You Already Know: Twelve Erotic Stories

Copyright

Mischief

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.mischiefbooks.com

Copyright © Charlotte Stein

Cover images: Shutterstock

Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008179281

Version: 2015-12-16

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

You Already Know

Four For The Seesaw

I Have You

Don’t I

Heavenly Shades

I Am

New Dress

Dancing On The Edge

Heat

Thief

Oppositeland

Falling

More from Mischief

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

You Already Know

Charlotte Stein

I tell him not to, I tell him, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He’s as big as a bull, as big as a brick wall, and he just bulldozes right into the store and takes Mickey D around the neck as though he’s nothing, and throws him over the counter.

Of course, everyone knows Mickey D is no good. He shirks his responsibilities, as Mr Kirkpatrick would say – but that doesn’t mean he has to be thrown over the counter. It doesn’t make it right and fair that this bull has him crying and bleeding on the floor of Mr Kirkpatrick’s store, for something he owes or something he has or has not done.

Even I know that. I’m pathetic, and I’m weak, and I don’t know anything about drugs or whatever this guy is into, but I understand that much.

‘Stop,’ I tell the bull, and he turns and looks at me with his mad, blazing eyes.

Only they’re not mad and blazing at all. He looks wounded, I think, like someone stuck him in his side. The matador waved his cape and he charged, and now there’s a lance through his body. Soon he’s going to bleed out on the floor of this little grocery store, and no one will care because he’s the guy who threw Mickey D over the counter.

He’s the guy who works for some drug lord or thief or pimp, and nobody cares about guys like that.

Least of all me. I just stare at him and stare at him, until he steps back from the counter. Mickey D is crying somewhere behind it, snottily, but the bull pays no attention. He just looks at me until I notice other weird little details about him.

His eyes are the colour of melted chocolate. He has a tattoo on his arm – a big Star of David. The grain on his shaved head is the colour of a million little iron filings, so rich and real I can almost imagine them sifting through my fingers.

Even though there’s nothing to sift.

And then he backs off, and walks right out the door.

* * *

Next time I see him, he’s not beating the shit out of anybody. But the stench of a million battles hangs all over him, like a soldier returning from a war he didn’t want to fight. He’s leaning against the truck he drives around in, shoulders too tense for someone who’s meant to be looking casual, cigarette dangling from one hand, unsmoked.

He flicks it away when he sees me coming down to open up. It’s 6 a.m.; the light is the same colour as that grain on his head. On his face now, too, because he hasn’t shaved and there are deep shadows around his too-curved jaw.

There’s something in his face, I think. A roundedness all over that cuts against the sharp masculinity he wears everywhere else. It’s in his eyes, too – those eyes that aren’t like chocolate at all. They’re deep and fathomless and when he calls out, ‘Hold on there a second,’ they tell me a thousand things he doesn’t want to say.

I’m just not sure what all of them are.

‘Hold on there,’ he says, and I think about Mickey D flying through the air. I think about him panting, full of rage or aggression or something else altogether, and I want to run. I want to tell him, ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ just like I did in the store.

But I don’t.

‘Your friend,’ he says, then pauses as though he’s waiting for me to recall who he’s talking about. He licks his bottom lip, and I notice it’s very fat and full, and also chapped. ‘He did some bad shit, got it?’

I don’t know what to think. It’s like an explanation, only not. It’s like an explanation he needs to punch into my gut, though I’m surprised as anyone to find I’m still standing when he’s done. I go one worse than that, in fact.

I blurt out: ‘Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?’

And I don’t even know how or why. It just comes out of me, as jagged as I thought he was, and when I’m done he stares at me like I’ve gone mad. Maybe I have. He could punch me for real right now and I’d go down so hard, so hard. Hell, he wouldn’t even have to punch me. He could just swipe me with the back of his hand and I’d be bloody and sore tomorrow.

But he does none of those things. Instead he runs a hand over the bristle on his head, and when he does I see his knuckles are as raw as fuck. They’re not just bloody – they’re split and scraped and there’s a glimmer of something shiny in amongst everything, as though somehow he’s gone right down to the bone without gushing everywhere.

He doesn’t even seem to notice, however. He just seems … tired.

‘What do you want from me?’ he asks, only it comes out all run together in that gravelly voice of his. It’s like he’s entirely made up of building materials: rocks and iron filings and the stuff you line driveways with.

‘I want you to come inside,’ I say. ‘So I can take care of that hand.’

* * *

I don’t know why I say it. I suppose it’s because I can’t get it out of my head, once I’ve seen it. It looks disgusting, and it’s even worse under the queasy fluorescent lights of the store’s bathroom.

