Eleven
T he bathroom is as pleasant as the bedroom outside. Gleaming stone wash–effect tiles, a double shower that I don’t want to think about right now, lighting that goes from eye-searing to sultry. It’s almost like we’re on a romantic getaway, of the kind I’ve never actually experienced.
All of which just ramps the problems I’m having up a notch.
Now it’s not just slowly escalating thoughts about every delicious detail of him. It’s becoming a physical thing. I can feel my body responding, as if it spent the last three hours doing something other than sit in a car and stick a hand in a pocket and get urged up the stairs.
It’s like he licked me with that little contact.
Every bit of me is alive, just waiting for more.
Even though I barely know how to explain the intensity of it. Well, Beck, I never knew my kink is someone being caring and nice and innocent and big and hairy and bearlike all at the same time, and so now it’s hitting me like a freight train , I imagine confessing to him.
Then just want to throw myself in the lake rather than doing anything of the sort. I mean, it would horrify him, I know it would horrify him. He was horrified over the pocket thing. And even if he hadn’t been, I know what he wants and needs. A sweet, super-smart, glasses-wearing girl, who probably likes the idea of waiting until marriage. Or at least, prefers doing the usual married sort of things, like scheduling sex for a Sunday night.
Whereas I am the kind of girl who would never be able to stick to that.
I’d be jumping his bones on a random fucking Wednesday. He’d be in the kitchen making a pot roast to serve with things like fucking napkins and silverware, and I’d be on him up against the stove. So what the fuck am I going to do here? I don’t know. I don’t know.
But I think I have to start by eating crow.
Okay, I text Mabel. So I know I said that I could cope with this. But hear me out, what if I am already coping very badly indeed. In what seems to be a really weirdly sexual way.
Then I clunk down the toilet seat cover, and sit down on it, and wait anxiously for an answer. I bite my thumbnail, I tap my feet, I stare at my phone. I put my phone facedown on the fancy linen basket across from me.
And when it pings, my heart jolts.
Please don’t tell me you told me so , I think.
But of course I should know better than that by now.
Do not panic. We will get you through this, she has texted. For once I am the experienced one, and I know exactly how to deal with this, and I can help you. Now start by remembering that this situation is deranged. And figuring out if it’s the deranged situation, or your actual feelings that are happening.
Because she’s the best. She’s the greatest friend.
She always knows exactly what to say.
And so does Berinder.
Try thinking if you’d feel the same if he was just someone you met on a date that you knew was going to end soon, she chimes in. And while she and Mabel are saying things like oh, good call and yeah, that’s a great idea , I consider. Would I react like this if I didn’t know him, and he just bought me a drink? I mean, I would most likely find the combo of his personality and his appearance attractive.
But I’ve never gone zero to a hundred over attractive, in other situations.
Probably not, I text back.
So Mabel texts: Well, there’s your answer.
And I have to say, I do feel better after that. I feel much calmer, and more rational. Stuff like this is bound to happen, when everything is so bonkers and heightened. It’s not just new weird kinks and him driving me round the twist. Hell, it’s possible those things wouldn’t even affect me in any other scenario.
So I just have to remember that.
I have to hold on to that.
And even more so when I emerge from the bathroom, and find him without his goddamn shirt on. Seriously, just, like, no fucking shirt at all. The shirt is completely off him. Absolute nudity from the waist up. Plus somehow, the nudity isn’t even bad. I can’t even lean on him being weirdly hairless only on his torso and maybe the colour of undercooked tripe.
No, he’s the same there as he is all over.
He’s better there than he is all over, honestly.
His chest is incredibly burly, and completely covered in all this thick, lush fur, and said fur extends right the way down over his slab of a stomach. And to be honest even the bits that aren’t covered? They also somehow look great. He has these love handles, and they look so smooth and soft and plump.
All I want to do is sink my teeth into them.
So I repeat to myself: It’s just the situation. It’s just the situation. It’s just the situation . And when that doesn’t really work that well, I focus on his face. His big, handsome face. His big, handsome, blushing face.
‘Oh, I thought I’d have a chance to finish before you came back out,’ he says.
