Deep Desires (8 page)

‘Say it again,’ I tell him, and he laughs and asks me if I’m really masturbating to the sound of his voice. As though it’s crazy to get off on that sultry, smoky sound.

Christ, even his English is sexy, and I tell him so.

‘No matter what language you’re using your voice drives me crazy.’

‘Really? I always thought I sounded cold.’

‘No.’

‘Mechanical.’

‘Oh God, oh God … keep talking.’

He laughs, a sound I’m getting used to hearing.

‘Now you’re just teasing me,’ he says, and I wish I could tell him I was. But he got me worked up with the poetry and now he’s being all amused and surprised … what does he want me to do? I’m still wet from the ham salad sandwich discussion we had the other day.

He likes sliced cucumber. I do not.

I get turned on over conversations about food.

Whereas he …

‘Are you really touching yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve just got my hand a little way inside my panties. Just rubbing over the lips, there. They’re all slippery already, hearing you talk,’ I say, because he doesn’t really have to persuade me anymore. There’s no moment when I pause, nervous and afraid of what he’ll think.

He’s so withdrawn that I just need him to know before he pulls away any further. I want to go to him, for all the ways he can’t come to me – and then he does, he does.

‘I’ve got my hand on myself, too,’ he says, while I thrill over this small victory. Usually it’s all me:
what am I doing, what do I want to do
? It’s almost a novelty to have to switch it around on a man. Put the focus back on him, and wait for him to share.

In fact, it’s more than a novelty, more than a thrill.

It’s a huge fucking turn-on.

‘You have?’

‘I always do when I talk to you.’

‘Oh that’s good. Tell me how it feels,’ I say, because, hey, I learned from the best. If he can coax it out of me, I can coax it out of him.

‘Ready to burst. Hard enough to ache.’

‘But you’re not stroking yourself?’

‘Not yet. I like to wait.’

‘Until what?’ I ask, though I think I know what he’s going to say. He’s both unreadable and utterly easy, at the same time – like he really is a half of me. Sometimes I’m so certain what I’m going to do, and other times my will likes to turn on me, needle me, make me do things I didn’t know I wanted.

Is this what he wanted to do?

‘Until I hear you coming, too. You like the sound of my voice when I talk, I like the sound of yours when you come – those moans you make, the sense of abandonment. It’s like a promise of something I could do if I really wanted to.’

‘You could moan for me like that?’

‘Is that what you want?’ he asks, but, ohhhh, that’s a dangerous question to pose. He’s got to know what the answer is by now, because I’m sure I’ve said it to him a dozen times. We took a bath in our respective tubs together the other day, and I said it to him then. I said it to him as he urged me to use the spray from the shower head on my eager clit, and I said it to him again after he sent me a rather hard and thick sort of gift.

The one I grab now, in lieu of the one thing he won’t give me.

‘I want you to fuck me. I want to feel you inside me,’ I say, just as I slide his perfect present through my slick folds. It’s carved wood – just like the box – so of course the whorls and curves feel just incredible against my clit.

But there’s only one thing I really have in mind.

‘You know I want that too.’

‘How much?’

‘So much that I’m picturing it now, as I slide my hand over my cock. I’m so stiff and swollen I’m sure I’d hurt you. I’d have to lick that sweet pussy first.’

‘God, Ivan. Oh God, yeah, fill me with that big dick.’

‘Work you open with my fingers, get you nice and wet. Are you wet for me now?’

‘I’m so wet I can just take that gift you sent me … Oh yeah, feels so good sliding inside me. Is that what you’d feel like? It’s so hard and thick.’

‘You know what I’d feel like. You’ve seen me.’

‘Yeah. Ohhh yeah, you’re so big.’

‘Is that good? Is that good going in? Fuck yourself with it, baby. I want to hear you come on that thing. I want to hear you take it and take it.’

‘I am, I am. I’m fucking myself so hard. Just the way I want you to.’

‘You want me to get you on your hands and knees?’

‘Fuck, yes.’

‘You want me to pound into you, make you come, make you scream?’

‘Please. Just come to me, come to me,’ I say, but he won’t give in. He tells me things he knows I want to hear instead – like how hard he’s jerking himself and how close he is to coming.
I’m gonna spurt all over myself
, he tells me, in such a filthy, half-groaning tone of voice that it couldn’t be more obvious what he’s trying to do.

‘I know you’re trying to change the subject,’ I say, and now his groans are more frustrated – with himself, or otherwise.

‘Really? I thought it was called
having an orgasm
. I guess my English has slipped since meeting you.’

‘You’re not going to have an orgasm. You never come this fast.’

‘Maybe it’s the thought of fucking you.’

‘Why think when you can have the real thing? I’m so ready, so hot and wet and tight. Don’t you want to feel that? Don’t you want to feel me around you?’

He moans, then, and contrary to what I’ve just said I can hear him going over. He always makes the same sound when he does – rough and guttural, not quite in control of himself. And I can hear how frantic he’s being, how hard he’s fucking himself.

He likes a tight hand on his cock, I know, and when he’s climaxing it’s almost as though he’s punishing himself. He’s punishing himself for wanting this, the way Sid used to punish me – which is when I realise. It’s not an invisible hand he’s got, hovering over him. It’s his own hand. It’s his own hand, holding him back.

And when it slackens, just a little, oh, it’s like the sun coming out in the middle of winter. It’s the first time I’ve ever orgasmed to words that are barely sexy at all.

‘Tomorrow, I promise,’ he says, and in answer I come, and come, and come.

He’s a liar, though. He’s a filthy liar, leading me on. I thought he meant that tomorrow would bring him, at my door. But instead there’s another gift, which I can’t quite bring myself to like. I can’t bring myself to like it until I open it, and after I have I feel bad for ever doubting him. How could I have thought he wouldn’t keep his promise? He’s done nothing but be absolutely and intensely honest with me about everything, from how hot he likes his baths to what brand of mayonnaise he likes on his sandwiches.

