Читать книгу Addicted - Charlotte Stein - Страница 7

I know he’s behind me. It’s like his presence is pressing against the fabric of the universe, and I’m forced to notice it whether I want to or not. Plus … you know. I can also actually see him in the flat-black gaze of the shop windows across the street. He’s about ten paces back, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of the hoodie he’s put on.

I’ll admit: I kind of expected him to brave the elements in just that ridiculous T-shirt. But it makes him more human to see him with some layers on. He’s not some sexual superhero, swinging through the November-washed streets in just his undercrackers.

Even he has a line of normalcy drawn in the sand of his insides.

It’s just that this line includes following me – because come on, now. He totally is. I stop when I get to the window of a newsagent’s and pretend to be examining a sign for someone’s missing cat, just to see if he’ll stop too. And when he does, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’s only doing so because I did. He has to feign interest in the contents of a store that sells orthopaedic trusses, for God’s sake.

I almost want to shout back at him that he’d look great in a girdle.

But I refrain. Jokey comments about his gut-restraining needs will only encourage him – and after I did so well to evade him back at the hall. Out here, I’m never going to get away with declaring loudly that I need a wee. There’s no one here to frown at him for stopping me visiting the toilet.

He had to let me go, then. He doesn’t have to let me go now.

Unless this isn’t actually a thing – which could be the case. Maybe I’m just imagining him all hot on my trail, ready to take me down for the terrible crime of sex-addiction fakery.

‘Hey, Kit – wait up!’

Or maybe not.

I try walking faster, but to no avail. You can’t block out sound by moving your feet more rapidly – and even you could, he’ll soon be close enough for me to read his lips. Two of his strides make up seventeen of mine, and he makes short work of the distance between us. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if his speed and persistence mean something else.

Maybe he kills people for faking sex addiction. He’s the fabled Fake Sex Addiction Killer, and I’m about to be horribly offed in the doorway of a Burger King.

‘This is a really long way around to the bathroom,’ he says, which at least reassures me on the murdering front. If not the anything else front. He’s going to want to have a discussion, now, about that one word he whispered, and I am not at all prepared for it.

I didn’t bring my conversational shotgun.

‘Are the facilities not seven streets down? Oh, that’s pretty foolish of me. Well – I’m here now. Might as well keep going. Goodnight, Dillon!’

I say ‘Goodnight, Dillon’ far too hysterically. Even I know that, and I’m the person who never realises when I’m being hysterical. I just discover that Masterchef didn’t record and then hurl the remote control through the television.

‘Hey – you remembered my name.’

I don’t look at him when he speaks. Sensing the weight of those beautiful eyes on the side of my face is enough. I feel like I’m basking in the light and heat of some sun from a distant galaxy, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

‘I think anyone would remember your name.’

‘Huh. Really? Why’s that, then?’

Because you delivered a ten-page essay to the class: Why I Like Oral Sex, by Dillon Holt. Because you look like the picture they put under the word ‘memorable’ in the dictionary. Because of a million things, a billion things, all of which cannot be said by someone like me.

‘Because you went to a sexual healing group to brag,’ I say, finally – though I immediately regret it. It’s the only answer I had in my head that doesn’t feel true, and now I’ve slathered it all over him. He’s going to nail me for it, I know.

And he does. He just does it with more gentleness than I expect. He actually sounds as light as air and like he’s half-laughing when he says:

‘Is that better or worse than going to a sexual healing group with a fake sex addiction?’

‘I didn’t fake anything.’

‘Oh, honey. Come on. Nuns could have told you that you were faking. I’ve heard more convincing tales of sexual excess from my elderly grandfather.’

Christ, I knew I shouldn’t have said that thing about the leather miniskirt. I bet true sexual adventurers haven’t worn leather miniskirts since 1982. And besides … he’s got to know what that would look like on me. I couldn’t land a fish in something that showed my thighs – never mind a man.

It’s no wonder he’s sceptical.

Though, lucky for me, he doesn’t continue this line of questioning. I’m already cracking under the pressure, and he’s barely begun his cross-examination. Thank God he changes the subject, to something even worse.

‘Did it really seem like I was bragging?’

I have to look at him then. That note of sincerity in his voice kind of makes me do it – but his expression doesn’t contradict what he’s saying. He’s almost wincing, with one thumbnail caught between his teeth. As though he truly didn’t realise how he was coming across. He just said what he was feeling – in the exact way he does now, while I’m all naked and unprepared.

