Addicted - Charlotte Stein

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now nearly impossible to say. I stare at the first few in dismay: Have you ever tied anyone up? Do you ever take a woman to the top of a glass building and blindfold her with red ribbons? Am I insane and too steeped in fantasy land, wanting to write about those things?

      I can’t ask him stuff like that, after he’s said ‘seducing’.

      ‘Well … uh … maybe you could just tell me … something. Like in the group. You tell me a story, and I’ll … take notes.’

      ‘A story, huh?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      He pauses, as though he’s truly considering. Though he doesn’t pause like a normal person, of course. Now he seems to be smiling without moving his lips, and his eyes are full of this devilish sort of delight. He’s going to really sock it to me – that much is clear.

      ‘OK. How about this? There once was a man from Nantucket …’

      I come close to throwing my pad at him.

      ‘I was really expecting something then.’

      ‘I know. You’re practically pushing your pen tip through the paper.’ I glance down, and sure enough, there’s a blob of ink the size of a tomato, soaking through the top layer to seven other layers beneath. I’m a nervous wreck. ‘What exactly are you going to note down, anyway?’

      Maybe he’s a nervous wreck too.

      But if so, I wish he’d show it.

      ‘Just any relevant details.’

      He makes a worried, this-food-is-going-to-taste-bad face.

      ‘Like … what? Girth, thrusts per second … are you measuring me for a sex suit?’

      ‘Yeah, and then I’m going to shoot you into sex space.’

      ‘Awesome.’

      ‘I’m just looking for some authentic experiences, that’s all.’

      ‘And what if my experiences don’t seem authentic?’

      Alarms bells ring, at this point. But apparently, they’re the kind of alarm bells that make you want to move towards the danger, instead of running away. They’ve been wired wrong, and now I’m stumbling towards his so-wild-they’re-unreal stories without a thought for my own safety.

      ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? If you’ve done it, then it’s believable – whether I’m convinced or not.’

      ‘So it’s sort of like I’m giving you permission.’

      ‘To do what?’

      For some reason I think of a swimming pool filled with writhing bodies instead of water, and me poised on some impossibly high diving board. Go on and jump, he says. But how can I, when I don’t know if anyone will catch me?

      They seem pretty preoccupied by each other’s groins.

      ‘To write what you want to write.’

      Oh, what a lovely concept. What a lovely, lovely concept. I don’t tell him how much it makes my heart sing, however. He’d only get the wrong idea.

      ‘I suppose.’

      ‘OK. So I’ll start at the beginning, then.’

      ‘The beginning?’

      ‘Yeah. The beginning of my escapades.’

      My mind immediately sends me an image of a gaudy comic book, with the words The Madcap Adventures of Dillon on the front. At which point, I have to accept that I’m not going to get anything down to earth out of this. He probably doesn’t even know what down to earth is. He only knows wild, and electric.

      Yet somehow I hardly care.

      ‘The beginning, then,’ I say, because apparently I’ve already jumped.

      I’m halfway to the writing water already.

      Chapter Five

      ‘I didn’t know her first name. She was always Mrs Goldman, to the staff. Hell, I think she was Mrs Goldman to everyone. Her husband probably called her that in bed. I know I wanted to call her that in bed. It was bad enough that I was seventeen and still a virgin – I lived in permanent boner-land anyway. But trying to trim the hedges round her pool while she lay there on a sun lounger, half-naked, all oiled and shit …

      ‘It was pretty torturous. She had the kind of breasts you don’t see any more. Eighties breasts. Really round and real, always trying to burst out of tiny bikini tops. And eighties legs, too – strong, thick thighs that sort of slid against each other when she moved. She glowed, you know? Her skin was always like satin. Some days I’d go inside to the bathroom just so I could, you know, take care of myself … which I’m pretty sure she knew.

      ‘How could she not? That summer was so hot you couldn’t wear anything but shorts, and I knew my dick was always straining through the material. Weird thing was, though – that only turned me on more.

      ‘She told me once that I had a blow job mouth, and I guess that’s true. I do love to suck on things.’

      He gazes off innocently at some innocuous spot, everything about him so casual, so calm about this. He’s propping his chin on one hand, his bottle lying lazy in the other – while my mind frantically fumbles towards thoughts of that thing he said, about Alan.

      It doesn’t get very far, however. It went sort of blank right around the idea of him looking at himself naked. The image he paints is so vivid that I can’t see anything but it for a second – like the photo-flash of something, seared on the insides of my retinas. There’s the outline of his body, thinner than he is now but somehow just as compelling. And his skin … oh, God, what must his skin have been like at that age? I imagine it the way he described hers: as glossy as syrup, as smooth as silk, so beautiful you want to die the moment you see it.

      He must have been stunning. He’s stunning now, and that’s without the other thing my heated imagination has latched onto: how dazed he must have looked, under the pressure of all that lust. I think of those blue eyes of his, near-blank and foggy with a thousand thoughts of her, and I can’t imagine how she didn’t jump on him immediately.

      Though I’m guessing I’m going to find out.

      ‘Back then, though,’ he says. ‘I honestly thought I was being real subtle. That she had no idea about the private sex sessions I was having with her, in my head, in her bathroom. I pictured myself suavely seducing her – giving her exactly what her puny husband never did. I’d seen him around, in his shitty suits, as skinny as a reed.

      ‘Whereas I was … well. I was six-two before I graduated junior high, and had already hit two hundred pounds of mostly muscle. I just knew I could give her what she wanted. I’d grab her and throw her onto the antique Italian silk couch, then pound her until she screamed for more. Then I’d bend her over the kitchen counter, the way I’d seen some guy do in the electric seven minutes of porn I’d dared to watch in my parents’ basement – then shove myself inside her. She made me feel electric.’

      I flick from this to that, in the maze of all the things he’s saying – the idea of him swaggering around, contrasting with the expression he has on his face now, as he talks about it. He thinks he was ridiculous, I can tell – and I like him for that.

      But I like him more for the last little bit. The way he says the word electric, as though some probably pilfered dirty movie sent a charge direct through his body to his dick. I know how that feels, all right … oh, I remember the delight of digging through all kinds of movies and books, searching for that one illicit scene.

      We have something in common there, I think – though I suppose everybody does. I’m not about to get excited over it, or anything. I mean, his next words are these:

      ‘I spent

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