Waiting in Vain Read online

  But it’s definitely had some thought put into it. So much so that I’m certain he must have asked David what I might like. Or just watched me really closely on all the previous years. It’s not as though he came up and talked to me a lot, all those times before. But clearly, he knows what I’m about.

  It’s a book of fairytale illustrations. Fairytales from all different eras and all over the world. Really nicely done—beautiful, in fact. But to everyone else it’s just a book, so it’s not as though he has to explain the fuss.

  After I’ve opened it, I don’t feel embarrassed, anymore. I don’t know why. I just don’t. I’m glad that we did what we did last night. It was fun and exciting and pleasurable, and there’s nothing wrong with that, even if his Gran did hear.

  When he asks me if I want to go for a walk after we’ve cleared up all the wrapping paper, I don’t say no. After all, I bought him a t-shirt. It’s the least I can do.

  The morning is crisp and clear, frost still all over everything despite the pale wintery sun. I wear my boots and my new leather coat with the fur collar —thanks, David! —and his Gran forces him to put on the cardigan she knit for him.

  It’s not a bad cardigan, exactly. It’s grey and big and looks manly. It’s just that it looks Dad-manly, rather than young hot stud manly. Though he needn’t worry—he’d look like a young hot stud wearing a bin liner.

  “All right?” he asks me, as we start down the little crazy paved path to who knows where. There’s a stream at the bottom of their garden, I know, so maybe he figures we’ll take a walk along there. Maybe he just wants to grope me in some frosty bushes.

  Maybe I want him to.

  “Just fine,” I say.

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  For a second, I think he means because of the book. I’ve no idea why he could expect me to be mad over such a thing, but I think it anyway.

  Before I realise and feel silly.

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “Because I seduced you in my bed.”

  I giggle a little at that—seduced!

  “Oh, I know. I was powerless to resist your manly charms.”

  He wrinkles up his nose in a way that somehow makes him even more handsome.

  “Yeah, ‘course you were!” he says, and then he only goes and mimics me. “Oh Mick, Mick, please!”

  I give him a shove, for that.

  “I seem to remember you doing your fair share of noise making—they weren’t insults you were doling out, mate.”

  “Like the compliments, did you? Appreciated my silver tongue?”

  Aha. Here’s my opening. I knew one would come around, eventually—though I have to say, I didn’t think he’d be so easy.

  “You’ve got a good line in bullshit, I’ll give you that.”

  “Bullshit? What bullshit?”

  Et voila! And now I can ask about his comment the night before without seeming like a sap or an idiot. Nancy, you are a genius.

  “As though you’ve waited three years to sleep with me! Come on.”

  Or maybe not so much of a genius. He goes very quiet, after I’ve spoken. We walk in silence for what seems like an age. It’s a good thing the scenery is pleasant, or the lack of occupation would drive me bonkers.

  I gaze at the misty fields beyond the stream, trying my best to appear as though I don’t care what he has to say about that. Unfortunately, it seems that I do care. I know I do, because I feel all funny inside when he says, finally, “What would be so bad about that?”

  Mainly because he takes so long to say it. Him taking so long to say it turns simple words that mean nothing into something else altogether. It turns them into the truth, I think. He really has waited all this time to make a move on me.

  I shrug. I want to say other things, but I’m afraid of what they’ll be. I like him too much, already. I liked him before, as handsome and funny and charming as he is, but this sudden swerve into possibly soft-hearted territory is really putting a strain on things. Amazing sex and sweet words and thoughtful gifts and now, oh Lord, he’s holding my hand—what next?

  “You could have—you know, asked me on a date before. It’s not as though you’re awful and ugly, or anything.”

  “Yeah,” he says, before following it with something that I think makes me go deaf. Or at least paralyses me, momentarily. “But I’m not smart.”

  I need the deafness and the paralysis just to work out what he means. But thankfully, he supplies the meaning a second later, “And you are. You’re massively smart. Einstein smart. You probably date loads of other, massively smart blokes who know the square root of eighty million, or something.”

