But Hunter makes me apologise. He looks up the moment I’m on deck, and smiles his winning smile, and says something I don’t want to hear, like ‘I was wondering when you’d join me.’ As though there’s a possibility that we could actually join. The universe is making new glue as we speak, for bookworms who refuse to wear bathing suits and giant jockish men called Hunter.
He’s out of his mind – perhaps literally. Lily says he’s secretly weird, that he has trouble relating to people, that his parents died years ago and ever since he’s been some kind of hermit … but I don’t buy it. People like him aren’t hermits.
They’re on the covers of catalogues, staring off at imaginary horizons. He doesn’t need this holiday. He doesn’t need to socialise. He needs to spend five thousand dollars on deck shoes, before insulting some waiter we don’t have.
Hell, maybe I’m the waiter, in this scenario. I certainly feel like one as I edge around his most glorious self, in an attempt to reach the sun lounger on the other side of the deck.
But then I see it, and suddenly I’m not a waiter at all. I’m trapped into being his holiday companion, by the presence of the seat he’s moved next to himself. He’s actually dragged it all the way across this bright-white deck to make a neat little pair, side by side.
As though that’s perfectly reasonable.
He even makes it sound reasonable.
‘Come and sit down,’ he says, which of course gives me no choice. If I say no, I’ll look anti-social and awful. And if I say yes … if I say yes …
I’ll have to sit next to him, right next to him, with the heat of the sun blasting me on one side and the heat from him blasting me on the other. In fact, I can practically feel it before I’ve even taken the lounger next to him. He’s so bright, so big, so winning – he makes the sun look like a speck on the face of a giant.
He’s the giant in question.
He’s so big that I feel crowded the second I arrange myself on the lounger, even though he’s set them a decent way apart. I can get my whole hand between them without any trouble at all, but that’s not the point when your companion is eight foot eleven. His arms span that tiny gap with very little effort, and any time he shifts a tad I can just feel him.
I can feel the heat coming off him, in waves. I can smell his suntan lotion, light and summery, and the febrile scent of his skin beneath. Sunshine skin, my mother would have called it – and it is. You can tell the kind of tan he has just from drinking in that scent: a golden honey hovering over the blush underneath.
But of course I have to confirm how it looks, anyway. I pretend I’m engrossed in my book, when really I can’t stop flicking my gaze to his immense hands – pale on the inside, caramel on the out. He’s fiddling with the tie on his shorts, which only makes the show more compelling.
Those long fingers, those heavy knuckles … and then further down the endless stretch of his solid legs. I confess, I follow them all the way to his feet, which aren’t clad in the five-thousand-dollar deck shoes. They’re bare, instead, completely bare, and somehow that’s much worse.
His feet are even more gigantic than his hands, and knuckly like them, too. They’re a real man’s feet – different to Patrick’s, all neat and clean. They make me think that he’s not an airbrushed-catalogue-model Hunter, at all, but a real one instead.
He goes into the forest, at night, and runs down a hapless deer. And then when the moon is at its fullest, he tears the thing apart, with his teeth. He tears me apart, with his teeth. He makes me want to look at his face, but I can’t, I can’t.
Why isn’t he saying anything now?
He wanted me to sit, didn’t he? He wanted me to join him, in that tiring way most middle-class people with yachts seem to demand. Patrick needs it all the time, and so does Lily, and so does Gregory – though I know there’s something different between the time they want from me and the time Hunter does.
I can feel it prickling in the air, now, between the words he thought he should say and the silence he now allows. He doesn’t want idle chitchat, I think. He wants to sit here and make me bake in his heat, until I’m so uncomfortable I could die.
And then he abruptly puts a hand on my thigh, and I think I do die. I stop breathing, at the very least, because he’s not low down, towards my knee. He’s really, really high up – almost under my sundress, in fact.
And when I don’t move away or slap him or any of the things I should do, he slides that hand higher, casually. Like he’s just turning the pages of a book he’s not all that interested in. It could even be the book I’ve just discarded, which is now lying on the floor by my lounger.
Either way – I could almost pretend he isn’t doing this at all. I don’t look at him. He doesn’t speak. There are no questions, no answers. Just his hand working further and further up my thigh, until finally he’s clasping me in a very rude place indeed.
I can feel the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, pressing tight against the taut mound of my pussy. And after a second of this, I can make out that finger rubbing in slow circles, right between my legs.
It makes me very, very aware of my greedy little hole. It’s like he’s feeling for the right spot, or maybe suggesting where it might be, through the material of my panties – and he’s right too. That is where my cunt resides, and further up oh further up … yesss. That’s where my clit is.
But he doesn’t linger there for long, either. He alternates back and forth, stroking over my hole and then back over my clit, as though testing which one I like best. I can’t decide, however. The former is so rude, so … humiliating, somehow, while the latter simply sparks pleasure up the length of my spine.
Both sensations are utterly, deliriously delicious. I want to spread my legs wider just to get more of them, but of course I restrain myself. It’s bad enough that I’m letting him rub me like this, without saying a word – as though he’s so handsome and magnificent that he just has a right to my helpless body.
Egging him on is completely out of the question. I can’t even look at him.
Until I do, and then … then I wish I hadn’t.
He doesn’t seem like himself, any more. He’s not a composed cut-out from the cover of a magazine. His eyelids are so heavy it’s almost a burden on me to carry them, and his soft lips have parted in this really suggestive way. Even if he wasn’t currently stroking my swollen pussy, I’d know what’s going on here.
It’s like he wants me to reach up and slide something into that open mouth of his, and if I was better at this – more sure of myself, sexier, an adventuress – I’d know what that something was. I’d take it out and fuck his face, until he begged me to stop.
The way I beg him to stop, after a moment of this. I have to, after all. If he keeps going I’ll come all in an embarrassing rush, just because he’s got a finger on some material and is rubbing me through it.
Too bad, really, that my protests come out wordlessly, soundlessly. I barely make it to a syllable. I just lie on the sun lounger and let him work my stiff clit to a shuddery, buckled-down sort of orgasm, while a thin breath takes the place of all the things I want to say.
Stop, I think. Don’t, I think.
But I can’t get either word out. I’m awash in this brutal kind of pleasure, of the sort that doesn’t take kindly to being restrained. It spills around the edges of my control and pushes through the boundaries I’ve long established, and once a bit of it’s free it goes on and on and on.
It’s