Читать книгу Uncover Me - AM Hartnett - Страница 6

Sitting at a corner table with a steaming cup of tea in front of her, Carrie couldn’t remember the last time she was so wound up.

She’d arrived early, because that’s who she was. She always had to be prepared. She had to scope things out, look for distractions, escape routes, and to plot scenarios.

Since she had taken her seat, she’d found herself stuck on the same terrifying scenario. The video wasn’t really him. The man with the tattoo on his shoulder, the man who was in front of his computer in a North End condo, wasn’t the man who was coming to meet her. The pretty face and hot body were just lures, and she was waiting for some disgusting little man who had gotten tired of being shot down for intimate encounters on online dating sites.

As she sat there, part of her wished she had never started that damned blog. Giving herself a little exhibitionist thrill several times a day was simply not worth the anxiety that was killing her now.

You did this to yourself, not the blog. You could have pushed him back. You could have closed Dirty Pictures and started a new blog, taken new pictures and been more careful next time.

She brought her tea up to her lips and blew on it. She had no desire whatsoever to drink it, but wanted to hide behind it. Lift and blow. Lift and blow. All the while peeking at the door to see what this nightmare would bring her.

Every time a man walked in, her heart jumped into her throat and her stomach rolled.

You should have just told him to fuck off. You didn’t show your face. He’d never be able to prove it was you in 605. It could have been a cleaning lady, or any other woman in the building.

Yet there was no pinning it on him, at least not entirely. He hadn’t threatened her or so much as hinted at blackmail. He’d even given her the opportunity to say no, but she hadn’t, because she was curious. Because she wanted to know what would happen.

You’re not Maggie.

The door jingled open.

Lift and blow, and the young man made a beeline for a crowded table by the window.

Carrie wished she had picked a different coffee shop. This one was riddled with university students, but it was the only one she could think of that guaranteed she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. She didn’t want to have to suffer interruptions and introductions. She wanted to be able to run when she pleased.

Carrie practised her escape in her head. If he came in and it wasn’t the man in the pictures, he didn’t know her face and she could retreat in just a few steps. She’d look at her watch, slide her sunglasses off her face and hike her purse over her shoulder. Then she’d breeze past him without the slightest acknowledgement.

Just like that, she’d leave. She’d go home, delete her blog and pray she never heard from him again.

A group of students loaded with enormous backpacks headed for the door. One pushed it open, and suddenly they were all parting like the Red Sea for a man coming in from the outside.

Carrie raised her cup.

It was him, the man in the webcam shot. He wore a look of expectation on his face as he looked around, his gaze going from table to table.

Her stomach fluttered.

There was no way to tell that this was the man on the video, but he was as attractive as the picture. Tall, but not too tall, with an average build. When he looked in her direction Carrie glanced down, but not before she saw those soulful brown eyes.

She took a sip. She still hadn’t made up her mind what to do. He was good looking, but he was new and terrifying and had come into her life in the most cosmically fucked-up way she could imagine.

She glanced up and her heart stopped. He looked directly at her. Their gazes actually locked, like in a book or an old movie.

Fighting away the shakes, Carrie pushed away her tea.

You don’t have to speak to him. You don’t have to look at him. Just walk past him.

But she didn’t. She raised her chin and looked at him, and he walked towards her.

‘Maggie?’

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she felt silly nodding at him.

So much for playing the vamp when you meet him. See? Not Maggie.

A smile came across his wide mouth as he pulled out the chair opposite hers.

In the moments after he took his seat, they simply sat regarding one another. He looked perfectly comfortable in the silence while Carrie wanted to squirm.

Close up, she could see the lines around his mouth and a few flecks of grey in his hair. He was about her age, maybe a couple of years older, and definitely someone she would have given a second glance if they had passed one another on the street.

He didn’t look like someone who spent all day looking at naked pictures on the Internet.

Then again, she didn’t look like someone who took them.

‘I’m surprised you came,’ he said, his gaze sliding over her face.

‘So am I.’

He leaned forward and folded his arms in front of him on the table. ‘I knew it was you. As soon as I spotted you, I knew. You look like a woman who’s wearing dirty things under her clothes.’

‘Do I really?’ She was genuinely surprised, and suspicious. He seemed so … sly.

‘When I first contacted you, I was expecting someone a little wilder, someone who would scare me off,’ he said. ‘I never would have done it if I’d thought you would react the way you did. I almost cancelled. I didn’t want to be the asshole that made you do something you didn’t want to do.’

Once again, his gaze moved downwards.

Curious.

Interested.

A long-forgotten fluttery feeling came over her: the blossoming pleasure of being admired by a good-looking man.

By the time his attention turned to her face, she was hot all over and she knew her cheeks showed it. She looked at the table top and wrapped her hands around the paper cup in front of her. After a moment’s silence, she realised he was waiting for her to speak.

She took a sip to wet her mouth and then looked at him. ‘Do you have a name?’

