Chapter 10
I’m Not Very Pretty
Back at his apartment, Charles’s respect for his own rules is disintegrating.
“That’s definitely third base,” I pant.
“Your knickers are still on,” he says, continuing to lick and suck at the cotton. I’m spread on his bed, and he’s between my legs. He’s shirtless, but I’m down to my underwear.
And soon he’s nudging the fabric to one side with his nose, and his tongue is unambiguously touching my labia. I grip the mattress above my head as my knees lock and my abdomen convulses.
“Definitely, definitely third base,” I say again.
“Tell me to stop then,” he says, and with the very tips of his fingers he pulls the crotch of my panties entirely to the side. He puts his lips and tongue on my clit, and I clutch my legs around his head, lifting my pelvis to meet his touch. He moans against me and puts his hands at the tops of my thighs, his fingers gripping and pulling down my panties.
“Okay, we can make a deal,” I say, having no interest in stopping him. “Whatever time you spend at third base today is time you aren’t allowed third base tomorrow. How about that?”
“Deal,” he says, muffled by my vulva. When I look down, I find his eyes on me.
He loses about forty minutes this way, in which time we discover that how I like to be licked is steady, hard flicks of his tongue right on my clit. He does lots of other things too, many of them extremely pleasant, but when he does the steady, hard flicking, my arousal spikes instantly. He does not use this information to make me come right away, though. Oh no. He starts and stops, taking me to the edge and back three times before he finally lets me come in sharp, jabbing contractions, my thighs clutching around his ears.
All of this has been his answer to my question, “Are you slowing us down because you’re not that interested in sleeping with me but don’t want to tell me that?” We got home from the hike, and I asked the question because I couldn’t not ask. And so he took me to bed. And now I’m lying here, panting and glowing, still covered in mud to my knees from our hike, my underwear twisted and wet. He’s dirty and sweaty and wearing way too many clothes.
“That is my very favorite thing in the world,” he says, coming up to lie beside me afterward. He kisses me with a mouth that tastes like me, and I pull away, torn between pleasure and surprise.
“Really?” I ask. “That’s okay?”
“Very okay,” he says, and kisses me again, his tongue deep in my mouth. But then he stops and says, “Unless you don’t want to.”
“No, I like it. I just never thought, like . . .” I kiss him, sucking the taste of my own body from his lips, murmuring, “I like it.”
He says into my ear, “Are you sufficiently reassured of my desire for you?”
I turn to my side and kiss him, my tongue in his mouth. He tastes like me, and I love it. He slides his palm up my naked back as I slide my palm up his. Then I mutter, “Third base,” and start undoing his pants.
“Not until midnight,” he says, grabbing my fingers. He pulls my arms over my head, rolls on top of me, and pins my wrists to the bed.
“That’s so not fair! You just—”
“I cheated,” he says as he kisses my throat. “I’m a cheat and a liar and a heartless bastard who’ll make you come no matter what, even if it means double standards. What do you plan to do about it?”
What I do about it is say, “Ha!” and wrestle my wrist out of his grip and try to get my hands on his zipper again. He catches one hand again, and I rotate my wrists out of his fingers. I turn to my side and manage to pin one of his hands under my shoulder, so even when his free hand catches one of mine, I still have a hand free, and I undo his pants while he tugs at his arm, trying to get his hand back. We’re laughing as we wrestle, but I’m serious, too: he started us at third base early, and now I want my turn. He pulls his arm out from under me, but not before I’ve got his pants open, so even when he rolls on top of me and traps both of my arms over my head again, I can wrap my legs around his hips and use my feet at his waistband to start pulling down his pants and his boxers.
He counters with an, “Oh, you sneaky,” and rolling onto his back, me over top of him, and pinning my arms behind me, at my hips.
“Well then,” he pants, smiling. “What’s your plan now, Coffey?”
My own smile fades, and I kiss him, rolling my hips against his. All that’s between our two bodies is the thin cotton of our underwear—and mine’s still tangled and halfway off. Charles keeps my arms trapped behind me, but he lets me move against him, lets me rub myself along the length of his erection. I move my lips to his throat and determinedly suck bruises into his skin.
“Jesus,” he breathes, and I laugh, even as I press my clitoris against him. He makes an unghf noise and grips my wrists behind my back with one hand while he uses his other hand to feel my ass moving over him. His fingers grip into my butt cheek, tugging me wide open. I struggle to pull my arms free so I can touch him, his face, his shoulders, his chest, but he keeps me trapped. And somehow not being able to do what I want to do just arouses me more, as if the wanting is itself the most powerful pleasure.
