Читать книгу Addicted - Charlotte Stein - Страница 6

The first thing I hear after I’ve finished reading is my best friend’s laughter. And the second thing I hear is more laughter – this time with actual tears streaming down her cheeks to accompany it. Apparently, my erotic masterpiece is amusing to her. More than amusing, in fact. After a second she holds a hand up, like she’s begging me to stop the mirth.

It takes her a while to realise.

‘Oh,’ she says, as she wipes away the tears. ‘Oh, you were serious? This is a serious start to a serious novel?’

I kind of wish it wasn’t, now. But I plunge on, regardless. I mean, I read it with the intention of getting some feedback. It’s probably best if I just brace myself and hear it.

‘I know it needs work.’

‘Oh, honey, I’m sorry,’ she says, and I can tell she really is. She’s a good friend, Lori. She’s not the type to laugh because she’s a horrid jealous cow – though really, what does she have to be jealous of? She’s blonde, I’m not. She’s tall, I’m not. She’s interesting.

I am not.

Which is probably why I’m writing ridiculous stories about kinky things I’d never dare do. She’d probably dare do them, when I really think about it. If she stopped finding them hilarious for five seconds.

‘It just wasn’t what I expected, that’s all. I mean, the blindfold … the businessman … I didn’t think you were capable of writing something like that.’

I flame red, then, thinking of the words I actually dared to speak aloud. How did I do that, again? Typically I can’t even tell a sex partner that I’d like to kiss and cuddle, now. So this seems … suddenly impossible. I’ve somehow made it impossible, after actually doing it.

‘It was so graphic.’

Oh, God, it is. It was. What’s wrong with me?

‘And a little …’ She pauses, wincing. But it’s OK, because I’m wincing right along with her. ‘… unrealistic.’

She clearly doesn’t know that a word like that is a lifeline to me. She looks as though she’s just murdered my grandmother, but the second she says it this weird relief slides through my body. Unrealistic – I can handle that. Hell, she’s probably right.

After all, what do I know about sex? Nothing. Less than nothing. Every sexual encounter I’ve ever had has occurred beneath the sheets, under a double layer of darkness. Once I started kissing some guy’s elbow, thinking I’d found his cock. And as for the pleasure I’ve just described to her, in my twisted tale of kinky delights …

Well, I guess that’s disingenuous of me, at best. I should have written:

Sex for her was sort of like being vaccinated, by a big pink finger.

‘You’re not mad, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Because, you know, it’s just … well. People don’t really do those sorts of things, do they? In real life, sex has consequences. And there are all these issues, obviously … especially for women.’

She’s got a point. So why do I kind of wish she didn’t? I remember being this gawky teenage girl, once, who truly believed in passion and pleasure and crazy thrills. There were no double duvets and fat finger vaccinations in her future, no way, no how. She was going to take sex by storm, and experience delights the likes of which the world had never seen.

Where did she go, exactly? How did I end up here, with these papers in my hand and the certainty that Lori is correct? People don’t really blindfold each other, down here in mundane reality. And if they did manage to do a thing like that, it would probably end really badly. Someone would stumble into a chair, and accidentally fracture their jaw. Or maybe my kinky businessman would turn out to be a total asshole, who filmed everything on his camera-phone then put it all up on YouTube.

Are those the kinds of consequences she’s talking about? Because I can absolutely see myself being on YouTube; for wanting something as simple as excitement. In fact, I can imagine worse, when I really put my mind to it.

Maybe he’ll sell me to slave traders, and I’ll end up in a sex factory – for ever being vaccinated, for the amusement of strangers.

‘Here,’ she says, and I know what’s going to happen before she’s even finished fishing through her wallet. She’s finding a card for me, with the name of some expert on it. She did the same thing last year, when I told her I was afraid of spiders – she sent me to a wellness specialist, who made me touch a spider.

Which doesn’t bode well for this particular scenario.