‘Brendan, and … Maggie isn’t your real name, I take it?’

‘No, and I don’t want to tell you my real name yet.’ She looked him straight in the eye as she spoke. She couldn’t help how defensive she was getting. ‘Not yet. For now, you can call me Maggie.’

He leaned back and grinned. ‘Well, Maggie, I’m going to get a cup of coffee and hope you’re still here when I come back. And then I think we should get out of here.’

‘I don’t think we should,’ she said with a scowl. ‘I don’t know what you were expecting, but –’

‘No, you misunderstand me. I just meant we should take our coffees and get out of this noisy little hole in the wall, head down the street to the park and get to know one another.’

Brendan stood over her. Carrie hated to look up at anyone and so she didn’t. She simply took another sip.

He chuckled, a delightful rumbling sound that ran right through her. ‘Can I get you another one?’

She hugged her cup between her hands and shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’

After he’d moved away, she lifted her chin and took a second look. He looked so normal, like any other man, and so far he had been nothing but sweet to her. The very act of speaking to the barista and slipping his debit card into the machine seemed out of place as she thought of how he had come out of the masturbatory haze of her blog. Tingles sparked along her arms and down her back, and she felt ashamed of her shyness in the face of a man who had seen so much of her from afar.

His slight swagger as he moved down the counter to wait for his drink painted a more accurate picture of confidence. The video had proved that. He had filmed himself fucking the woman because he had wanted to be seen. Perhaps it had started off as a private thing, but somewhere along the way he had decided to give it to the world to get off to.

Just like me, she thought.

Curiosity burned through her anxiety as she watched him and, in spite of herself, she wanted to know more. So she rose from the table and collected her things and met him at the door as he took his cup filled with ice and red liquid.

‘You can relax,’ he said as soon as they were out in the daylight together. ‘I know you’ll take it with a grain of salt, but I just want to talk. No expectations.’

‘Good. I don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of prostitute.’

‘I was thinking the complete opposite, actually.’

He led the way along a sidewalk busy with students hobbling like hunchbacks between campuses for coffee and lunch. A step behind him, Carrie let her gaze move over him and wondered if the back was as nice as the front when he was stripped down.

‘It’s funny how all these months I’ve been visiting your blog, getting myself off two or three times a day, and you were just a few steps away all this time.’

‘I don’t find it funny.’

‘No, I don’t expect you would, hiding in plain sight like that.’ He peered at her as they trotted along. ‘You’re very skittish, aren’t you?’

‘I’m cautious.’

‘Are you a virgin?’

Carrie stopped dead. ‘Because I didn’t immediately invite you for a fuck, you assume I’m a virgin?’

‘That got a rise out of you.’ He turned, his mouth in a mischievous twist. ‘I know you’re not a virgin, at least not in the clinical sense. I’ve seen all of your pictures. Maybe not skittish. More …’

‘Cautious.’

‘I want to say repressed.’

‘I’m not repressed.’ She was so annoyed she could have thrown her tea in his face. Instead, she tilted her nose in the air and glared at him. ‘Let’s talk about you now. You’re so well put together, so chatty, but you’re still a man who sits in front of a computer and jerks off to a woman with her panties twisted around her knees.’

His smile unwavering, Brendan leaned forward. ‘And you’re the type of woman who would shove her panties down to her knees and take a picture of her wet pussy so a man like me can jerk off to it.’

As he drew back, Carrie caught a whiff of his aftershave, a subtle mixture of menthol and something earthy and green. He never broke eye contact as he stood away from her, triumph on his handsome face.

After a moment, he shook his head. ‘I’m really not going to get into a pissing match with you. If you want to part ways right here, I’ll let you go … but I really don’t want to, and I don’t think you do either. You’re just as curious about me as I am about you.’

‘I don’t want to be analysed like a thing in an aquarium.’

‘Then tell me something about you, Maggie. Tell me how you came to start your blog.’

She walked alongside him, her thoughts muddled as she not only processed the fact that she hadn’t walked away but delved into her memories for the moment when this all began.

After Frank? Yes, the blog started after Frank. But it was more than Frank, and somewhere along the way it had separated from him completely.

‘I had a boyfriend who worked as a teacher up north,’ she said. ‘Three months collecting the big money up there, three months back here. He didn’t have a good Internet connection, so instead of video chatting I sent him pictures. I didn’t want to, at first, but I loved him and it was horrible having him so far away.’

‘And then you came to like it.’

Carrie took a deep breath. ‘I did. I’d take pictures of the things I’d bought when he was away and model them for him. Back then I just used the camera on my computer. I worried that he’d show the pictures to someone else, but as far as I know he never did. He sent back his own, and there we were for about a year.’

‘Did you ever take pictures when he was in town?’

She hesitated, then sighed and relented. ‘Once. He filmed me. After it fell apart …’

She stopped, hating herself as she recalled sitting at her computer, tears streaming down her face as she deleted every single photo, video and email.

