The Englishman

chapter 26

IF ANY EVIDENCE WERE NEEDED that I did not come on this trip with any thought of seducing anyone, my pajamas would do it. Baby-blue flannel with white sheep. Thick woolly socks. You never know how warm or cold these hotel rooms will be, and I hate cold feet.

Out the door, down the mercifully empty elevator, into the hotel lobby. It is past midnight, and residents have retired to bed or the bar. The receptionist is on the phone to a friend, talking in loud, over-emphatic cadences. No one notices me as I stroll nonchalantly toward the restroom. Like a child sneaking out to buy candy in a corner store, I clasp my coins in my hand. I have loose change enough to buy two.

Two, in different colors.

Hand deep in coat pocket, as if I had stolen them, I sidle back toward the elevator. Again I am lucky; no one rides up with me. I pad along the carpeted hallway, half-expecting to see Kathleen round the next corner. But the hall is silent and empty. And now…

I knock.

I knock, and the door gives a little, as if the door hinges were loose, or as if someone had very carefully not quite closed it. One false move and it will latch. I so dread being seen in the hallway that I slip in and quickly close the door behind me before I realize that there may already be two people in the room.

Why else would the door not be shut? Careless.

I force myself past the cubicle formed by the bathroom toward the dim pool of light round the corner—and there he is, lying in bed, propped up on his elbow, reading. Like a boy.

Not reading now, of course. He is watching me, waiting. He does not look as I would if I had just heard someone enter my hotel room in the middle of the night. Did he leave the door open for me? That must be nonsense, and yet it adds to the poignancy of the situation, because I know that in a pathetic kind of way this whole thing is about me wishing someone would leave the door open for me.

Giles closes his book and puts it on the bedside table. He is wearing a white t-shirt, and the light of the lamp shimmers on the knobbly bones of his wrist and elbow and on the long strands of muscle that connect them. He looks like a boy waiting to be tucked in, and at the same time it is one of those moments in which I am overwhelmed by how big he is. The swell of his shoulders and the sudden bulge of his bicep as he bends his arm to lift the corner of his blankets.

My flannel knee looks childish on the edge of his mattress, and he could touch it without moving his hand more than a few inches. But he does not. He is so grave he almost looks forbidding. No smile, no flippant remark to relieve the tension. Waiting. Watching me with those light green eyes. There is a low crackle of plastic in one of the pockets as I let the robe slide to the ground. But I still don’t have the courage to climb into bed with him—the enormity of what I’m doing has rooted me to the edge of it. His eyes crease in a slow, wary smile, his shoulders relax, and his hand is warm and hopeful around my knee. The temperature in the room rises. He sits up and bunches his pillows against the headrest of the bed, scoots up so that he can lean against it and lifts his comforter to reveal blue-and-gray-striped pajama bottoms. I crawl up to him, into his naked arms, unsure of how fast this is going to happen. One arm is around my waist, and he pulls me onto his lap, astride, facing him. So near, suddenly. So close. So hard.

He slips his hands under my pajama top, up my back to my shoulders, his fingertips hard in the tense muscles, and for a swooning moment all blood drains from my brain. His eyes are glowing with pleasure at what lies ahead. His whole face is glowing, and I’m so nervous.

How difficult it is not to hide from what I want so much.

“I have to switch off the light.”

Comprehension registers in an incredulous shake of his head. I understand the disappointment, but not the flash of fear that hardens his face when my words sink in. But I am afraid, too.

“You can’t do this with the light on?” he asks in a tight voice.

“Not—tonight.”

“Not with me.”

“No.”

He seems to shrink into himself, and his hands lie still on my pajama’ed thighs. He stares, without seeing, at something there. The back of his hand, my knee in flannel.

“I don’t like that.”

He sounds defeated, but I can’t explain, and I can’t argue. The truth is, I need to do this in the dark and in silence. I grope for the switch of the bedside lamp, and the room is dark. Not quite pitch dark; after a while we are able to make out the white patches of each other’s eyes. I shrug out of my pajama jacket and wrap my arms around a phantasma. It is warm to the touch, substantial and alive, this fantasy of mine, and it smells like Giles Cleveland. It kisses like Giles Cleveland, too. Like a grumpy Giles Cleveland, at first, because he is annoyed with me, unresponsive. I love that he wants to see me, but I can’t allow that. Can’t allow him to see…me. See how much I want him.

