Authors: Charlotte Stein
He has that cupboard full of video tapes and his clothes all in a row, and prior to me he hired thugs to fake-brutalise him, whenever he wanted a bit of intimacy. He had to be forced into doing anything beyond watching.
And now he won’t even watch.
Which is a shame, because I’m more than ready to stand at the window for him now. I’d do anything for him now. I
dream
about doing anything. In some of them, he lets me roam all over his naked body, from that slice of muscle to the jut of his heavy collarbone. And I devour him with my mouth, I do. I taste the glorious curve of his cock, long and smooth and just a little slick at the tip.
Just a little salt-sweet.
In my dreams, he always bucks into my mouth. He resists at first, but then he can’t anymore, and those hips lift, forcing him deeper into me. Forcing him over my tongue, filling my mouth – oh God, those dreams are worse than the dying ones. They’re like waking up with the belief that someone long dead is still alive.
He’s still alive, and he’s going to kiss me at any moment. I’ll answer the door and there he’ll be, just like that longing-filled fantasy I had of our bodies plastered together. Only this time when I imagine it, we’re somehow naked the minute he walks through the door. His chest rubs roughly against the tips of my breasts, and similarly I can feel him between my thighs.
I feel his hot, strong cock, like an iron bar against my always overheated pussy, and then he lifts me and simply slides all the way inside. As smooth as he did when we first made love, only sweeter this time because it’s a reunion.
It’s that bit in the movie when the couple realise all obstacles can be overcome, and then he returns to her and sweeps her into his arms. Which sounds like utter nonsense, now that I’m thinking about it. It sounds like three-day-old garbage, and I suddenly hate Hollywood for doing that to me. The one constant in my life – my love of film – has turned against me in my hour of need.
Or at least I think so. I think so, until I hear my doorbell ring.
There’s no one else it could be. No one else in the world. Nobody ever comes to my door; nobody cares where I live. It can’t be the mailman or the milkman or someone calling door to door with leaflets.
It has to be Ivan. He read my last note –
Oh my love how you call to me, call to me
– and it made him forgive me. It made him come back to me, to offer a second chance I probably don’t deserve. In fact, I definitely know I don’t deserve it.
Because it isn’t Ivan at the door.
Of course, I try to close it again immediately. But I think it’s a mistake that I do. Maybe if I’d paused, and tried to be rational, we could have had a calm conversation first.
Try to see things from my point of view
, I could have said to him.
I ran away from you because you hit me with a hammer.
But, instead of taking this route, I panic and try to shut him out. I try to act like he’s not really there, but naturally he muscles his way in even so. He gets his foot in the door – of course he does – and he laughs in that awful manner of his. Like he’s saying:
Oh, Abbie, why do you have to be so silly?
The answer’s obvious. I’m silly because he forces the door open, and once he’s inside he grabs me by the hair. He doesn’t even pretend he’s going to do anything different. He just pulls and pulls until it hurts so bad I have to be on my knees. I have to be.
But I’m not as acquiescent as I used to be about going. I used to cry for him, prettily, but now I know what it’s like to cry because someone’s been so kind you can’t stand it. I know what it’s like to cry with joy and relief, and I don’t want to cry like this anymore.
I want to punch him in the groin.
So I do.
He isn’t expecting it. Of course he isn’t. He’s halfway through his
do you know how hard it is to forgive you
speech, which doesn’t include an encore of intense pain between his legs. His thin-lipped mouth makes this big surprised O, and those dark brows I once thought beautiful draw together.
And that’s the last thing I see before I make a run for it.
I barrel down the hallway, not thinking of a coat or my things or where I’m going to run to. I didn’t think about it last time either. I just ran and ran and ran and this is where I ended up: almost normal, almost living, almost in a relationship with a man called Ivan.
It’s almost like a fairytale, if you blindfold yourself before looking at it.
Except, of course, in this version, the monster is still chasing me through the labyrinth. And there’s no escape, no key to press, no lock to find. I bang on doors as I fly down these green tunnels, but no one hears me.
I doubt they would if I used a battering ram and a foghorn. That’s the way things are around here, after all: no one hears and, more importantly, no one
sees
. Once I’m outside, all the closed-curtained windows stare down at me, silently mocking me forever thinking I could have a normal life. That I could just escape so easily.
And worst of all, of course, is Ivan’s window. As dark and silent as a tomb, completely impassive as I run around the pool and head for the exit to this little cul-de-sac.
I get close, I’ll say that much. I get to the shrubbery around the water, and almost to the path that leads out of here. And then I hear his breath behind me, grating and awful, and his hand goes to my hair again, and I know it’s going to be bad this time.
I punched him in the groin. It can’t be anything
but
bad.
In fact, it’s much worse. He doesn’t just yank me down to the ground or drag me back to the apartment, kicking and screaming. I catch a glimpse of his face, and he isn’t even human anymore. He’s not real. He’s just a thing who yanks me by my hair, until I’m suddenly floundering, falling, with the taste of chlorine in my mouth.
I’m in the water, I think, but such inane announcements from my brain don’t help me. I need my brain to do something else, quick – formulate an escape plan maybe, or remind me how to swim so I can get away. But it’s too slow on the uptake. It just about registers that I’m in the water, and then I’m suddenly plunged underneath it. Liquid fills my nose and stings my eyes; it floods my mouth before I can stop it.
How could I have stopped it? How could I have expected this?
He’s going to drown me, I think, and then a second or two later that nightmarish fantasy turns into something real. I can’t breathe. He’s got his hand on the top of my head, and I can’t breathe. I can’t even prise him away with my flapping, fighting hands, because I’m half blind and still in shock and, oh God, everything is going fuzzy.
Everything is going fuzzy really, really fast, which I suppose is a relief in one way. For a second there, I was really panicked and heartbroken, and no one enjoys feeling like that before they die. I much prefer this kind of odd calm, and the lasting image of all of this neon blue floating around me, as I drift away.
My life doesn’t flash before my eyes, but that’s OK. My life wasn’t anything to speak of anyway. It was dull and monotonous, with the occasional violent episode. The occasional brilliant moment, when Ivan wrote those words out for me:
my thoughts turn to you.
My thoughts turn to you, my immortal beloved, I think, and then my mouth is suddenly full of salt, amidst the chlorine. I’m not sad. I wouldn’t want you to think I was. I’m happy that my last thought is of something so lovely and romantic it couldn’t possibly be real. I probably made him up, my Ivan.
I made him up, which is why the pressure on my head suddenly eases. I’m dreaming of him coming for me, of saving me, even though he can’t. He’s not real. I’m just imagining that sudden loss of the hand on top of my head. And I can’t hear the muffled sounds of a struggle, the muffled sounds of angry words and even angrier actions.
I think I fantasise about flesh hitting flesh, and the slow red trail of blood making its way through water. And then there’s a rushing feeling that’s probably me ascending to heaven. Or me descending to hell.
Either way, it’s very bright and very fast, and once it’s over there’s a dark figure crouched over me. The devil, I think, but everything is so cold it can’t possibly be. I’m cold all over my outsides, and cold all over my insides, too, and not even the shroud he puts around my shoulders can stop it.
Not even the sound of his voice can stop it, or the words he says that I’m sure I’ve misheard:
Come back to me, Abbie. Come back. Come back
.
But his kiss … yeah, his kiss makes a difference. All of that cold rushes out of my body in one big glut, and then of course I realise what all of this is. My lungs were full of water, and now I’m spitting it all back up. He breathed air back into my lungs, and now I’m alive. I’m alive.
And he’s holding me. My Ivan – he’s holding me.
Stupid, really, that the first words out of my mouth are
I’m sorry
. He even seems to think they’re stupid once they’re out, because he shakes his head and strokes my hair, half laughing. Half laughing and half telling me something I never thought I’d hear.
Don’t be sorry
, he says to me.
You don’t ever have to be sorry, my Abbie
.
And then I know it for sure: this isn’t a dream or a fairytale at all.
For once, it’s real.
* * *
He carries me inside, trailing water like a mermaid he found washed up on the beach. I even feel a little like that. I suppose that’s a side effect of actually getting a sort of happy ending – you start feeling like you’re in a Disney movie, about to be gifted legs by your bearded father.