  There are many, many things wrong with what he’s just said. But all I can think to blurt out is this, “How do you know I’m smart? I might be as thick as a brick!”

  “You got every question right when we had that Christmas Eve quiz the first year you came.”

  Oh, Lord. He’s right, though—I did. I just didn’t realise that meant some gorgeous lust object would be...what? Intimidated by me? That sounds ludicrous, even when I’m just thinking it.

  “Yeah, but you’re gorgeous!”

  I’m still in blurting out mode, it seems. And the blurting isn’t stopping. I pull my hand away from his and turn to face him.

  “You’re absolutely gorgeous! Hideously gorgeous! I hate to break it to you, Mick, but gorgeous men aren’t afraid of asking clever women out on dates. Quite the opposite.”

  “Did you work that out in your giant alien brain?” he says. Completely deadpan. See—not only is he gorgeous, he’s also funny enough to make me laugh in the middle of indignation.

  “No, but—”

  “Were there lots of equations involved? If X has a tight bum and Y has big knockers, do they intersect in column Z?”

  “I’ll intersect your column, in a minute.”

  Such a warning does not put him off, however. He touches a teasing tongue to his upper teeth, and pulls at the front of my coat.

  “And what do you mean, big knockers?”

  “Well, I never said it was just your brain I liked, did I?”

  “I knew I caught you looking down my top last year.”

  “I’m only human! They were right there, staring at me!”

  “My knockers don’t stare. They’re shy. They hide themselves in blouses—especially when they’re here with all your family about.”

  “Apart from when you come out of your bedroom just in time to catch me coming out of the bathroom, wearing that skimpy little vest thing you wore last year—oops! Didn’t know you’d be in the hallway, Mick! Here, look at my knockers!”

  “That’s rich! What were you wearing those skin-tight jockeys for? Do your balls hang low in polite company? Did you suspect that it would be as hot as the sun out in the hallway, so wore just your underwear, in case?”

  “I knew you checked me out.”

  “I bloody didn’t! I was too busy trying to hide my breasts from your prying eyes.”

  On the word eyes, he leans down whip-quick and kisses me.

  Of course, I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t turn that quickly. I don’t have good tread on my tires and I skid all over the place.

  Though mostly I just kiss him back, twice as passionately. Despite the fact that it’s Christmas morning and his entire family is probably looking out of the living room window at us.

  Not that I care all that much, anymore. It just feels too good to stop—that’s the truth.

  His hands feel cold, this time, on my face. But that feels good, too. So does his body, when I slide my arms around him. It makes me mad to think we could have been doing this for the last three years, if it wasn’t for his weird fear of my massive brain.

  Why couldn’t he just be like normal blokes, and not care a fiddle about what’s in my head?

  I almost make myself laugh, just as he’s getting to the really good stuff. You know, hand on my bottom, other hand in my hair, tongue doing things
in my mouth that makes my stomach somersault.

  By the time he’s through, his hands are no longer cold at all. I don’t think anything on him is cold, and the same goes for me. In fact, I’m boiling hot and desperate to unbutton this completely inappropriate coat, even if it means we’ll look like we’re undressing on the back lawn.

  I don’t think any less of him for saying, “The shed’s over there.”

  Instead I just follow him, mindlessly, to a place where his Dad probably smokes a pipe and reads porn mags, and spiders have parties in all the corners.

  Sure enough, it’s a dim, grimy mess. There’s barely enough space for both of us to fit inside, amidst the old rusty tools and the piles of broken things and the bags of soil. But if I try not to think about my tweed skirt and sit on the bags, and he stands right between my legs, why, there’s plenty of room to spare!

  Lucky us.

  And it’s the perfect height, too, for me to attack his mouth with little effort on my part. I don’t even have to drag him down to me. It’s all just lips and tongues and terrible, desperate groans of appreciation, as though we didn’t have sex only a few short hours ago, and we’ve both been lost in a lust desert for the past one hundred years.