“Charles,” I whimper into his throat, still rocking my pelvis against his, still struggling with my arms. Would he let me go if I asked? I feel sure he would. So I don’t ask. “Why do I want to come again so soon? How are you doing this to me?”
I feel the sound he makes in his throat, against my lips. The vibration travels all through me and I start to come, pressing my body hard against his. With my arms still pinned together, I rub myself against him, and he searches out my mouth and kisses me hard, pushing back against me, his cock throbbing noticeably. He comes, saturating both his boxers and my panties with semen.
“We’ve got to get out of the flat,” he huffs, as I laugh in glorious self-satisfaction. And then, not pausing, he rolls me back to the mattress and puts his face between my legs, licking and sucking and even biting at the soaked cotton of my underwear. I’m still pulsing with residual throbs of orgasm, laughing with the quiet delight of making him come.
“Take them off,” I whimper. “Just take them off.” I push at them myself, but Charles comes up next to me and grips his hands into the fabric, tugging upward instead of downward.
“Why do you get to break the rules?” I complain as he pulls the fabric side to side against my vulva.
“Because I’m bigger than you,” he says. “And I have better behavioral inhibition.”
“But I don’t even want to control myself!” And I’m not. I’m rolling my body against the pressure he has created with my panties.
“Which is why I can break the rules. You let me. I don’t let you.”
“But why don’t you let me?”
“Because look at you. Just look at you. Why would I want anything but to make you come any way I can find?” He kisses and licks my breasts, still pulling and tugging the crotch of my panties. “Tell me what you want to do,” he says through the kisses, “and I’ll consider it.”
“I want to go down on you,” I squeak. “I want your cock in my mouth.” I can say one sentence at a time, the tension in my body is growing. His mouth on my breasts, and the rhythmic pull on my panties are shortening my breath, filling me up. “I want you to lick me while I suck your cock.... I want to straddle you and . . . put your cock inside me and fuck you while you . . . while you spread my ass cheeks with your hands. I want . . . oh my god, Charles, I want . . . Oh god, I want . . . Please I want . . .” I come again, unable to tell him what I want, apart from the compulsive chanting of “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck” with each throb as he bites my nipples.
When my body relaxes against him, he kisses me so, so, so, so sweetly and says, “You’ll have all those things, my termagant. All you need do is wait.”
“I don’t want to wait, fuck me right now.”
“No, sweetheart.”
I groan and put my forehead on his chest. “Then we need to get out of here.”
Instead of getting out of here, we shower—separately (“No, if I get in there with you, I’ll just fuck you.” “I know! Please?” “Behave”) —I put on lots of clothes, and we have Chinese food delivered. The plan is to watch a movie, but I need us to have a reckoning first. Sitting at the opposite end of the couch from Charles, through a mouthful of crab Rangoon I say, “Tell me again why we’re going around the bases.”
“Is that your circumspect way of asking why I’m putting you off?”
“Yes.”
He stabs his chopsticks into his food. “How do I explain it?” he says. He thinks as he chews his chicken and broccoli. When he swallows he says, “I did have every intention of shagging you blind last night. But then you told me how little experience you had, and I . . . I couldn’t just toss you onto my bed and give you one. I . . . It’s rather difficult to explain, I suppose.”
“Well, I need you to explain it,” I insist somewhat peevishly. “Because right now when you say no, when you put me off, it makes me worry you’re not really interested in me.”
He laughs a little and shakes his head at his chicken. “If my relentless pawing and my inveterate rule breaking are not enough to persuade you that I am, as you so delicately understate it, ‘interested’ in you, I hardly know what would be enough. Look . . .” But then he stops and pokes at his food again.
“What?” I prod.
He hesitates, but at last, his eyes still on his plate, he says, “Years from now—maybe months from now—after you have more experience, you’ll look back on this with a different perspective. And if you were just a girl I picked up somewhere, it wouldn’t matter, I suppose. But you’re you. I like you. I want us to be friends after you leave, and so I want you to feel, months from now, years from now, that I . . . well, to feel that I set a high standard.”
He looks up at me, a crooked grin on his face, and adds, “If that sounds too condescending, let me admit that partly, too, it’s simply ego. I want to compare favorably to your future partners.”
“So”—I tilt my head, trying to understand—“we’re going around the bases now because you think that in the future I’ll be glad we did, even though right now I find it dissatisfying and anxiety-inducing?”
He frowns, looking back at his chicken. “Obviously, I’d rather you didn’t find it dissatisfying and anxiety-inducing, and if there is something I can do about that, I shall do it gladly, but yes. That’s the idea.”
