Flora Dain - Charm

Emotion wells up like it sometimes does when I come as hard and as often as this. I look up at him imploringly, aching for his entry. ‘Are you going to …?’ I tail off, unsure how to ask for this. A helpless tear trickles down my cheek.

‘Hey. Don’t cry.’ Concern flickers instantly across his face as he touches the trickle with his lips, tasting gently, and then moves lower and fastens his mouth on mine. He kisses me softly, his touch light and honeyed. I shudder in his grasp as the fading echoes of my orgasm briefly intensify.

‘What do you want, Ella? You want me inside you? Is that what you want?’

I’m still pinned. His grip is still as thrilling, his look still as fierce and his hot shaft still in place. He must want relief. He held off all last night. How can he do this? It’s unnatural.

Something of this must show in my face. His gaze softens and I see his eyelids lower. ‘I’ll take that as a yes. But you’ll have to wait a while. I’ll take you when I’m ready, not before.’ He stoops to kiss my breasts, taking a mouthful of each in turn and sucking hard, drawing the blood to my fevered nerve-endings and leaving my aureoles rosy, swollen and tingling. All at once he straightens up and kisses me full on the mouth.

‘Now I have to work. I’ll only be an hour or so. When I get back we’ll go see your boyfriend.’

He releases me with a smile and closes the door softly behind him. I stare after him and rub my wrists as my robe slowly unwinds at my back.

At that moment my phone rings.

Ryan.

Still shaky, I grab it and peer at the display but it’s not Ryan, it’s my old friend Billy Brown. I tried to reach her yesterday and now she’s calling back.

‘Willamina. Hi, where are you? Fixed your new job yet?’ My voice sounds shaky but as usual she chatters on without drawing breath.

Her new internship in a big Boston law firm has really caught her imagination. She joined them as a researcher. She’s small, dark and dynamite and gets bored easily. This is her third try in a firm so prestigious even the janitors seem to have college degrees.

I tell her she’s aiming too high. She laughs, and I know that her elfin face has lit up with mischief. That’s all that’s worth aiming for, she says, and anyway she can afford it and I aim too low.

Ouch. After we graduated we both took a course in law but I went back to literature, my first love. While she took the risky route via a legal internship Miss Normal took the safe one and decided to teach. Unlike Billy’s father mine’s no millionaire, just a country physician. I need to earn money. Also I have a paralysing shyness that sometimes roots me to the spot in interviews and forbids me to speak.

At least in the classroom it can’t do any harm – not lose me a case, like it would in law, my first career choice, or fluff a broadcast like it would in journalism, my second. Students just laugh.

So for various reasons that I’d never tell anybody else my third career choice – teaching – was also the hardest for me and presents a daily challenge. But I’d never complain. I love it.

Now she’s curious about my unscheduled trip west. I can almost see her eyes narrow. ‘I thought you were invited to speak at the Charlotte Academy Summer School in North Carolina? So how come you’re in Dallas, Texas, of all places? Come on, spill.’

I sigh. ‘It’s complicated. Ryan-related.’

‘That asshole.’

She must be feeling good. Her usual comment would make a trucker blush. I grin into the phone. ‘Tell me about it. Catch you passing through, maybe?’

She’s on office business in Austin so we could meet. We leave it in the air and I ring off. Billy’s brisk, no-nonsense energy has put me back on the rails. Now to get my day to match.

And the first thing I decide is to drive over to Fort Worth by myself. I’ll meet Ryan, find out what he wants and then get back here. Why wait for Darnley? It’s not like it’s really his business.

* * *

I leave him a brief note and then shrug on some clothes, scrape back my hair and set off to the parking bay to retrieve my hire car. Too late I recall my hasty promise to call the company for an upgrade but I decide to risk it.

At last I turn out of the impressive hotel driveway into the freeway running southwest, lower the window when the air-con fails once more to kick in, and switch on the radio.

I love driving in strange places. It’s about the most daring thing I do these days, so I’m happily bowling along, and singing along – at the top of my voice and in my best nasal twang – to Tammy Wynette and then Hank Williams on a local radio station, when I glance at the rear-view mirror. Some way behind me there’s a dark car. It looks like an expensive brand and it’s maintaining a steady distance behind me. Other cars are sliding past each other or falling behind but this particular car never seems to shift out of view.

After a few minutes I glance back again. It’s still there.

I frown at myself. Fort Worth’s the next town. Lots of people are going there.

Plenty of cars follow other cars – for miles, sometimes. I do it all the time. Why am I so jumpy about this one?

You might be in danger . Away from the seamless protection of his wealth and his lavish hotel suite Darnley’s words take on new meaning.

I press my lips together and turn up the volume on the radio. Bobbie Gentry’s mournful lament about Billie Joe McAllister fills the car and brings tears to my eyes. Irritated I switch it off and change lanes twice, speed up for ten minutes, and then slow down and change lanes again.

Other drivers lose patience and lean on the horn but to my relief the dark car has disappeared.

Panic over. My heart still thumping, I switch on the radio again and start drumming my fingers on the steering wheel as some couple – sadly not Johnny Cash and June Carter but pretty good all the same – crow about getting married in Jackson but all of a sudden I’m not listening any more.

That car has just reappeared in my mirror. It’s keeping a precise distance away from me, it’s travelling at exactly my speed and in the last twenty minutes it switched lanes each time I did.

Sweating now, I infuriate my fellow drivers further by swerving right across the slow-moving traffic and take the first exit slipway I see. I’ll lose him in the suburbs.

Funny how memories of your first boyfriend stay with you long after you know he won’t be your last. In the case of Ryan and me it was more a matter of convenience than anything else. I was shy around most boys – the speaking thing made me nervous – plus he turned up to all the dances I did and he seemed a nice guy. Correction, he seemed a carefree, brilliant kind of guy and he was not only a member of the teaching staff but a rising star in his faculty.

I was young and fresh from the country – a small town in Maine’s not much prep for the cut-and-thrust of hard-hitting Boston, it seemed to me then – and romantic.

So many fellow students, mostly females, told me how dishy he was and how lucky I was to go out with him that I overlooked the weak chin and the take-it-or-leave-it sex. And so many men on campus said how clever he was, I told myself he had his mind on higher things and forgave the missing rent money, the unexplained weekend trips and the late-night ‘seminars’ with female ‘students’ who looked nothing like any students I knew.

But when I graduated and my new teaching job started to cover all the bills while his generous salary never seemed to help out, I began to smell a rat. He begged me to be patient. He was onto something big. Everything would come right, yada, yada. So our relationship was already pretty shaky that night I walked into the business gala hosted by Wolfe Security where he was planning to clinch some deal and saw him clinching his female boss instead.