Chapter 11
My Skinned Knee
Sunday morning I learn how complicated it is to split my attention between the sensation of Charles’s tongue and mouth on my genitals and the sensation of my mouth and tongue on his genitals. Charles wakes me up with his mouth on my clit, and rolls me on top of him. I kiss and suck and stroke his cock in a lazy, half-asleep way as he licks me and presses into my vagina with a fingertip. The harder he sucks on my clit, the more aroused I feel, and the more aroused I feel, the harder I suck on his cock. But by the time I come, it’s all I can do to grip my fists around him and hold my open mouth, breath suspended, against him.
After I come, I try to suck him some more, but he moves out from under me and pulls me up until I’m straddling his face and he licks me again. I feel his hands gripping into my thighs as he sucks hard on my clit. When he sucks this way, directly, in a steady, pulsing rhythm, I escalate right to the brink. I press my forearms against the wall and shudder over him. My thighs shake, my belly flexes to concavity, and I come almost against my will while his fingers press into my thighs.
He tosses me down onto the bed, even as the pulsing is still fading. He moves over me and rubs his cock against my labia, up and down, as he mutters in a gravelly whisper in my ear, “Do you want me to fuck you?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Right now? You want me to fuck you right now, now that you’re wet from my mouth and hot with coming and—”
“Yes. Now. I want you.”
He growls and bites my earlobe and, with three hard thrusts he comes on me, heat and wetness coating our pelvises.
“Tonight,” he breathes, his voice dark and muffled against my throat.
“We have got to get out of this apartment,” I moan.
We do. Sunday afternoon I learn that it is much easier to let go by choice than it is to fall. Falling off the rock wall is a messy, noisy, humiliating experience that for me involves skinning my knee and shrieking like a little girl. Charles has me, of course—I’m dangling morosely from the top rope, which he has locked off securely. There was never any danger. I just feel and look and am stupid. That’s all.
This all started because I was ambitious/arrogant/dumb enough to agree with Charles that yes, it might be fun to try climbing some of the marked routes, to challenge myself. I start with one he says I should find “pretty easy.” It’s marked 5.3 on the red tape that indicates the holds, and now that I’m used to the height, I go right up it, no trouble.
Then he climbs one marked 5.10c, and that’s when the trouble starts, that’s when I start getting competitive.
My next route is a 5.5—again, pretty easy. When Charles lowers me to the ground, I say, “This is awesome!” It is. I’m gaining ground fast.
Then he climbs a 5.10b. He struggles a bit with it. I feel myself inching up behind him.
My next route is a 5.7. This is not easy. This is very, very hard. It doesn’t help that I’ve started to get tired. But I do actually stick to the wall perfectly well. I just stop to rest a lot.
Charles calls, “Take a sit. You can let go and not burn your arms out.”
“No, I’m good,” I call.
I’m not good. I’m in pain and I’m panting like a dog in summer, but fuck you, wall. Fuck you.
Which brings us to the 5.8 route, on which I have left a not insignificant quantity of skin from my knee. I’m hanging in my harness, holding my knee and feeling sorry for myself. “Can I come down now, please?” I call to Charles.
“You don’t want to finish the route?”
“Yes, I do, but I can’t. This one is too hard.”
“Bollocks. Try again.”
“Dude, I fucking hate you,” I say.
“Good,” he answers calmly. “Use it.”
I try again. And I finish it.
“Nice,” he says.
And I bite my lips together to keep from smiling too stupidly.
“Pizza and beer?” he suggests when at last he allows me to surrender.
“Oh my god, yes,” I moan.
We go to Upland and split a pitcher of beer, but we order a whole pizza each.
As we eat, I say, “I don’t fucking hate you, by the way.”
He smiles. “I know.”
“Hey, so, your turn,” I say, remembering. “Story of your life. Go.”
