You Already Know: Twelve Erotic Stories. Charlotte Stein

him, but the words he manages are not enough either.

      It’s a good thing, really, that Ryan’s there to provide them for him.

      ‘All this time,’ he says. ‘And you never told him how hard you like it?’

      I glance across at him and he’s just lying there, head on his pillow, expression soft and innocent. He’s a little amused, I think, though not cruelly so.

      ‘Go on,’ he says to Sean. ‘Give it to her hard. Really fuck her – she loves getting fucked.’

      I bite my lip and try to turn away from him. I try to pretend that Sean jolts hard against me because he wants to, and not because Ryan has put something in the suggestion box. But he has, and oh there’s plenty more where that came from.

      ‘You know what else she likes? When you gasp for her, nice and high. As though her pussy is the sweetest, hottest, wettest bliss you’ve ever felt around your cock. As though she caught you j-u-ust right, and now you’re thinking of every boring thing you can to hold off that almighty orgasm.’

      I can’t stop looking at him. I don’t think Sean can stop himself, either.

      ‘And you’re the authority,’ he says, in his best man-of-science voice, but Ryan seems unfazed. He doesn’t even look away from me to meet what I’m sure is Sean’s accusatory stare.

      ‘No, not the authority. It’d take years and years to puzzle someone like Tia out. But I’ll give you one more free tip.’ He leans in close, so close that he almost puts Sean off his stride. ‘If you get her as she’s about to come, and she’s shaking in just that way she is now, and you cover her mouth with yours – she’ll give it up, just like that. Right … into … your mouth.’

      And then he kisses me, he kisses me, he kisses me.

      Of course, he’s right. I come so hard that my body arches up off the bed, and he has to hold me down. Not Sean – Ryan. Ryan puts his big hands over my shoulders and I buck against them, long waves of sensation rolling up my body and out of my mouth, to pour into him.

      Always into him.

      And I think: you knew. You always knew. You let me fly away to far and different distant shores, just so that I could turn around again, and fly right back to you.

       I Have You

       Charlotte Stein

      I don’t react when he slides his hand down over my bare back. I’m used to not reacting. A hand can mean a million things, after all – a sign of solidarity, a touch of comfort, a suggestion that someone comes with you to the place you’re meant to be going. And for a second I’m sure his hand is all three of these things together, because really it can’t be anything else.

      I don’t know him, in that other way. The one where people tangle together and press their mouths to each other’s and feel that thing … What’s it called again? Pleasure, I think it is, but pleasure is so far away from me it might as well be on Mars.

      All I can do is dissect the various elements of his hand on my back: the way my skin almost seems to part beneath the press of his thumb. The way his knuckles feel when he turns his hand over and drags them down over me.

      They feel heavy, I think. The backs of his hands are heavy, though I can’t remember how I know this. When I close my eyes it’s as though I can hardly picture his face, but then he leans in quite unexpectedly and touches his mouth to the nape of my neck and suddenly I can see it all clear.

      He has brows that draw together too often, I’m sure, and eyes that are too often worried, and when the kiss on the back of my neck suddenly becomes hot and wet I think of his mouth. Soft, so soft, and promising so little.

      But it promises a lot, here. I can hear him breathing in between those kisses, ragged and not quite in control of himself and, though such a thing should make me nervous, I find I feel nothing instead. Nothing at all, except for the minutiae of what being kissed is actually like.

      I think I’m physically reacting to it, too. It’s sort of like cracking through an ice-covered pond, only to find hot lava underneath. My skin catches fire, my heart starts pounding thickly, sluggishly – though it doesn’t do so in my chest. It does so between my legs, where I’m somehow already wet even though this isn’t anything at all, really.

      I mean, it’s rude that my back is bare. And though I’ve crossed my arms over my chest in a big X, my breasts are bare too. I somehow never got around to putting my top on, and so here I sit on my bed, staring out of the window over the windy rain-slicked hills, in just a skirt.

      I must look like someone who’s lost all of their sense of self. Like I’m vacant, though as soon as I think the word my mind changes it to vacated. I’ve been vacated. Something has left me and I’m just a limp thing staring at a grey world in half my clothes.

      Aroused, but not really connected to my own arousal. In truth, I can hardly recall what arousal is – no more than I can remember the man behind me and his face of many parts – and I think so right up until he gets two hands on my hips and pushes me into a clumsy standing position, then begins ruffling up the skirt I don’t remember putting on.

      I think I know what he’s going to do. It’s obvious. But it’s still something of a shock when I feel his mouth searching blindly between my legs – shoving me when he can’t get at what he clearly needs to, the sounds he makes all desperate and somehow brutal at the same time.

      My nipples are stiff, now. I don’t even try to cover them. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, but I suppose someone could walk by and see me like this – expressionless, trembling, my breasts exposed for anyone to look at. And yet I don’t care. I don’t care about anything.

      And I have to confess, something about this intense sort of detachment excites me thoroughly. He’s licking me in a really dirty way, now – right between the cheeks of my arse – but I don’t give a damn. I just want to burn in that lava. I want to plunge right through the ice and boil alive.

      I come close, when he slides two fingers into my cunt.

      Of course I’m sure it should hurt. The position I’m in isn’t great – legs barely parted, stood as straight as an arrow – and I haven’t been fucked in an age. I should be locked tight, resistant somehow.

      And yet he just eases in as though I’ve turned to syrup, which I suppose in one way I have. I’m so wet I can feel it on my thighs, I can feel it sliding slickly around his fingers, and even if I couldn’t I’d know about it because of him.

      He makes a sound, a little moan of delight. My wetness stands in for my permission, and he fucks me roughly like that for a moment. Just in and out. Just good, firm thrusts that make me ache. And when I think I can’t bear it any more, he slides his fingers through my slit – backwards, everything’s backwards – and finds my embarrassingly swollen clit.

      ‘You like it,’ he says, in a tone that suggests he’s surprised. And then with more assuredness: ‘Oh yeah, you like it.’