I can’t imagine myself fingering a penis, to get over my need for more exciting sex. If anything, the penis fingering is only going to make me crazier – though of course I don’t say that. Mainly because it’s insane, but also because I suspect she’s going to offer me something far more daunting.

‘You want realism? You should try this on for size,’ she says, then hands me a square of yellow construction paper with a terrible-sounding title emblazoned across its front. Sexual Healing, it says. As though Marvin Gaye is going to help lower my expectations and make me all normal again. ‘It’s a kind of therapy group for people with sexual … issues.’

Oh, God, there’s that word again. Issues. And if I’m not mistaken, she seems to think that I have them. This isn’t just a friendly word of advice to help me be more than a librarian.

This really is her way of making me touch a spider – only the other way around. She wants me to sit in a cold, probably clinical room, with people who think sex is a hideous nightmare. I’m going to come away even more depressed about the whole thing, and probably never do it again.

Is that the aim here? To make me never do it again?

‘Lori, I really don’t think I need to visit a sex issues group,’ I try, but I already know it’s too late. Her eyebrow is raised in that particular pointed way – the one that makes her look like a schoolteacher, who always knows what’s best for me. And once it’s up there, I simply can’t finagle my way out.

The weight of her one eyebrow is like seven bags of sand, tied too tight around my neck. I’m being dragged down to God knows where, and there’s really nothing I can do. I simply have to take the card, and hope for the best.

Even if the best is me signing up for a life in a nunnery.

* * *

The meeting isn’t held where I thought it would be, in some sterile semi-hospital, set in the middle of endless green grounds. It’s on Becker Street, right in the heart of the city. The front of it reminds me of an old abandoned warehouse, or maybe a crumbling town hall, and it’s sandwiched between a barely surviving video store and a pizza place.

The flickering pink neon from the latter’s window gives the dark, narrow building a tawdry air – and it’s worse inside. Kind of homey, in one way. But worn and withered, in another. The big heating pipes that run along the hallway remind me of school, as does the wrought-iron banister that lines the staircase – the one that leads to God only knows where. When I dare to duck my head and look up those stone steps, all I can see is the fuzzy, faded darkness that all old buildings seem to have.

And just past the stairs to hell is a noticeboard, which brings me no more comfort. The signs tacked to the cork surface are gaudy, even jaunty, but the things written on them are not. Anger Management, the first one says. Followed by Violent Outbursts, Night Terrors, and my personal favourite: Inexplicable Rages.

As opposed to the totally explicable ones, I suppose, where the situation warranted you throwing a chair across a room before tearing out all of your own hair.

What exactly have I gotten myself into here? I don’t have night terrors or angry outbursts – and, more importantly, I don’t have sex issues either. What am I supposed to say, if everyone starts going into their deepest, darkest fears and problems? Lori made it sound quite light and fun, but this isn’t a light and fun sort of place.

This is the sort of place where I’m going to be exposed as a horrible fraud, who preys on the issues of others. It will come to my turn and I’ll have to say the only thing I can: One time Martin McAllister accidentally slipped his cock in my bum a bit, when aiming for my vagina. And then he expected me to be mortified, only I wasn’t!

God help me, I wasn’t.

And then maybe I’ll cry a little, or wring my hands, just to make the whole thing more convincing. Though I can already tell it’s not going to be. My sensible half is laughing at my ridiculous attempts at sexual verisimilitude, and even if she wasn’t I’d be aware of how silly I am. I have to go, now, before others find me out. I have to Google sex and authenticity instead of making any attempts at actual research – after all, that’s what most authors do, isn’t it? Scour Wikipedia for a helping hand?

But of course it’s already too late. I can see some kindly aunt-type standing by the door to the main hall, and as I do my best to slink past her, she hooks my arm. She actually hooks my arm, like she just knew I was trying to make my escape.