She didn’t want to talk about it.

Still, she felt a little less anxious. Scores less anxious, in fact. She tossed her tea into a trash bin and tucked her hands into her pockets.

‘I dated someone for a few months after it ended, mostly because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? But after a while I decided I wanted time to get to know myself again. Turns out I like taking pictures of myself. It’s got nothing to do with a failed relationship or anything like that. I just like it. It just feels good. Other people do it, so I do it too.’

‘You like looking, too?’

‘I have a few blogs I like to go to. People like me. Sometimes they just take pictures of themselves. Sometimes they’re with other people.’ Her voice shook as she made her admission. Releasing it into the atmosphere was as thrilling as it was terrifying. ‘There’s one I like the most: a woman in Scotland – some small village on the coast. She posts black and white pictures. She shows her face, but she never looks right at the camera. Her pictures say something about her. Every single one tells a story about the type of day she had. You can tell by what she’s wearing or what she’s doing to herself who she chose to be that day, or what she was forced to be by her real life. I don’t know if mine does that, but I like hers.’

‘You’ll have to share it with me. Any others that turn you on?’

Carrie shook her head. ‘You next. I want to know how you found my blog.’

‘By accident. I fired one of my employees for being a fuckwit and, when I sat down to have a look at his computer, he had the link in his bookmarks. The first one I opened up was you lying in bed with the sun creating this glow around you.’

His voice changed in the way people did when they were relishing a memory, and when Carrie looked at him his expression was almost blissful, a half-smile on his face as he stared down the street.

‘You weren’t completely naked. Your bra was pushed down to your ribs and your panties were twisted around your knees. You had your hand between your legs. It was like you were waiting for someone. I got so hard thinking about what came next I unzipped right there in my office and jerked off.’ He shook himself and looked at her. His smile turned mischievous. ‘You’re blushing.’

‘Of course.’

They arrived at an intersection and Carrie discovered that having to wait for the light brought back her anxiety. She kept looking straight ahead.

‘Who is the woman in the video you sent me?’

‘My wife.’ Carrie bristled, but she still didn’t look at him. Brendan chuckled. ‘My ex-wife, though your reaction was interesting.’

‘How else would I have reacted? For about five seconds there you were some creep trying to start an affair.’

‘It didn’t occur to you before you met me?’

‘I imagined much, much worse. The video could have been a fake. Besides, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. For all I knew, you’d show up at my office with an envelope full of my pictures.’

‘I still could.’

The red hand turned into a little green man and they crossed, heading for the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the large garden showcased in the middle of downtown.

‘But you won’t,’ she said once they’d reached the swinging gate, and she turned to block his entrance. ‘Because you’re only here for one thing.’

Brendan drained his cup and crumpled it in his fist. ‘What do I want?’

‘Like you said in your message to me, you want to play.’

He stepped closer, backing her against the cold bars. ‘And what about Maggie? Does she want to come out to play with me?’

His mouth was so close to hers, she could touch her tongue to his if she dared. She’d bet he tasted sweet, like the red drink he had been slurping on their way here.

She stopped his kiss with a hand pressed against his chest. ‘I have more questions.’

‘Of course you do.’ He pushed forward, she thought to kiss her, but instead the gate swung inwards. ‘It’s my turn to ask a question, though, isn’t it? What do you do for a living?’

She shook her head. ‘No, ask me something else.’

‘Come on. You know where I live. You know where to find me.’

‘Who said I wanted to find you? And I don’t want you finding me, either.’

‘All right, enough of this bullshit.’ He stepped in front of her and blocked the gravel path. ‘I’ve left it wide open for you to walk away, but you’re still here, busting my balls about my motivations for being here when you’re here for the same thing.’

Carrie opened her mouth, but he just went on. ‘You won’t come right out and say it: it’s not taking the pictures that gets you off, it’s the thought of someone out there stroking off to those pictures. That’s why you do it. That’s why you like it. You’re just as dirty as the rest of us, and Maggie, let me tell you, I’m dying to show you how dirty things can get.’

There wasn’t even a hint of a smirk left on his face. His words bled into her skin and trickled through her veins.

Carrie wanted to back away from him, but found herself fixed to the ground like one of the statues around her. This small part of the world she shared with him seemed to close in, and she didn’t so much as flinch when he slipped his arm around her and splayed his hand at the small of her back.

‘You want to be fucked. Tell me, where do you want to be fucked?’

She licked her lips and watched him mirror the action. She felt his cock pressing between them. With the pressure of his hand drawing her closer, it was harder than ever to breathe.

She tilted her head. She intended to shake her head, ‘No,’ but lost the intention entirely halfway through.

‘My place is five minutes from here.’

The corner of his mouth turned up, delectable and tempting. ‘What’s your name?’

She brought her hand up and pressed it against his chest, not to push him away but to steady herself. She struggled through a deep breath and curled her fingers. ‘Carrie. My name is Carrie.’