The memory of the connection we made earlier is still glowing in his belly, too, and soon he is kissing me like he kissed me in the hallway. Only now I drive him on. He wants to be tender with me, but I cannot allow myself to feel the tenderness. There is nothing for me here except the fierce ache of lust. Impersonal and anonymous, in the dark, this naked male body, and I want to make it mine. This body is my fantasy of Giles Cleveland, and a fantasy is all he can be to me. I want to blurt out words, words to tell him what this feels like, what I feel for him. But the Sinatras are right. I won’t go and spoil it all.

I draw him toward me, away from the pillows, so I can lean over him and pull his t-shirt up and over his head. So much naked skin, cool in the night air but heated from inside. One male body should be much like the next, shouldn’t it? But this is the one I want. I lift his hands and cup them around my breasts, and he squeezes them lightly and chafes the tips with his palms. Half-heartedly, it seems to me.

“Too small?” A pointless question, but I can’t help it. This is an insecurity I thought I had mastered, but apparently not. Not in this case. He gives a low spurt of laughter, and of course I can’t tell, now, what it means, because I can’t see his face. The top of his head brushes along my chin, then my left breast contracts almost painfully, his mouth is so hot and so deliberate in its caress. It feels like the ache of fear, and I know why: if he is going to touch me like this, I will lose it.

We grapple in the silvery darkness, and with this phantasma I can be bold in a way I could not be bold with Giles Cleveland.

“No, don’t!” He pushes my head away. “I won’t—last. Please. Please.”

The skin of his belly is smooth and vulnerable under my lips, between my teeth; the soft, wiry hair tickles my cheek, and I simply have to take him back into my mouth. I wish I could be rough with him, just make him come fast and fierce, all control mine. Suck his brains out. I know I can make him come, and judging by the state of his hot, hard shaft, it would take about thirty seconds.

He scoots away from me, out of my arms, and jumps out of bed. Is he angry? What man gets angry when the woman he invited into his bed offers oral sex to him? He disappears into the bathroom and I hear him rummaging in a bag with a zipper. What is my cue? Should I just leave? When he returns, he makes for the window and opens the thick curtains with one swift movement so that the light from the street lamps illuminates the room enough to see the outline of furniture and bodies. Enough for me to see that he has left his pajama pants in the bathroom. Enough to see that he has not gone off the idea of having sex with me. Not at all.

Naked and erect he stands in front of the bed, waiting for my reaction. He doesn’t want this to be the anonymous encounter of two naked bodies in a hotel room. I can’t be mad at him for that.

“You do it.” He holds out his hand.

Oh! That’s why he went into the bathroom.

He reaches past me and takes something off the bedside table. There is a faint bleeping sound and then the display light of his cell phone dimly illuminates the scene.

And what a scene it is—the most beautiful cock in the world. Its length and thickness are in perfect proportion, the shaft is velvety and without blemish, and it is so hard that the foreskin has receded almost completely from the head, which rears up like a snake from the sheath it is shedding.

I scramble onto my knees and crouch in front of him; it is too, too beautiful, so hard and proud against the pale skin of his belly, and then like a smooth, lambent torch in my hand, and in my mouth.

“Anna—it’s not as if this weren’t a dream come true, but—”

This confession makes me grin, and with a plopping sound I release him. Gingerly I tear open the sachet and do what I have not done for almost a year—what I have never done in my life. I roll a condom over Giles Cleveland’s cock. Admiring my handiwork, I cradle his balls in my hand. This is almost the most intimate caress of all, holding a man’s testicles. So curiously heavy, so soft. So vulnerable.

I make him sit as before, with his back against the headboard, and he pulls me into a bear hug, nuzzles his face into what passes for my cleavage and exhales such a deep, heart-felt sigh that I have to laugh, though it sounds more like a sob.

“I know!” I whisper into his hair, against his shoulder. “Giles, I—” He freezes in my arms, so ready to expect a rebuke. “I don’t think I need a lot more foreplay.”

Again that spurt of laughter, and then he kisses me.