And once I’ve looked her in the eye, I know I’m not going anywhere. There’s just nothing I can convincingly say to this woman, to make a clean getaway. She has the friendly, open face of some beloved relative I don’t actually have, and, when she speaks, things only get worse for me.

She has a Scottish accent. A kindly, whisky-biscuit Scottish accent. And she uses that accent to say the following:

‘Are you a little bit nervous, petal? Don’t be. Come on in, and have a cake.’

Which is quite possibly the most welcoming set of words I’ve ever heard. It started with an acknowledgement of my main weakness – nerves – before launching into the kind of epithet I’ve always wanted. And to finish, she offered me a cake.

A cake.

She gave it to me with both barrels, and doesn’t even know it.

‘Well, maybe I can … sort of … I don’t know …’ I hear myself saying, as she leads me into a hall that time forgot. Honestly, for a second I expect my old headmaster to come bouncing over the trampoline-like wooden floors towards me – which only makes things worse.

I can’t lie in front of my old headmaster. I can’t even lie in front of this lady. She asks me what my name is, and instead of offering the fake one I thought up for this very occasion, I go with the real deal. Kit, I say, and then she writes it on the sticker in her hand and plasters it to my right boob.

Now I have to be me, for all eternity.

‘You just take a seat when you’re ready, Kit,’ she says, but the sight of that prison-like circle of plastic chairs makes me dizzy. I try the fold-out table of orange squash and home-baked treats, instead, only to find I’ve forgotten how to eat. My hand shakes as I raise a square of ill-gotten ginger cake to my mouth, and I end up putting it back down.

But that just makes me look like some nervous first-timer. A willowy woman in seventeen layers of lovely clothes pats me on the back, and tells me everything will be fine. ‘Just share your inner self,’ she says, as though my inner self could be so easily persuaded. I can’t even tell someone on the subway that they’re standing on my foot, let alone this.

Because, oh, this is something else.

The guy in the tweed with the nice professor’s face – he can’t stop masturbating. He masturbates so often that I find myself doing the maths in my head, but once I have I’m no less in awe. His weekly total is more than my yearly one. In fact, if I divide the four and carry the one, it’s more than I’ve ever masturbated in my entire life. I don’t even know how he’s functioning, in all honesty. I don’t even know how someone can physically crave something that much … something so small and ordinary and nothing. God, when I do it – it’s nothing.

But when he describes it …

‘It’s a rush,’ he says. As though it’s some new drug I wasn’t aware of. And then even more thrilling: ‘It’s a rush to think I might get caught. I do it in my office, sometimes, with the door unlocked, half hoping someone will walk in.’

And once he’s done, all I can think of is my old university professor, Dr McCaffrey. Dr McCaffrey, with those leather patches on his elbows and his pipe and his neatly parted hair. And most of all those steel-grey eyes of his, surveying the study hall with a kind of disaffection.

Did he have a secret life like this, behind the cold façade? Did he imagine keeping students behind after lectures – students more lovely than me, obviously – before offering them something strictly prohibited in the university handbook?

Bend over, he says in my head, and then he raises that pointer of his, about a second before I snap back to reality.

God, Lori’s right. My attitude to sex is weird. They’re talking about their problems, and I’m in the middle of some crazy fantasy featuring a teacher I once had. I’m imagining what it’s like to be this consumed by sex, to be this nuts about it. The woman on my right has a ritual, for fuck’s sake. An actual ritual.

She goes to the same bar every Saturday night, and picks up a dark-haired man – preferably with a moustache. And then she takes him back to her apartment, puts a collar on him and makes him stumble around her living room like a dog.

My Saturday-night ritual consists of me deciding whether to wear pyjamas or a nightie to bed. Is a jam sandwich a good idea, after ten-thirty? Or will I wake up feeling nauseated and too thirsty? Chances are I’ll be thirsty. And then I’ll drink half a pint of lemonade and need to pee at six in the morning – it’s a whole big thing, and far too much hassle.