And if there’s one big thing he’s kind of holding back, well, that’s OK. At least he gives me his word, and holds to that. He holds to it after half an hour of mystery and me wondering what on earth this thing is.

It’s a box like before. This one is smooth, corner-less, white, though I get the impression he made this one too, somehow. He melted it and moulded it until he came up with something just as initially frustrating, and just as magical when I finally understand.

It’s not as obvious as the toy he sent me, in one way, because with that I knew what he wanted me to do. I knew he wanted me to wear it and walk around as though nothing was happening, my arousal a secret only I could know. But although the function of
this
item is clear, the meaning is not.

It’s just a blindfold. What does a blindfold have to do with his promise? He didn’t say,
Tomorrow, I’ll send you something to cover your eyes
. He said,
Tomorrow I’ll be with you
. I mean, that was what he meant, wasn’t it? I’ve spent all day in that wretched store, wriggling on the spot, in anticipation of what might be waiting for me.

This just doesn’t seem right at all.

And then I see the key. I see the note, in his curlicue handwriting, like Cyrillic script without the Russian.

Let yourself in. Wear my gift. Wait for me
.

I can only come to one conclusion. And the conclusion turns me into a giddy, trembling wreck. My heart tries to escape out of my chest, then settles down, then goes for the exit all over again. For five long minutes, I don’t know what to do with myself, and it doesn’t get any better when I reread the note and fully consider what it means.

He wants me to go to his apartment. He wants me to go
inside
his apartment – maybe when he’s not there. After all, he’s left me a key. That implies he won’t be around when I let myself in to what has now become a mystical cave of wonders in my head.

I’ll get to see the table, and the carpet that I vaguely remember as a kind of rough green pile. There’s a kitchen just off his bedroom-slash-living-room, and now I’ll get to do more than just kind of see it from afar on a crackling video tape. I’ll get to explore it, as though somehow it’s going to be way, way different to mine.

Even though I know it won’t be. Everything’s the same in The Courtyard.

It just doesn’t feel it when it’s him.

That’s why I’m shaking, before I’ve even gotten to his door. I’ve got the gift clutched in my hand, half of me unsure of what the instructions were now. Did he say wear it first, and then go in? And, if he did, how on earth am I supposed to fit the key in the lock? I’ll still be stood here when he returns, hands fondling all over the goddamn door for the keyhole.

Which decides it for me. I have to go in, and
then
wear this strip of red lace, despite how achingly intrusive that seems. It’s like breaking the seal on an airtight bag. I open the door and almost hear something hissing or shushing, and then the undisturbed air of his apartment rushes against my face.

Everything is so still, inside. So quiet. And I was right, too, to imagine his apartment would be different, because somehow it is. Things look more polished in here than they do in mine. The walls almost have a reflective surface; the fixtures and fittings are so smooth and modern. My lights are held up by these old crooked brass sorts of things; his look near futuristic.

The kitchen’s the same, too. I hardly dare to go in it, but, once I’m sure he’s not here, I take a little step through the door. I take in the white and black checked flooring, which puts my own peeling linoleum to shame. The double-wide refrigerator, steel grey and shining, and the sink to match.

In fact, everything matches. Everything is neat and ordered and perfect. The bank of computers he’s got against one wall hum in this low, comforting sort of way, as though to say they’ll always be there and always be working, because Ivan takes such good care of them. He takes care of the single plant he’s got, of the clothes that hang in his closet, just like I thought. And lastly, the thing my eyes want to settle on after everything else has been thoroughly examined:

His bed.

It shouldn’t look inviting, but it does. Those crisp cool sheets, pulled hotel-room taut. The neat fold-down he’s done, as though this really is the Hilton instead of his home. Even the pillows are somehow wrinkle free, plumped and smoothed to perfection.

I don’t know whether to be unnerved, or oddly thrilled. I’ve never seen a man do this sort of thing for himself. I didn’t know a man was capable of living like this, unless he’d ordered and bullied and beat a woman until she did it for him.

But not Ivan. He’s got his own demons driving him to this, and that thought takes away any pleasure I found in his care and precision. He doesn’t delight in this, I’m sure. He’s just waiting to stop, he’s wanting to stop, and maybe this is what I am to him.

I’m messing things up.

His choice of someone like me says it all, really – my big, crazy hair and my sloppy clothes and my eating of things with my fingers. The other day he asked me to describe my bed to him, and when I told him –
like a shipwreck, like a bomb’s hit it, like I’ve been fucked for five days in the sheets
– he sighed this contented sigh and asked me to tell him again.

It hadn’t made much sense at the time, but I think it does now.

The very thing Sid hated about me, Ivan craves. He wants disorder in his strictly ordered life, and I can give that to him. I can. But first I’ve got to sit on the edge of his bed with this blindfold on, and that’s a much taller order than I thought it would be.

The material’s heavier than it had seemed in the box, once I’ve tied it around my head. I can’t even open my eyes behind it, and for a long panicked moment I consider loosening the knot I’ve made. If I get it just right, I could possibly see through the red lace, just a little. After all, I could see my palms through the material when I held it in my hands. It’s not dense and impenetrable.

But somehow I don’t. I leave the blindfold as it is, and try my best to be patient. To be calm. He’ll come in and everything will be fine, because I trust him. I do.

So why do I freeze when I hear him walk into the room? Hell, I freeze when I hear his door go, though after a moment I understand why. It’s not really because of him at all. It’s because of the sudden and sharp idea that comes to me while listening blindly for the turn of the doorknob, the sound of the door shutting, the heavy thud thud of someone’s shoes on the carpet.