Innocents (24 page)

I felt you watching me. Your eyes slid all over my back, down my spine, down my legs.

You shuffled uncomfortably.

An intense heat swelled in my stomach and under my nipples. I was perfectly in control of my body, perfectly aware of how I must look from where you stood. White shoulder-blades, delicate hollows, little dancing ripples of light and shade. I stood still as a flower.

I overpowered you in an instant. You crossed the floor and pressed yourself into my back, gripping my arms below the shoulders. I didn't move or respond, but stood passive, half-limpid.

I felt your erection, defenceless against my back, through the scratchy surface of your trousers. I swelled inside, feeling it.

Your fingers dug into the soft skin on my arms. I hoped you wouldn't spoil things by speaking. I didn't want to be reduced from nymph to raconteur. You caught your breath and I knew you were trying to frame questions: Where've you been? Who were you with?

But at that moment, at the zenith of my powers, I could silence you with a thought. I made the tiniest, most delicate movement. I shifted position, rested my weight on the other leg. It was a disdainful movement. It meant:
Oh, so you're going to keep holding me, are you?

This enchantment was impossible to resist. It brought you closer. It made you crush your chest into my back, link your hands around my chest, binding my arms to my sides. I could feel your anxiety in the unsmooth breath that blew over my neck, in the trembling of your knees and the white-knuckled tightness of your two hands.

I was the puppeteer and the puppet too. I slithered my hips from side to side, just gently, shifting my weight again. I turned my face further from you, tucking it into my chest. I let my hair fall between us like a curtain. Such a posture could have seemed frightened, vulnerable, but I infected it with slight, provocative boredom.

Your poor, powerless erection jumped and jolted. You made a little inarticulate noise of distress.

Every inch of my skin, every nerve of mine you touched, filled with blood and expanded. I saw your hands and they squeezed at me furiously, purple with the power of your grasp, but shaking from deep within, and with a desperate whiteness round the knuckles.

I couldn't titillate myself any longer. Turning, twisting round—but careful not to let you loosen your hold on me—I looked at your face. You were fierce, your brows all thundered together—but fierce like a boy who is frightened and embarrassed by his rage, a boy who cries when he is angry. You breathed between your teeth and seemed as usual to be trying to frame normal words, trying to think of some correct and proper sentence to set things right.

My heart beat faster. All my body seemed anaesthetised and swollen, fuzzily. You made some noise like ‘Jhhh!’ and seemed to be pleading, while you duelled. Your top buttons were undone. There was a little fluffy something in your hair. Oh, you were ridiculous, my angel.

I struggled against you. It was sensuous and calculated. You held my hands up above my head and I twisted from side to side, my face framed between the insides of my arms. I felt my wrists turning inside your hands. It was invigorating, like a massage. All my muscles warmed and tingled, as though I had been exercising.

You were shaking. You bared your teeth, resolute.

And now you bore down on me, turned me round, holding me by the wrists so that my toes just barely swept over the floor. I swooned as soon as I felt the bed behind my knees. I just
fell
, and took you with me, so that I lay below and you lay above, still holding my hands in that desperate vice.

I felt my lips pulsing as though swollen. I knew how red they must be. I let them part, and regarded you through my parted lips and my big eyes.

You couldn't help but kiss me. I lay as though in a faint and because I didn't respond you had to kiss me harder. Because I didn't part my lips wide for you, you had to force them open.

It was pure energy, to have you invade me like that. It was like entering the ocean or a storm, and lying limp in the grip of the elements.

Through my eyelashes I glimpsed wonders: the curve of your arm above my face, all muscles standing stiff, the skin glowing damp. You still held one of my wrists, up above my head.

I moved my free hand close to the captured one. I rubbed my wrists together.

You stilled completely. I heard the air pass between your lips with a rush.

You said with false, dangerous calm, ‘Is that what you want?’

I lay mute beneath you, allowing your weight to squash the air out of my lungs.

Even then, you must have been willing me to say no, to scream, to end the game somehow. ‘
Is it
?’ you demanded.

I said nothing.

