Page 114 of For Real

He squeaked. “What? In public?”

“No, in a nuclear bunker.” I fiddled idly with the arrow through his nipple, gently moving it back and forth until he was panting and wriggly. “Can I take you out to dinner?”

“I don’t know.” It was a pathetic attempt at indifference. I could hear the excitement in his voice. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Please.”

“Well, maybe, if we can have all the courses, including aperitifs.”

* * *

That afternoon, we went shopping together. As soon as supermarket deliveries had become a thing, Robert and I had signed up, and never looked back. Our lives, our time, had seemed so much better spent elsewhere. But this was pleasant in the most ordinary of ways, and I trailed along after Toby, pushing the trolley, and it didn’t seem like a waste of my Saturday in the slightest.

He bounced all the way home.

“Do I just leave you to it?” I asked, once we’d unpacked and my kitchen work surfaces were covered with purchases.

The look he gave me was downright wicked. Downright terrifying. “No way. You’re totally going to be part of this process.”

“In a…loading-the-dishwasher capacity?”

“Nuh-uh.” Oh God. “But first I need to make pastry.”

So I sat at the kitchen table and read the Times, not entirely successfully, as Toby got to work. He was humming under his breath—“Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart”—and seemed a little more like himself.

At last, he was rolling out his pastry and using it to line a pie tin I didn’t even know I owned. “Okay.” He popped everything into the fridge. “Now I just need to grab some things from upstairs.”

“For the pie?”

“For you. Give me like…five minutes. And”—he flashed his toothiest grin—“take your clothes off.”

I froze. “When you said you wanted a lemon meringue pie and filthy sex, I didn’t think you meant together.”

“That’s what you get for underestimating me.”

He vanished upstairs, leaving me paralysed with awkwardness. The kitchen was warmer than the rest of the house because of the AGA, and nobody would be able to see me unless they scaled the garden walls and came right down onto the patio. But there was still something a little terrifying about stripping myself in the middle of my kitchen. I felt disproportionately vulnerable for how safe I was there. It was something about the way the light fell, bright but without heat, across my skin, illuminating and revealing me. All my desires undeniable and laid bare beneath the winter sun.

Nervous anticipation stirred the hairs on my arms.

I wasn’t sure how to wait for him. On my knees? On the hard floor. Would that help? A piece of fantasy. But he hadn’t said…

In the end, I rested my hips against the table and folded my arms, as though this was perfectly normal.

It seemed like longer than five minutes. It seemed like forever.

But finally I heard footsteps on the stairs, and Toby reappeared, his arms full of…things. He paused in the doorway, his eyes sweeping up and down my body with such unabashed and possessive eagerness it made me hot and flustered and a little bit shaky. I wasn’t sure a nineteen-year-old should have been able to do that to me, but there was an absurd sort of gratification in knowing he found me worth looking at, that he liked me naked and at his pleasure.

He dumped a couple of pillows on top of the table, his hands tracing the worn-smooth surface. “This is so awesome.”

“It’s actually a magistrate’s bench. I got it at an antique sale.”

“That must be why I keep having kinky daydreams about it.” He patted the wood. “Up you get, on your knees.”

On the table? I’d be so…exposed. Little shivers chased themselves over my skin, turning me hot and cold at once. “Oh, Toby, really?”

He gazed at my hardening, traitorous cock. “Yeah, really.”

So I climbed onto my kitchen table, aroused and embarrassed, or aroused because I was embarrassed, which was its own sweet-sharp torment.

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