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When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not look at you.
No matter how much you pray,
I will not listen,
for your hands are covered with blood.
ISAIAH 1.15
Quarens me, sedisti lassus,
redemisti crucem passus,
tantus labor non sit cassus.
Dies Irae : I : Sanctus
Our first time, and it's predictably perfect.
It’s also going to be pretty damn quick: you’re too inexperienced and I’m too impatient to make it last any longer. In my defence, it’s difficult to make it last, what with something as beautiful as you under me. You are, too. You said you weren’t, but you are. With your face flushed dark with blood and your eyes half-closed with pleasure, sweat making your fair hair limp on your forehead, you clench your thighs so hard round me as you arch your back and wriggle and twist your hips and generally work yourself up, moaning, that I’m beginning to get an ache at my sides, like a stitch. I never in a million years thought you’d be so into it. I certainly never thought you could be sexy. Not like this; not knowingly. The naivety I expected, down the drain like so much cheap whisky.
But, as ever, it’s not that simple. What you do is knowing, but how you do it isn’t. There’s a transparency there, a wholesomeness. I can sense it, even as you strain up to kiss me, with your sweet-tasting tongue pressing hard into my mouth; even as you hold me to you with both hands, urge me deeper, lift your hips and part your thighs to make it better, to get more. It’s strangely unsettling, even though I’m trying not to take it that way.
I change angle slightly, aiming that minuscule bit higher. You open your mouth in a silent cry of pleasure, your eyes rolling closed. You’re certainly a gratifying partner. Sensitive. Responsive. Tight.
‘Does it feel good?’ A shudder ripples through you from your core, shaking me too. ‘Like I said it would?’
‘Oh, Nick, it’s – it’s good.’
In my head an echo of soft, soft laughter.
Give it to him, then, barely-whispers a voice like black sugar. If it’s what the pretty fool wants.
My fingers flex as if of their own volition and I find myself grabbing at you, roughly, leaving dark red marks on your pale skin, yanking you over on to your stomach and holding you down, pressing your head down with the flat of my hand. You whimper, struggling automatically in the face of the aggression of the action, attempting to get to your hands and knees, to regain some control. I shove your face down harder into the mattress. I stare down at my own hand, my mind blank and buzzing. I try to move my fingers. Nothing.
‘Nick— you’re— hurting—’ You’re barely able to breathe, I know you can’t, I know I’m hurting you. But I can’t stop. It’s like there’s a huge invisible weight on my shoulder, lending me strength I never possessed, strength enough to be pinning you down so completely. Strength enough to suffocate you.
Enjoy him while he lasts. Go on. Enjoy yourself, Chapel.
I summon all my will, drawing deep from my mental reserves, forcing my thoughts to turn to defiance, to Get out, to I won’t – and then my hand jerks away, off you, slides off your soft yellow hair easily as butter.
Immediately your head comes up; you let out a pained gasp for air.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ You sound nervous. As well you may be: you could hardly be more vulnerable than you are now.
‘It wasn’t you.’ True enough. It wasn’t. But I never thought he would intrude like this. I never thought he would be watching.
Fuck him, my mind says defiantly, though I’m trembling with fright, delayed shock rippling across my skin, raising the hairs like a breeze across a lake. It’s showmanship. It’s self-delusion. And I’m the master at both. Fuck him. What can he do? Kill me?
Big fucking deal.
But now I have to make it up to you, anxious as you obviously are, wondering what you’ve done to provoke this new, unfathomable weirdness of mine. I kiss the top of your ear through strands of your soft hair, slip my left hand under and hold you, firmly. As you relax by degrees, sure I’m not about to try to kill you after all, I begin to stroke you, long, assured strokes, until you’re moving into the sensuous rhythm yourself, giving little soft breathless cries of encouragement, sexier than sin. I slide my thumb over the tip, drawing forth a drop of moisture. Perfect. I make to withdraw my hand but, breathing tight and laboured, you reach under and grab my wrist, trying desperately to hold me to that promise.
‘Finish it,’ you almost hiss, urgency underlying the uncharacteristic violence of your words.
‘No, Vash, sweetheart,’ I murmur, kissing your shoulder, deliberately patronising, and take my hand firmly away. You moan, anger fading immediately to frustration and disappointment. ‘Not yet. I’m not done with you yet.’ I reach down and slide both hands under you. Your stomach, tense against my fingers; the puckered smoothness of scar tissue. I grip your hips, forcing you to slow down, but really it’s too late. Saint Peter himself couldn’t make it last much longer. Still, I slow my pace. Gently, now, just to tease, when I know you want it anything but gently. Shallowly, too, barely giving anything, goading you, stimulating you. Wetness slides down the inside of your thigh.