Though I’ll take what Ivan actually does over that. I’ll take him cupping my body tenderly, with his eyes fixed on mine. Like he can’t bear to look at anything else, as he takes me into his bathroom. As he sets me down on the tiled floor, and takes off my wet nightgown, the wet robe I was wearing.
I’m sorry
, I try to say again, but he stops me for the second time. He takes my face in his hands and tells me that it doesn’t matter, that he’s glad I know now. That he wanted me to know, and that’s why he left the door unlocked.
I didn’t jimmy it at all.
It was already open.
‘I’m sorry I was scared after,’ he says, and then I hug him, the way I wanted to back there in the closet. My body tight against his, every part of us touching. My arms tight around his neck, until he prises me away long enough to submerge me in warm scented bathwater.
Sluicing off the chlorine feels like sluicing off my old life. He washes it out of my hair for me, and kisses it off my lips and, by the time he’s done, I’m half-asleep. I’ve got a million questions on my lips: Where’s Sid? What did you do to him?
But they all die away in the face of his neat bed and the feel of his big body sheltering mine. He curls around me, and then somewhere in the middle of the night, I curl around him, and everything is forgotten. Everything is warm, and safe.
No one can hurt you now
, I say. Or does he say that to me? I think he says it to me, just as I’m drifting off. I think he tells me that Sid won’t be coming back, that he hit him and that he won’t be coming back, though I could be wrong. I could be dreaming.
Either way, we wake up tangled together. He’s already kissing me, and I have no problem kissing back. In truth, I kiss him back as though I’ve been starved of him for the last three days, and what I really need is to cram as much of him as possible into my mouth. I kiss his lips, and his jaw, and, when I kiss him in crazy places like behind his ears, he actually laughs for me.
You should probably rest
, he tells me, but I’ve been without him for too long. I don’t want to rest. I want to devour him. I run my hands all over his body, remembering places I’d forgotten, like the curve of his back just above his ass. It’s smooth and solid and good, and it grounds me in him. It makes me forget the taste of chlorine in my mouth, the feel of that brutish hand in my hair.
Instead, I feel him. I lose myself in his kisses, which start out slow but soon turn frantic. He’s forgotten too, it seems. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be buried underneath bad memories, because he looks at me when he kisses me and he looks at me when I touch him.
When I run my mouth all over him, from his shoulders to the soles of his feet.
That last one makes him laugh, again, but that’s good too. I want him to laugh. I want sex to be happy and light, not dim and dark. If we play games, I want the games to come from nothing but desire, instead of a thousand different things that weigh us down.
And they do. They do come from desire. He doesn’t stop me when I straddle his body on the bed. I’m looking right down at him, right into his eyes, but he doesn’t say anything. He just watches me, watching him. He lies there and lets me ride him.
And when he commands me, when he tells me
harder, faster, lift your hips, touch your breasts
… I don’t feel commanded. I feel free. I’m free. The blackbird has flown away, and this is what I’m left with: the hot, insistent sense of someone between my legs. His eyes locking with mine, as I take him and claim him and make him mine.
‘I love you,’ I tell him, as I feel him swell inside me. He’s going to come before I do, I’m sure, he’s going to actually let go and give in, though it’s not a disappointment when he doesn’t. I still revel in the feel of his hips jerking up to meet mine, those rough hands of his replacing my own on my breasts, as I climb.
And the look on his face is a picture. He looks caught between pleasure and determination, ready to give in but wanting to give me more at the same time. He’s even biting his lip, which isn’t something I ever thought I’d see. He’s too tightly closed for lip biting. He’s too restrained for what he does next:
He throws me over onto my back in a tangle of limbs, and tells me what I already know.
You’re a bad girl, trying to force me over the edge
, he says, and then even better:
But you don’t have to. I’m already there. I’m already lost in you
.
He kisses those last words into my mouth, skin so hot against mine I can hardly stand it. Perspiration has made a gloss between our slowly working bodies, but it only adds to the sensations that are building through me. My nipples feel too taut and sensitive to be rubbing against his solid chest, and his cock is ever so slightly sliding back and forth over that good good place inside me.