‘What did you do? Punch out a wall?’ I ask him, but he doesn’t answer.

He does something better than answering. He cocks one eyebrow at me, and the corner of his mouth turns up – almost like he’s smiling, really. Yeah, almost.

‘You know, if you look like a thug and act like a thug, people are going to think you’re a thug,’ I tell him, but again he doesn’t say anything. He just lets me run his knuckles under some warm water, a hiss or two coming out of him every once in a while. I watch the little sink turn red, then white again, and then finally there’s nothing but a series of tiny pink mouths along the heavy bumps of his knuckles.

And me holding his hand, as though it’s something separate from him.

‘Stay there while I get something to put on it,’ I tell him but really it’s only so I can go out into the store and catch my breath. Stop the shakes I’ve fallen into, somewhere in between touching his hand and right now.

However, when I go back in there I’m still doing it. And I think he notices, too, because his eyes go all over me in little stuttering fits and starts, and as I paint Bactine over his knuckles he asks if I think he’s going to hurt me.

‘No,’ I say, but I don’t know if I’m telling the truth.

‘I’m a thug though, right?’ he says. ‘Maybe that’s all I’m good for.’

I put strips of white over the little mouths, to hold them closed – neatly, I think. Fussily.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say and he replies:

‘’S that why you’re being good to me?’

Though I hadn’t really thought it was the case. His knuckles just looked rough, that’s all, and I wanted to see to them. It was me – the urge to make them all right again, to do what he hadn’t, to do what he probably never does.

And then he says: ‘Maybe you just want me to be good in return, huh?’ in this new kind of voice – this curling, deep-down sort of voice – and I can’t respond. I know what he means, of course I do, but I can’t tell him to back off or get out or any of the things I know I should go with.

They won’t come to me, no matter how hard I pull.

‘You want me to be good to you, baby?’ he asks, and maybe it’s that word. The one on the end, the one that isn’t my name. Or maybe it’s the way he puts a hand on me – so much gentler than everything else about him would suggest.

He just rests it on my hip, as though he could take it off any second. All I have to do is say the word and he’ll go away, he’ll never have existed, he didn’t come into the store the other day and throw Mickey D over the counter.

Only I know he did and I can feel that hand, those long thick fingers, stroking the material of my little grocery-store uniform into fine little wrinkles. He doesn’t bunch, or tug, or rip. It’s just those little wrinkles like he’s ruffling feathers.

‘I’ll be so good to you,’ he says, and I believe him, I do. I don’t know where it comes from or why it’s in me now, but I believe him enough to let him lean down slowly, and press his mouth to mine.

He’s soft on the upper lip and rough on the lower, just like I’d thought. But there are other things I don’t expect, like the strange half-smoke, half-cinnamon taste of him, as though he chews Big Red between each cigarette.

And his hands go up instead of down, circling over my back until I’m boneless and wondering what it’s like to be the kind of girl who fucks someone in a grocery-store bathroom. Is that the kind of girl he usually has? Up against some tiled wall somewhere, clothes barely off? Mouths hard and clashing, almost too rough to stand it?

Only then he says: ‘You live upstairs, right?’

And I don’t tell him no. Apparently I’m the kind of girl who takes strange, bullish guys up to her apartment when she’s supposed to be opening up her place of work, and when this guy says lie down on the bed and spread your legs, she does it.

I do it.

I spread my legs over my flower print coverlet, and he just comes right on over and slides his hands up my thighs. Underneath my dress, underneath all of my clothes with everything about him strange and too big in my neat little bedroom, one of his massive knees making my mattress dip and his face set to that almost-smile he sent me before.

His eyes glitter in the half-light and I can’t speak, I can’t breathe, he’s moving too slow and I thought this would be fast. Like someone ripping a Band-Aid off, quick and painless. You don’t even have to look.

But I do have to look, because he’s right there and now his hands are at my panties. They twist the elastic into spirals, and tug so slow it’s almost maddening.

‘This what you want?’ he asks, but his flickering smile says he already knows. My breath is coming in weird little hitches, and once he gets my panties around my knees – almost off, but not quite – the scent of my arousal hits the air.

Of course it does. I’m as wet as a river. He hasn’t even done anything and I’m so slick it’s embarrassing, my body like a wire strung too taut – but worse than this is the fact that he can tell it. Before he puts a single finger between my legs he can tell, and I think the idea makes him hard.

I can certainly see something, pressing against the rough material of his pants. And when he shifts on the bed the view gets better, until I’m sure I can make out the exact solid curve of his stiff cock.

