Telling Tales. Charlotte Stein
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look at it with dread all through breakfast. And then all the way through lunch too, while simultaneously trying to think of a way to make knitting sound interesting. The magazine wants the article by the seventeenth, but something in me says I’m not quite going to make it.
I’m not even sure what knitting is, really. Something to do with wool, maybe? Possibly a little bit about making jumpers that no one wants to wear with two pointed sticks? I can’t build an article on those things – I know that much. I might as well write what I really want to, which goes something like this:
And then aliens invaded Earth and blew up all the knitting in the world.
But instead I look at the letter again, while pretending I’m not doing anything of the sort. The letter mocks me with its weirdness and its reminders of everything I don’t have anymore, and it makes me think strange things like: I wonder if Wade ever did become a screenwriter. I wonder if he’s still as funny and amazing and handsome, with his gorgeous electric-blue eyes and his mean, mean mouth and his look of something wolfish, as though he might just bite you at any second. God, why did he have to be so attractive? I would have loved him if he’d looked like something that crawled out of a drain.
And I know that much is true, because when the phone rings and it’s suddenly Wade’s voice crawling out of my past at me, saying things in that yawing Canadian accent of his like yeah, no time has passed at all, everything in me goes still. I can’t move for a second, just sitting there staring at the answering machine like it’s suddenly caught on fire.
While he says perfectly normal, ordinary things like How’ve you been, Allie-Cat?
As though no time has passed and I’ll just understand it’s him, immediately. He even has the nerve to demand I pick up pick up pick up, because of course he knows I’ll be here; I have to be here – I’ve just been sitting in one place all this time, waiting for him to grace me with his presence.
I’m almost ready to kill him with the force of my own resentment, when a touch of the old Wade sings out at me from a million miles away. A million years ago:
‘So are you up for the Mystery Machine or what?’
Because, let’s face it, that’s what this is. For reasons unspecified, our old professor has left us his rambling house – the one we used to go to every weekend and rattle around, telling stories by candlelight because Lord, how spooky it was, even back then – on the condition we spend a month within its walls. ‘Renovating,’ the letter says. ‘Restoring,’ the letter says. But Wade knows the score and so do I. The professor wants one last bump-in-the-night story. One last hurrah for the Candy Club, and all those nights we spent telling tales we now can’t remember – or at least, I can’t remember. They’re all at the bottom of my desk drawer and the bottom of the drawer under my wardrobe and the bottom of everything in my apartment ever. They’re spilling out and coming to get me through the dearly departed spirit of Professor Warren, and his house with the corridor of stepping stones and that one room with the little round boathouse window and the doors that sometimes went to nowhere.
I close my eyes and I can almost see Cameron putting the flashlight up to his face – reluctantly, because Cameron was always reluctant about goofy stuff like that – and saying in his gunmetal voice, Mwa ha ha, we’re all going to die in here. Those eyes of his like a storm at the bottom of the ocean, always, and the flashlight making his dark eyelashes seem like shadows, deep shadows.
The machine beeps and I jump as though I’ve been pricked with something, and then it’s just me in my apartment. Just me and the knitting articles and the letter that says, Come and play Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Mansion one last time, Al. Come and see if you can figure out if it was old man Withers all along.
But I don’t think I can. I know what the house is worth – I’ve looked it up, of course I have – but even £750,000 split four ways doesn’t seem like incentive enough. In fact, it feels like a pretty poor pay-off for too many memories and too much pain and this low thrum I always get when I think about his face or his mouth or the way he used to grab me all the time.
He didn’t understand what it did to me. His hands on me, I mean. He didn’t understand that when he fell asleep with his long body curled around mine, I lay awake aching and unfulfilled, wondering what it would take for him to touch me in the way I needed to be touched.
Like now, when just hearing his voice has driven my hand to the top of my thigh – almost at my slowly pulsing sex but not quite. I won’t give in just yet, not yet. Instead I shove the letter in the top drawer of my desk, and stare long and hard at the knitting article that’s blinking away on my laptop.
Then I go one further – a really desperate move, I have to say – and open the bottom drawer. The one crammed with writing, most of it smutty and some of it probably about Wade, and then I grab a wedge of it. Just to, you know, distract myself.
Only it doesn’t distract me. Of course it doesn’t. The story on top – actually handwritten, ink almost disappearing, corners curled – is the one about the girl who comes back from the grave and haunts the man who didn’t love her.
And it’s embarrassing, Lord is it embarrassing. I can hardly stand to look at it, it’s so obvious. I’ve even given the hero a mess of blond hair and those bright sparking glances of his, and there are so many psychosexual Freudian undertones that calling them undertones is like calling a mountain a sinkhole.
It actually turns me on, reading it. I imagine the girl in her dress made out of mist and fog, spreading herself over the hero’s body until her non-flesh sinks all the way into him, and all I can think about is fucking, fucking, fucking. I think not about Wade but about this supposedly faceless and nameless hero, about him over me and under me and inside me like something I always want but never get.
And then I put the heel of my palm over my aching sex and ache harder, stronger, sweeter.
My clit feels huge beneath the press of my hand, but I resist the urges it thrills through me. It says: Replay the answering machine message. But I ignore it and think about the story instead, the story I once read out to my former friends, without shame or worry or any of the things I’m feeling now. He must have known I was writing about him, but back then I didn’t care.
I just care now, as I try to pretend I’m not sliding my hand under the waistband of my panties, to get at my slippery pussy. And it is slippery, because Wade always got me that way and even if he hadn’t, six months of neglecting myself in that regard has definitely put a spike in my libido.
I’m suddenly thinking about what I can do to make it better, make it hotter. There’s a vibrator in one of those many bottomless drawers of mine, but it’s probably still in its wrapper. The batteries inside it have most likely melted. I barely even know what to do with things like that, but just thinking about it buzzing against my clit or filling up that great empty space inside me is almost too much to take.
I can hardly remember what it’s like to get fucked, and my fingers just aren’t enough. They slide around in all this wetness I’ve somehow produced, glancing over my too-sensitive bud until I’m shaking against the hard wood of this chair and on the verge of doing something stupid.
Something like calling Wade up to ask him to talk dirty to me, while I fuck myself on something I don’t know how to use.
Of course, I do know. I’ve written stories about it, so I do know. I’ve written stories about girls masturbating with cucumbers on trains, for God’s sake. I’ve written about girls fucking machines, girls fucking each other, girls fucking guys who can go for hours. It’s just that I’ve never actually done any of that stuff. It’s all fiction and none of it’s fact, not even in the tamest, stupidest, slightest little sense.
Not even a girl getting herself off against a sex toy, because everything in her head turns her on but nothing in reality does the trick.
I think about Wade. I think about the hotter stories I wrote in his honour but never actually read aloud to any of the Candy Club, about the great and terrible land of Hamin-Ra,