Deep Desires (7 page)

‘Then what?’ I ask, but I think I already know.
Contact
, I think it is.
Intimacy
. He can meet me in the hall, touch my elbow. Help me up. He can talk to me on the phone or send me gifts that drive me nuts. But he can’t accept that image I’ve got in my head:

My body with his body. No spaces between us.

‘Are you thinking about what the
what
might be?’ he asks, and I kind of hate how amused he sounds, how sure. I was so fucking hurt that he didn’t open the door. Does he know how much it cost me to go over there and do that?

‘I’m thinking about what an asshole you are,’ I say, and it’s only afterwards I realise what I’ve done. I haven’t spoken to anyone that way in
five years
. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve
ever
spoken that way to anyone. It makes my cheeks flame immediately and the urge to be sorry rises up inside my throat, like a sickness. He’s going to kill me now. He’s going to backhand me across the face, through the phone.

It almost makes me jump out of my skin when he laughs instead.

‘I know. I know I am. I’m sorry, Abbie.’

Oh God –
accountability.
Is there anything sexier on a man? Actual
apologies
. I could drown in him, I could.

‘If it’s any consolation, you came real close to making me open up.’

‘How close?’

‘A hair’s breadth away. A heartbeat away.’

I can hear his accent again, thick and sticky.

‘And what would have happened then? If you had let me in?’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

‘I do.’

He pauses then, the longest pause of my life. But he makes up for it when he finally, finally speaks.

‘I would have run my hands all over your body. You know how hard it was to keep them off you on those stairs? When you could hardly walk? Every time I didn’t touch you, it made me ache.’

Of course I automatically think of what he would have found if he’d given in and done it. All the lumps and bumps all over me … all those vast expanses of pale, pasty skin …

‘You don’t even know what I look like under my clothes, not really. You –’

‘That just makes it sweeter. I spend long nights imagining your shape under those shapeless things. Imagining my hands pulling the material taut around the curve of your hip, the roundness of your breasts. Would you let me do something like that, Abbie?’

‘Yes. Yes. Anything.’

‘Would you let me pull it over your head?’

‘Oh God, yes, take it off me. Take everything off.’

He makes a restless sound that I appreciate ten times more from him than any other man. He’s so closed off he can’t even open his front door, but, oh, he can sigh for me. He can say: ‘Fast, or slow?’

‘You decide,’ I say, and for once in my life it’s good to do it. Yeah, he can decide. That’s OK, it’s OK. I know he’s not going to tell me to do anything bad.

‘Slow,’ he says. ‘Slow.’

And, oohhhhh, that’s not bad at all. I’m dying; I’m dead. I’m hunched over the phone like a starving animal, guarding my stash. The receiver has turned to a hot, slick mess in my hand, and I’m just barely hanging onto it. I’m clenching the plastic tight, but it’s not going well.

‘Lift that jumper over your head. Go on, lift it now for me,’ he says, so I do.

I fumble my way out of it then discard it on the bed. Now I’m only in my bra, my big ridiculous skirt.

‘I’d get my hands underneath that jumper and just slide it over your head. Take my time working through the layers, unravelling you. You wearing a bra?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to keep that on, at first, just peel the cups away from your breasts. See you like that, with the straps still framing those gorgeous curves. Because they are gorgeous, right, Abbie?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ I say, but only because anything more seems impossible. I’m almost struck dumb by his ability to say all of these amazing words once we’re not actually looking at each other. Once I’m not lurking on the other side of his door, like some strange new sort of threat.

Girl with a pie
, I’ll call it. It’s almost like
guy with an axe
, if you squint hard enough.

‘You do know. Go to the mirror and do what I’ve just described, then tell me exactly what you look like.’

I could go to the window
, I almost say, but it’s like him with the door. Too much, too much, and besides … I’m not sure that’s the point. He doesn’t want to look at me. He wants me to look at myself, which doesn’t seem quite as hard.

