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.
Chapter Four
His apartment isn’t really an apartment at all. It’s more like a converted floor of a warehouse that didn’t actually get converted. The floors are that grey, untreated wood that you often see in seventeenth-century sweatshops, and he hasn’t bothered to make things like ‘rooms’. There’s a badly hung curtain between his bedroom and his rudimentary living area – and when I say rudimentary, I absolutely mean rudimentary.
Cavemen had more mod cons than this. He invites me to sit on a garden chair, and I’m actually grateful for that. Because the only other seat in this ‘living room’ is a crate that used to hold melons. His television is sat atop another television, which I’m assuming doesn’t work. Unless his attention span is so bad that channel changing just wasn’t cutting it any more. Maybe his remote control doesn’t move fast enough – who knows?
I don’t.
I’m too busy studying every bizarre detail of his mad home, so that I don’t have to look directly at him. Because when he answers the door, he doesn’t do it like a normal person. I can’t give him the bottle of wine I brought, and inquire after his mother.
It’s impossible to do those things, when your host is completely naked.
And all right, he’s not completely naked. He is, in fact, wearing a towel. But when I say wearing a towel, I mean it in the loosest sense of the term. He hasn’t even folded it around his body then made one of those nice little tucks at one corner.
He’s just kind of … holding it over his bits. And the hold itself is very tenuous. He’s practically doing it with his pinky finger, and the drape that’s causing is very narrow. Before I’ve had chance to stop myself, I’ve glanced down and seen just about everything he’s got. I can practically make out the insides of his thighs, which has to be some sort of optical illusion.
If I can see the insides of his thighs, I should be getting an eyeful of his cock – but thankfully I’m not. I’m just seeing everything else instead. The arrows of muscle either side of his groin, the hair that leads all the way down to there … and his tattoos, oh, God, his tattoos. They don’t end with the coils on his arms. He’s got a dragon crawling over his left side, like something leading the way to places I definitely want to go. Its open mouth is about a millimetre from his left pec, and that pec looks eight hundred times better than it did when he was clothed. His T-shirt lied: he isn’t just hunky.
He’s good enough to turn me into a drooling, gibbering mess. I’m thankful that he offers me a seat, because if he hadn’t I would have definitely ended up on the floor.
And I think he knows it. Of course he knows it. You can’t have a body like that and not know it. He just swaggers around with it all hanging out, and expects me to look.
But he’s not going to get me that easily. I sit on his garden chair with my knees together, staring straight ahead at the curtain with ducks on it. And no matter how many times he passes me by, waffling on about how he’s just going to get dressed and do I want a cup of coffee and so and so forth, I don’t turn my head.
I can see him in the periphery of my vision, all gleaming and slippery from the shower, skin like honey in the low light that’s slanting through his makeshift room partition, and I resist I resist I resist.
Until he turns and heads back to his bathroom, flashing his completely bare ass as he goes. I totally don’t know how to resist then. The glimpse of him is so shocking that I have to turn, to get the full impact – and it is an impact. His ass is like a meteor, smashing down on my defenceless body.
I’ve never seen another quite like it. It’s so round and firm and full. And it has these hollows on either side of the cheeks that flex and fill out every time he takes a step. For a second I’m actually hypnotised by them. I’m hanging off my chair trying to follow them, and then he disappears into the bathroom and I actually curse in frustration.
He definitely does it on purpose. I see his expression before he lets the door swing shut and it’s pure victory – though I don’t hate him as much as I should for that.
He’s victorious because I looked. He actually cares that I did.
Is it OK if I kind of like that?
‘So, uh … this book you’re writing …’ he calls through the door.
‘Yeah?’
‘What exactly do you think it’s missing?’
‘Realism,’ I say, but that’s not what I’m thinking. Passion, my mind whispers, and I know that’s true, too. There’s nothing I’ve ever put in a book, that’s half as good as you.
‘You think realism’s so important for a sexy book?’
‘I think that it’s hard to be excited, when you don’t really believe in something. When it seems unlikely that it would ever actually happen, in real life.’
‘And what kind of things do you think wouldn’t happen in real life?’ he asks, and I’m alarmed to find myself stumped. Was it the blindfolds and the talk of Masters that Lori didn’t buy? Or was it something else? When I look back on it now, the story seems so artificial. So full of things that I’ve never experienced.
But