Chapter Three Fiona
A day at the beach in a glass: bright sun and sea-spray, until the inevitable bitterness of getting burned.
I had a problem with getting ahead of myself.
It had been worse since Matt left, fantasising turning to catastrophising, but I’d been this way my entire life, forever skipping to the end of the story while everyone else was still at the beginning.
Age five, I’d spotted another girl with the same colour ribbons in her pigtails as me, and I’d decided we were going to be best friends before she’d even told me her name was Kaitlyn.
Age thirteen, I’d failed one history test and immediately concluded that I was eternally destined to be the black sheep of my academic family.
Age twenty-two, a man I’d been sleeping with for nine months asked me to marry him, and I’d jumped straight to happily ever after without asking a single question.
Age thirty-four, I had a graphic sex dream about the nice boy from the bar a few days after seeing him passionately making out his boyfriend in the alley, and my mind had skipped forward like a rock over water to a future where I got all in my head about it and made things between us extremely weird.
That was the last thing I wanted. I had come to truly value our friendship, and he’d been so, so wonderfully supportive helping Lex navigate coming out.
So in the interests of preventing that future from coming to pass, I’d boxed the dream up and put it away.
It wasn’t that deep, I told myself, burying it in the dark recesses of my mind: just a combination of misfiring synapses and Matt being gone for work more than usual.
It wasn’t the first random sex dream I’d ever had about someone inappropriate, and it wouldn’t be the last. It didn’t mean anything.
But then the words, You deserve pleasure, Fiona, and if you need someone to give it to you, I’m here came out of Satoshi’s mouth, and that box I’d hidden exploded open.
It felt like I’d been hit with a computer virus that had suddenly flooded my system with pornography, all the thoughts I hadn’t let myself think happening to me all at once.
Satoshi’s lips on mine. Satoshi’s body against mine.
Satoshi’s hands on me, those deft, capable, strong fingers currently curled around the stem of his wineglass caressing me gently before gripping me tight, and—
Wine. Wine was supposed to be about pleasure. He was talking about giving me wine, not an orgasm.
‘You already give me plenty of pleasure.’ I raised my glass to him, trying my best not to let my face turn tell-tale red.
‘I’m not talking about the wine.’
… oh.
‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,’ Satoshi said. ‘Tell me no, and I’ll never raise this subject again. But I mean it, Fiona. You deserve to feel good. Let me give that to you.’
I seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
For a long moment, we sat there, looking at each other across his desk.
My heart was racing so fast that I wouldn’t be surprised if he could hear it.
My scalp was tingling, but not in the icy way it had earlier, sitting across from Matt in the mediation meeting.
It felt charged, like all my hair might stand on end. Electric.
I couldn’t speak. I’d forgotten how to do that too.
But Satoshi was looking at me, nothing but kindness and a question in his eyes, and I – sad, lonely, touch-starved Fiona, who maybe hadn’t buried that dream quite as deep as she should have – was nodding.
The corners of his mouth curved upwards, cheeks dimpling. ‘All right, then.’
He stood. Reflexively, I stood too, then immediately felt awkward as he started clearing the glasses and open bottles from his desk. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I twined my suddenly sweaty fingers together in front of me.
Fuck. This was a terrible idea, wasn’t it? It would be nice to have the last person to touch me not be Matt – but what was I doing? I was about to make a complete laughing-stock of—
‘Come here,’ Satoshi extended a hand to me.
I had to work hard to unclench my fingers. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What are you sorry for?’
‘My hands. They’re all clammy – oh.’
He’d grabbed me by the waist, picking me up and sitting me on the edge of the desk in one swift movement. My knees fell apart and he stepped between them, body not quite touching mine but so close I could feel the warmth of him, radiating outwards.
I swallowed. ‘Are you sure? You – we – don’t have to.’
One of Satoshi’s hands came up to frame the side of my face. ‘I know.’ His thumb stroked along my cheekbone. ‘I want to.’
‘Why, though?’ His fingertips were nestling into my hair, drawing soft little circles, and the feeling was mesmerising. ‘Why would you…?’
He paused. The tip of his tongue was pink as he licked his lips, and time seemed to slow down, stretching, expanding.
‘Because I like you,’ he said at last.
He leaned in closer, his forehead coming to rest against mine, and I barely repressed the shiver that ran through me as his glasses pressed lightly into my eyebrows. ‘I’m going to kiss you now, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I only just managed to whisper.
