The Things That Make Me Give In by Charlotte Stein

won’t share his perverted secrets with me.
    I have to pretend I don’t know he wants to fuck someone in the arse.
    Colin just says it right out in the open: ‘I want to bugger you.’
    I blush when he catches my eye in the dining car, and think of him saying that to me, in the dark with my knickers already around my ankles. On my hands and knees, him over me andwhispering in my ear. I hadn’t answered him. I never answer him. If I answer him I might say no.
    Instead I gasped into the pillow and tried to think of other things. Though it’s very hard when someone’s circling your arsehole with a slick finger. Oddly, it’s recollecting the things he said while teasing me in that place where no one else had ever touched me that lit me up the brightest. All of the you-can-tell-me-to-stop-any-time-you-likes. And then later, much later and after an agony of delay and teasing and awful comments like ‘You’re so tight and hot – has he never fucked you here? I bet my arse has been fucked more times than yours.’ Later, once he was actually shoving his cock into me and groaning to hear my shocked groans back, he said, ‘You never want me to stop, do you, dirty girl?’
    No. No, not really. Maybe. Maybe, God, oh, I don’t know. I let my husband’s best friend fuck me in the arse. I let him hold me afterwards, too, though mainly because I was all keyed up and juddering as though I’d just survived a fifty-foot fall. And also because he had been so . . . so like someone comforting a person who really has just fallen all that way.
    He put his arm around me, and petted me, and said, ‘There, now. There now, it’s all right. What’s the matter? It didn’t hurt that much, did it?’
    No. It didn’t hurt at all, really – I suppose because he was so gentle. His words are sometimes rough and dirty and direct, but still. He’s so gentle.
    And somehow, this realisation makes my heart start making a racket. It pounds, it actually pounds. I think I’m about to start shaking just as I did after we did . . . that. So I’m grateful that he threads through the crowd towards me, drinks for two held over the sea of people, looking as hopeless as ever. One of his shirt-tails is untucked.
    ‘Drinkie-poos,’ he says, and the pounding recedes. ‘Have you got a seat?’
    I do have a seat, inside a little carriage. ‘First class, of course,’ he says, in a mock-posh accent. ‘Nothing but the best, what-ho?’
    ‘Cheers,’ I say, and we blankly bang our glasses of awful wine together. I don’t look at him. I look out of the window.
    ‘Are we playing this game again?’ he asks, after a moment, and I’m glad that he doesn’t see me briefly glance at him, because then he would know that I had caught him with that pained expression on his face again.
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘The one where you pretend you don’t like me and I have to talk you into something.’
    It’s the bitterest I’ve ever heard him be. Though I’m not sure if it really is bitterness. It sounds more like he’s goading himself into a challenge. Or maybe he’s goading me.
    His leg brushes against mine, and it’s terrible but I like it. I think about last week in the cinema, watching pinkly sweet bodies pretend to enjoy each other on the screen, the screen then fading to black just as it got to the really good bits. And him whispering through the darkness at me:
Do you want to make our own good bits up
?
    I did. I do. But then he asked me to touch myself and I couldn’t do it. I told him so, too, and he laughed. Though he hadn’t laughed at all when I told him that I’d never touched myself. Not ever.
    The look on his face! As though a grown woman who never masturbated was the equivalent of a straight man never looking at a big pair of tits. That shocked, slightly condescending expression made me say some spiteful things to him, but none of them landed. Or, at least, he never made me feel bad for saying them.
    Instead he gave me a present. A beautifully