Читать книгу Exposure - Various, Glenda Jackson - Страница 6

The first time I watch, I don’t mean to. It’s an accident, like reading a letter that’s not intended for you or going down a road you weren’t supposed to. I’m going down this road, and, though it’s clearly marked watching your flatmate masturbate, I don’t turn around and walk the other way.

I stay like this instead. Poised in his closet, the laundry mistake still in my hand. Everything in me saying leave leave leave, despite one very real and very unavoidable problem.

It’s too late, now.

It was too late thirty seconds ago. Too late after ten. The moment I stepped into his closet and searched for a place to put his T-shirt, my time was up. Because, apparently, Drew isn’t the sort to wait around for a while before taking all of his clothes off.

He takes them off the minute his bedroom door is shut. And, when I turn around, that’s the first thing I see through the slats in the closet door: my cool, collected, unfathomable flatmate Drew, without anything on.

Though, really, I know that’s not the right way to put it. Without anything on is the manner in which people describe their elderly relatives, just before they help them into the bathtub. It’s almost a joke punchline; it’s without a hint of anything sexual.

Whereas this thing in front of me – this thing I can see so clearly in spite of the stripes of wood over this bit or that – it’s so … fleshy. It’s so real somehow, as though all the other naked bodies I’ve seen in my short life were fakes.

This is what a naked body should be like. This thing, with its broad back and its curving thighs. Even the tiniest detail calls to me, on a man like him – the way his collarbone stands out so heavily against the honey-coloured skin, like dinosaur bones beneath the earth. The way his biceps curve outwards almost delicately, when he reaches up to rub some spot on the nape of his neck.

Though maybe delicate is the wrong word. There’s nothing delicate about him. It’s just the way his skin looks there, drawn taut over the thick muscle beneath. And he’s so pale in places like those, too – on the insides of his arms and below the line where his jeans once rode.

Then down, down, to the thing I absolutely should not be looking at. The one that didn’t really exist for me until right now, as though prior to this I thought of him like a Ken doll. Smooth, and completely featureless between his legs.

Instead of how he actually is.

There’s nothing about him that I’d call featureless. I’m not even sure I’d call it smooth either, because I can see the thick ridge around the head of his cock, beneath the skin. I can see the veins that rope his shaft, so obviously more pronounced than they were a second ago.

He’s getting hard, I realise, though God knows why. He’s just sat there, on the edge of his neat bed, hands sort of loose on his bollard-like knees. He isn’t touching himself or flicking through a skin mag or any of the things I seem to associate with male arousal, so it’s understandable when fear suddenly grips me.

He knows you’re there, this fear whispers. He knows you’re watching, and he likes it