I can’t explain it. Usually I barely register men at all, and I certainly don’t find myself engrossed in the way they look. Guys that women call attractive – footballers and rugby players and other rugged examples of extreme manhood – I barely pay attention to. I’d kind of accepted that my responses were mostly dead, in terms of actual men in real life.
But this guy … oh, this guy. I don’t even know what it is about him, but the moment his sultry blue gaze locks with mine something happens inside me. That dead thing rises from the grave and starts stumbling around, looking for loins. I’m lost, I think, I’m totally lost. I can’t even stop staring at him, despite all of my best efforts.
I glance at the pictures some kids have drawn on the opposite wall. I pretend my fingernails are suddenly as fascinating as the riddle of the Incas – but it’s all in vain. I end up taking in everything about him, whether I want to or not. I even take in the parts that are completely unremarkable, like his shortish dark hair, unstyled and lazy-looking. Or that tattered T-shirt he’s wearing, pulled taut across his unbearably broad chest, and those jeans that seem similarly thin and ready to expose him at any moment. His thighs look like ham hocks beneath the material, thick and juicy, but that’s not what draws my eyes the most out of everything he’s wearing.
His flip-flops do. His ridiculous flip-flops – so casual in a room of neatly tied and laced shoes. Everyone else is trying like mad to contain themselves, to be respectable and normal and totally OK.
Whereas he clearly doesn’t care. He’s half-smiling before he’s even started talking, with a mouth so wicked I’m afraid seeing it might constitute a sin. His lower lip is as plump as an overripe fruit, and, when he thinks no one’s looking, he licks it. He licks it in a way that makes my body respond – like some secret sex sign I didn’t even know existed.
Suck me right here, that sign says, and the worst of it is … I want to. I’d crawl across deserts to take that lower lip in my mouth. I’d renounce my life of jam sandwiches and terrible sitcoms for one kiss from a pout like that.
Because it is kind of a pout. His face is this insane mixture of rough masculinity and sensuous something-else, and the battle between the two is so engaging you just have to look. He’s covered in stubble, of course, and his strong nose is just a touch too big for his face. His eyebrows are thick, dark – almost oppressive, in fact.
But then they’re paired with the longest, blackest, loveliest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man. He shuts his eyes briefly and they fan over his cheeks like something a geisha girl would carry. And then he opens them, and that’s no better either. I don’t know if the blue is enhanced by the dark rings around them, or if his gaze is just naturally like this – naturally heavy, naturally smoke-screened, naturally hypnotic.
But either way I don’t suppose it matters.
He knows I’m looking, now. That little half-smile has quirked up a quarter of an inch, to see me falling all over myself – because he’s definitely that kind of man, I can tell. He’s the kind who thinks every girl is head over heels in love with him, to the point where he has to be a jerk just to get them to look the other way. The kind that shoulders past lesser people in bars, and strolls around town centres with his top off. I bet he goes on holiday with Club 18-30, even though he’s clearly over that, and when he returns he talks to everyone about larging it and getting his end away.
Yeah, I’ve got his number.
Until he speaks, and then I don’t know what I’ve got.
‘Yeah, so I’m Dillon. Dillon Holt,’ he says, like he’s introducing himself at a barbecue. You got any hotdogs, dude? I think, deliriously, before he plunges into the opposite world everyone else is in. There’s not a hint of discomfort in his voice, when he says: ‘I’d say I’ve slept with quite a substantial number of women – maybe a hundred?’
I think I can see him counting, in his head.
‘Maybe more like two hundred, huh?’
And to make matters worse, his accent isn’t some buttoned-up English thing, layered with a thousand years of repression. He’s American, I think, and his voice has that breezy, open, friendly quality to it that draws you in immediately. It makes you feel comfortable, even though you probably shouldn’t be.
I should still be guilty, and ashamed of myself.
But he makes short work of that.
‘Big girls, little girls, dark-haired, blonde, burgundy … girls with weird bits, girls who don’t know how to dress – I’m not fussy. I’ll take all comers.’
Oh, God, he’s not fussy. He’ll take all comers! Which probably shouldn’t seem like a good thing, here. And a second later, he seems to twig to that.
He clears his throat, and starts again.
‘I mean … uh … I used to take all comers, until I realised that was really bad and … uh … unhealthy for me, as a person, and also it … you know. Negatively affects those around me in terrible, terrible ways.’
Is he reading this out of a handbook? I kind of feel like he’s reading this out of handbook. He picked it up on his way in, and is now awkwardly fudging his way through the spiel he thinks he ought to give.
‘I’ve gotten myself into some really bad situations – on planes, on trains, in automobiles. And this one time, on a beach. Though in my defence, that last one wasn’t really my fault. I missed the sign that said, “You’re now wandering off the nudist part,” and after that I was just some guy on a beach with my nadgers out.’
Oh, Lord, I love the way he says nadgers. I love the way he says planes, trains and automobiles, like the pornographic version of a much-loved John Candy movie. It makes me realise that he’s not my reflection at all. He’s what my reflection would be, if I was without shame or any kind of nervousness. If I didn’t feel guilty about anything, and instead just reeled off the truth.
Which he continues to, in great and varied detail.
‘I’ve been arrested a couple of times for things like that – in changing rooms, and so on and so forth. I guess I’m just really sort of into being naked, you know? And that … uh … has gotten me into trouble a few times. My ex-girlfriend’s mom once caught me in her greenhouse without any clothes on – maybe ’cause I was kind of communing with nature, or something else that probably isn’t true. And then I, ahem, communed with her and her daughter.’ He pauses, and I know – I know – he’s trying not to laugh. About a second before he adds: ‘And their friend Alan.’
Alan. Did he say Alan? Oh, Jesus, I think he did. I think he’d be raising both eyebrows and grinning devilishly, now, if he thought he could get away with it.
But everyone is nodding so sympathetically, and the Scottish woman is telling him that she’s using crystals to de-cloud his sexual aura, so really he can’t do anything of the sort. He can’t do anything but continue into what I can only describe as bragging, now. He’s bloody bragging, I swear to God.
‘And then there’s the reason why I’m here – I went over to see a couple of friends of mine, a couple of girls. Not girls I was screwing around with, or anything. They just said, “Oh, come around, Dillon,’ so I did. I came around thinking I’d maybe get a sandwich – and God knows I can never say no to a sandwich. I’d probably go to Hitler’s house if I thought I’d get some pastrami between two slices of bread, so you know. It’s not like I can be blamed, right?’
It’s OK, Dillon. I totally understand your predicament. I’d be round Hitler’s house with you, munching on a slice of wholemeal slathered in strawberry conserve.
‘I mean, how was I to know one of them was going to take her top off? She just did it right out of the blue, halfway through the cheese and pickle she’d made me. I’ve literally got it hanging out of my mouth, and her friend’s in the middle of totally ordinary conversation about some British sport I don’t understand – then bam.