Is it weird if the sight makes me wetter? I suppose the weird thing is how wet I was before anything really sexual happened, but I can’t think about that now. I don’t want to think about anything but his hands on the insides of my thighs, and then, after a moment, his body between my spread legs.

‘Wider,’ he says, and I obey. There’s nothing else for it, really. I might as well just do whatever it is he wants, and then I can simply slide back into the way my life was before, as though nothing ever happened. Service was not interrupted.

I did not let him put his face between my legs, I swear to God.

Only I did, and I know I did because when it happens I’m so shocked I put a hand over my eyes. I make a little noise, thinking of all the things I expected him to do. Get his cock out and fuck it into me bareback, ride me hard then leave me wet and wanting on the bed. Maybe something dirtier – something I can’t even think of and don’t really want to – and then him laughing afterward.

But instead he cups my thighs with those big rough hands, and dips right down as graceful as a cat. Like maybe he’s going to bite me somewhere, but decides to kiss at the very last second. Right when I’m on edge and I’m staring into the blackness behind my hand, sure it’s going to be one thing then getting another.

Of course I think of skinny Brad and the boy I had before him – the one who bought me flowers and seemed like a real swell guy. I think about the way they pressed their mouths to mine, all teeth and sloppy wetness, nothing smooth or sweet or calm.

And then I think of this bull between my legs, with the iron filings coating his scalp – the ones I can feel burring beneath my fingertips when I dare to just reach down and touch him – and his hands like shovels. The brutish swell of a million muscles working beneath every item of clothing he wears.

The Star of David blazing on his massive bicep.

And I forget about flowers and skinny Brad and everything I’ve ever believed in. His mouth is like silk. He doesn’t lick: he strokes me with his tongue. He doesn’t suck: he draws me into him.

He makes a million romance clichés between my thighs, and when I arch my back he does them all over again, in spirals.

Feels like he does it for hours, though realistically I suppose it’s only been a few minutes. All of this teasing, all of him pressing down on my thighs until I’m good and open for him, all of this flickering over the very tip of my clit … it’s just a little bit of time, really.

So why am I bunching the sheets up into my fists?

I try to tell myself not to. He’ll know it so bad, if I react the way I want to. He’ll get that I’m so close to coming – so close it feels like agony – and then he’ll smile his little half-smile and I’ll be trapped for ever.

I fight it. I keep my mouth pressed tight closed and when he sinks a finger into me like he’s just testing the waters, I bite down hard on my lower lip. Not enough to make it bleed but close, and oh, it feels good to get that bit of pain.

It’s what I need to keep me above the pleasure swelling through my clit. He’s barely doing anything at all to it, really – every circle he makes around that little bead feels as though he’s studiously avoiding it – but somehow that’s worse.

It’s building and building, and it’s going to be terrible when it finally comes. And I think he knows it, too, because the more I struggle against it the tighter he winds things, using two fingers instead of one, pumping harder and faster in response to the sounds I make, his free hand almost like a restraint on my thigh.

Though I’m sure I could get away if I wanted to. Positive. Any second now I’m going to get up, and walk right out the door. Go downstairs to the store and continue my life as it was. Any second now.

And then he swipes one long stroke right over the tip of my clit and, oh God, I come, and come, and come.

* * *

Next time he comes by, Mickey D cowers. Mr Kirkpatrick says: ‘You’d better get out of here, you!’

But I don’t do any of these things. I just stand there with the broom still in my hand, and think about him kissing between my legs the way most men have never even kissed my mouth. I think of the spiral patterns on my ceiling, and how for the first time in my life I didn’t notice them during sex.

Though I guess technically he didn’t have sex with me. It was just a kind of sex – maybe just foreplay, when I really think about it – and then he had simply stood and walked back out of my bedroom.

Though I lie when I say that. He hadn’t simply stood and walked out. He had looked at me as he backed towards the door, this expression on his face like … I don’t know.

Like maybe I surprised him, and the surprise amused him greatly.

Which I suppose I should be mad about. I mean, I’m not something to be amused over, you know? I’m a decent person and I do the right thing when called on and I’m not a sex maniac, or anything.

So why am I looking at his big, rough face while thinking, Do it again?

This time, he takes my dress off. I don’t say he can, and I don’t ask him to. He just turns me until I’m bent over the bed, and unbuttons everything back there. Undoes my apron and lets it drop to one side. Spreads everything once he’s done so I’m only clothed over the front of my body, but bare at the back.

It’s a weird feeling. Like being separated from myself – I’m separated from myself and then he rumbles that he’s going to do the same thing he did the day before. ‘You OK with that, you OK?’ he asks, but I can’t answer.

