You (20 page)

They went up the main staircase, darkness interspersed by the intermittent buzzing of lights. A door slammed below. A sole guitar sounded from somewhere across the grounds. It was an old route: left, right, a bank of lockers shimmering in the gloom, past the high window at the turn of the staircase on whose sill you could sit and be animated, profile arranged becomingly, in case of James Dahl passing; up further flights of stairs to the top of the building and right again, its details followed in her head so many times.

The room was dark. The tables in the centre, regrouped since the previous term, formed a grey bulk, the area by the door illuminated by the glass-shaded bulb on the landing. The plant curled down the wall from the sill.

‘You see,’ she said, pressing her face against the window, but nothing was clear in the blackness. He cast a shadow over her that spilled into the corner of her vision. The scent of him came to her in twists twined with radiator dust. They stood there.

He said nothing. She listened to him breathe.

‘I love you,’ she said.

He was silent. There was a click in his throat.

She heard herself with a delay, echo of sound lapping echo.

He drew in his breath.

‘You don’t,’ he said.

‘I do.’

‘You can’t,’ he said in the same tone.

‘I know,’ said Cecilia blankly. She was cold.

She stood stiffly. She lowered her face. She was motionless, leached of thought or movement. Nothing more mattered: she could die, she could escape.

‘Look at me,’ he said eventually. He shook her shoulders lightly and placed his hands just below them on her back, reassuring her or comforting her.

‘Silly girl,’ he said. ‘Lovely girl –’

‘I –’

‘– don’t waste it on me.’

‘It’s not a waste,’ she said in a thread of a voice. She looked at the floor. Her hair fell over her face.

‘I have to go,’ she said.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

She stood still.

‘I have to see that you’re all right,’ he said.

She looked up at him, his face lit by the hall and the spill of lights on the drive. She could feel the mobile warmth of his breath about her. The plant floated gently with radiator heat.

Her face tilted minutely, instinctively, towards his mouth. She stopped. She emitted a small sound; she stayed still, humiliated.

‘You’re very – fine,’ he said. He frowned. ‘That’s not the right–’

He caught his breath with a snaggle of air.

‘I think you have to keep away from me,’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head.

‘You – I think you should.’

She moved nearer him, or he pulled her further towards him, an adult comforting her, the side of her face pressed against his chest, his shoulder, and tentatively he stroked her hair. They stood still by the window. The Klimt was golden in the night. She rested there, his heart pulsing warmth into her ear from beneath his shirt, the size of his chest remarkable to her: he was the widest and tallest person she had ever felt. She tried to steady her breathing. The stroke of his hand on her hair was so rhythmic, so constant, she could barely absorb it; she was suspended by the movement into a state of milky tranquillity, past and future obliterated.

She felt the varying pace of his heart. She stared at the darkness that welled and retreated in the corner of the room when she focused on it.

‘It makes me very miserable,’ she said eventually.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know what you feel.’

She paused. She detected the acceleration of his heartbeat again. She nearly spoke.

‘Do you?’ she said after too much silence.

He was silent.

‘I think you – I think you should go down now,’ he said.

She nodded.

His hand was still on her back. She turned her head and she pressed her mouth to his chest like a small creature seeking comfort with a gesture in which pride threaded supplication. He bent down and eased her away from him and as he did so she looked at him, and they kissed.

They paused. They pulled away, their mouths open; she glimpsed the reflection of light on his pupils as he looked at her, his eyes dark, almost unfocused; then they kissed again, the cool movement of his tongue against hers shocking, the realisation of what was happening surging to her head.

He was so much taller that in kissing her he half lifted her, his hand on the small of her back, her waist, his body bent to meet hers, and she pressed herself against him, kissing him fast, searching for breath, clutching at him for salvation after such grief: frantic, almost tearful in her need to eradicate that despair. Sharp spurts of anger at all that suffering rose, surfaced, made her faster. His hands moved down to her hips. She shivered. Her coat fell down one arm, his palm meeting her shoulder, her untouched skin flaring to sensation, and she pressed against his chest, finding his skin, his clavicle. They stumbled together round the desks: he backed, still kissing her, holding her as she moved with him, and they sank on to the small sofa on which he had once stacked books, moving in a slow awkward fall towards the arm. She kissed him faster, still startled by the rougher harder planes of a man, by the bristle and searching tongue.

‘Slowly,’ he said gently, his voice low.

‘Yes,’ she said, kissing him, playing with his ear, tracing the line of his jaw with her finger. Memories from films, from books, twitched through her mind informing her, making her momentarily conscious of cliché, of stock images that could either instruct her or humiliate her, but now he was kissing her, his mouth on her temple, cheekbone, lips, his body so hard and male-scented against her that extreme excitement edged with fear mounted inside her. He kissed her neck; he pulled her coat from her, her jumper, his own jacket, and she, her mind still flickering with cinematic sequences, unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her lips there.

‘We – mustn’t do this,’ he said, opening his mouth against her hair.

‘Yes,’ she said, her face scraping against his stubble, distant panic rumbling beneath her elation. She wondered, unable to regulate her breathing, whether she might have to struggle away from under him after all, to run away and hide.

‘I was looking for you – some part of me –’

‘Me too,’ she murmured, exaltation hitting her again.

‘As I walked along the corridor. I knew I shouldn’t –’

‘Me too.’

‘I – shouldn’t,’ he said, pulling his head back, gazing at her for one moment, his hair disordered, his mouth slack. ‘Absolutely –’

‘You should, you can,’ she said, pressing her mouth to him, stopping his words. ‘You’ve already kissed me,’ she whispered. ‘Already.’ And he kissed her for a long time, long and focused, his hand moving over her body towards her hips, and her heart thudded; her body was liquid; she felt arousal move through her thighs in rising heat, spreading its tendrils upwards. Vague sounds from several floors below came to her through some outer skin: doors, passing footfall. A stereo thudded across the night from one of the boarding houses. She wondered vaguely where his wife was, but Elisabeth Dahl was a mere idea.

