Run To You

‘No, I really am. I’m sure you think you’re talking to some gorgeous babe whose presence pushes through wood, but in reality I’m monstrous. I’m six foot tall and three hundred and fifty pounds, with no ears and one eye,’ I say, and I know why I do it. It’s so I can be the minotaur instead of the girl. I’m marching around his maze, hungry for his blood.

But he doesn’t care either way.

‘Are you just trying to turn me on now?’

‘A man like you isn’t turned on by no ears and one eye.’

‘Perhaps not – but I am turned on by the sound of your voice, and the way you watched me, and by your resistance. I’ve never known anyone long for something so much and yet be so afraid to take it when it’s offered.’

I’m the girl again, just like that. I’m running around the insides of myself, blind and fumbling – only I think I was wrong about him having a lair at the centre. I think I can see him atop one of the walls with a rope, and he just threw it down to me.

I won’t take it though. I don’t know him well enough to take it. This could be a trap, and once I’m up there he robs me of my self-esteem and makes a run for it.

‘You don’t know what I long for.’

‘How can you imagine so when you make it this clear? You long for something different, and lovely, and exciting,’ he says, as my eyes drift closed. ‘You long to be outside your own skin, for just a little while.’

I’ve never ached before over something someone’s said. I’m not used to the sensation, so sweet and hollow inside myself. It makes me swallow too thickly and keep my eyes closed in case someone sees I’m having feelings, and most of all it forces me to deny, deny, deny.

‘That’s all wrong.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why are you still on the phone?’

‘I’m putting it down.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘We’ll never speak again.’

‘No, never.’

Is it my imagination, or does he sound strangely sad when he says that last lonely ‘never’? It must be the former, and yet I can still hear the word echoing in my head a long time after he’s said it. I let the silence spin out, just so I can feel it for a little while longer.

Before I have to say: ‘I’m really not pretty, you know.’

‘Tell me all the ways in which you think you’re not.’

‘My face is too square.’

‘So you have a strong jaw that I should angle up to the light, before I leave a trail of kisses over its perfect slant.’

‘And my upper lip is hardly there, while my lower one …’

‘Is so full and soft and sulky, as I lean in to steal a kiss.’

‘You wouldn’t want to. My skin is almost see-through and my hair is as thin as paper. I can never do anything with it.’

‘Except lie back and let me wrap my hand around those soft strands. Is it dark?’

‘It’s almost black.’

‘And your eyes?’

‘A muddy brown. A boring, dull, nothing brown,’ I say, though that’s not strictly true. It’s just that I don’t want him to recognise me as the girl from the lobby, not yet. Not while he’s so content to imagine me into someone else.

‘But you would look up at me with them, wouldn’t you?’

I know what he means. He means that I would look up at him as I took his cock in my mouth. He means it because I make him, in my head. I push him back on the bed, and lick along the length of him, wetly, greedily, oh, God.

‘I would.’

‘And what would those eyes of yours say?’

‘More, now, yes, please.’

I don’t know if I mean more of his words, or of the sex he doesn’t know we’re having in my head, or just everything, everything would be fine. He’s nothing like I thought and everything that I want, and if that means I have to take a leap of faith and grab the rope, I will.

‘Oh, so greedy. Are you greedy, little Alissa?’

‘You know I am.’

‘Then tell me what you want,’ he says, and the fantasy suddenly bleeds into reality. I blurt out words before I’m even sure he’s ready for them – words like ‘I want you to fuck my face.’

But he doesn’t let me down. Of course he doesn’t. I’m halfway up that rain-slicked granite-grey wall, and he’s still hauling me.

‘Yes,’ he says, only he stretches that one beautiful word out to twice the size. He packs it full of delicious satisfaction, and ends it on this: ‘You want me to fill your hot, sweet mouth, over and over, as deep as you can take it and as rough … and then just as you’re sure you’ve reached your limit … just as you think it’s too much with my fist in your hair and my cock so swollen and eager …’

He leaves the last word hanging, like the hand I imagine reaching down to me. I’m almost at the top, now. I’m almost able to look out over the labyrinth if I can just take this one last little step …

‘You come all over my tongue. All over my face. Oh, God, yes, come all over me,’ I tell him, sure for a second that I’ve gone too far.

And then I hear that amused lilt in his lovely voice.

‘Do you see now how lovely you are?’

Chapter Three (#ulink_7809eb51-1864-5d11-8df4-14eef423416f)

The problem is that I now know what the phone is. It isn’t a device through which I can make deals or contact friends I don’t have or order a Chinese takeaway. It’s a hotline to him. It’s a way of revealing I’m ready. All I have to do is dial and he’ll have my home number, too. And I suspect he’ll call it.

Even though I’m not the sort who suspects anything, of anyone. I usually get it wrong in some spectacular fashion. I imagine someone’s watching me and it turns out they’d just noticed my skirt tucked into my knickers. I believe I’m loved and discover it’s just a mild affection. This is the usual way of things, and for a while it makes me pace the living room like a trapped animal.

I put it off and put it off, by turns angry at myself and almost pleased. I don’t care who he is or what he does, I think to myself. And then I call quite suddenly, when I least expect it, and thirty seconds later he calls me back.

The moment he does, a half-made circle in my head clicks closed. I guessed, and was proved right. For once, I was proved right. I wasn’t punished for imagining something amazing, only for reality to fall so very short.