Ever Unknown by Charlotte Stein

he didn’t need anything. He had a lock of her dark hair curled around one of his fingers, and was examining it, until she spoke. Then those clear eyes locked on hers, and her entire body went liquid.
    “I wasn’t sure,” he said, after a moment. “I thought you seemed like…you wanted something more. Like me, you just seemed to want something more.”
    And that was true enough. However, he still had something more to say on the matter. Something great.
    “I would have given you anything you wanted, but this…this was what you seemed to respond to best. And then, when you asked about James Walsh…I thought perhaps…”
    “It’s you I want. The person who wrote those emails—that’s who I want. I don’t care what you look like, though you should know, you’re pretty damned gorgeous, and I don’t care what job you do or how you dress or any of it. I just. Want. You.”
    She watched his barely-there smile grow, throughout her little speech. It hovered over his lips, straining for full-blown happiness.
    “Now give it to me, okay? I’ve been waiting for you to give it to me for what seems like weeks. And don’t hold back—I don’t need you to hold back. Just be you.”
    His cool gaze trailed over every inch of her face, drawing it out, she knew, then finally he pushed her onto her back. Slowly, as though he wasn’t really in any rush. Of course she knew he was, but the pretence was good. The pretence was golden.
    “I’m going to fuck you, now,” he said as though it was his idea. The awesome thing was , it felt like his idea. The notion had just popped into his head, and she was going to have to comply whether she liked it or not.
    She could have squeezed him to her, he was so unbelievably awesome.
    “Turn over,” he said, and that was awesome, too. She did it with squiggly fizzing things going off, low down in her stomach. Her legs had mysteriously turned to rubber, and the rubber needed him to help it complete the action.
    But that was okay, because he knew that. She didn’t even have to ask him for help. He just arranged her on the bed like a doll, and ran soothing hands all over her back, and murmured in her ear about how much he couldn’t wait to be inside her.
    Then louder and far more commanding, “Keep your face in the pillow and your legs spread.”
    An— an— nd more fizzing. More tingles.
    She heard him get off the bed, but didn’t turn and look. Somehow the noises made the whole thing filthier—him rifling through something, then the distinct sound of a condom wrapper being split. That rubbery, slippery sort of snapping, while she waited and waited and shivered with the waiting.
    “The anticipation is good, right?” he said, but that amused note to his voice was better. He just knew , every single time.
    He climbed back onto the bed slow, slow. The hint of one hand, high up on her thigh. Another at her shoulder, briefly. Then nothing.
    Of course, she knew what was coming.
    “You have to beg me, Molly.”
    His voice had gone as flat as it probably went, and she felt her sex swell to hear it. The earlier orgasm had done almost nothing, it seemed, to take the edge off, and now here she was, lost in it all again.
    “Really, I get no enjoyment out of this.”
    She tried to hold still. Bit her lip, to help that stillness on. She’d asked how he’d known already, and he’d answered, but still it kept playing through her mind. How did he know her so well? How did he understand all of this so well, before she’d even had a chance to comprehend it herself? How did he know that such a simple sentence, loaded with some sort of cool indifference, could affect her so powerfully?
    His tone even said that he knew, secretly. He knew that the pretence at indifference would make her squirm.
    “Fuck me, oh God, fuck me,” she said, not quietly, either. Her voice sounded shrill and desperate, even to her ears.
    “What? I didn’t hear you. Say it again. Be more graphic, just so that it’s