Until I do, and then it’s very hard indeed. I look clumsy, I think – silly pink bra caging my breasts in, the waistband of my big skirt over my belly – and I tell him so.

But he won’t have it.

‘Are you sure?’ he asks, then more, more, oh unbearably
more
. ‘I know what your skin looks like … luminescent, like cream. And those beautiful breasts … they tilt up a little, don’t they? Full and heavy but with just that little tilt, made near obscene by the straps now around them. Am I right?’

He’s right about the obscene part. My nipples are so stiff they look sore, all red and spiky and rude. And the straps on either side are just ever so slightly cutting in, like some strange sort of bondage that I’m not quite familiar with.

‘I bet they’re almost begging to be touched, right now,’ he says, and he’s not wrong. There’s a hollow ache thrumming through my body, and it starts at those stiff points and ends between my legs.
Touch yourself
, it says,
go on
, but I can’t quite make it happen until he tells me.

‘Go on,’ he says, as though he knows. He knows I find it hard and wants to make it so easy, and it is, with him talking in my ear. He lets me know all the things I wasn’t sure about, like how lovely I must look and how good it must feel to just run a hand over the smooth slope of my breast. I don’t even feel bad about the little gasp I let out when my palm grazes over my stiff nipple.

Because he’s there to suggest otherwise.

‘Oh yeah, baby. Tell me how it feels,’ he says, so I do.

‘Soft. Really soft … and my nipples are tight.’

‘How does it feel when you touch them?’

‘Like this,’ I tell him. ‘Like this.’

And then I moan, just for him. I’ve never moaned for anyone before. My life is a ruin of fake sighs and phony
yeahs
. But he pushes me to some real point of arousal without even trying, without even touching me, and I can’t help being grateful for that.

I show him my gratitude, with words I could never previously say.

‘Every time I touch them this bloom of pleasures shoves down between my legs, close to an orgasm. Really close. I can hardly stand up for it, but I don’t want to sit down.’

‘You want to stay and look at yourself.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Are you beautiful, Abbie?’

‘I seem beautiful when you talk. Oh
God
, that feels good.’

‘What does? My words, or the way you’re touching yourself?’

‘Both. All of it. Everything,’ I say, though I’m only partially telling the truth. His words are amazing and the way I’m plucking at my tight nipples feels good, but there’s so much more I desperately want.

If he could just tell me it’s OK …

Or if I could just tell him. I can. I will. I’m going to.

‘I want to lick my fingers.’

‘Why?’ he asks me, but his voice is very hoarse now. I think he knows. I think he more than knows, in fact – I think he might be touching himself, as I moan and whisper into the phone.

‘So that I can rub that slickness over my stiff little nipples. It’s not enough, like this. But if I just put my fingers in my mouth and suck …’

‘Ohhhh yeah. God, yeah. When you did that for me in front of the window, I almost lost my mind,’ he says, but all I can think of is how still he had seemed. Fierce in the eyes, but motionless otherwise. You would never have known that he was close to losing his mind, but then, that’s the benefit of words. That’s the benefit of being just this little bit closer.

Now all I have to do is get him to come closer still.

‘You liked that, huh? I do too. I like imagining it’s you when I slide them into my mouth. My fingers aren’t as thick, of course, but I can almost feel it.’

‘You can feel my cock in your mouth?’

‘Yes. Mmmm, yes. Do you want that?’ I ask, but he doesn’t answer me directly. Not yet anyway. A little bit more maybe.

‘I want you to make your nipples all nice and slick. Do that for me, Abbie. Rub that wetness all over them, and tell me how it feels.’

I’d be frustrated by his evasion if I didn’t love how much he wants to know about me and my responses. Not his.
Mine
. My pleasure, my desire, the things that turn
me
on. I swear this wouldn’t be half as easy as it is if I didn’t feel so
valued
.