“Er. All right, only fair I suppose. Born in ’88, birthday March twelfth. Er, ordinary, ordinary, mostly the usual thing for the first decade or so. Went to a boarding school—Eton, if that means anything to you.”
“Oh yeah, Bertie Wooster went to Eton!” I say.
He laughs. “Yes. I went to the same school as Bertie Wooster.”
“I remember because there was that episode where they wanted to break into a safe, and the code was the year of the Battle of Naseby, and Bertie didn’t know when that was, and the woman asked him, ‘Where did you go to school?’ and he was like, ‘Eton.’ So I asked my dad, ‘What’s Eton?’ and he said, ‘It’s a very good school in England.’ When was the Battle of Naseby?”
“1645. Next time look it up if you want to know. Hang on—‘that episode’?”
“Yeah, the miniseries with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie? My parents have it on DVD.”
“Oh, you appalling, appalling American. When we get back, I’ll point you to the Wodehouse shelf. You shall not leave Indiana without reading at least three novels. Anyway,” he says. “Where was I?”
“School. A boys’ school?” I ask with a cringe.
“Yes. A load of spotty, insecure arseholes with a pathological need to prove themselves. Me included,” he says. “I was small and swotty and basically a total wanker. I was younger than the other boys, too, because my father insisted I was a prodigy—”
“You are a prodigy,” I interrupt. “You finished college at the age I started!”
“I’m really not.” He drains his pint. “Anyway, once I was away from home, I’d get bored and want attention, and so I’d start trouble.”
Well, that’s irresistible. “What kind of trouble did you start?”
“Just ordinary things,” he shrugs. “Practical jokes. Clever dick nonsense—in the end it protected me, I think, from some of the bullying I might have experienced, because boys would vie to take the blame—or the credit, I suppose—if a trick was clever enough. Everyone knew it was me, beaks all knew it was me, but when you’ve got five other boys all saying, ‘I did it, sir; sorry, sir, it was me,’ there’s not much you can do. My tutor confronted me directly once. ‘Douglas,’ he said, ‘for my own edification and entirely off the record, how, hypothetically, might one have managed to get a pie to fall from the rafters at precisely the moment the headmaster walked under it?’”
“And how did you?” I ask.
He only winks at me over his pizza and says, “Flying buttresses, my girl, flying buttresses. Anyway,” he continues, “apart from that, I climbed and played cricket, and that’s about all. Then I went to Cambridge, and I more or less stayed there until I came here.”
“Did you always want to be a scientist?”
“No, I always wanted to be a doctor. When I started as a research assistant at the BRC and developed—”
“BRC?”
“Stands for Brain Repair Centre, sort of.”
“Seriously, it’s called the Brain Repair Centre?”
“Well, no, mostly it’s called the BRC,” he grins. “Anyway, I was working on traumatic brain injury and got more and more interested in how nonbrain trauma affects brain functioning, and that really became my focus.” He shrugs. “I met Diana at WCP about five years ago, and she suggested I come do the fellowship if I could get the residency in the School of Medicine. And here I am.” He chews his pizza.
“And how about family? Are your parents together?”
“Yes,” he says.
“And . . . any brothers or sisters?”
“Yes,” he says, “Elizabeth is nineteen, and Simon is twenty-two. Your age.” He says it as if he’s just realizing.
“Do you get along?”
“Well enough. I haven’t spent much time at home.”
“You mean, since you came to Indiana?”
“Since I was ten,” he says.
I don’t want to say the only thing I can think to say—Like Harry Potter?—so I just sit there with my mouth hanging open.
“It’s been my choice, for the most part,” he says. “My father’s fairly unpleasant, and I prefer not to live under his roof.”
I want to ask about his dad, but I can tell he doesn’t want me to—I’m getting a “police line, do not cross” vibe. So instead I say, “How about your mom?”
He refills both of our glasses from the pitcher of beer and says, “Mum’s all right. She comes to see me sometimes. She was here last summer. Brought me the Wodehouse collection, actually. I took her to the Lion and fed her coddle. She loved it.”