‘Please,’ you gasp, simultaneously grinding down into the bed and arching your back, fingers clutching sporadically at the pillow. ‘Please, Nick, I can’t – I want – do it harder – do me – fuck me harder – make me come –’
You barely know what you’re saying, caught up so completely in that singular desire to be finished off which blocks out all sense and coherence. But still, wow. I guessed you’d be a talker, but Jesus, who knew you’d fit in just fine in a skin flick? Those sleazy movies, the ones you get in the classier hotels with television: the no-no-yes ones where the girl with thick glasses is all shy and prim at first and then ten minutes later is screaming Give it to me, oh God fuck me. I have an image of you in my head now that won’t dissolve, two on you, and it’s making me harder than ever. Shame filters through me, hot, blooming bright on my face. I can’t think of you like this. It’s too squalid. You’re too sweet.
And yet here I go, harder, faster, thrusting into the tight heat of you with feral grunts and gasps of pleasure. And you, close to crying with sheer pleasure, sobbing my name between tight ecstatic breaths: ‘Nick, fuck me, fuck me, N-Nick—!’
Charmingly, I find that I can pinpoint the exact moment when you’re about to come. Not because, unlike some, you feel you have to announce it (I’m coming I’m coming oh Gawd I’m coming! – get over yourselves, girls; like I care) but because your whole body tightens and goes still, just for the tiniest second, like, I imagine, the moment before a bow is fired and the string is taut and ready. Quiveringly, singingly ready. And then you let out a strangled gasp, a drawn-out Ah sound, force your hips urgently back against me, and I know you’re just about there, and I can’t do anything to stop it.
Not yet, though. Not quite yet. We’re going to come together, of course – because, as I said, it’s perfect: because it has to be, because God has a sense of irony – though too suddenly, sooner than I’d like. We’ll climax – perfectly – with that weird rightness and is-that-it abruptness, the uncomplicated explosion of white godly pleasure that really should not come of ten minutes or so of inelegant grappling.
Frankly I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long. From the moment I showed you what it could feel like, from the moment you realised for yourself – after kicking me in the face, after I’d tried and failed to set it in context for you (Me: This is the equivalent to a woman’s clitoris, Vash. You do know about that, right? You: Um, no) – that my fingers down there were a good thing after all, you lost yourself. As you were lying there, spread wide, with my lubricated fingers slowly and gently circling inside you, alternately shivering with shudders of sudden pleasure and begging that I not stop whatever it was I was doing, you lost any dignity you had (not that you had much) and all of your self-control (ditto) and became a quivering, hyper-sensitive mess. To anyone else I can see that it could be frustrating, this lack of control. To me, however, it’s endearing. It is so endearing – the painfully vulnerable and half-angry cry I know you’ll give when you come, the way you’ll relax so completely, go utterly limp beneath me, trembling – that it constricts my throat. Stills my hands, convulsively gripping your shoulders.
It was the sheer unlikeliness of the combination of you and sex that initially I found so adorable, sentimentally charming, the way others find puppies or babies. Between your spread legs, about to begin, with you anxious and serious beneath me, and I was smiling like an idiot, fondly, as you tensed up and then tried to pretend you hadn’t, compensating by kissing me, firmly, a nervous distraction. I wanted to pet you, to stroke your blonde hair and coo, to let your sweetness envelop me. I didn’t want to do this with you – though I did, so much, I wanted you so badly and I was scared at the strength of it because we weren’t even drunk, I wasn’t even slightly drunk. And then your cool pale hand was on me and you were guiding me between your legs, frowning your concentration even as you bit hard into your lower lip, obviously terrified. I caught your wrist, moved beyond words, suddenly sure beyond all doubt that to do this to you was extraordinarily wrong. You peeled my fingers away with a controlled iron strength that terrified me. You looked deep into my eyes (cliché, I know, but there’s no other way I can say it. It felt like I was being scoured from the inside out by the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen).
I won’t break, you said, bravely.
And now those last few unimportant seconds as the surge of completion approaches us both, irresistible, intense. I press my forehead hard against the back of your shoulder and concentrate purely on the motion. There’s an art to it: there should be quick short teasing thrusts broken up by deep, slow strokes, but that’s all fucked and gone to hell as I drive hard, harder than I’ve ever gone, lace grimy fingers in your fair hair and yank your head up from its place buried in the dirty pillow as you tense and tense, almost to breaking point, and then, finally, begin to shudder underneath me. You cry out, helplessly – a short, shocked cry, freed into stifling air that’s heavy with sex and sweat and musty blankets – jerking and shuddering, helplessly, because you have no control. You have no control.