Then he starts quickly trying to fumble into the T-shirt he was in the middle of changing into. But of course he’s going too fast, so his arm ends up in the neck hole and his head ends up in the arm hole, and I can hear him getting all flustered.
‘Oop, oh no,’ he gasps, so despairingly I simply can’t fight the urge to help him. I step around the bed without even thinking about it. I reach my hands up, and get hold of the material, and start wrestling with it. Only two things happen when I do: a wave of his scent hits me right in the face, all sweet as a soft, freshly washed blanket.
And I realize with a jolt that he is no longer wearing his khakis.
In fact, for a second, I think he’s wearing nothing at all down there.
All I can see is a lot of his meaty thighs. I almost stop myself from looking any further, in case I accidentally encounter his most likely gorgeous cock and probably end up permanently changed forever. And it’s not really much better when I catch a glimpse of material, and look at whatever is going on.
The material is a pair of shorts.
Really, really tiny shorts.
Seventies shorts, I automatically think. Of the kind a man might wear at a summer camp, where all the teenagers are in danger of being murdered. Though the only thing likely to be murdered here is my dignity. I can’t even do what I set out to. I’m just standing there, frozen, hands sort of on his T-shirt, when he pops out of it. And I know my face is all flushed. It feels like I’ve just baked in the sun for seven hours.
He even comments on it. ‘Oh, you’re all embarrassed. Well, look, maybe we can institute a policy. Changing clothes only happens in the bathroom,’ he says, but all I can think in response to that is, Can you only wear those ridiculously hot little murder shorts in the bathroom, too?
And only stop by the skin of my teeth.
‘Honestly I was more wondering about what you’ve changed into.’
I gesture at the general area of the shorts.
At which he looks sheepish, even though I didn’t mean to make him.
‘I just thought they looked fun. Like a camp counsellor type of thing.’
‘And they do. In fact, that’s exactly what I thought of – that you look like a guy in a horror movie, from the seventies. You even have the moustache for it. And the body hair. And the jawline.’
Stop saying things , I think at myself.
It doesn’t matter though. He’s oblivious.
‘That was exactly the idea. And hey, if you like it, guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I got you one, too.’
He goes to his suitcase, open on the bed. And pulls out what I am bracing myself for: the tiniest little pair of red shorts, and the clingiest-looking cream T-shirt, with stripes on the scalloped sleeves. Cute, but not really the kind of cute I’m usually comfortable with.
‘Beck, this is really sweet. But I don’t know if I can wear this,’ I say. Though I touch the soft material of the top as I do. You know, just to mitigate the rejection of his gift.
I needn’t, however. He takes it on the chin.
‘Oh. Well, you can just say you don’t like it, I won’t mind.’
‘I know you won’t. But not liking it isn’t the issue. It just won’t fit right.’
He glances at the outfit, confused. ‘Pretty sure it’s your size,’ he says – as if there’s really a chance that it wouldn’t be. I told him what my size was in the questionnaire. And even if I hadn’t, I think he would have guessed correctly.
That’s not the point, though.
‘Right. But it’s still going to show a lot. Like, a huge amount of me.’
‘And that is a bad thing because you think too much butt is rude?’
‘ Rude is not the word I would use.’
‘So tell me what the word is.’
He tilts his head to one side, just a little. And he gives me this strange look.
Soft and open, still. But with this glimmer of something in his eyes. Almost like he already knows what the answer is, but wants to hear me cop to it. He wants me to admit that I wanted to default to saying something like it’s unflattering. Like when someone tells a sexist joke, and you say to them, I don’t understand, explain it to me .
Because you know they won’t be able to.
And I realize, again, just how smart he is.
‘I don’t want to,’ I tell him, somewhat sullenly.
After which, amusement and victory light his eyes.
‘Good. Because I know you know they’ll look great.’
‘And how exactly do you figure that?’
‘You’ve obviously been burned by someone you trusted telling you otherwise. But you have eyes in your head. And you’re not a fool,’ he says, and as he does he turns away. I watch him start to unpack his things, as tidily as I would imagine him going about it. Remove, straighten, stack in several neat piles. Then into the chest of drawers, by his side of the bed, and the wardrobe, that’s closest to mine.