Better that I don’t have the jam sandwich.

Yeah, that’s right. She has trouble fighting her urge to have wild and anonymous sex. I have trouble deciding about preserves and buttered bread. I’m ashamed of my attitude to late-night snacks. If I needed any further proof that I shouldn’t be here … that I should feel guilty about peeping in on their private feelings … this would be it.

I mean, these people are really hurting, about actual things. They’re all freaked out by their obsessions and unsure of what to do next – all of them are. Every last one of them, down to the girl who can’t even bring herself to say the word ‘vagina’ and the man who’s never so much as shaken a woman’s hand.

I don’t belong here.

And neither does that guy on the other side of the circle.

I don’t know how I missed him, at first. He’s completely unmissable, in every way possible. He’s like a sore thumb in a room full of perfectly healthy fingers, though I really don’t think I can be blamed for overlooking him. I was just so engrossed in other people’s sad tales and my own rampaging guilt that I didn’t pay any attention to the one other person in the room who isn’t real. Maybe I thought he was a mirror on the other side of the circle, reflecting me.

Because it’s obvious he is. He isn’t slumped in his chair, defeated, or full with celebration of some small victory over sex. He doesn’t look the least bit sad or ashamed about anything. His arms are folded jauntily over his chest, and I immediately notice two things because of this:

First, his arms and his general chest area are absolutely enormous. They’re so enormous that they briefly blot out all light in the universe, and cause a cataclysm the likes of which the world has never known.

And:

Those earth-destroying arms are covered in tattoos.

Though maybe all of that is just a slight exaggeration. He’s so incredible-looking I briefly hallucinate, and imagine him pounding downtown Los Angeles with his immense fists. He’s already taken root in my brain, and I don’t even know how. His face just exerts some kind of gravitational pull, and the moment I make the mistake of looking I’m caught for ever in his orbit.

I can’t explain it. Usually I barely register men at all, and I certainly don’t find myself engrossed in the way they look. Guys that women call attractive – footballers and rugby players and other rugged examples of extreme manhood – I barely pay attention to. I’d kind of accepted that my responses were mostly dead, in terms of actual men in real life.

But this guy … oh, this guy. I don’t even know what it is about him, but the moment his sultry blue gaze locks with mine something happens inside me. That dead thing rises from the grave and starts stumbling around, looking for loins. I’m lost, I think, I’m totally lost. I can’t even stop staring at him, despite all of my best efforts.

I glance at the pictures some kids have drawn on the opposite wall. I pretend my fingernails are suddenly as fascinating as the riddle of the Incas – but it’s all in vain. I end up taking in everything about him, whether I want to or not. I even take in the parts that are completely unremarkable, like his shortish dark hair, unstyled and lazy-looking. Or that tattered T-shirt he’s wearing, pulled taut across his unbearably broad chest, and those jeans that seem similarly thin and ready to expose him at any moment. His thighs look like ham hocks beneath the material, thick and juicy, but that’s not what draws my eyes the most out of everything he’s wearing.

His flip-flops do. His ridiculous flip-flops – so casual in a room of neatly tied and laced shoes. Everyone else is trying like mad to contain themselves, to be respectable and normal and totally OK.

Whereas he clearly doesn’t care. He’s half-smiling before he’s even started talking, with a mouth so wicked I’m afraid seeing it might constitute a sin. His lower lip is as plump as an overripe fruit, and, when he thinks no one’s looking, he licks it. He licks it in a way that makes my body respond – like some secret sex sign I didn’t even know existed.

Suck me right here, that sign says, and the worst of it is … I want to. I’d crawl across deserts to take that lower lip in my mouth. I’d renounce my life of jam sandwiches and terrible sitcoms for one kiss from a pout like that.

Because it is kind of a pout. His face is this insane mixture of rough masculinity and sensuous something-else, and the battle between the two is so engaging you just have to look. He’s covered in stubble, of course, and his strong nose is just a touch too big for his face. His eyebrows are thick, dark – almost oppressive, in fact.

