face and he makes a little snuffling noise – a silly noise, that tells me he’s only half-asleep. Then he sneaks his hand up from inside the sleeping bag, and clasps his fingers around mine. Just right there against his cheek.
I’m almost afraid to go to sleep, in case I wake up to him making love to another woman. But then again, what if I stay awake and he doesn’t? What if later on down the line we hate each other for never letting us be the people we didn’t know we wanted to be? Tia with a scientist, Ryan with an actress.
You’ve got to swap and change and explore and find out about your body with another completely different sort of body, while you still can. I remember saying to him: What sort of person would I be if I had never met you?
Better, he had said. But I don’t think that’s true.
I go to sleep, with my hand still in his.
* * *
I wake up to sighs, and moans. Soft and faint, as though knowing they have to hide. Automatically I think of Ryan and Kay going at it, and for a moment I’m afraid to open my eyes. Even though I maybe possibly wanted this, I’m afraid, I’m afraid. All those conventional feelings that he’d probably mock well up in me: what if he likes her better, what if I don’t want him to like her better, what if I don’t really want Sean at all so it’s not OK for him to like Kay?
But when I open them, Ryan has his head in the pillow. Utterly asleep and oblivious.
It’s Kay and Sean who have the reins of whatever sleigh ride we’re on. Or rather, Kay does. She’s the one calling the shots, and her shots are these:
‘They did,’ she’s whispering. ‘Why can’t we?’
And then she gives out a faint little moan, because I guess whatever she’s doing to herself feels nice. It’s certainly not anything that Sean’s doing to her, because he looks tense and tight and is lying ever so slightly off to one side, and when he speaks it’s in a straining sort of voice.
‘Because we’re not like them,’ he says, and I wonder what he means. Not like the sort of person who screws in a lake, or while lying next to other people? Because I wasn’t either, before I met Ryan. And I suspect Kay isn’t much either, while she’s with Sean.
Though I gather she’d kind of like to be.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Just shove it in me.’
Yeah. I kind of think she might.
‘I know you’re hard.’
‘That’s irrelevant,’ he says, but then she reaches down to the place where said hardness will be, and he flinches as though struck.
‘No-oo-oo,’ he whines, and then in a sterner sort of voice: ‘I can’t in front of other people.’
Though I really don’t think that matters so much, when she’s already got her eyes closed and is definitely playing with herself. She doesn’t say it, but the meaning’s clear: if you won’t, I will.
It’s just as she gets her hand underneath the clingy vest she’s wearing to play with one of her spiky little nipples as she squirms and sighs, that he looks away exasperated and catches me looking back. Only then does his face flush. Though I don’t think he’s embarrassed because his girlfriend is masturbating while I watch. I don’t think he’s embarrassed that he’s probably got an erection, either.
I actually think it might be because he’s the one hanging back. He’s the one with a lack of daring. His girlfriend is willing to get herself off in front of other people, and I’m the girl who fucked her boyfriend and kissed his pretty mouth while I did it.
Sean, on the other hand, is capable of nothing. Just a boring scientist set in his boring conventional ways.
He glances down at Kay, her eyes scrunched tight shut and her mouth a cute round O as her fingers work on whatever they were working on, and then his eyes seem to darken. He doesn’t look cross exactly, but he doesn’t look pleased either, and, though it’s a surprise to Kay to find him suddenly on top of her, it doesn’t surprise me.
He kisses her hard and she squeals into his mouth – I guess he’s not usually the sort to be rough. Usually I bet he’s restrained, tender, not quite letting himself go. But he certainly seems to be letting something go now.
He yanks her hands out from inside the sleeping bag and pins them above her head, and a strange sort of echo floods over me. I remember the first time Ryan and I screwed – when we’d fallen asleep together one too many times, and I couldn’t help looking at his face while I touched myself. He had woken up just as I got too excited to hold back, and then he’d taken me in much the same fashion as Sean is about to take Kay: on my back, hands suddenly and startlingly pinned above my head.
His voice in my ear: Yeah, I think I’ll just finish you off.
There’s something about the scene before me that’s the reverse of that, however. It’s Kay who pants at him to do it, do it, yes, fuck me. Sean seems aggressive with her, but resistant somehow at the same time. His expression only relaxes when he’s clearly between her legs and feeling her spread for him – her soft pouting cunt probably slippery with arousal, just aching for the thick push of his cock.
It isn’t hard to imagine at all. I’m aching for it too, and it only gets worse when he starts rocking over her and she starts wailing – and, dear God, does she ever. She cries and pants and moans and claws at him while he keeps up this steady solid rhythm – almost as though he’s insensible to her reaction. The only clue that he’s enjoying himself is the spreading flush on his cheeks and the way he’s biting at his lower lip, but somehow that just makes him more alluring.
I wonder what it would take to crack through that façade. Certainly not all the groaning and squealing that Kay’s doing. She looks a picture: cheeks hot pink, eyes closed, lips gleaming and open. And the words she babbles – yes, right there oh yes, baby, you’re doing it, oh fuck my little pussy – are arousing even to me. But I guess that’s not enough for the man of science.
She comes long before he does. I know she does, because she pants kiss me now, now, and I take my eyes off Sean long enough to realise that Ryan is awake, and she’s talking to him. She must have known what I did with her boyfriend, and now she wants some of the same – she wants Ryan to kiss her as she comes.
Which he does. And not to my consternation, but certainly to Sean’s.
He moves back a little to let it happen – not that he has much of a choice – but I can see the dazed hurt clear on his face. He swipes a hank of hair off his forehead and pulls completely away from her when she doesn’t end the kiss with her orgasm, and then he just sits back on his heels, sleeping bag swaddled around all the parts I want to see, watching his girlfriend make out with my boyfriend.
He doesn’t see it as a free pass, the way I do. He just looks hurt and confused.
Or, at least, he does until he turns his gaze back to me.
I pull away from Ryan and sit up, gazing right back at Sean with steady eyes. Even in the low light I can see there’s a faint gleam of sweat on his upper lip and at his temples, and that he’s trembling just a little. With tension, I think – the tension of whatever it is we’re doing, and the tension of not getting that orgasm he clearly needs.