And it’s good that he does.
Considering I have no idea what to say.
Half of me wants to tell him it was my mother, and her insistence that I be as stylish and perfectly dressed as possible, at all times. The other half wants to ask him how he guessed that. Nobody guesses that with me. I’m the confident one. The one who wears whatever I want, when I want to wear it. I’m not supposed to care about looking weird. Or worry about showing off my curves in the ‘wrong’ way.
But he clocked it. No more than a week I’d known him, and he knew.
He knows now, too, that something is off. I can see it in the way he pauses mid–clothes folding, and looks at me. ‘Was that inappropriate of me to say?’ he asks after a moment. Though I’m not really sure what he means by that.
‘I don’t see why it would be.’
‘Because it implies that I’ve noticed.’
‘Noticed what?’
He tenses. Just a little, but it’s visible.
And it takes him a second to answer.
‘I don’t think I can really be specific without making it worse,’ he says, blushing as he does. In fact his face goes this wonderful warm pink – so I can’t fail to grasp what is going on here.
‘Because the specific thing is, like, my butt. You’ve looked at my butt.’
‘Well, no, not like that. Not directly at it, on purpose. All the time.’
‘So just near it, accidentally, once or twice.’
He goes to say no, I think.
Then seems to reconsider, in a frantic sort of way.
‘Not exactly that. But kind of. I mean, my eyeline was already in the wrong place when I opened the door that one time and saw you bending over. But I immediately looked away. In fact, I looked away so fast I clocked my head on the light fixture just inside my flat. It needed three stitches from a doctor I couldn’t explain it to,’ he says, all in a panicked rush.
And he’s now bright red.
He doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands.
‘Beck, you don’t need to knock yourself out because you saw a butt.’
‘Not even if the butt in question was super awesome and very hot?’
‘Found it easier to say it that way, huh,’ I say, and I can’t keep the amused twist from my lips as I do. Luckily, however, he finds it amusing, too. His mouth quirks up on one side like, welp, what are you gonna do.
‘Of course I did,’ he says. Then after a beat, he puts out his hands, like a teacher trying to explain an important concept to the class. ‘Though you should know, I still feel terrible about objectifying you.’
But despite how weirdly sexy that makes him look, all he’s getting is an eye roll and some scorn for it. ‘You’re not objectifying me, Beck. You’re just trying to make me feel good, even if it means it makes you feel or look bad. So I should probably stress to you here that it does not.’
‘So I seem super great when I say things like that, then.’
‘You do to me. And you said I get to say okay to things, if I want.’
‘Well, sure, but I didn’t mean that to cover something like this.’
‘Why not? It’ll definitely make things more convincing if you do.’
That flummoxes him, quite clearly. He looks at me like I just trapped him in a maze of complete accuracy, and he has no idea how to get back out. ‘So what you’re saying is I should loudly proclaim it to be the roundest, juiciest, sexiest butt I have ever seen, in front of everybody? Just, like, tell you how hot little shorts make it look, and how I can hardly keep my hands off it when you wear them?’ he says, eventually. In this baffled, incredibly sceptical sort of way that I think he believes is going to work.
But how can it possibly, when it’s also so inexplicably hot?
I swear when I hear him say the word juiciest , a whole wave of heat goes right through me. And then the thing about hands, oh god, I can hardly take it. Just the thought of someone like him really feeling like that, of him really being so hungry – I have to press my legs tight together against the ache that seems to start up over it.
But worst of all:
I speak without thinking. ‘You shouldn’t even keep your hands off it. Just grab it, anytime you like,’ I say, in this feral way I know he can’t possibly mistake. I feel like it must be absolutely clear that my desire is real – and so I brace for his horror.
Then get an expression that says, That seems tough, but fair.
And a firm nod, like an army general going to some terrifying war.
‘Well, if you think it will help. I’ll do my darndest,’ he says.
You know, just to underline the fact that I have well.
And truly.
Fucked myself.