‘You can,’ she repeated almost coquettishly, laughing into his ear and feigning confidence so that she pressed her hand on his chest, lowering him further on to the small sofa, its fabric already blessed, and she lay across him, feeling the stretch of her body, knowing the power of the smoothness of the skin that was gradually exposed, and she kissed him from above, aware that what she felt was the hardness of his penis, and with the very idea – she removed herself mentally at that moment, saw him as her formal English teacher in his corduroys with his stack of Chaucer essays – a kind of delirium hit her. Her head raced. Triumph, rapture after the weeks of abandonment rose inside her, and she kissed him and murmured into his face again, telling him soundlessly that she loved him, she wanted him, she loved him.

His hand skimmed her breast.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

He was moving faster, his body wrapped with hers. Clothes were coiled or abandoned; the top she had worn under wool now snaked and caught above her bra. With one hand she started to undo his belt, the recalled images lending her certainty laced with self-consciousness, and she felt a flicker of hesitation in his response, but the pause was followed by a quickening of his breath. He said her name. The excitement of that fired her brain. She felt small, and carried by events, and riding over fear. He breathed. He burrowed into her neck. His hands were between her thighs.

She saw the concentration of urgency in his face: a play of expressions unknown to her. She wanted him inside her now with a fierce longing, and then a returning feeling that she might suddenly, after all, in such excitement, push him away in fear: she was being carried down an icy pitch and saw the ground sliding from her and knew that she would only go faster. It was inevitable. She felt him hard against her, felt him on her thigh, the hollow of her hip.

‘Yes,’ she kept saying in his ear, ‘yes.’ And when she said it, she felt an acceleration of his desire, a letting go of last restraints.

‘Yes?’ he murmured finally into her shoulder. ‘Cecilia.’

She hesitated minutely. ‘Yes,’ she said, the sound vibrating against his neck where his skin was damp.

His hand was gliding over her pubic bone, making her gasp and move. She could feel her wetness, the new heat growing as he stroked her. She was profoundly shocked that he was touching her there. She pushed against his hand, rubbing against him harder. She felt as though her body was a separate entity, swollen and floating, her legs moving instinctively further apart.

‘Yes,’ she said again, encouraging him, and she felt the hardness nudging against her, utterly alien and surely large, larger than anything she had conceived of in her graphic yet hazy imaginings. His mouth was against her neck, skimming her skin, talking to her. She opened her legs further and she felt it, a block of flesh, a private thing, a part of him yet surely an entity with its own life. He looked serious, utterly absorbed, his jaw taut. The intensity of his expression in the shadows sent a fresh plume of fear through her.

I can kiss Mr Dahl, she thought, and, almost testing herself, summoning a picture of him in a lesson, she craned her neck and moved awkwardly towards his mouth, so that after a pause they were kissing. She was kissing James Dahl. His tongue was moving against hers. She pressed her hips more forcefully towards his, and now the hardness was against her, bearing down uncomfortably against her, pulling at her pubic hair, hurting her. She held it, her eyes widening in the dark almost to herself, this object in her hand, and she moved against him. He slipped away. He came back to her, his breath fast in her ear. She moaned. He pressed against her. She drew in her breath sharply. It was hurting, straining, an impossible obstacle.

‘No!’ she said.

‘No?’ he said, stopping, the sound broken into separate components. He paused.

‘Yes,’ she said. She swallowed. ‘Now.’

He hesitated.

‘Yes now.’

He kissed her breast. His hand was on her hip, lightly, his fingers on her buttock. She moaned, and he moved again, began to enter her, but it hurt; her scalp seemed to expand with the pain of it, the sharp stretched stab.

Panic hit her. She glimpsed shame. Her breath speeded; she shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong – I –’ she said in a high, rapid voice.

‘Shhh,’ he said, nuzzling into her neck, stroking her chest, his hand lingering lightly on her hip. ‘Shhh, my darling.’

She drew in her breath. He kissed her, murmuring, holding off: she had a sensation of him swimming above her, touching her in a way he understood but that was unknown to her.

‘I can’t believe . . .’ she said, feeling the shape of his face.

‘I wonder – about you all the time,’ he said, arched above her, touching her, lowering himself to kiss her, his breath uneven. ‘You’re beautiful. Your hair.’ He stroked her breasts, her hips. He moaned. ‘If I don’t see you I wonder . . .’ he drew in his breath ‘. . . where is she?’

The words filtered into her mind in little grains of amazed pleasure, like a drug settling into her bloodstream. Incredulity sped through her again. He stroked her, and she moved her hips, arched them towards him, encouraging him.

‘Slowly, slowly,’ he whispered, the tension subsided.

Her hips moved against him. ‘Come – on. Now,’ she said.

‘Soon,’ he said, his hand trailing joy, alarm hovering in one residual spray in its wake.

‘Oh –’

‘
Slowly
,’ he murmured into her ear, and she could hear his voice breaking into fibres of sound.

She opened her legs, and he stroked her and then he paused, and she felt the straining stretching of her skin again as he partially entered her, and she called out, astounded, the pain of it, the largeness of it beyond all her anticipation or understanding. He stopped. He waited there, and she discerned the rate of his heart, felt his sweat, his desire, his maturity in close proximity. She was impatient for him inside her. She slowed her breathing with an effort of will, and he kissed her gently, their tongues mixing, the different currents of their saliva meeting.