‘Wolfwood,’ you gasp, and your shaking fingers blindly grasp for mine on the blanket at your side. ‘Nick. Oh. Oh, Nick. Sorry. I couldn’t – I couldn’t stop it.’
‘It’s okay,’ I murmur mechanically into your (perfect) ear, the silver earring brushing against my teeth with a tiny click; squeezing your hand, stroking your hair, the whole bit. ‘It’s okay, Tongari. You were really good. Thanks.’ Might as well lay it on thick.
Your breath, coming uneven and loud, loud in the baking silence. I kiss the nape of your neck, low-key, buying me time. I don’t ever want to get off you. Shamefully, it feels good, being on top of you. It feels too good. Pushing you into the bed like this, with my whole weight centred on you; with your fabulously pliable long and slender legs spread under me like wings, spread so wide that your bare feet almost touch the sides of the bed. Here, if nowhere else, I dominate you. Here I have such power that you’re still trembling with it. Have sex with me and tremble, Vash the Stampede. Worship the power I have to make you come so hard. A tacky voiceover, a pseudo-pantomime villain. If I’m the bad guy in this little tableau, then that makes you the freshly fucked hero.
But, of course, we knew that already.
I make to get up, bracing my arms either side of your head, but you reach forward and grab my wrist. ‘Don’t go,’ you say, dazedly, twisting round to try and look at me. ‘Where’re you going?’
‘Just to get us something to eat. I’m starving.’ I am not smiling, cannot smile, but I force my voice into a smiling register. ‘Sex makes you hungry. Uses up a lot of energy. Burns calories.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh.’
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘A bit.’ Underneath me you wriggle round, turn over on to your back so that you can lie under me as you were before. Before, when we lay here, clothed, making out like kids. And now all your sadly scarred perfection open against me, your legs blithely gaping. You yawn, rub your left eye with your knuckle, unsubtle as Gest: solemnly, comically tired. I want to kiss you. I know I don’t deserve to. My throat, tight as closed-up rubber. I have to sit up and turn away, quickly, so as not to let you see the expression seeping across it like spilled coffee. You lay your arm across your eyes and you yawn again, almost silently, a cat-yawn.
‘What d’you want to eat, then?’ I ask, forcing my voice normal, directing the question to my thighs. ‘If I’m going.’ I risk a glance at you.
‘Doughnuts?’ You push your hair back from your forehead, sounding hopeful. ‘I know the bakery’s a couple of streets away, but I haven’t had doughnuts in ages and—’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’ How can I be so flippant? ‘I’ll wake you when I get back.’
‘I’m not going to sleep.’ You draw your fingertips through the wetness on your stomach, absently, close your eyes and smile. ‘Just resting…’
‘Tongari.’
‘Mm.’
‘Did you like it?’ It comes out too quietly. You don’t hear it. It’s imperative that I know.
‘Say again?’
‘Did you – like it?’
‘Of course I did,’ you say, blue eyes opening, sleepily frank. ‘It was you.’
‘Right,’ I say in my tight rubbery throat.
By the time I’m dressed you’re sound asleep, sprawled across the middle of the double bed, naked, uncovered, the heat of the afternoon rising perspiration to the surface of your skin. One white arm hangs down from the side, fingers loosely curled upwards. Come here, it beckons. Come here. Your glasses, lying folded on the scarred wood of the bedside table, catch the sunlight that glimmers through the half-closed shutters, filtering it orange against the wall. You mutter something inaudible, sighing, turning on to your side, bringing a fist up to your mouth. The same shaft of light catches your gold hair, picks out the delicacy of your features, the bruised and blurred sensuousness of your mouth. You look like some battered and battle-scarred angel. In that instant I want nothing more than to lie down with you, feel your heart beat its slow, regular rhythm against me and pretend there’s nothing but this. Nothing more complicated than this.
‘Back in fifteen,’ I say softly into the warm silence, swallowing hard.
It takes a lot to close the door on you, sleeping softly and stickily amidst damp sheets. I can’t blame him this time when my hand doesn’t want to turn the doorknob. The hallway is silent. Unventilated. The heat rolls up to meet me, settles down on me like a wet wool blanket, carrying the smell of unwashed human beings, sweet-smelling and gamey. Slowly I push back my sleeve and look at my watch. Ten minutes. I have ten minutes to get to where he said, that bench in front of the parched dolphin fountain. I’m going to be late. I’m going to be late, like always.
But fuck it. Fuck him. He’ll wait.
He’s damn good at waiting
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