  I think I actually bite him. I’m that hungry for him after all the great gifts and flirting.

  “Someone could come down here and walk in on us,” he says, but I’m not sure what his intention is in doing so. Is he trying to make me stop? It’s too late for that, now. He’s turned me into the same sort of pervert he apparently is, and the idea of someone walking in only spurs me on.

  I pull him right to me with the heel of my boot pressed to his backside. He gives me a breathless laugh, for that one. Then his hands are on the buttons of my coat, the hemline of my skirt. He can’t seem to decide which to remove or tug aside or push up first, and settles on all three in a hurried jumble.

  The tights throw him. God, I wish I hadn’t worn them. What was I thinking, trying to look respectable? I should have come downstairs naked. Naked, Nancy!

  I guess I’ll just have to settle for him being naked. Though he voices some surprise when I manage to unbutton his jeans before he’s even got my tights halfway down my legs, and when I yank them and his underwear all the way down to the ground.

  Now he’s there all bare legged, while I recline on my throne of soil, almost fully clothed.

  He’s sporting an absolutely delicious erection. I didn’t get the full view of it, last night, but it’s here in all its glory, now. Thick and just ever so slightly turning skyward, with a little jewel of liquid beading at the tip.

  I want to lick him up, but unfortunately he has other, frustration-prompted ideas. My boots are apparently massively in his way, so he pushes me down onto the dirty bags, grabs a pair of shears, and cuts the crotch of my tights clean in two. Just like that!

  I have no idea why such a thing makes me breathless. I only know that it does. When he drags me back up to him, I search frantically for air. Probably even more so when I realise he’s done the same to my knickers as he has to my tights.

  “Are you wet?” he asks, and I almost laugh at so foolish a question. But then he follows those words with these, “Because I just need to fuck you right now.”

  And I forget anything was ever funny at all.

  “Fuck me,” I tell him. “Just fuck me.”

  The scrabbling around on the floor he has to do to get a condom out of his pocket is almost too much for me to bear. I think I actually grind my teeth, and it takes a lot of restraint to keep my own hands away from my slick and aching pussy.

  It also takes a lot to keep my hands away from his heavy cock when he stands back up again, all harried and pink cheeked and fumbling with foil. For some reason my hands are steadier than his, so I get to fulfil my own need to touch him, after all. I take the foil from him, and tear it open, and take my sweet time rolling the rubber down the length of his gorgeous prick.

  He gasps, when I give him a little teasing squeeze. Just a tiny one—barely anything at all. But then I remember from last night how sensitive he is. He doesn’t seem to like it when I lean forward and graze my teeth over his t-shirt covered nipple, either.

  “Enough,” he tells me, in this rough and breathy sort of voice.

  The sort of voice that goes straight to my clit. When he grabs my thighs, his strong grasp goes straight to my clit, too. And when he yanks me to him, hard—oh I don’t mind that at all. I don’t mind any of this. Least of all his lust darkened eyes and his thick erection pressing between my legs.

  Despite his obviously desperate state, he takes an exquisite moment to slide the head of his cock through my slippery folds. Just that small moment, to kiss his firm flesh against my clit. He had to tease me until I spoke to him the night before, but not now, no way. I tell him in the throatiest, shakiest tones how much I like him doing that.

  I cry out his name, brokenly. I wrap my legs around his hips.

  When I do, he has mercy on me. He slides into me in one smooth glide, groaning as he does so.

  I only get that one sweet pause before he fucks into me hard and fast, over and over. He gets a hand on my hip, on my ass, and holds me so tightly there’ll be bruises tomorrow. But just having him be that desperate with me, that impatient—it makes my teeth chatter. I cling to him and dig my nails in and tell him harder, harder, harder.

  “You like it like that, huh?” he asks, though of course he’s not really asking. It’s obvious I like it. I’m gasping as though I can’t get air and generally making more noise than I’ve ever made in my life.