‘Guess it did, huh?’ He shakes his head. ‘Really didn’t mean it that way. Just never revealed stuff like that before … kind of felt like I was talking about someone else’s life. But nope – that’s me. The guy who ran to a hospital wearing a cardboard box.’

He sounds rueful, now, and it makes me wonder: was he really aiming his amusement at the whole idea of sexual healing? Or was he laughing at himself, for being such a fool?

‘But enough about me. What about you? What made you fake being a sex addict?’

Shame, I think, but I can’t say that.

So it shocks me when he does it instead.

‘You embarrassed about how you really are?’

‘No.’

Yes.

‘You don’t have to be – there’s no crime in being a little shy. Is that why you went there in the first place? To maybe get you out of your own shell for a while?’

For a second I’m too stunned to speak. How does he get something like that? It isn’t even the actual reason, and yet somehow it feels more real than anything I tell him next. I make my voice strong and firm, and I go with the party line. But inside I’m still that fumbling fool who couldn’t even hug a man properly.

‘I’m doing research for the book,’ I say, and he buys it. Why wouldn’t he? I bought it, and I’m the one living this life. I believed it right up until the moment he called me out, and if possible I’m going to keep doing so.

I’m not timid and tentative and unable to look him in the eye.

I’m Kit Connor, sultry sex bomb. Who flushes red when he says:

‘A dirty book?’

‘Yes.’

‘About insane braggarts like me?’

‘No,’ I say, but there’s another version of that answer in my head.

Yes. Yes. I could devote an entire book to you. I could tell tales of your eyes for ever, and never stop writing lines about the laundry-sweet scent of your amazing skin. You, Dillon Holt, are all the things I’ve always wanted as inspiration, and never quite found in anything but fantasy land.

Thank God I don’t go with it. My head sounds like a drooling moron.

‘You’ve gone all quiet.’

Because I’m busy being mortified over things I didn’t actually say aloud. That’s how big my capacity for embarrassment is: I go all red over non-existent gushing about hot guys.

‘I’m just thinking.’

‘About what?’

Oh, now I’m in trouble. Why did I lead him down this path? Now I’ve got to come up with an actual reason for my sudden lapse into silence.

‘About why you were really there. You know, if it wasn’t about you being an insane braggart. Which I don’t believe it was, by the way.’

There. Perfect.

Or it would have been, if he didn’t take my words as his cue to start walking backwards right in front of me. Now I’m all boxed in, and even worse – I have to look at his gorgeous face, while I attempt to lie. This just isn’t going to go well for me. Everywhere I look, there’s more of him. He’s kind of hunching his shoulders against the cold, and they’re still taking up my entire world.

And now he’s saying things. Revealing, warm sorts of things.

‘I guess I just wanted to find out why I feel this way.’

Oh, Lord. He’s talking about feelings. He’s looking at me with those eyes and talking about feelings. Shouldn’t a guy like him be mashing a beer can to his head while mooning the Prime Minister? I’m sure that should be his MO.

But apparently it’s not.

‘And how do you feel?’ I ask, still expecting something stupid. I feel like lighting my own farts, he’ll say, and then he’ll snort and probably run off to find some guy to punch. I’ll see him on an episode of Street Cops two months from now, and never regret jumping over a hedge to escape him.

Though all of that nonsense just makes it more of a shock when he answers:

‘Empty.’

Man, does he ever have a way with his single words. That whispered ‘Faker’ made my pulse race; now my heart sinks all the way through my body and right out onto the street. I can’t speak for the longest time, and when I finally do it’s not about anything useful. It’s all general and blasé, despite the very specific echo I’ve got inside of me.

‘Hate to break it to you, but I think everyone feels that way,’ I say, while the echo tells the truth: Especially me, it says. I’m so hollow you could fill me with helium and float me up to Mars.

Which is a depressing thought, when you really think about it. I’m almost glad when he flicks the switch from serious to silly again – despite the topic he raises.

‘Even fakers?’

‘Are you seriously bringing that up again? I just wanted to … learn about sex things. I just wanted to make my work more … real.’

He nods, sagely.

‘Ah, yes. Sex things. I believe that is the technical term.’

‘Shut up,’ I say, and come dangerously close to batting him playfully when I do.