But then they’re paired with the longest, blackest, loveliest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man. He shuts his eyes briefly and they fan over his cheeks like something a geisha girl would carry. And then he opens them, and that’s no better either. I don’t know if the blue is enhanced by the dark rings around them, or if his gaze is just naturally like this – naturally heavy, naturally smoke-screened, naturally hypnotic.

But either way I don’t suppose it matters.

He knows I’m looking, now. That little half-smile has quirked up a quarter of an inch, to see me falling all over myself – because he’s definitely that kind of man, I can tell. He’s the kind who thinks every girl is head over heels in love with him, to the point where he has to be a jerk just to get them to look the other way. The kind that shoulders past lesser people in bars, and strolls around town centres with his top off. I bet he goes on holiday with Club 18-30, even though he’s clearly over that, and when he returns he talks to everyone about larging it and getting his end away.

Yeah, I’ve got his number.

Until he speaks, and then I don’t know what I’ve got.

‘Yeah, so I’m Dillon. Dillon Holt,’ he says, like he’s introducing himself at a barbecue. You got any hotdogs, dude? I think, deliriously, before he plunges into the opposite world everyone else is in. There’s not a hint of discomfort in his voice, when he says: ‘I’d say I’ve slept with quite a substantial number of women – maybe a hundred?’

I think I can see him counting, in his head.

‘Maybe more like two hundred, huh?’

And to make matters worse, his accent isn’t some buttoned-up English thing, layered with a thousand years of repression. He’s American, I think, and his voice has that breezy, open, friendly quality to it that draws you in immediately. It makes you feel comfortable, even though you probably shouldn’t be.

I should still be guilty, and ashamed of myself.

But he makes short work of that.

‘Big girls, little girls, dark-haired, blonde, burgundy … girls with weird bits, girls who don’t know how to dress – I’m not fussy. I’ll take all comers.’

Oh, God, he’s not fussy. He’ll take all comers! Which probably shouldn’t seem like a good thing, here. And a second later, he seems to twig to that.

He clears his throat, and starts again.

‘I mean … uh … I used to take all comers, until I realised that was really bad and … uh … unhealthy for me, as a person, and also it … you know. Negatively affects those around me in terrible, terrible ways.’

Is he reading this out of a handbook? I kind of feel like he’s reading this out of handbook. He picked it up on his way in, and is now awkwardly fudging his way through the spiel he thinks he ought to give.

‘I’ve gotten myself into some really bad situations – on planes, on trains, in automobiles. And this one time, on a beach. Though in my defence, that last one wasn’t really my fault. I missed the sign that said, “You’re now wandering off the nudist part,” and after that I was just some guy on a beach with my nadgers out.’

Oh, Lord, I love the way he says nadgers. I love the way he says planes, trains and automobiles, like the pornographic version of a much-loved John Candy movie. It makes me realise that he’s not my reflection at all. He’s what my reflection would be, if I was without shame or any kind of nervousness. If I didn’t feel guilty about anything, and instead just reeled off the truth.

Which he continues to, in great and varied detail.

‘I’ve been arrested a couple of times for things like that – in changing rooms, and so on and so forth. I guess I’m just really sort of into being naked, you know? And that … uh … has gotten me into trouble a few times. My ex-girlfriend’s mom once caught me in her greenhouse without any clothes on – maybe ’cause I was kind of communing with nature, or something else that probably isn’t true. And then I, ahem, communed with her and her daughter.’ He pauses, and I know – I know – he’s trying not to laugh. About a second before he adds: ‘And their friend Alan.’

Alan. Did he say Alan? Oh, Jesus, I think he did. I think he’d be raising both eyebrows and grinning devilishly, now, if he thought he could get away with it.