The first brush of his lips against mine was featherlight, fleeting, the gentlest possible question, but it made me shiver again, irrepressibly this time, an almost-panicked high-pitched needy sound erupting from my throat.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know where that came from. I’m just – it’s just—’
‘A lot?’
I nodded.
Satoshi stroked his thumb along my cheekbone again. ‘We can stop whenever you want.’ He folded the fingers of his other hand through mine. ‘But it’s just me, Fiona. You’re safe. I’ve got you.’
I know, I wanted to say, but it felt too weighty, too fraught, too dangerous somehow, so I just squeezed his fingers.
That drew a smile from him. I touched the pad of my index finger lightly to the dimple in his right cheek, then the left one, then beneath his chin, drawing his face to mine again.
I had never been kissed like this before – so softly, so tenderly, so respectfully. The barest touch of my finger beneath his chin was enough to hold him to me. His hand against my cheek was a request, not a demand, his fingertips in my hair making me feel like I was turning to liquid.
The first nudge of his tongue against my lower lip drew another sound from me – less a squeak this time, more a sigh. ‘Okay?’ he asked, letting go of my hand and tracing his fingers up the length of my spine to curl around the nape of my neck.
‘Yes.’ My free hand came up to rest against his clavicle, fingers under his collar, thumb resting in the divot at the base of his throat. ‘Okay.’
It might have been a minute that Satoshi kissed me like that, tongue sliding gently against mine, or an hour. He was so leisurely and unhurried that I completely lost my sense of time.
With Matt, sex had always been about milestones.
It had got more pronounced over time, but even in the early days, there had been a routine.
We’d kiss for a while, more as a signal to the other that we wanted to have sex than something to be enjoyed in its own right.
He’d work on me for a bit (real men make sure their partners are enjoying it as much as they are, he’d said to a much younger Fiona, head between her thighs, and she’d been foolish enough to find that romantic instead of smug), I’d work on him for a bit, relishing the sounds I could get him to make, and then he’d slip inside me.
He’d always come, I usually would, and I’d thought that overall, I was pretty lucky.
I’d heard how some of the other school mums talked about their sex lives.
Mine might not be rip-your-clothes-off passionate, but it certainly wasn’t terrible.
… God, the things those mums would say if they could see me now.
Satoshi used the hand he had on the nape of my neck to tilt my head back so he could kiss his way down my throat.
This time it wasn’t a squeak or a sigh but a moan he drew from me, and his laughter was a soft hum of approval against my skin, especially when he pressed his lips behind my ear and I jerked like I’d been electrocuted.
‘There?’ He licked the same spot. ‘That’s good? ’
‘Yes,’ I breathed, curling my fist into his shirt, trying to pull him tighter to me. ‘That’s so good.’
He kissed me there again, laughing when it elicited the same shudder. ‘I’m going to have to hold you still if you keep doing that,’ he murmured, tracing the shell of my ear with his tongue and then gently teasing the lobe between his teeth.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise.’ He nipped at the spot behind my ear this time, and I would have fallen off the desk if not for his body holding me there. ‘I like it.’
He caressed my cheekbone one more time before he trailed his knuckles gently down my body. ‘Can I figure out where else makes you jump like that, I wonder?’
My breath was coming shallowly as he traced the curve of my breast through the grey wool of my dress. ‘What about here?’
I’d never had particularly sensitive breasts – Matt was more of an arse man, and once he’d figured out that I didn’t get much out of having my tits touched, he mostly left them alone – but Satoshi’s thumb against my nipple made me reflexively swallow and clutch at his waistcoat. ‘Oh, that’s – that’s—’
‘Not your favourite?’
‘I like it, though.’
‘I definitely like it.’ He cupped my breast in his hand, kissing that spot behind my ear again in a way that made my head fall back. ‘You feel so good.’
He drew back so he could kiss me again. I sighed into his mouth as he dropped his hand from my breast to my hip, caressing my hip bone.
His other hand was firmer now against the nape of my neck, his tongue more insistent in my mouth, and I looped my arms around him, digging my nails into his shoulder blades, inviting him deeper.
Satoshi’s fingers fell again, tracing the line of my left thigh until they brushed the inside of my knee. He pulled it tighter around his hip, and I gasped at the sensation against the ticklish crease of the joint.