Then Alice
Then
Alice
Sex with Jacob turns out to be a lesson in longing. And waiting. He wasn’t joking about that. The teasing, the painfully slow removal of each garment, the stroking of one part of my body, his touch so devastatingly effective that I no longer care about the noise I am making, and then, just when I think this is it, he begins all over again somewhere else. I didn’t know that the feeling of his lips pressed against the arch of my foot could trigger a short, sharp pathway of desperation that leads straight to my groin. Or that talking, non-stop in Jacob’s case, could drive me to the edge of insanity. He tells me what he’s going to do, he tells me what he likes.
‘I think this might be my favourite part,’ he says, before pressing his mouth very exactly beneath my hipbone, a light line of kisses from one side to the other.
I sit up and try to kiss him too.
But he pushes me down again, gently.
‘I’d like to do things to you as well.’
‘And you will. I’m looking forward to that.’
Always in his voice I hear the smile.
He turns me over and I wait, unseeing, for the feel of his lips, always longer than I want to wait, never where I expect them to be. He smoothes his palm over the curve of my bottom, follows it with the light flicker of his tongue.
‘This I like very much,’ he says.
He slides his fingers inside me, first one, then another, moving them backwards and forwards until I think I have reached the point of no return. My mind is empty, my body moves to its own rhythm, thrusting, pulling, wanting more. Yet just as I am about to tip over into orgasm, he stills his fingers and begins kissing my neck instead. And this goes on for more than an hour.
When we finally make love, I’m so riven by need I grip his shoulders tightly with my fingers and he laughs and says, ‘Ow, that hurts.’
And then neither of us is laughing; there’s just the feeling of him being inside me at last and the euphoria of being able to finally give in. Afterwards, we lie in stillness, hearts racing, and then Jake lifts his head from my chest and says, ‘Some business meeting,’ and my laughter verges on hysteria. Everything with him is magnified and I can’t quite work out why. There’s my inexperience, but I don’t think it’s that. I think Jake, somehow, is just more; he exists in high relief.
We sit up, both naked on his corduroy sofa, but after his leisurely exploration of my body, I feel no self-consciousness, none at all. Jake passes me a glass of wine and I take two big gulps, one after the other; I need the alcohol to calm me down.
He says, ‘I feel completely wired. What have you done to me, Alice? There’s no way I can go to sleep. Shall we smoke something?’
For the record, I’m the world’s worst pot smoker, though I try to persevere. I watch him crossing the room again, and this time he comes back with a sweet tin, the kind my father keeps in the glove compartment of the car, and a blue striped blanket, which he hands to me.
I wrap the blanket around myself and watch him work, opening up his tin to reveal Rizla papers, a lighter and a foil packet that contains grass. I’ve seen joints being built numerous times, but something about his skinny-fingered expertise connects with my brain and my heart and my groin. Already, only minutes later, I long to be in bed with him again.
He lights the joint, an elongated, tightly packed three-skin, inhales deeply and passes it to me.
‘This is probably the moment to warn you that I’m a lightweight.’
‘It’s very mild, you’ll be fine.’
I take several long, deep tokes, hearing the little seeds of grass crackle and pop, the tip of the joint burning vivid orange with flecks of yellow. I hold the smoke down in my lungs for a few seconds and exhale in a pleasing, dragon-like plume. I’ve kept going with the smoking thing because everyone does it and I want to fit in. I want my university years here in London to be the thing I dreamed of in my teenage bedroom, this vibrant, free-spirited, technicolour world where everything is possible.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘How much I want to be in bed with you,’ I say, surprising myself, though Jacob smiles.
‘So now you can read my mind?’
He stubs out the joint in the ashtray, stands up and leans down to scoop me up into his arms, carrying me across his sitting room like a threshold bride.