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?’
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.
He’s right there, on the other end of the phone.
‘Hello, Alissa,’ he says.
It’s practically his catchphrase.
‘Hello, Janos,’ I say.
His name sounds like something sacred and unspoken, in my mouth. My clumsy English accent stumbles over the J that should be a Y and the missing H at the end. It’s a travesty, really, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
‘You remembered,’ he says, as though I could ever forget now.
It’s burned onto my brain. I say it in my sleep.
‘Of course I did.’
‘I get an “of course”? Well. I do feel privileged.’
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘No?’
‘I’m hardly anyone important.’
‘And you believe that is how I weigh things? By importance? Perhaps I would like you better for being the undiscovered queen of a small country.’
‘It would make more sense.’
‘Then I shall make you one. You can be queen of my island.’
‘What island?’
‘The island that all men are, naturally.’
He sounds like he’s laughing, again, but I’m starting to think that’s his default state. Or at least it’s his default state with me. I make his voice go all rich and rolling like that, with a faint curl upwards on the end of every sentence.
‘That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I’d probably have to wave a gloved hand from inside an expensive car. Accompany you to functions I’m not prepared for. Wear outfits I look terrible in, with hats I can’t afford.’
‘That isn’t the sort of island I had in mind.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Then what? What sort of island are you?’ I ask, but I’m picturing it in my head before he’s even said. I see tangled jungles lit by a thousand lurking eyes … great jagged rocks turned black and nightmarish by a storm that’s always raging.
And me, swept up on the beach.
‘One where it’s always night.’
‘I can see that.’
‘And the ocean rages.’
‘My little boat hardly stands a chance.’
‘No, probably not. But you needn’t worry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I am waiting for you on the shore.’
‘In your suit?’
‘No, I’m never in my suit, on the island inside me.’
For some reason it makes my breath catch in my throat, when he says it like that: