"Nervous as fuck — I was certain I wouldn't be able to get it up, I mean just certain, especially as I'm still feeling the effects from getting pissed yesterday — and then, well… aroused, I suppose, when… when I realised you were."
"Uh-huh. Not before."
"No!"
"No."
"I mean, I felt awful for long enough; I felt like a rapist."
"But you weren't." She slides her hand between the cheeks of my bum, then soaps my thighs and down my legs. "You were doing something I'd always fantasised about."
"Oh great, so that old fuck Jamieson was right and all women secretly want to be raped."
Yvonne slaps my calves. "Don't be stupid. Nobody wants to be raped, but some people have fantasies about it. The control isn't some detail, Cameron… knowing it's somebody you can trust isn't just by-the-way; it's everything."
"Hmm," I say, unconvinced.
"Men like Jamieson hate women, Cameron. Or maybe they just hate women who aren't totally in awe of men, women who aren't under their control." She runs her hands up my legs to my buttocks again, sliding her fingers between my cheeks, touching my anus and making me go up on the balls of my feet, then her hand runs back down my legs. "Maybe men like that should have it happen to them," she says. "Rape; assault. See how they like it."
"Yeah," I say, shivering suddenly despite the heat because we're getting into dodgy territory here. "All those wigs and garters and funny gowns; fuckin askin for it, in't they? Know wot I mean?" The steam gets to my throat and I cough.
I'm wondering whether I should say anything to her about the police, and about the retired Judge Jamieson being "assaulted', whatever that means. After my drunken afternoon with Al I don't feel the same need to offload as I did before, and I can't decide whether I ought to involve Yvonne or not.
She washes my feet. "Or maybe," she says, "the Greers and the Dworkins are right, and the Pickleses and the Jamiesons are right too, and all men are rapists, and all women want to be raped."
"Bullshit."
"Mm-hmm."
"But I still didn't like being made to feel like I was a rapist."
"Well, we won't do that again."
"And I still find the idea of you wanting me to do it… unsettling."
She's silent for a while, then says, "The other day" — she's soaping the front of my legs now, from behind — "when you had to sit through Eldorado in that really uncomfortable position; you enjoyed that, didn't you?"
She's smoothing her sappled hands up and down my thighs.
"Well… eventually," I concede.
"But if that had been somebody else doing that to you…" she says softly, so that I can hardly hear her over the quiet thunder of the shower. She's soaping my balls now, gently palping them, massaging them. … Somebody you didn't know — male or female — tying you up, leaving you helpless, somewhere where shouting couldn't help you, and there was a big sharp knife under the bed… how would you have felt then?"
She stands up and rubs her body up against me, stroking my still mostly limp cock. I gaze out through the steam and the rivulets of water running down the glass of the shower cabinet. I'm looking out at the moodily lit bathroom and wondering what I would do if I suddenly saw William appear out there, flight bags in hand, a Surprise, honey, I'm home! look on his face.
"Petrified," I admit. "I'd be scared stiff. Well, scared soft."
She's gently pulling on my prick. It doesn't really want to and I find it difficult to believe and I'm not sure I want to because I feel so fucking drained and sore, but the thing's actually responding, fattening and firming and rising in her kneading, soap-slick hands.
She puts her chin on my shoulder and a sharp fingernail against my jugular. "Turn round, bitch-boy," she hisses.
"Oh ha-bloody-ha."
Yvonne wakes me up after an hour's sleep and tells me I have to leave. I turn over and pretend I'm still asleep but she pulls the duvet off me and switches the lights on. I have to dress in my sweaty, dirty clothes and go back down to the kitchen, grumbling while she makes me a coffee, and I complain about my wet boots and she gives me a fresh pair of William's socks to wear and I put them on and drink my coffee and whine about never being allowed to spend the night and tell her how just once I'd like to wake up here in the morning, and have a nice, civilised breakfast with her, sitting on the sunny balcony outside the bedroom windows, but she makes me sit down while she laces my boots up, then takes my coffee cup off me and sends me out the back door and says I've got two minutes before she arms the alarm and puts the infrared lights on stand-by so I have to go back the way I came, over the estate wall and through the wood and down into the stream where I get both feet wet and cold and I fall going up the bank and get all muddy and eventually drag myself up and through the hedge, scratching my cheek and tearing my polo-neck and then trudging across the field through heavy rain and more mud and finally getting to the car and panicking when I can't find the car keys before remembering I put them in the button-down back pocket of the jeans for safety instead of the side pocket like I usually do, and then having to put some dead branches under the front wheels because the fucking car's stuck and finally getting away and home and even in the street light I can see what a mess of the pale upholstery my muddy clothes have made.
I feel too tired to sleep so I play some Despot when I get home but my heart's not in it and the Empire is still in a tattered-looking state after all the earlier disasters and I'm almost wondering if I should start again but that would mean going back to the fucking dawn of civilisation and the temptation in Despot is always to swap PoV, which people who don't know the game always think sounds sort of innocent, like some detail, but it isn't: you're not just swapping Point of View, you're swapping your current Despotic Power Level for something less, even if it's a regional lord or other king or a general or royal relation close to the throne, and it is not to be done lightly because as soon as you renounce the current Despot's PoV the computer takes over and it's a smart fucking piece of software. Try to swap too late, hold on too long and you get assassinated and that's it; that's you back to the cave with twenty other flea-bitten reduced-statures and the bright idea of bringing some fire into the cave! Swap too soon and the program takes over and performs some miracle that pulls the ass of the Despot you just abandoned out of the fire and next thing you know the secret police are banging down the doors and hauling you and your family off into the night and oblivion; the machine thereupon promptly declares itself the winner and it's back to that fucking cave again.
I give up after an hour of civilisational water-treading, hit Store and slope off to bed. I've smoked six fags without really meaning to.
I'm still heading for the hills. I get up bright and late. I phone Andy and confirm it's still all right to visit, then I ring Eddie and get the next three days off, tell the cops — they're based at Fettes, though the DI has gone back down to London, and no they're still not giving me back my new portable yet — and (after I've cleaned the car up a bit) head out of the city and across the grey bridge in a day of squally, buffeting rain that has the bridge's 40-limit signs on, high-sided vehicles banned and the 205 dancing its Dunlops sideways as the gusts hit.
Then it's up the M90, skirting Perth and heading northwards on the A9 with its frustrating mix of dual and single carriageways and its dire-warning signs about unmarked police cars before the fun begins at Dalwhinnie. Nirvana, Michelle Shocked, Crowded House and Carter USM provide the sound track. The rain eases as I head west; I catch the last of a wide, bloody-looking sunset over Skye and the Kyles and the floodlights turning Eilean Donan's grey stones green; I make it to Strome in four hours twenty minutes from home, arriving just as the stars are coming out above in the purple spaces between the dark, heavy clouds.