I think I’m shaking. I think there are tears running down my face but it’s fine – he can’t see me. He doesn’t need to know what I’m doing as he sinks to his knees and licks and licks over my swollen sex.

Though I’m pretty sure he can tell when I come within a minute, and sob too loudly for anything inside me to take, and then, oh, then he runs a gentling hand down over the curve of my back.

It’s too much. Be rough, I think at him, but he isn’t like skinny Brad. He’s not like the swell guy with the flowers. He says, ‘Easy baby,’ and then he asks me. He asks me:

‘You OK with me taking you, now?’

And I can’t say anything to that. If I open my mouth I might beg.

But he gets to me before I have to endure a thing like that. He turns me back over and spreads me across the bed, most of his own clothes still on. Most of mine gone. And though I don’t want it to happen with my face wet and all of me mixed up like this his mouth finds mine.

His big arm goes around me.

I’m not even sure when he starts fucking me – though the word fucking is stretching it a bit. It’s stretching it a lot, in fact, because he rocks me slow and easy and there’s something unbearable about that. So much so that a hot rush of anger goes through me, unaccountably, and the urge to bite him or dig my nails into his back swells up.

The urge to tell him, ‘Do it hard’ comes up with it, but it’s difficult to say words like those with a soft mouth on yours, and everything like a long, smooth roll into bliss, and his big arms around me – God, his arms right around me.

It’s like he’s holding me as I go down.

And, even better than that, I can feel him moaning. I can feel him doing it all the way through my body, because his mouth doesn’t veer from mine and his voice is like the distant rumble of thunder.

Mine sounds faint, by comparison. Faint, but I hope he can hear and feel it anyway. I hope he knows I’m clinging to him, instead of digging my nails in. I hope he knows how good this is – how each stroke of his thick cock strikes me just right, pushes me a little bit further into bliss.

But then he pulls away just long enough to gasp, ‘You gonna come, baby?’ So, in all honesty, I think he knows. He can probably feel it, bubbling up through me. He should definitely be able to feel my pussy clenching around his ever-working cock, and, even if he can’t, the words I get out do the rest of the job.

‘Oh God, oh God, I’m coming,’ I gasp.

But I only say God because it occurs to me in that moment of bliss – I don’t even know his name.

* * *

It’s early morning, and that sweet bluish light is just starting to creep under the drapes. I watch it make its way over all the ordinary things in my apartment, and then finally it gets to him and paints the solid curves of his gorgeous arms. It slants shadows over the side of his face, the heavy slab of his cheekbone, the delicious curve of his perfect mouth.

I don’t know when he started sleeping over. Probably some time after I dared open my mouth to ask him what his name was, right in the middle of a hot and sweaty fuck session. He had grinned, at that – not offended the way I expected – then said: ‘It’s Tyler, Bethany.’

Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I’d told him things had to end, then. I should have let things go the moment I realised he already knew my name, but I think it was too late even then. It was too late when he stared at me with those wounded eyes. It was too late when he leant against his truck, cigarette in hand.

It’s too late before it’s begun, with Tyler.

He stirs and turns over and my heart stirs with him. I’m lost, God, I’m lost.

‘You OK, kid?’ he asks, before he’s even opened his eyes. Maybe he can tell I’ve got my back pressed too tight to the headboard. Maybe he can tell I’ve been gazing and gazing at him like some lovesick puppy.

Lord, when did this happen? When?

‘Man, it’s early,’ he tells me – just for something to say, I guess. But then he follows it with this, right out of the blue: ‘Love you, kid.’

And that isn’t just something to say. I don’t know where he gets these things from, I really don’t. I don’t know how he’s this person inside – it’s impossible, it’s awful, I can’t look at him.

‘You love me, right?’

He sounds so sure, and I’m glad. Mainly because I can’t speak and even if I managed to I’m sure I’d do something dumb when I did. Blubber, probably. Laugh it off, this thing we’ve got – this thing born out of fists and brutality and bitter lives made up of nothing.

It’s good that he keeps talking, really – right past everything I can’t say.

‘How come you never answer?’ he wants to know. ‘I ask you a question, you never answer. Afraid the answer’s yes, huh? Don’t wanna get caught out saying yes to the likes of me.’

He’s smiling, though, when I look at him. The teasing smile that tells me I don’t have to really say – and then I realise. It floods through me, the understanding of how he is different to every other man I’ve been with.

‘I never have to answer with you,’ I say, and I think of those big arms of his holding me as I fall down, down, into this sea of strange love. ‘You already know.’

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