‘You can, if you wish. Of course it will mean that I have to be honest while you do not, but if you really must …’
‘All right. All right. I am,’ I say. ‘But it’s not just about your face.’
‘I see. How intriguing. Perhaps you could tell me what it is about, then.’
He knows I won’t refuse, now, but oh, it’s agonising to get the words out. Words he said so easily to me, so freely, and I’m struggling like I’m in a straitjacket.
‘The way you say things.’
‘So it’s the sound of my voice.’
‘Not just the sound, though that’s nice enough,’ I say, then immediately want to make it more than that. He was so generous, I think. Why don’t I know how to be generous with him? Why do I keep thinking that he’s heard it all before, when I can almost hear him waiting on every single thing I say?
He’s waiting now, I can tell, and the longer he does the more the pathways in my mind begin to rearrange themselves. The one marked sex no longer has a beware sign barring the way. And the one marked Janos is a thousand miles wide and as smooth as silk.
I could probably slide down it.
‘It’s more than nice enough. It’s so beautiful I hear it sometimes in my dreams. The first time I heard it in the hotel room it was like I’d known it all my life, and just hadn’t listened before.’
‘Ah, Alissa.’
‘And your words …’
‘Tell me about my words.’
‘They make me crazy.’
‘Which ones, specifically?’
‘All of them. Any of them.’
‘So mostly “and”, and “when”, and “if”.’
It’s another challenge, ten hurdles high. I can clear it, though. I can.
‘No. Mostly “sex” and “pleasure” and the way you just said “wet”.’
‘Like it excites me.’
‘Yes. Exactly, yes.’
‘Like I want you to tell me all about that slippery seam between your legs, and how eager you must be to have someone lick their way over it.’
‘Oh, God, yes.’
‘And how I would, if I were there. I’d kiss your pussy until you forgot every little sliver of that restraint, play with your nipples to make them so pretty and stiff, slide my fingers inside you just as I think you might be doing now. Are you?’
I’m sitting with my legs squeezed so tightly together you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar, one hand a tight fist just above that place he’s talking about. However, my imagination is an entirely different matter. In my imagination I’m sprawled back on the bed, fingers sliding through my absolutely soaking folds, everything so frantic and furtive it’s almost real anyway.
I don’t suppose it matters if I lie a little.
‘Yes.’
Only I think it does matter that I lie a little. I can tell. There’s a silence after I’ve said it, as though he’s considering saying one thing. But in the end, he goes with the other.
‘Good. And then just when you’re at the point of begging … just when you’re ready to tell me your every secret without dissimulation …’
‘Yes, oh, yes.’
‘I’d stop.’
‘No, don’t,’ I say, and am shocked by the urgency and desperation in my own voice. I sound like I’ve lost my mind, or at the very least would be willing to trade it for more. And worse, he definitely knows that this is the case.
‘It has to be so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this way I can make you take another step, without even really trying. You’re ready now, aren’t you? You’re just waiting for the next part, hovering on the edge. So I will leave you here, sweet Alissa, with a promise.’ He pauses, almost unbearably. ‘I’ll carry on, if you come to me.’
I could kill him. I want to kill him. At the very least I want to cry and kick and scream, and have to fight with myself to stop it happening. I’m not a child who’s been denied something. I’m a rational adult, who needs to tell him rational things like:
‘I won’t be what you expect, you know.’
But he defeats me again, as easy as anything.
‘Of course you will. You’re the girl I saw in the lobby, aren’t you?’ he says, and when I answer with a shocked silence he laughs. ‘Oh, my darling. Did you really think I didn’t remember?’
There are so many reasons why I’m standing in the lobby of The Harrington again. Obvious ones, like the curiosity which now burns through my body unchecked and uncontrolled. Undeniable ones, like the draw of that voice and the deal I made with him.
And then there is the real reason:
He lied.
Or, at the very least, he didn’t say. Either way it doesn’t matter, because the result is the same: I’m here and waiting for him, angry and stupefied but most of all safe, oh, so safe in the knowledge that he knew all along. I won’t be a shock to him. I’ve never been a shock to him. He saw my face and my clothes and my body, and carried on with all of this even so.
In fact, he carried it on to almost insane heights. He said I was lovely, and made me say it too. He told me I was a thousand things, and now all of them must be true. Even his guesses now seem stronger and on surer footing.
He’s not a magician after all.
Though it seems like he might be one, when his hand suddenly smoothes over my back. I don’t hear him cross the skating-rink lobby, or see his shadow out of the corner of my eye. He keeps everything drawn in, so that this one touch will have the strongest possible impact. And oh, it does.
I think my whole world lights up to suddenly feel him. My skin bristles all over, so sharply aware of that one innocuous touch. That one nothing touch. He doesn’t even cup my waist or linger for a while, and somehow I’m feverish over it. I’m flaming hot and hardly able to stand it – though I suspect the reason why.
The very casualness of the gesture is what makes it so very potent. Only intimate acquaintances would touch each other like that, with some unspoken hint of all the years between them. Somehow, I think, we have years between us, even though we’ve never actually and properly met.
This is the first time, and despite those years it feels like it. I’m shaking in the semi-shelter of his arm, afraid to meet his gaze but dying to do it anyway. Will he be as magnetic as I remember? It seems impossible, and yet I know the answer before I look. I don’t have to see those eyes. I can feel them on the side of my face: a slow caress.
And when I finally turn my head he’s even better than I expected.
I do it in increments, starting at his stubble-roughened throat, before moving onto his muscular jaw. There’s something so fist-like about his face, so brutal … until you get to the centre. Until you get to that mouth like melted butter and those eyes, oh, those eyes. Had they seemed so alive before? I would have called them hooded and sultry, I think, but I can’t quite call them that now.
They still are, but it’s different. It’s like he’s searching for something; I can see the restless pacing behind that gaze. I can feel him wandering