He runs his fingertips slowly down my spine, up my sides and over my breasts, over and over, like butterflies, like a length of silk, still kissing me. He is unexpectedly expert at caressing tiny tits, very unlike a man who is used to handling those sizable jugs that fill the former Mrs. Cleveland’s blouse, very gentle, suckling them, flicking at them with his tongue, raking his fingernails along my back with just enough pressure to make me shiver. Now I really don’t need any more foreplay. I raise myself on my knees, clasp the base of his cock—he doesn’t need any more foreplay either, judging by the state of it—and—

Just a naked man. Just a cock. It will feel lovely, because I am burning to have him—it—inside me, but I mustn’t picture us—Giles and Anna—in this hotel bed, me crouching over him, Giles clasping my waist with both hands, because if I could see that, his hands round my waist, both of us looking down although we can’t see more than hazy outlines, looking down to where we will be joined and fused—if I could see all that, I’d panic.

Control. Keep mine. Make him lose his.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!”

He rears up as if in pain, and I gulp for breath but manage to do it soundlessly. It does feel like pain, the stimulation overload as he slides into me, just slides in, smoothly and easily, all the way, all in one simple, fluid movement. I am so ready for him, have been, for such a long time. And because that felt so good, I do it again. All the way up till he almost slips out of me, till we almost lose contact but not quite. His fingers tighten around my waist, and this time he pushes me down, bucks his hips in anticipation, and I can’t suppress a groan of pleasure as he fills me up.

F*ck, yes. This.

“Make me last,” he whispers when I start to ride him, not fast but thoroughly, to feel as much of him as possible with each thrust. If I want to pretend to myself that he is just a man, just a cock, I will have to close my eyes, because we can see each other now, in the silvery darkness. I can see his gleaming eyes and tousled hair and the slim, angular outline of his shoulders that feel solid under my palms as I am holding on to him. He feels so solid and strong, strands of muscle and sinew under warm, smooth skin, but he looks almost fragile, like a specter, like a phantasma. Like a boy. I remember watching the side of his neck in the car this morning, and how on the plane he made a little nook for us with his body, and the pleading expression in his eyes when he turned to me in the restaurant and said I don’t want them! I want you!

“No,” I murmur against his lips and set to work.

I am neither surprised nor disappointed that he comes about three minutes later. I meant him to. I made him. What does surprise me is how close I was to coming myself. I don’t, usually, with a new man, not right away, not the first few times, not if it’s someone I care about. Surely not with Giles Cleveland!

Almost. I am seconds away from an orgasm, but also seconds away from falling asleep; it is the most bizarre feeling. If I roused myself just a little more, just stretched that little bit further, I would crash on the other side of a huge climax and then…I don’t know what then. Sleep for a hundred years.

I fall asleep. The last thing I remember is wrapping my arms around his neck and resting my cheek on his naked shoulder. No, the last thing I remember is the insidious bite of doubt whether he would want me to stay or to leave.

“Don’t leave…” The bedclothes rustle; his fingers touch my thigh and close around my knee as I scramble onto my haunches. “In the fairy tales the princess always has to stay with the ogre till the morning.”

“Ogre?” I can hear the smile in my own voice.

“To break the spell.”

I am amazed at how well he understands what this is about, and yet I have to ask, “Is that what we’ve been doing here?”

“I thought that was the idea.” Warm, gentle fingers are inching their way up my thigh. “I’ll feel horribly lonely when you leave.”

His hand slips round my waist, the flat of his hand against the small of my back; the mattress sags, and he pulls himself toward me. I only realize what he is about when I hear him groan and feel his cheek on my thigh and his face nestling against my naked belly.

Never in a million years had I expected Giles Cleveland would be so open, so trusting as a lover. It disarms me completely, and at the same time it exasperates me. What on earth was the trouble between him and Amanda? He is lovely. Just lovely.

Curled around me like a lanky dog, he offers me access to all parts of his body, and it is only because I am tenuously holding on to the resolution to go back to my room that I do not avail myself of this opportunity. One hand in his hair, the other on his neck, I try not to think of the long strands of muscle along his spine, and how easily I could run my hand down to the smooth, taut globes of his buttocks…and the demesnes that there adjacent lie. I drop a kiss onto the temple that is facing up, hoping that this will help me preserve a state of maternal tenderness.

“And there’s another thing,” he murmurs against my skin.

“What other thing?”