“Oh.” I pause, thinking as I trade the tray of crab Rangoon for the carton of chicken mei fun. At last I say, “When you say I can’t do things to you, and when you won’t do things I ask for, then I think . . . you don’t so much like me, like, in the sexy way.”
“I see.” He nods and chews. “So the problem seems to be that I’m slowing us down to protect my ego at the cost of yours.”
“Is it my ego that your saying no to me makes me feel rejected?” I think I’m managing to keep my pouting on the inside, but I’m not sure.
“Is it mine that I want your good opinion in the future?” he challenges. “Think about it this way: I like you so much as a friend that I’m willing to delay slightly the glory of being with you ‘in the sexy way’ in order to make sure that when the sex ends, the friend is still there.”
“But—”
“Repeat what I just said back to me,” he says in his teacher voice.
“You’re delaying because that’s how you think we’re most likely still to be friends after I leave Indiana.”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” I pause and think. “So it has nothing to do with not being attracted to me?”
“On the contrary.”
“And you do actually want to have sex with me?”
He raises an eyebrow and smiles in the direction of his plate. “Annie, the only thing I want more than your body is your friendship.”
“I’m not very pretty,” I say with sudden, stupid tears in my eyes.
Now he looks at me. “Are you joking?”
“No.”
“You can’t be serious.” He looks genuinely puzzled.
“Of course I’m serious. I mean, it’s fine, it’s okay, I’m lucky in a lot of ways, and I’m not saying I’m, like, a hideous freak or anything. I’m just not what guys are attracted to. Like, no breasts and a weird face.” I stop and battle valiantly against tears, but a few of them escape. “I’m not being self-critical. I’m going by the evidence. Not many guys have been attracted to me, so I can only conclude it’s because I’m not actually all that attractive. I mean, it took you a year to notice me.”
“You were a student in my lab; the fact that I did notice you is what’s compelling in that story, not that it didn’t happen the first year.”
I wipe my eyes with the heels of my palms and say, “I’m being so stupid. It’s just . . . I want to be liked in the sexy way, and hardly anyone ever has. I mean, there was that guy in my sophomore year, but he, like, only liked me in the sexy way. I guess you’re the first guy who likes me both ways, maybe, and it’s weird. I don’t know how to . . . It’s just a lot of feelings all at the same time.”
Charles puts his food on the coffee table. “When I was a student, I would have avoided you like the plague.”
“That’s great, Charles, thanks. I feel better.” I sniff and laugh.
He moves closer to me on the couch, puts a hand on my foot, and looks at me. “Because you’d have been wildly out of my league. Brilliant, funny, gorgeous, sweet as hell, so completely sane, emotionally generous. You’d have terrified me.”
“I’m terrifying?”
He withdraws a little. “To the unworthy.”
“I don’t want to be terrifying.”
“Then only spend time with those who are worthy of you.”
“I think you might be trying to give me a compliment, but it’s a pretty conditional one.”
“I’m saying you’re a powerhouse, and not everyone is comfortable around that. Look, if you actually believe, against all evidence, that there’s anything about you that falls short of perfect desirability, there’s nothing I can do that will convince you otherwise.”
“You could fuck me tonight.”
His eyes search mine. “Would that work? Would having intercourse now instead of thirty hours from now convince you that you are what I see when I look at you? Stunning? Warmhearted? Disturbingly intelligent? Is that all it would take? If I put my penis in your vagina now, rather than waiting another day, you’d feel certain, from tonight on, for the rest of your life, that any man who doesn’t fall to his knees before you is a fool and a criminal? Because if it will, I’ll do it. Frankly, I had no idea my cock had magical powers, but if it does then, by god, I’ll use it as a force for good.”
I laugh a little then, as I know he wants me to.
“Is that all it would take?” he asks again. He’s being Socrates, and I play along.
I shake my head. “I guess not.”
He smiles, sympathetic. “Then what should we do?”
“Wait another night.”
“I think so too.” He lifts my foot with both hands and kisses the toe of my sock, then presses my foot to his chest.
“On one condition,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“Stop breaking the rules. It’s not fair.”
“Done,” he says solemnly.
“And tonight I want—”
“You said one condition!” he growls with a grin, and then I barely have time to shriek, and he’s on top of me and wrestling me to my stomach. He grabs my wrists and pins them behind my back. With his lips against my ear he whispers, “Now, what was your ‘condition,’ Miss Coffey?” But I’m giggling too much to answer, so he nips my earlobe and then kisses my ear until my giggles fade into sighs.
“It’s not a condition,” I finally manage.
“What’s not? Oh right,” he says.
“It’s a request. Tonight I want to go down on you, without you going down on me.”
“Well, that’s asking a lot,” he says, a crooked grin against my ear. “But I suppose I can sacrifice myself.”
And then we watch the movie. We lie on opposite ends of the couch, our feet tangled together, not really paying attention to the screen, but taking turns rubbing our feet on each other’s shins and up thighs and generally teasing each other. And when the movie is over, we go to bed. Charles detours to the bathroom, and when he returns, I’m naked, sprawled on the bed, my hands behind my head. He stops beside the bed and lets his eyes roam over my body.
I say, “Take ’em off.”
“You can have no idea,” he says, “what seeing you like this does to me.”
“If you’d take off your pants, I’m pretty sure I’d get some idea,” I say, raising an eyebrow.
He takes off his clothes like it’s nothing. But it’s not nothing. He is beautiful. He is golden and strong and firm everywhere. Everywhere. I bite my lips between my teeth as I watch him walk to the bed.
He turns off the light, lies down beside me, and pulls me into his arms. We’re all the way naked together now, for the first time. I kiss him and rub my skin against his.
“How do people ever get enough of this?” I breathe as he moves his lips to my ear and jaw and neck. How can I have missed this, missed him, when it’s only been a few hours since we were here? I run my hands down over his skin, down his back, over his ass, feeling the firm muscle under smooth, peach-fuzzy skin.
“Oh god, your body,” I sigh.
“Your body,” he says, and he kisses under the slight curve of my breast.
But I’m determined not to be distracted. “I want to go down on you now,” I say. “Can I?”
He lies on his back beside me, not touching me, not making the “I don’t know, can you?” joke. He says, “I’m all yours, termagant.”
I move to the end of the bed and start at his feet. I suck his toes, swirling my tongue around each, and listening to his breath and the little noises he makes. I kiss and lick and bite his insteps. I scrape my fingernails from the middle of his thigh to his ankles, listening to the changes in his breathing, the little hitches, the deep exhalations and sudden inhalations. I make my slow way up his body, and then I use my hair to caress his hips and abdomen and chest. His breath is uneven.
I put my hands on his hipbones and barely touch my parted lips to the shaft of his penis—he makes a sound, and it twitches under my mouth. I inhale the scent of him, and I like it.
I turn my head and look up at him. “I can do anything I want, right?”
“Right,” he says with some effort.
“And you’ll tell me what you like or don’t like?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And you’ll ask for what you want?”
“No,” he says.
I lift my head up abruptly. “Why not?”
“Because this isn’t about what I want,” he says, a little breathless, but looking right at me, one hand delicately caressing my hair. “It’s about what you want. I’m yours to do with as you please.”
“Okay,” I say, considering. I tilt my head and look at his face. “What pleases me is turning you on.”
“And what turns me on is your pleasure. Do what you like.”
So I do—or rather, I explore. I try things. Do I like pressing kisses up along his shaft? Why, yes I do. Do I like putting just the head in my mouth and sucking on it like it’s a Popsicle? Yup. Do I like burying my face at the base of his shaft, inhaling the scent of his body, sucking on his skin, holding his scrotum hot in the palm of my hand, running my lips and tongue up and down the shaft? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I love the taste of him and the smell of him and the feel of him in my hands and in my mouth. I love the way he twitches and gets harder, I love the way his breathing changes and the way his face, when I look up at him, is out of focus, his lips parted, his eyes on me. And I love the way his belly tightens when I use my mouth and my hand together, one rhythm, one movement.
“Jesus, fuck, Annie,” he says.
I stop. “Would this make you come?”
“Do you want me to come?”
“Uh, yes!”
“Then keep going.”
I keep going. The tension in his belly increases. His breathing changes. Somehow he gets even harder in my hand; his whole body is tensing like a stretched spring. Only his hand, stroking lightly over my hair, is relaxed, and eventually that, too, goes rigid as he gasps.
I pull my mouth away, leaving only my hand stroking steadily up and down on him. With my lips hovering near the head of his cock, I say, “What would you do if I stopped right now?”
“You have stopped!” he says in a tight, cracked voice, and his hands grip the sheets. “You vicious, wicked, heartless—”
I laugh out loud, amazed, delighted at the unexpected pleasure of giving pleasure. His abdomen contracts, and his eyes and mouth open. “Oh god,” he says, and he pushes his hips to thrust in my hand. I see the spurt and pull my face away, out of sheer surprise, then watch the jet of fluid that shoots up his torso to his shoulder.
“Whoa!” I say, impressed. I’m grinning like a fool. I did that! I made that happen! “This is fun.”
He laughs and says in an unsteady voice, “This is fun.”