But everyone is nodding so sympathetically, and the Scottish woman is telling him that she’s using crystals to de-cloud his sexual aura, so really he can’t do anything of the sort. He can’t do anything but continue into what I can only describe as bragging, now. He’s bloody bragging, I swear to God.

‘And then there’s the reason why I’m here – I went over to see a couple of friends of mine, a couple of girls. Not girls I was screwing around with, or anything. They just said, “Oh, come around, Dillon,’ so I did. I came around thinking I’d maybe get a sandwich – and God knows I can never say no to a sandwich. I’d probably go to Hitler’s house if I thought I’d get some pastrami between two slices of bread, so you know. It’s not like I can be blamed, right?’

It’s OK, Dillon. I totally understand your predicament. I’d be round Hitler’s house with you, munching on a slice of wholemeal slathered in strawberry conserve.

‘I mean, how was I to know one of them was going to take her top off? She just did it right out of the blue, halfway through the cheese and pickle she’d made me. I’ve literally got it hanging out of my mouth, and her friend’s in the middle of totally ordinary conversation about some British sport I don’t understand – then bam. Naked time.’

I get the impression that naked time kind of happens to him a lot. Maybe because his thousand-yard stare of utter sex just melts the clothes right off women’s bodies.

Though, to his credit, he actually doesn’t seem smug about any of this. If I was going to identify his expression, right now, I’d probably call it bemused and/or amazed. As though sex is some facehugger that sneaks up on him in the night. Vaginas just attach themselves to his face, before he knows where he is.

‘And then the other friend takes her top off, too. I’m just sat there eating my sandwich, with a naked girl on either side of me. I mean, what am I supposed to do here?’

Not sound like you’re actually asking, I think, but of course I can’t say that.

Everyone’s completely engrossed by what he’s saying – even the girl who hates the word ‘vagina’. In fact, she looks almost as giddy as I feel. She’s vicariously living through Dillon Holt, and I don’t blame her in the slightest. In fact, I feel slightly better about my own desperate need to hear more.

‘So I kiss one,’ he says, and, oh, I can almost see it. I bet she was tall and blonde, like Lori, and in my head, when he presses his mouth to hers, she dissolves under the pressure. Her lips part to invite him onward, to get more of that softness pressing and working against her – and then maybe after a while some of that slippery, sinful tongue. I bet he’s forceful, when he gets going. I bet he’s lewd about it, thrusting in a way that mimics the rhythm he’d use later on … and ohhhh God.

All of this from imagining a kiss?

Clearly I’m going to pass out, if he goes any further.

‘And she gets all squirmy, the way a girl gets when she’s really excited, you know?’

Oh, Lord, he’s going further. And he’s talking about the way girls get, as though he’s really, really experienced in that field. He’s a Professor of Lady Arousal, and now he’s going to rub that fact right in my face.

The last guy I dated thought clitoris was an island off the coast of Greece.

‘Then the other girl starts getting kind of irritated that I’m paying the first one the most attention, and she wants a kiss too. I couldn’t very well say no. So I give her one – only she’s not satisfied with the usual, polite, cheese-sandwich-and-a-cup-of-tea sort of peck. Yeah, she’s kind of wanting the same thing, only lower down. And by this point, I really want to go lower down. I’ll say it right now – I love eating pussy. I could eat pussy all day every day until the end of time, just to get a girl all flushed the way she gets, and hear those little soft, desperate moans or maybe even the loud, aggressive ones … I don’t mind. Pull my hair, call me names, sit on my face, I’ll take it and come back for more, I swear I –’

He cuts himself off here, but it’s fairly obvious why. It’s kind of like seeing someone wave a beer around at a meeting of alcoholics anonymous. Or a meeting of people who can’t drink, because drink makes them insanely nervous. The group is split between those who’ve gorged themselves to breaking point, and those who are starving in the desert.

And I don’t know who it’s worse for.