‘Why, when we’re so close to a breakthrough, professor? I really wanted to discuss my pee-pee and your yoohoo.’

I give him a withering look.

‘I don’t call them that.’

‘Are you sure? Maybe you can’t say “vagina” either.’

‘I can absolutely say … that word.’

He hoots with laughter to hear me evade it, but there’s nothing I can do. Somehow the word just won’t come out in his presence, no matter how much I want to prove him wrong.

‘Yeah, it definitely seems that way.’

‘Hey – I’m trying to write a book. Not talk dirty to you.’

‘Does the book have a vagina in it?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well … maybe I don’t exactly call it that. I mean, it’s not a particularly sexy word.’

I realise a second too late that it’s the wrong thing to say. I’ve added a Y to the end of sex, and now my writing is no longer the biology textbook I know he was thinking about. He called me Professor, and talked about technical terms – but I’ve lost all that now.

‘Oh-ho-ho,’ he says, as my dignity disappears down the drain. ‘So I guess it’s not just a dry treatise on the benefits of having one?’

Is it weird that I like him using the word ‘treatise’? Because I totally do. I like how heavy and solid he seems, while all of this too-fast talk rattles out of his mouth. I can’t even keep up with most of it, despite the immense effort I’m putting in.

‘Having one of what?’

See? That’s real effort, there. I’m terrified of the answer, but I’m still asking the question.

‘A vagina. Were you really that mystified there, or are you actually not sure?’

‘Sure about what?’

Goddamn, he needs to finish his sentences.

‘About the benefits of having a vagina.’

‘Look – I know the benefits, OK?’

I totally don’t. Currently it feels like an angry animal that wants to eat him, between my legs. That can’t be a benefit, can it?

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because I can help you out in that area, if you were a little shaky on the many and varied advantages to having a yoohoo.’

He’s like a used-car salesman. Who sells lady bits.

‘I don’t need your help anywhere near my area, thanks.’

‘Ooh, baby, stop, that almost sounded like a proposition.’

‘What? It did not.’

‘You’re getting me so hot, I swear.’

Of course, I realise here that he’s teasing me. So it’s quite alarming to feel a kick somewhere lowdown, in that long-dormant area between my legs. He just fakes excitement, and apparently I go nuts. The angry beast rears its head, and starts searching for manflesh.

‘I didn’t … I didn’t even say anything, I –’

‘I’m just messing with you, Kitty-cat. When I said “area”, I meant the book. I meant I could help you with your book.’

Is he being serious now? It’s so hard to tell with those madly expressive eyebrows of his. And that mouth – it’s always twisted into the cheekiest little smirk. He’d never be able to deliver someone’s eulogy. Everyone would think he was amused by some guy’s tragic death.

‘I really don’t need help.’

Only I do, oh, God, I do, I know I do. I couldn’t say ‘vagina’ in front of someone so handsome, and now I’ve just shooed him away from my ‘area’. He didn’t even mean ‘area’ in that manner. He meant something else, and my nineteenth-century brain just got itself all into a tizz. I’m still in a tizz right at this moment. My heart is thumping and thumping, as though we just wrestled for the world heavyweight title.

In fact, it feels like we really did wrestle for the world heavyweight title. I’m all sweaty and prickly, and my face won’t go a normal colour no matter how hard I try.

And then it occurs to me, in a scary rush: is this what flirting is? No, God, no – it can’t be. This isn’t flirting. Flirting should feel light and breezy, like a Cary Grant film about fast-talking news reporters. I should be jauntily walking away now, while he shakes his head ruefully. That darned Kit!

Oh, how I wish I could be that darned Kit.

Instead of someone he gets to say this to:

‘I think you need help.’

‘Yeah? With what?’

I don’t know why I keep asking these questions. It just leaves me so open.

‘Sex.’

This is definitely flirting. I’ve no idea why it has to feel so nightmarish, however. He says one word, and bombs go off inside my body. I don’t even know how he does it. He just opens his mouth, and previously innocuous terms become so sinful. So alien and the opposite of everything they were before. Martin McAllister once said ‘sex’ to me, and I think I answered, ‘If we must.’

But when Dillon says it, the word just slides out of his mouth, ripe with the promise of a million things I’ve never known. Yes, I think. Do sex to me.