“You didn’t take her to the lab to meet people?”
“I did. It was in July. You were away. She would like you,” he adds, smiling at the remains of his pizza. “She’d be intimidated by you though.”
“Why would I intimidate her?” I’m worried about a meeting that’s unlikely ever to happen.
“You’re . . . very American, I suppose. Confident. Sure of yourself.”
“Am I?”
He nods and sips his beer. “And she’s very British. Terrified of accidentally saying the wrong thing. Certain that she already has.” His face grows dark suddenly, and he says, “Let’s talk about something else. What time is it?”
I pull out my phone. “About eight.”
“Four hours, then,” he says, lifting an eyebrow. “What shall we do with the time?”
We go back to his place.
In a stroke of genius, I ask to take a bath. “On your own,” Charles says. “There’s only so much of you naked and wet that I can stand.” While the water’s running, he hands me a P. G. Wodehouse novel to read while I soak, but when I crack a joke about dropping it in the tub, he takes it back from me, looking affronted.
“Go on.” He waves me into the bathroom, following me like a sheepdog with a stray. “Get in,” he says, and I undress and step into the hot water. As I settle in, he sits on the lidded toilet, his ankles crossed on the edge of the tub, and clears his throat and reads, “Very Good, Jeeves! by P. G. Wodehouse. Copyright 1930—a first edition, you’ll notice, not to be dropped in the bath by any careless young harpy who happens along. Where were we? ‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom. It was the morning of the day on which I was slated to pop down to my Aunt Agatha’s place at Woollam Chersey. . . .’”
And he reads to me. He does different voices and everything—an exaggerated bass for Jeeves and a floaty, silly voice for Bertie. Aunt Agatha herself gets a wobbly falsetto that cracks me up so much, Charles has to stop and wait, smiling, for me to stop laughing. Eventually he gives up on me and gets on his knees by the tub and kisses me while we’re both laughing, and then the kiss turns serious, deep. I put my wet hand on his face when he bites at my lips. When he pulls away, he says, “Christ, woman.” I bite my lip and look up at him.
He goes back to his seat and opens the book again. “Where were we?” And he begins reading again.
“Eton!” I interrupt when the book mentions it. “You went to the same place as Bertie Wooster and Bingo Little!”
“And that is a source of great pride to my family, I can tell you,” he answers with a grin.
He stops too when I interrupt him for translations—
Like, “A cabinet minister is a government thing?”
“Yes, a government thing.”
Or, “What’s a soup and fish?”
“Dinner jacket and black tie, referring to the first courses of dinner.”
Or, “How much is a couple hundred quid?”
“Er . . .” He stops and scratches his head, counting. “Maybe . . . I dunno, ten thousand dollars? Twenty? The joke is, it’s a lot.”
“You know many things,” I say in response to this last one.
“ ‘And to all this he must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of his mind by extensive reading,’” he answers.
“I know that one—Colin Firth unites all women, everywhere.”
He shakes his head sadly. “I quote Jane Austen, she names an actor. Honestly, what is the world coming to?”
I look at him from the tub, where I’m lying up to my chin in hot water. “I’m pretty sure it’s coming to streaming video on the Internet.”
He gives a dignified snort. “Right. That’s enough of that, miss.” He closes the book and stands up. “I’m taking this out of harm’s way, and you can get on with whatever it is women do in the bath.”
He has his hand on the doorknob when I say, “Hey, Charles?”
He turns and looks at me, an eyebrow raised.
“Thanks for reading to me.”
He smiles and leaves me to my bath. I run more hot water and let myself soak in the heat, relaxing my climbing-fatigued limbs. In the end, I feel too lazy to wash my hair, so I make do with a quick soapy wash, and then I pull the plug, get out, and dry myself off.
Wrapped in a towel, I make my way to the bedroom. I lie down to wait for Charles.