Me, I think, me, though I can’t say why. Because he’s so casual about it? Because it’s so easy for him? He makes sex sound like all the tales I’ve always wanted to tell, instead of the reality it usually is. This is the reality, I know – people who want to heal and transcend and eventually become …

What he is.

Happy.

Lord, he’s so happy.

‘But obviously I realise the detrimental effect this unhealthy pussy-eating obsession has on my psyche.’

He doesn’t realise that at all, and we know it. Even the Scottish lady knows it. She’s just as caught up in his tale as everyone else, cheeks pink and eyes bright with that one idea he represents. That one great, good idea that she actually promotes: sex should be something exciting and positive and good.

‘Well, I don’t know about that, Dillon,’ she says, and when she does her voice flutters, the way I imagine mine would if I was talking to someone like him. And she’s toying with the crystal on the chain around her neck in this very specific sort of manner, too – a very amusing manner. I want to giggle hysterically, but I rein it in just in time to hear him say this:

‘OK, maybe the love of oral sex isn’t so bad. But jumping out of a second-floor window when one of the girls’ husbands comes home – just in time to see his wife riding me like a bronco while her friend smothers me on the other end … yeah, that’s probably not that cool. You should have seen my knees, man! Skinned them all the way to the bone. Had to walk into the emergency room wearing a cardboard box; so it really wasn’t a surprise when the nurse who patched me up sent me here.’

I love the fact that he’s so concerned about his knees. And that he jumped out of a window, naked. I know probably I shouldn’t, but I do just the same. In fact I think I look as moony as the Scottish lady does, if his amused expression is anything to go by. He’s levelling it right at me, those blue eyes suddenly as sparky as someone’s finger in a socket.

And he doesn’t leave off – not even after she’s turned her attention my way.

‘We have another new member of the group today,’ she says, and like an idiot I glance around, searching for this other person. Maybe they’re even more handsome and beguiling than Dillon Holt, and I can focus all of my faint-heartedness on them instead.

Only then I realise. I realise about a second before she says my name.

‘Kit.’

I wish I’d given her a fake one. I could have got an extra thirty seconds’ respite out of her calling for a Cassandra who doesn’t actually exist.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ I say, but those two non-words don’t buy me any time. I have to decide now what I’m going to go with: shy incompetent or wild party girl?

Judging by his expression, he expects the former.

Which is probably why I go with the latter. I paint a vague picture of Kit the lonely one-night-stand addict, hopping nightly from bar to bar in the hopes of making some connection. And though it kind of sounds like hokum, while I’m saying it, that last word leaves me feeling … I don’t know.

Unsettled?

I find myself thinking back over my life, sifting through various relationships and friendships … things that should have stood me in better stead than trawling night spots for tail. But really, when I consider it … when have I ever connected with anyone?

I haven’t. And that slight sinking of his oh-so-amused expression confirms that much. He can see it in me, I think. He can tell that I’m being honest, in some tiny way – that I’ve just exposed a part of myself I didn’t want to give.

And now he’s sad for me.

Christ.

‘I can’t really say any more,’ I say, to the circle. At which, they all nod sympathetically and give me reassuring pats on the back, and the kindly Scottish aunt says, ‘Well, why don’t we move on to some healing, wholesome one-on-one time?’

I’m almost relieved, in the few precious moments before I realise what that means. In fact, I make it all the way over to the squash and cake table, before it comes to me. I’ve got a cookie in my hand and I’m thinking, Hey, at least I’ve got some kind of epiphany out of this. Maybe I can ask Tom from the library out, the next time he rubs against me between the stacks. That’ll be some kind of connection, all right. Or at least it’ll prove I’m open to connections.

And then I see him, out of the corner of my eye. I see Dillon Holt, strolling towards me, in a way that makes me want to glance over my shoulder. You know, just in case there’s a sexier, wilder sort of chick behind me, and she’s actually the one he’s aiming for.

This imaginary woman has to be the one he’s aiming for.

