me I was prior to this sits on one side, watching me writhe and gasp and make a complete fool of myself. Surely he must think I’ve made a fool of myself. The second this fizzing, insane sensation dies away I have to check, only to find him staring up at me with those midnight eyes. He stares and stares like I just did all of this to him, instead of him doing it to me. I’ve made something happen that I didn’t even consider.

And I know what it is, too.

I made him want to do that. I somehow pushed him into this panting, slick-mouthed disaster, so fierce he doesn’t know how to check it, so greedy for me he can’t stop himself. And when I doubt myself on this he makes me believe.

He says:

‘You are more than I dared imagine you’d be.’

As though there was already a fantasy version of me in his head. There
was
already one, and apparently I just surpassed it. I stumbled and fumbled and spread myself out naked in front of him, and none of it was found wanting. In fact, he found all of that better, greater, more. Different, I think.

The way that he is different to me.

He’s assertive without being aggressive, sure of himself without arrogance, and kind in a way I could never have imagined. I thought he’d be sexually demanding, and instead he did something no one else has ever done before: he kissed my sex before I kissed his. He made me come before I did the same for him.

And for a moment all of those ideas are so overwhelming I just can’t help myself. I wait long enough for him to stand and then I just do it: I grab hold of his perfect, expensive shirt, only slightly rumpled and so soft to the touch. I grab it, and him, and I haul his mouth down onto mine.

I
have
to have his mouth on mine. He’s just done all of those things despite the fact that we’ve never actually kissed, so really I don’t even need to think about it. I don’t think about anything until I taste myself on his lips, and feel the amazing shape of them against mine – though I wish I had.

I can already tell where I’ve gone wrong. I can sense the sudden stiffness in his body, and the lack of effort in his response. In fact, there isn’t any response to speak of. It’s like kissing a marble likeness, smooth and perfect but completely inert.

Or maybe inert is the wrong word. He isn’t still, after all. He’s vibrating just a little with a strange tension, and it’s this strange tension that finally makes me pull away.

I do it slowly, slowly, half-embarrassed and half-wondering. Is he really so averse to a kiss? Can it be possible, after everything we’ve just done? It doesn’t seem right somehow, and yet there it is. It’s in his expression, as flat and still as a glacial lake. And it’s in his eyes, as they ask me
why, why did I have to spoil things
?

But I can’t answer. How could I possibly? I filled my kiss with all the happiness in the world, and all the pleasure he gave me, given back.

And somehow poisoned him instead.

I suppose I think it’s over. That’s how it seems, anyway – like something is done. He didn’t really want to do anything after the kiss, and I don’t blame him. I didn’t want to do anything either. I couldn’t even speak. The weight of his strange expression and his tensing body just sank me down, until it was time to leave.

Of course, he was a gentleman about it. He called me a taxi, and bid me a formal goodbye. It was all oddly respectful … but oh, it was the painful sort of respect. It was the excruciatingly polite kind that only served to remind me of the bad thing I did. I kissed him on the mouth like the cruel witch in a fairytale, and he duly fell down dead.

I just don’t know
why
. I don’t know why, damn it – but God, how I want to. I’d do anything to understand. I keep thinking about his stony face, and what it would take to get a chisel underneath the top layer. What question would work on him? What words could possibly unlock his hidden secrets?

I can hardly imagine.

And that’s probably my flaw. I’m not good enough for a puzzle like him. I don’t have his preternatural ability to ascertain every lie, or work out every problem. Instead I have to settle for answering the questions on this week’s edition of Mastermind, and I’ll be perfectly honest: it’s a very hollow substitute.

I’ve had a taste of something more, and now I don’t know how to be satisfied with my life as it was. My microwaved meal seems bland and pathetic, like something only an idiot would eat. I feel trapped inside the confines of my L-shaped apartment, too restless to sit and too annoyed with my surroundings to pace.

I keep noticing things I didn’t before, like the peeling paintwork in one corner and the narrowness of my neatly made bed. Why did I think it was a good idea to buy something so small? You couldn’t fit a couple into it, though I know what I really mean when I think that. I really mean: you couldn’t fit me and him in it.

He’d be too big. He’d spill over the edges and hang off the ends, crowding me into corners I don’t want to be in.

I don’t want to be in this one, obsessing about him. It’s not healthy to obsess about a man, it’s not right. Normal girls don’t do it, and I should know. I was normal, before. I was eminently, perfectly normal, and now I’m changed in some way. I don’t want to go to work in the morning, and take to some strange notions instead.

Maybe I should just go for a run. A big, wild run all the way down the road, then through the park and over the hill to the open fields beyond. Or what if I just decided to fly somewhere without telling anyone – the way Lucy did? Hell, maybe this is exactly why Lucy did it. She met someone like him who turned her world upside down, and suddenly she could no longer stand London.

She had to leave, and so do I. I need to get out of this apartment at least, though unfortunately I don’t get any further than the hallway outside my door. I’m stopped by a box someone has left on the floor, and for a moment I’m flummoxed. I almost kick it down to the next apartment, thinking it’s for the cute girl I sometimes see coming out.

And then I catch the edge of a curling S, and I understand. I pretend otherwise for a little longer, but I understand. The box is for me, bought by someone I’d pegged as out for the count a little while ago. In fact, I spent all night thinking he was out.

Now he’s right back in again, too quick for me to process. I think I have whiplash – or at the very least, I’m suddenly unable to pick up mysterious gifts from enigmatic strangers. That gene is missing in me.

I’ve got the gene that tells me he’s secretly sent me a bomb.

I can’t even open it at first. I just set it down on my rickety little dining table, and let it fester. If I leave it for a while, any hidden booby traps might reveal themselves. The fog of evil will start oozing out from between the folds of the wrapping paper, and I’ll have a chance to get it to the bin and maybe seal it in.

In truth, I picture myself doing that anyway. What good will possibly come of this? It can’t be a present, it just can’t be. It has to be some final divorce settlement, for a marriage we don’t have. There’s an assignation contract in there that I didn’t know about, and when I open it I’ll find the price.

The dirty talk was twelve grand; the kiss for my pussy an even twenty. And as for the arm around me in the lobby … oh, well. That one was priceless. That was beyond all measure. Just the thought of it makes me glance across at the bow-wrapped time bomb on the table, but I promise I quickly look away.

And then slowly, slowly, I start to give into its pull again. My head is on hinges, and the box has no problems making it turn. Soon I’m staring and staring, unable to think about anything else. What if it really is some kind of contract? I’ve read enough books about men like him to know that this is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Maybe he read the same ones, and started getting ideas.

Or maybe I should cut it open and put myself out of my misery – which I do. I get a paring knife and slice the thing up, ripping through this and tearing that. The paper’s probably worth more than my annual salary, but I don’t care. And I don’t care about the bow, either. I toss it aside as though it isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever touched, and then I open the box like I just brought it home from a phone store. There’s a piece of plastic inside, I think. There’s styrofoam and instructions in Japanese.

And that idea helps when it comes to touching the actual contents. For some reason, I’m finding it hard to do it. I see what he’s put in this little box for me, and I consider that bin option again. I think about burning, though I don’t really understand why.