But none of them want her really, she knows. They want the idea of her, they want her crown. They want to stand at her side and rule Hamin-Ra, and so she teases each one with a finger on their cocks or a raised eyebrow, and passes them by.
Until she gets to the One. He doesn’t have to pretend, or feign desire. He stands there so seemingly insensible of her presence, with something smouldering and burning beneath eyes so quiet and still. And when she runs her hand over the heavy length of his slumbering cock, he seems to despise the thrill of desire that charges through his body.
Though I’ve no idea why. I’ve no idea why this one story turns me on so much, either, or what’s so compelling about his resistance. It hurts, that Wade so indifferently rejected me. Why do I give this one man Wade’s face and have him turn away from my Queen, even in so silly a fantasy?
But I do and he does and my clit thrums beneath the busy slide of my finger, all of me eager to hear the rest, the best parts, the scenarios I’ve replayed over and over in my head. Like the ones where the Queen tests him by tying him to a bedpost, then makes him watch as some other man licks and licks at her creaming sex.
Or maybe one of them – some big burly guard with grasping hands and a stone-like face – fucks her and fucks her in ways my resisting hero knows are wrong. He knows she’ll never come on her back like that, with her legs in the air and the guard’s little prick shoving in and out of her cunt.
How he longs to please her, my best hero. How he wants to fight the ropes around his hands and get at her with his stiff, swollen cock. He’s in agony – I know he’s in agony – but worse than that, I truly understand the fantasy for the first time ever. My cheeks burn with shame and I fuck two fingers inside myself, knowing that I’m this ridiculous creature who wants someone to want me that badly, and oh there’s nothing I can do about it. I try to slow everything down, to just feather those strokes over my bursting clit, but it’s like striking a match. It’s like rubbing my face against the coarse grain of someone’s stubble, even though I can barely recall what that feels like. In my head the hero doesn’t care about my shame or what the subtext of this fantasy is. He just tears his way out of the bonds that restrained him suddenly, full of all the fury and lust I’ve never seen on a man’s face in real life.
And then he does all of the disgusting, perverted, insane things I’ve always secretly wanted. He fucks her face with his steely cock, hand too tight in her hair and body rippling with that delicious tension. Or maybe I go worse and weirder than that, and have him force her to fuck his face, cunt pushed so tight against his mouth that he can’t breathe or move or do anything but moan.
Oh yeah, yeah. I like that one. I like it when he gets her on her front and fucks her ass, oil running over her thighs and her hands twisted up behind her back. I like it when he makes her suck the guard’s cock as he takes her, or maybe, God, maybe he sucks the guard’s cock as he takes her.
It doesn’t matter. It all amounts to the same thing – me moaning aloud in an empty apartment, my head full of all the stories I never dared to tell, and then God, God, Wade’s face flashes up behind my eyes and I’m coming, I’m coming, and I’m making so much fucking noise it’s almost enough to drown out the phone.
Almost, but not quite. In fact, I’m still right on the edge of it – little shocks of pleasure still shuddering through me – when I hear another voice on the answering machine, as familiar as Wade’s but for different reasons. Wade I know because of all the things we shared together, because of everything in me that longs for him. Cameron’s voice is recognisable because it’s like liquid metal, pouring out of that accursed masturbation-interrupting box.
‘I don’t know if this is you,’ he says, while my cheeks flame red for reasons better left untouched. I mean, it’s not like he can see me, right? It’s not like he can see me with one foot up on the desk and my knickers half down and my fingers inside, still stroking over my wet and swollen folds.
And even if he could, what would it matter? It’s only Cameron – Cameron with his liquid metal voice that isn’t really liquid metal. It’s just deep because he’s massive, and it’s cultured because he comes from one of those snooty American Harvard-going families even though he didn’t go to Harvard and his family has no money now and, to be honest, I don’t know when he last lived in America.
But he’s on my answering machine anyway, talking and talking.
‘Or if you remember me,’ he says, as though I could forget. Why did Wade assume I’d know it was him, when Cameron thinks I’d forget him so easily? ‘But I just wanted to call and say I’ve missed you, Allie. And if you come to this…whatever it is…it’d be nice. It’d be good to see you again.’
I think it’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in one go. He was never big on talking, Cameron. And if he did talk it was always about something that bored most people to tears – computers or rowing or something that once happened that no one else is interested in. Man he was beautiful, but man could he clear a party.
And his stories…so strange and mechanical. Wade wrote things full of life and pizzazz, people pogo-ing across the universe in spaceships filled with magical robots from the planet Neptune. Whereas Cameron, well…he wrote about spaceships filled with robots too. But then later we’d all find out that he’d intended to write about living, breathing humans, and only ended up with weird, emotionless automatons by default.
That was Cameron. A weird, emotionless automaton by default.
‘Oh, it’s Cameron, by the way,’ he says, and it’s strangely those words that touch me. Wade’s message was all bolsh and Kitty’s was all Oh my Gods, but Cameron doesn’t even think I’ll know it’s him.
Funny, that it’s this very thing that makes me decide to go.
The house is exactly as I remember it. More so, in fact. The driveway seems longer, the surrounding grounds bigger. Nothing has encroached on it – when I’m standing on the neatly shaped gravel semicircle in front of the entranceway, all I can see is a grassy veld that slopes downward into trees, and then more trees, and then nothing but farmland and quaint little villages and the mist of the morning rising up over everything like a veil.
It’s beautiful. The house itself is beautiful. There’s even more ivy all over the front and it’s the same squat, deceptively large grey building it always was, with the thickly varnished blue front door and the actual bell instead of a buzzer.
I almost don’t want to go in. What if it’s not the same inside? The letter said it needed some work, so naturally my head is full of images of walls that have fallen down and squatters living in fireplaces and God knows what else.
But when I get in – the key the solicitor gave me unneeded, because it’s open, creepily – everything looks so…familiar. The great staircase standing between the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right. The living room still stuffed with those leather wingbacks and the big red sofas and the painting over the fireplace of the stag with the terrifying stare.
They still follow you around the room, those eyes. And the colours are still a mess of vivid and impossible greens and reds, as though any second the whole thing is going to come alive and chase you into another dimension.
That was what this house was like. Another dimension. Everything else about university – the mundane classes, the mundane people, the sense of being alone even when actually in a room full of people – was a great swathe of nothingness, apart from this. Apart from the Candy Club and Professor Warren and the weekends we spent, talking until 2 a.m. under the watchful