‘Like I could come just from touching them,’ I say, and this time I get a full throated groan from him, so loud I almost sink under the pressure of it. The sigh was enough on its own to waste me, this is beyond what I thought I’d get.

And he’s definitely masturbating as he gives me it, too. I can hear the slick shuttle of his hand on his dick, quick enough to make him nuts but not quite enough to make him come. He’s waiting for me, I think, before he goes over. He’s waiting to get his composure back so that he can say to me: ‘No. No, not yet. Take your skirt off first.’

But I’m like him. I can hardly do anything. I can hardly think the way I normally would; I’m half insane with arousal. My pussy is one thick throb between my legs, and when I shift I can feel every little inch of it – my swollen clit, my slippery folds.

Taking off an item of clothing is agony, on my already oversensitised body. Just the feel of the material sliding over my legs is enough to make me sob, and, of course, it’s all so difficult. It’s nearly impossible. My feet get tangled in the masses of material and all the while I can hear him breathing too hard and being too expressive.

He’s not like this, he’s not like this, I think. But apparently he is once he’s worked himself up to a certain point. He’s like me in that regard, exactly like me – one half cut from the same cloth I’m made out of.

And, ohhh, that’s even better than all of this blistering, impossible sex.

‘Are you naked?’ he asks me, and I tell him I am aside from the bra. I can see my sex glistening beneath the tiny strip of hair I’ve got, clit so swollen it’s visible between those flushed folds, and somehow I tell him that, too.

And he answers in the best possible way he could.

‘Oh God, baby, I want you. I want you.’

‘You want me?’ I ask, because I need to hear it again, before the door slams shut. I’m talking to him through a crack in it, and one of his hands is almost all the way through to me.

But the chain’s still on.

‘You’ve no idea how much I want you. I want to bury my face between those legs, taste how wet you are, lick that stiff little clit.’

‘Ohhh, it’s so stiff. I can hardly touch it.’

‘I’ll touch it. Spread your legs for me, baby,’ he says, and now I can no longer tell. Who are these words persuading – him or me? Am I at the door, gazing through at him?

I feel like I am, but, if so, he should know:

It’s open. I’m open. At last, I’m open.

‘Anything,’ I say to him. ‘Anything for you.’

And I mean it, too. I spread my legs in front of the mirror, and tell him how it looks when he asks – so slippery I can hardly stand it, so flushed with arousal and ready to be fucked.

‘You want to fuck me, Ivan?’ I ask, and I do it just as I ease one finger into my warm, wet hole, imagining it’s him. Imagining it’s him with his face between my legs, just like he said, and those good, thick fingers fondling me, stroking me, pumping into me steady and slow.

And then after a while he wouldn’t be able to stand it – I can tell he wouldn’t. He’s groaning almost constantly now, and it makes the image very easy to see. Him moving over me, that big thick cock seeking out my entrance.

I can almost feel it … ohhh God, I can, I can. I’m almost there, with him over me and my hands between my legs and the sound of his voice as he says it, just for me. That one thing I wanted to hear more than any other thing in the world, so sweet in my ear, as I slide down, down into orgasm.

‘There’s nothing I want more. Ohhhh, Abbie, my Abbie. There’s nothing I want more.’

We do the same thing every night for a week from that point on. He calls me, and sometimes we talk idly about this or that. He likes Russian poets, and tells me so in dream-like detail, while my head fills up with snow-covered landscapes and curling spires. He says,
If I do not see you, I feel: minutes, as centuries, are endless
, and then again when I ask him to speak the words in Russian.

Though it’s better in the latter. It’s like hearing his real voice, his secret voice, buried beneath a life mostly lived in America.
When did you leave?
I ask him, and he tells me in those same clotted-cream words, those foreign words that I have to look up later on.

He was four apparently. Four years old and thirty-five now, but his Russian still sounds as foreign and foggy to me as anything I’ve heard in old spy movies. It sounds thicker than that, in fact, guttural almost, and when he speaks it I can’t help putting a hand between my legs.