Holiday Affairs: An Erotica Collection. Various

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      Heat

      Charlotte Stein

      I come up from below expecting to be alone, but I’m not. Hunter is inexplicably there, sprawled on a sun lounger with his big feet trailing off the end, that stupid handsome hair of his gleaming in the glare.

      And all I can think is: I wish his name wasn’t Hunter. I’ve never in my life known anyone called anything like that, and I don’t feel like starting now. It’s just so … beefcake. It’s so … Abercrombie and Fitch, even though I’m British and barely know what Abercrombie and Fitch is.

      I don’t want to know. I just want to sit on the sun lounger he’s currently occupying and read my book, like a semi-normal person. I’m the sort who goes on sun-blistering holidays somewhere exotic, and then sits alone beneath a giant umbrella to shelter themselves from the heat – and I won’t apologise for that.

      But Hunter makes me apologise. He looks up the moment I’m on deck, and smiles his winning smile, and says something I don’t want to hear, like ‘I was wondering when you’d join me.’ As though there’s a possibility that we could actually join. The universe is making new glue as we speak, for bookworms who refuse to wear bathing suits and giant jockish men called Hunter.

      He’s out of his mind – perhaps literally. Lily says he’s secretly weird, that he has trouble relating to people, that his parents died years ago and ever since he’s been some kind of hermit … but I don’t buy it. People like him aren’t hermits.

      They’re on the covers of catalogues, staring off at imaginary horizons. He doesn’t need this holiday. He doesn’t need to socialise. He needs to spend five thousand dollars on deck shoes, before insulting some waiter we don’t have.

      Hell, maybe I’m the waiter, in this scenario. I certainly feel like one as I edge around his most glorious self, in an attempt to reach the sun lounger on the other side of the deck.

      But then I see it, and suddenly I’m not a waiter at all. I’m trapped into being his holiday companion, by the presence of the seat he’s moved next to himself. He’s actually dragged it all the way across this bright-white deck to make a neat little pair, side by side.

      As though that’s perfectly reasonable.

      He even makes it sound reasonable.

      ‘Come and sit down,’ he says, which of course gives me no choice. If I say no, I’ll look anti-social and awful. And if I say yes … if I say yes …

      I’ll have to sit next to him, right next to him, with the heat of the sun blasting me on one side and the heat from him blasting me on the other. In fact, I can practically feel it before I’ve even taken the lounger next to him. He’s so bright, so big, so winning – he makes the sun look like a speck on the face of a giant.

      He’s the giant in question.

      He’s so big that I feel crowded the second I arrange myself on the lounger, even though he’s set them a decent way apart. I can get my whole hand between them without any trouble at all, but that’s not the point when your companion is eight foot eleven. His arms span that tiny gap with very little effort, and any time he shifts a tad I can just feel him.

      I can feel the heat coming off him, in waves. I can smell his suntan lotion, light and summery, and the febrile scent of his skin beneath. Sunshine skin, my mother would have called it – and it is. You can tell the kind of tan he has just from drinking in that scent: a golden honey hovering over the blush underneath.

      But of course I have to confirm how it looks, anyway. I pretend I’m engrossed in my book, when really I can’t stop flicking my gaze to his immense hands – pale on the inside, caramel on the out. He’s fiddling with the tie on his shorts, which only makes the show more compelling.

      Those long fingers, those heavy knuckles … and then further down the endless stretch of his solid legs. I confess, I follow them all the way to his feet, which aren’t clad in the five-thousand-dollar deck shoes. They’re bare, instead, completely bare, and somehow that’s much worse.

      His feet are even more gigantic than his hands, and knuckly like them, too. They’re a real man’s feet – different to Patrick’s, all neat and clean. They make me think that he’s not an airbrushed-catalogue-model Hunter, at all, but a real one instead.

      He goes into the forest, at night, and runs down a hapless deer. And then when the moon is at its fullest, he tears the thing apart, with his teeth. He tears me apart, with his teeth. He makes me want to look at his face, but I can’t, I can’t.

      Why isn’t he saying anything now?

      He wanted me to sit, didn’t he? He wanted me to join him, in that tiring way most middle-class people with yachts seem to demand. Patrick needs it all the time, and so does Lily, and so does Gregory – though I know there’s something different between the time they want from me and the time Hunter does.

      I can feel it prickling in the air, now, between the words he thought he should say and the silence he now allows. He doesn’t want idle chitchat, I think. He wants to sit here and make me bake in his heat, until I’m so uncomfortable I could die.

      And then he abruptly puts a hand on my thigh, and I think I do die. I stop breathing, at the very least, because he’s not low down, towards my knee. He’s really, really high up – almost under my sundress, in fact.

      And when I don’t move away or slap him or any of the things I should do, he slides that hand higher, casually. Like he’s just turning the pages of a book he’s not all that interested in. It could even be the book I’ve just discarded, which is now lying on the floor by my lounger.

      Either way – I could almost pretend he isn’t doing this at all. I don’t look at him. He doesn’t speak. There are no questions, no answers. Just his hand working further and further up my thigh, until finally he’s clasping me in a very rude place indeed.

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