Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty Read Free Book Online Page A

great chips. That’s if you’re sure you don’t have to go back to work?’ I glanced behind me, began to reverse the car slowly.
    ‘I rang my office and told them I was in a lot of discomfort and wouldn’t be coming back today,’ he replied, taking my hand from the steering wheel and placing it on his groin, so that I could feel his erection through his trousers. ‘Which is absolutely true.’

    I braked. It was still light outside. I glanced around the car park to make sure that none of my colleagues were within sight, then leaned over and kissed him on mouth. His lips parted immediately. My tongue grazed the hard-wet enamel of his teeth for a fraction of a second before I pulled back, squeezed his erection lightly, then withdrew my hand and returned my attention to reversing the car.
    ‘Fuck…’ he whispered under his breath, sitting back in his seat. I was grinning hugely, unable to believe my own daring. At that point, it was a toss-up which I was enjoying more – his blatant lust or the sheer surprise of my own. I have never behaved like this before, I thought delightedly, as I drove us to the pub.
    We got mildly drunk together on a great deal more than alcohol. We clutched each other’s thighs beneath the table. We kissed, in open view of the other drinkers. We fed each other chips. Halfway through the evening, his mobile phone rang repeatedly – he didn’t answer but I could hear it in his pocket.
    ‘Do you need to get that?’ I said, on the third ring. He shook his head. When it rang a fourth time, he extracted the phone and, without looking at it, turned it off, then smiled at me. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, softly, reaching out his hand, then placing it gently on the side of my head, just touching my hair. After all his hard flirting, his directness, the tenderness of the gesture made me melt.
    I was over the limit so we left my car parked in the street and walked back to my flat. It was his idea to take a short cut through the park. The angle was difficult. He had to hold up one of my legs with his forearm hooked beneath my knee and bend his own knees, then guide himself in. Even though it was only autumn, the temperature had plummeted during the evening. My coat and dress were hitched up around my waist. I was wearing opaque black tights. He tore a hole in them. Later, I found pieces of bark inside my knickers. I was shivering with cold and the fear of discovery by passing youths or dog-walkers, so much that I couldn’t come. He withdrew just in time and, with a deft hand gesture, came over his trousers. He kissed me ferociously and said he was sending me the dry-cleaning bill. The whole encounter was clumsy and only partially satisfying and drove me lunatic with desire when I thought about it afterwards.
    *
     
    The early days of David were delightful and feverish and, also, a kind of hell. I thought about him incessantly. I thought about him so much I felt nauseous sometimes, drunk with it. I would think of him even while I was talking to him, even while we debated, in a desultory fashion, whether or not to see a film or just get something to eat. I wanted him even while I was having him: having him wasn’t enough. My desire for him was so raw I was reduced to masturbating in the shower. I took to doodling his initials on bits of paper at work. If no paper was available, I wrote them on my hand. I thought about his haunches – an unprofessional word for an unprofessional assessment of that part of his body; part thigh-bone, part buttock, part muscle where it tensed against me. The word took on a sickening allure: haunches . Most people think it’s buttocks that do the thrusting, the gluteal muscles. In fact, it’s the piriformis, two small muscles deep inside the buttocks that join the hips to the legs. Male lecturers at university always took great pleasure in demonstrating the action of the piriformis muscles in front of female students. Haunches , though, a collective noun, and one that