“In the fairy tales the magic number is always three.”

The sensation of his lips between my breasts clarifies the meaning of this remark more efficiently than my addled brain can decode it.

“Giles—don’t!” I clutch his hair roughly, but of course I cannot push away a man who has both his arms wrapped around my waist.

“Have you already had enough of me, after that pathetic little performance? Don’t I get a chance at a make-up exam?”

“I haven’t had enough of you.” Saying it out loud sends a shiver of anxiety over my skin, but it is dark, and so I say it like it is. “But I know I will be lonely tomorrow, and I want to go back now. To find out how bad the loneliness will be.”

“Presbyterian mentality.”

“Your lot doesn’t have the premium on guilt, you know.”

“Guilt-shmuilt,” he murmurs, and a heartbeat later we are shaking with giggles like an eight-limbed blancmange.

“Oh, Giles!”

“I hate the idea of flying back home without you.”

He is breathless with laughter, but there is defiance in his voice now, and a little resentment, too, but what can I say? So I bend down again and kiss the cool skin of his shoulder. What else can I do? There is nothing I can do about it. So we will both be lonely, but there it is.

“I hate the idea of a whole week’s holiday,” he insists. “And what I would do with you if I had a whole week to do it in.”

“Don’t…”

“And when you get back you’ll pretend this never happened.”

A sensitive man, who, inevitably, has moments of tetchiness.

“No, not pretend it never happened. But it can’t happen again. We agree on that, don’t we?”

His arms around my waist tighten and for a few seconds he presses his face hard into my belly. “Giles! We do agree this is a…one-off, don’t we?”

“Please stay with me tonight. The whole night. Will you?”

I don’t know about this. I am getting really cold—wouldn’t be surprised if I am catching something, naked and sweaty in the cool hotel room—and after the first post-coital languor I can feel a wave of anxiety rolling toward me. I would rather be alone when it hits me. It will carry me far, far away from Giles, and I don’t want to be in the same room with him, let alone the same bed, when it breaks.

“Someone once asked me to assess, on a scale from one to ten, my ability to make myself happy,” he says. “I thought at the time it was about three and a half.”

“Are you asking me?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know whether this—coming here, tonight—falls into the category of making myself happy, or the opposite.”

He raises himself onto his elbow and gently kisses me on the cheek.

“Happy,” he says.

My cheek finds its place in the warm, fragrant crook of his neck; my shoulders relax in his embrace. He pulls me down, and our chests roll against each other, his ribs hard against mine, cushioned by the soft squishiness of my breasts, and our hips, pelvic bones colliding, and the smooth, musky skin of our bellies, and then our legs as we huddle under the blankets again.

“Come closer. While you’re still here, come close…”

I worm one arm through the narrow gap between the mattress and his body, slip the other around his waist, and nestle against him as if I could by some osmotic process become one with him. He catches his breath in the darkness above my head, and a large, determined hand clasps my buttocks.

“Every bone in my body turns to jelly when you do that,” he breathes.

I press my face against his shoulder and wonder whether he can feel that I am giggling again.

“And one bit of…um…jelly turns into a bone-er…”

A quiver runs through his chest and his hand on my ass squeezes in involuntary response.

“I had hoped you would notice…”

Leaning back on my trembling arms, I am mesmerized by the moonlit sight of our gyrating hips as Giles slams his cock into me, and because I am again half sitting on his lap, he has his hands free and puts them to good use on my breasts. Kneading them with his palms, tugging at them, a little harder now than before, as if he knew it was time. As if he knew I was riding the wave. Then he slows down, and frustration makes me want to cry out in protest, but I am determined not to surrender myself to him, to it—whatever it might be, my need for him—so I cautiously inhale, as calm as I can be while he is still inside me. God, this is so bizarre. Giles Cleveland’s cock inside me, utterly bizarre.

He clasps my hips and moves hardly at all, only his thumbs, stroking the sensitive skin above my ovaries, inching lower—I can’t believe he is doing this. Pushing my lips apart, away from his shaft, unfurling them to expose the swollen hood. I can feel it’s wet because it’s cool in the night air, then hot under the tender, tentative pressure of his thumb.

“Can I make you come…like this?”