And then I’m just mortified over something I didn’t say all over again. This guy … this guy is never going to do sex to me. He’d probably sooner fuck a postbox, and here I am mooning over him like a teenager with a crush.

It’s awful. It makes me say things like this:

‘Because you’re such an expert in the field.’

Just to make certain he doesn’t cotton on. Sarcasm is bound to make it seem like I don’t fancy him, surely? Guys usually hate it when I say things like that to them.

So why doesn’t he hate it? He’s not normal.

‘I know more than you. I bet you’re not even sure how it starts out,’ he says, in a manner that’s just as warm and friendly as it was before. I think my sarcasm just bounces right off him – probably because of his immense chest.

‘I do so.’

‘Show me then.’

‘Show you what?’

‘Show me how you start things up.’

This is a trap, and I absolutely know it. But I also know that I no longer care.

‘Well, I’d probably … I’d probably … look deeply into … someone’s eyes.’

He chuffs and rolls his own, as though he really is my teacher, trying to give me a lesson. Could do better, that expression says, and then he corrects me.

‘That’s not how you get things going. Here – it’s like this. First, I slide a hand around your waist,’ he says, which sounds so innocent on its own. He could be teaching me a dance step, in a class full of cookies and kids and marshmallows … if it were not for the actual hand that he slides around my waist.

This isn’t just a tutorial. He’s going for a full-blown demonstration, with things like fingers on my hips, and ohhhh his touch is so warm and firm and good and fuck fuck fuck. Why didn’t I stop this when he first started talking? I’m like Admiral Ackbar, yelling ‘It’s a trap!’ two hours too late.

‘And then, while you’re busy staring at my hand like it sprouted out of my forehead, I just … leee-ee-eeaan down …’

Oh, my God, he’s actually leaning down. No, he’s really really leaning down – like the way people do when they’re going to kiss someone. And no matter how much I bend my back, I can’t quite get away from him. I’d have to be a championship limbo artist to evade his face and his mouth and are his eyes actually closing?

They are.

‘Dillon,’ I say, then again with more panic and less ability to breathe, ‘Dillon, Dillon, don’t lean down. Don’t, don’t – stop leaning, stop leaning, please for the love of God stop leaning in, are you leaning in, oh no!’

Yes. I actually use the phrase ‘oh no’.

My deepest apologies to my vagina, who expected a kiss, and instead gets this:

‘How do you make leaning sound like a dirty word?’

‘It’s a gift,’ I say, and I must applaud myself for doing so. The sentence comes out so bright and chipper, even though I’m delivering it three inches from his glorious mouth. In fact, this entire conversation is now happening with me dipped down in his arms, like the dance partner I almost was.

‘It really is,’ he says, while I try not to enjoy the feel of his hand in the middle of my back. Or the heat of his breath against my lips. Or the hint of his body pressed against mine. ‘I think you actually gave it an extra syllable.’

‘Can you let me up now?’

‘Do you really want to be up?’

I hate the way he asks me. It makes it almost impossible to say yes – though I do my damnedest to. I make my mouth move, and some sounds come out. If you turn your head on one side, they could almost be an affirmative.

Plus, I do actually push against him.

If pushing means flapping my hands ineffectually against the solid mass of his stupidly big body. It’s really not a surprise when he eventually laughs and lets me go.

‘All right, all right,’ he says – probably because I was making a noise like a child who’s got stuck. He even spreads his hands apart in a gesture designed to soothe, while I attempt to straighten my clothes.

Of course, my clothes don’t actually need straightening. It’s not like he yanked my shirt over my head and then gave me a wedgie. It just sort of feels that way. It feels like I have to do something to put myself back together – I need time to think and process, before he says anything else.

Without it, I’m likely to say yes to anything.

‘I tell you what.’

Like this. I’m going to say yes to this. I can feel it.

‘You really want help with your book?’

No. No, I definitely don’t. And no amount of sweeping me off my feet is going to change that. I don’t care how handsome you are, or how much I internally swooned when you dipped me. That was just the logical reaction to something I’ve never experienced before. You caught me off guard by being different to every other guy I’ve ever known.

Have mercy. Please have mercy.

‘I live at 453 Maitland Avenue, apartment 6C. Come by tomorrow, and we’ll talk.’ He nods, satisfied. ‘Yeah. I think we could have a great, loooong talk.’

And what do I say?

I say OK.