  “You like my cock in you?” he asks, and I tell him yes, yes. “You could hardly wait for me to take you down here and fuck you, could you?”

  I think I actually sob my answer. I know I sob it when he gets hold of my hand and shoves it between my legs.

  “Touch yourself while I fuck you,” he says, and I’m honestly not sure if it would matter whether he was fucking me or not. His cock feels amazing inside me, and he’s hitting all the right places and he’s doing so hard and good, but his words—the way he says them. All that rough lust in his voice and his hand forcing mine.

  I barely have to touch my clit, and I’m coming. I feel his hand gripping my wrist, and I come and come and come. I cry out in a way I’ve definitely never done before—guttural yet high and silly sounding.

  But I don’t care. It’s all just too good and exactly what I need. I’ve been waiting all my life for sex like this. For him. God I hope he gives me the chance to make him feel as good as he’s made me.

  Though I think I’ve made an all right hash of it, when he calls out my name about ten seconds later. He calls out the Lord’s name, too, as his hips jerk against me and his hands tighten on my thigh and on my wrist.

  Then he sags against me, trembling. I don’t think I’ve ever made a man tremble, before. But that’s okay, because I’m trembling, too.

  * * * *

  He sits next to me on the sofa, when we all watch something supposedly awesome on the telly. He sits next to me at the dinner table, when we all eat Christmas dinner.

  But even so, I don’t think any of them suspect that we are...whatever it is we are. Fucking? Lovers? A fling? I guess it would be sort of difficult to tell his Mother and his Grandmother that we’re having a fling, and that’s why we go for walks and sit next to each other now.

  God, next year’s going to be even more awkward.

  But I don’t regret it. How could I regret something like this? I can still feel him on me and all over me. Still taste his peppermint-y mouth. David asks me what I’m smiling about as we stand at the front door, waiting for Cathy to bring the car around. I tell him it’s because I’ve had a lovely Christmas—which is the truth. I have had a lovely Christmas. It’s just that it had nothing to do with turkey and presents and not being alone.

  Well, maybe it had something to do with that last part. I’ve never told him before, but most of the time I feel alone even when I’m
surrounded by the Hennesseys. After all, they’re not my family. Not really. They’re an offshoot of someone else’s love—of David and his love for Cathy. And Cathy’s love for him, in return.

  But it’s been different, this year. Even if it’s just a fling, I’ve had a little taste of excitement and warmth and something that’s just mine. And who knows, maybe I can have another fling, next year. I could be his Christmas girl, ready to be unwrapped with the rest of the presents.

  He strolls up to me, as David starts packing the car with suitcases. Hands in pockets, probably ready to be sheepish. I’m betting he’s going to have explanations and excuses and those other things that men have when they’re wanting to ensure that something remains just a fling, but he really doesn’t need them.

  I want to pre-empt him, and tell him it’s okay. I’m happy with how things went this year.

  “You off, then?” he asks, and I try not to let my knowing smile show.

  “Looks like it,” I reply.

  “Thanks for the t-shirt.”

  His Mum’s about three feet away. I’m not sure what else he can manage, without giving our whole game away. She smiles warmly, when I glance at her—all ready to give David and Cathy and I some goodbye hugs.

  “I’m glad you liked it. And I really liked the book. A lot. Really. It was awesome. So...thanks.”

  “Oh God yeah no problem. The t-shirt—that was also...awesome.”

  I don’t why he’s so intimidated by my giant brain. He seems able to catch onto my secret code with amazing speed and skill.

  “Really...gorgeous,” he says, and I raise an eyebrow at him.

  “Not as gorgeous as the book.”

  He raises an eyebrow right back at me.

  “I dunno. The t-shirt is pretty hot.”

  Oh, this is descending into farce. I’ve got to get out of here before something even more ridiculous happens—and I do. I get to the driveway and then wish I’d hugged him or something, or hugged his Mum as code for I really wanted to hug you, so just as David’s opening the car door for me I turn, and say, “So I’ll see you next year, then.”