‘Right,’ you said. You were brisk and adamant.

Then you moved and lay half-off the bed, though still with your fingers circled round my wrist, and I saw you fumbling on the floor among my clothes for stockings.

Then you sat astride my midriff, your knees pinning my arms. ‘Right,’ you murmured to yourself.

Each breath I took only seemed to skim the surface of my lungs. There passed across your face the most exquisitely transparent parade of emotions. I seemed to see them all distinctly, one after another.

Your nose seemed aquiline, your eyes haughty, your expression superior, businesslike. You twisted the stockings into ropes, pulling them sharply, testing. That efficiency, that interest in details, was alien, mesmerising.

Then I saw you with the mane of your hair all ruffled up behind your head, and your face seemed shadowed and bestial. I could see flecks of spittle glistening on your teeth as you tied the knots around my wrists, securing them above my head and then attaching them to the bedhead with a short lead. You were like a great ape bending over me.

As you bent your head to undo your zip, your cheeks seemed round and soft. You were lost again to childhood, to vulnerability, to the great concentration required of tasks performed for the very first time.

Then as you reared up, as you dug your arms under my stomach and rolled me over, you avoided my eyes, looking instead in that instant at my breasts, and there was that naked, crippling lust in your face, in the tip of your tongue between your teeth, in the loud breaths you allowed in between your teeth.

But in that moment, as your fingers beneath my stomach became ten hard points aimed at my soft belly, I became really afraid. As I rolled and the room around me rolled and disappeared, I caught my breath, feeling like a stone that's been turned over.

I didn't struggle. Like the condemned prisoner who accepts the proffered blindfold, spurning the last glimpse of sunlight on the leaves, I turned my face into the counterpane.

I could smell my hair on the pillow. The strawberry shampoo I'd chosen for its chemical, teenage scent seemed gritty, grainy, like strawberry pith.

My back was cold, now, without the counterpane against it.

Your hands all over my back were hot and damp. They seemed like cheap sensations; just pressures on my nerves; nothing more.

Sweat seemed to float on me like oil on a choppy ocean. I felt your teeth on the soft skin under my ear; and they were sharp and small and there seemed to be crocodile's rows of them, nipping away. I tried to shrug you off, but you just went lower, biting at my spine like a mosquito, impossible to swat.

Then I began to feel the real terror of confinement, whiteblinded by the counterpane. I shifted uncomfortably, thinking perhaps I'd ask you to stop.

Your rough fingers under my legs drew them apart and I felt you sucking like some faceless thing—an oyster—at the ridge that divided my two holes.

‘Yuck,’ I whinged, with an angry little kick, like a child.

I expected you to respond to that. I expected you to ask if I was all right.

Then you were behind me, and I felt the knuckles of your curled fingers against my leg and I knew you were holding your cock and that's when I noticed that my wrists hurt. The stockings were too tight, I could sense a spreading blueness, a coldness, pins and needles, passing up the heel of my hand. I was pinned out like some amphibious creature about to be dissected.

Your fingers wormed around the edge of that hole, just tickling inside, and I was aware of a sudden urge to shit. Then you moved your hand away and I felt your fist around your cock against my arse and that's when I knew what you were going to do.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Don't do that!’

I felt the tip, all hot and surrounded by sudden stinging fissures.

‘I said don't do that!’ I wanted to shout it but that way I was tied meant I couldn't find the breath. The words came out shallow and panted. You might not even have been able to hear me, with my mouth muffled against the sheets

I kicked wildly, or tried to. I wormed and squirmed my body from side to side.

I was really panicking now.

‘Ow!’ I was close to tears. You weren't listening. I couldn't turn my head. I wanted to look at your face, to see how to make you stop.

You didn't move or retreat. Instead you grabbed me round the waist so that I couldn't move to frustrate your efforts. Your fingers on my hips were hard and grasping.

You must have felt me trying to get away. You must have seen my hands twisting frantically, scrabbling at the bindings. You must have noticed me kicking as hard as I could. But you didn't stop.

