Deep Desires by Charlotte Stein Read Free Book Online Page A

I gay?’
    Shit. I didn’t intend it that way at all. But when he frames my question like that, that’s how I sound. I’m a small-minded prude, shocked by his ability to take a cock up his ass.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘I wasn’t … I just … I just wondered if you paid him at the end.’
    ‘And that put you off?’
    I can’t even hate him for dogging me like this. He sounds too genuinely curious about someone as simple as me.
    ‘No.’
    ‘What could put you off then?’ he asks, and I get that same feeling I got when I first saw the question mark, only stronger. He just seems so full of this odd sort of tease, suddenly, so eager to hear.
    I didn’t expect that. Aren’t things supposed to be going the other way, into the land of closed-off-ness? He’s meant to be as silent as the grave, maybe a little resentful that I made him call me up. Though really, when I think about it, I didn’t force his hand.
    He called me all on his own, and now he’s asking me all on his own.
    ‘I think you already know.’
    He makes a little sighing sound, half contented, half not.
    ‘Probably. But we’re not talking about my keen powers of observation now. We’re talking about what you’d actually like to share.’
    ‘Keen powers of observation? What do you mean by that?’
    ‘I mean I took photos of you with a long-range lens and then made a giant shrine-like collage of your entire life.’
    I think it says something about me that I believe him. I stare wide-eyed at nothing for a long moment, utterly paralysed.
    Until he adds: ‘I’m joking, Abbie. That was a joke.’
    It’s so hard to tell with him.
    ‘I only use binoculars and a notepad.’
    See? He’s fucking stone cold deadpan. His pan is so dead he could lay it in a casket and bury it at Bellevue. They made a movie about him once:
Dawn of Ivan’s Pan
.
    ‘You birdwatched me?’
    He laughs, and I swear to God my heart jumps in my chest. I didn’t know he was capable of something as basic and human as laughter.
    ‘I didn’t really do that either.’
    ‘Then what did you do?’
    ‘I did this thing called seeing you around occasionally.’
    By this point, he’s so different to what I expected I hardly know how to get words out. I definitely don’t know what I’m saying. Stuff just spills out of me in a rush, most of it blindly groping for the Ivan he really is.
    ‘And that’s all it takes? That’s all it takes for you to … know things about me?’
    He pauses then, and I find myself doing something very embarrassing. I’m straining, it seems, to hear every little detail of what he might be doing. It sounds like he’s removing an item of clothing as he talks, clenching the phone between jaw and shoulder as he does so, but how can I be sure?
    And more importantly:
    Does this make me the same as him? Haven’t I watched him, wheedled details out of him? Aren’t I on the edge of my seat right now for more of this almost human contact? I am, I am, and yet …
    Nothing can match what he then says to me.
    ‘On Thursdays, you pick up dumplings from the Red Dragon. I know this, because you can never resist eating one before you get into the building. You walk by my window licking your fingers, or, if I’m really lucky, you’re still eating one.
    ‘You wear the same sorts of clothes no matter what the weather, come rain or shine, sleet or snow. Jumpers that trail over your hands as though you’re afraid to let anyone know you have the ability to touch, take, hold. Skirts that graze the floor, because even that much would be too much, right, Abbie? Showing an ankle would be too much.
    ‘You cut your own hair, because a salon would be vanity; you don’t look anyone in the eyes, because that would be inviting someone in, wouldn’t it? See, I know that last one because it’s the way I am, too. Carefully judging people in tiny stages, through snatched glances … just waiting … waiting for someone to look up and make me look too.’
    I think of