“No,” I lie, and just in time my * and the sensitive surrounding area are released from the firm, circling attention of the ball of his hand. I gulp for breath, relieved, frustrated.

“Show me how,” he says softly, but I can hear the tension and the excitement in his voice.

“No!” I almost don’t have breath enough for that one syllable.

“Yes.” And then, even more softly, “Please.”

He gives me a second or two, and when I don’t comply, he leans forward, and while he is kissing me, makes me fall flat on my back by the simple method of jabbing the crooks of my elbows. I try to protest, but his mouth is back on mine, and when he finally releases me and sits up, his cock still hard in my belly, he takes my hand and guides it between my legs.

“You’re safe. I’ll be watching you the whole time.”

There is a faintly malicious note in his voice; he is still angry with me for switching off the light. He settles my butt on the mattress and stretches out next to me, his legs tangled with mine, careful not to slip out of me. Props himself up on one elbow, draws me closer with one arm around my waist. Clasps my uncommissioned fingers with his other hand. Pins my left arm above my head when I try to free myself.

“Giles, no! This really isn’t—”

“You look extremely sexy like this, you kn-know that?”

I can tell that he means it; his voice close above my head is so strained it cracks.

“No, I don’t!”

He thrusts himself into me again, slowly but deliberately, and it’s as if a vial of hot oil had been poured onto his cock.

“Liar,” he whispers into my hair, and I giggle and groan at the same time. I hate that he knows how much he is turning me on, hate even having to admit to myself how much it turns me on to be pinned down like this, by his body and his cock, held like this, exposed.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire…” he whispers. Hesitates, almost stops breathing. “…cunt on fire…Show me how to make you come.”

I couldn’t say whether he pushed my hand back between my legs or whether it crept there of its own accord, but I don’t care anymore. I press my face against his chest. His skin is hot and smells of sex and fresh sweat.

And then I show him.

Sometime later, I float up from what feels like twenty thousand leagues under the sea to find that gentle fingers are caressing the back of my neck, kneading the muscles in my shoulders. A body lies warm and naked against mine, and a voice whispers like an echo from the deep.

“I can’t keep my hands off you.”

I grunt softly and arch myself against his fingers in languid invitation. They need no encouragement. Slowly but inevitably they work their way down the long strands of muscle next to my spine until a large, sure hand molds itself around the warm globes of my buttocks. It needs no more than that. Or perhaps it is because my defenses are down. I want to spread my legs, but at the same time I don’t want to show my need to be touched so blatantly. Down my thighs his hand travels, to the back of my knees, and up again on the inside of my thighs. I only realize that I have lifted myself up and toward him when I hear a noise of amusement next to my ear.

“Here?” he whispers. “You want me here?”

His hand slips into the hot, slick cavity high up between my thighs, almost but not quite reaching my center. Still I am hoping he will nudge my legs apart to give him more scope, but he does not. I must do it, offer myself to him in the silvery darkness, hiding against the mattress. I moan when he slides into me, when he bites into my neck, plays with my ear. His loins feel so smooth and strong against my naked butt. The bed sags. He has taken the weight off his elbows.

This time I come against his hand.

When I wake again, my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow. I was dreaming I was in an exam situation—fully clothed, at least—and I had to pick one from a table covered with hundreds of cards in wild disorder. I knew that the card held the question I would then have to answer, and I was terrified because I had not prepared myself well for the exam. Hoping against hope to pick a question I could handle, I turned one over, and instead of letters it showed an anatomy illustration: like one of Charles Estienne’s or Giulio Casserio’s naked women, this figure looked vaguely Grecian, and she was holding up the folds of her abdominal wall with both hands as if it were a frilly petticoat.

I knew without having been told that it was my task to comment on what she displayed within her abdominal cavity, but hard as I strained my eyes, I could not seem to focus on any details. People were passing in and out of the room, and I grew ever more frantic because one of them would stop by my table and demand an answer. Finally someone did stop, and I, playing for time, began to describe the scene in the drawing. But the examiner reached for the card and began to pull it out of my hand. I tried to hold on to it, but he laughed. As he laughed, I looked up, and it was Ciaran Dyce. With an overwhelming sense of defeat, I let go of the card and woke up.

I cannot do this.

I have not lost myself in him, or in this. But if we do it again, I will crack. He will crack me open to the core.