Desperation overwhelmed me. Surely you wouldn't really do it? Not
now
? Not when I'd made it clear I didn't want you to?

I tried to scream. But there wasn't the air—

You were inside.

I thought you were going to break some membrane. I thought my intestines would rupture. I thought my insides must have sprung endless tiny leaks. I swear I felt all the fluids of my body trickling out and running down my legs.

I felt horrible. I stopped trying to struggle. It only made it hurt more.

You pushed and pushed and your breathing through clenched teeth seemed as much a pushing action as the movement of your hips, in and out like waves but moving ever closer like the tide was coming in.

I can't describe how powerless I felt, how stupid and crushed and defeated, like a mouse in a concrete mixer. I wished I could crawl out of my body and leave it on the bed for you.

You were grunting behind me. The noises were just disgusting; you sounded like a chimpanzee, and there was this horrible, inhuman slapping noise as your belly rhythmically slammed into my back.

It felt revolting. It was the most invasive act imaginable. Those parts of my body hadn't even existed until now. I hadn't needed them for my act. I had never looked at them; not through your eyes, or through my own.

I couldn't even control my breathing. Your weight kept winding me every time you came down on me, and I had to breathe in big ragged gasps, gulping for air like a goldfish.

You drove harder, but I hardly cared. I screamed thinly, with the back of my throat, like an ageing, see-through banshee. It was like giving up my soul.

I abandoned myself to the whirlpool.

The waters began to conify and spiral, as you pressed into me harder and grunted gutturally. I spun with them, choking on the spray.

Your arms reached out, covering my own, clasping me too tightly round the elbows, as you strained into me. I began to disintegrate in the water, to become long and thin and twisted. I swelled up and all my parts distended.

You pushed more desperately, bracing your feet against the end of the bed. My limbs and my head all came unstuck from each other, and spun round in the whirlpool separately, long liquefied streaks of me making circles in the water.

You reached the end, and, with a desperate little grunt, you came.

By this time I was only a stain in the water, churning round and round, all mixed up and dissolved.

You stopped.

I heard you talking, as though to yourself: ‘Oh shit. Oh,
shit
.’

But I was nothing more than the white foam on the crests of little waves. I was gone.

*

What a consummate actress she was! Even torn in pieces, she remembered my lines.

Allowing my lower lip to tremble—a child betrayed—I said in the even tones of post-traumatic shock, ‘I, um. Shit.’ Shaking my head, bewildered. ‘I just … I didn't realise you were going to do that.’ My thin wrists were braceleted with red marks where the cords had bitten. I rubbed at them, dazed, abstracted, eyes unfocussed on the wall.

You stood naked, stupid, flaccid, the stockings hanging limp in your hands. For you, the shock was real. Your knuckles, gripping my white bindings, were white.

I closed my eyes. I had to shut you out. I didn't want to see any part of you: not even your shadow against the wall. I screwed them up so tightly that I saw red explosions against the blackness.

I ran into the bathroom, where I could look at the cool white surfaces instead of at you. I let you hear me slam the door, click the lock.

Then all pretences dropped away and I was violently sick in the sink.

I hurt, I hurt, I hurt. This was far worse than losing my virginity. It burned like fire, and it was embarrassing, too: perverse. Humiliating.

The pain bent me double. I crouched down on my haunches, an injured beast.

Ugly drops of cum plopped onto the ice-white tiles. These globules were tinged pink, I realised with dull horror, with my blood. They had brown bits of shit in them. I wanted to be dead.

There was acid in my mouth, on my tongue. I was afraid. I made animal keening noises in the back of my throat.

Crouched there, shivering, whimpering, under the towel rail, I was suddenly outside myself. I was a neighbour in a window, an actress on a movie screen, an anecdote overheard in a conversation between two strangers. My tears were bizarre, unnerving,
boring
: an unwelcome guest's unwelcome display of weakness. My situation seemed pathetic, my nakedness a needless melodrama.

There came a hammering on the door. ‘Are you all right?’ and a second later, loud with panic, ‘Baby!’

My silence wasn't artifice.