Right?

Only I don’t think I’m right at all. The kindly Scottish aunt said ‘one-on-one time’, and this obviously does not mean what it did in my head thirty seconds ago. My head thought she was suggesting we have a deep, meaningful discussion with a slice of ginger cake, but I can see now that I was wrong.

‘That’s right,’ she calls out, over the mostly paired-up room. ‘Hold your partner in your arms, and show them that you’re there for them.’

And then it clicks in my mind. Dillon is coming over here because I’m the person he wants to hug. He was touched by my lack of any kind of connection with fellow human beings, and is reaching out in his own lunkish way. He wants to show me it’s OK – but unfortunately, he wants to show me it’s OK by putting his massive arms around me.

I can’t have that. There’s a toilet somewhere beyond the double doors into this hall, and I need to feign interest in that place immediately. But how best to do it? If I raise my hand and ask for a bathroom pass, I’m going to look like the biggest fool on the planet. And if I don’t ask, then it’s not going to be clear what I’m doing. When he gets over here I won’t be able to politely excuse myself, and I’ll just have to walk away.

He’ll think I’m an ass. He’s going to think I’m an ass. And by the time I’m finished panicking over what an ass I am, it’s far too late. He’s already upon me – and, Jesus, he’s even bigger than he’d seemed across the circle. He has to be at least six foot two, if not more. His shoulders are so immense I can’t see the ends of them, once my eyeline is level with his chest.

You can’t even call what he does standing. It’s more like looming. I’m being loomed over by the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in real life, and once he’s there I don’t have a chance of escaping. It would take me seven years just to run from his left bicep to the tips of his fingers – though running isn’t even an option. The moment I think of it – like a desperate light bulb going off in my panicky head – he leans down and enfolds me in those enormous arms.

He enfolds me. I didn’t even know I could be enfolded. I’m not sure what to do, once it’s happening. My own arms go really stiff and sort of stick out on either side of his body, and I forget to turn my head when his chest angles down – which just leads to a kind of awkward face-mashing against his left pectoral muscle.

Though, in my defence, I’m not used to men having something in that place. Typically it’s just skin and chest hair, or maybe gigantic pillows of extra sweaters. Some of the guys I’ve dated weren’t really keen on hugging full stop, so there’s no helpful comparison there.

This guy hugs like his life depends on it. He hugs me so warmly that something embarrassing starts happening in my general eye area – something that stings a bit and mortifies me to my very soul. Apparently I’m so starved of affection I tear up when a random bloke squeezes me a bit.

I’m like a tube of toothpaste that’s never been used. My destiny in life – to have people compress me – has not been fulfilled.

Until now.

He has a hand on my back, and he’s kind of rubbing it up and down. Not in a sexual manner, you understand. Just in a nice, soothing, warm sort of way. He’s so full of heat that he’s got a ton of it to spare, and he just hands it around to random strangers, whenever the mood takes him. He can afford to, after all.

Women hurl themselves at him while he’s eating a cheese sandwich. He’s not going to nearly cry because he’s being hugged – but I think he understands that I might.

‘Yeah, that’s nice, right?’ he says, and I just sort of nod helplessly. I don’t want to; because if it turns out that he is an arrogant ass then this is only going to make him worse.

But I just can’t do anything else. He feels incredible. And he smells much, much better than I thought he would, when he was sat all the way over there like some half side of beef. I thought he’d have a musky tang, but mostly he’s made up of shampoo and fabric softener. He’s like a big pile of laundry, fresh out of the drier – and I don’t mind admitting that I kind of want to bury my face in him.

In fact, I’m almost comfortable enough to do that, by this point. My limbs have gone all loose and lax, and I’m pretty close to returning the favour. All I have to do is make a loop around his broad back, then squeeze gently.

Seems simple.

And then he whispers one word, in my ear. One shocking word that makes my hair almost stand on end.

‘Faker,’ he says.