Addicted

I can’t lie in front of my old headmaster. I can’t even lie in front of this lady. She asks me what my name is, and instead of offering the fake one I thought up for this very occasion, I go with the real deal. Kit, I say, and then she writes it on the sticker in her hand and plasters it to my right boob.

Now I have to be me, for all eternity.

‘You just take a seat when you’re ready, Kit,’ she says, but the sight of that prison-like circle of plastic chairs makes me dizzy. I try the fold-out table of orange squash and home-baked treats, instead, only to find I’ve forgotten how to eat. My hand shakes as I raise a square of ill-gotten ginger cake to my mouth, and I end up putting it back down.

But that just makes me look like some nervous first-timer. A willowy woman in seventeen layers of lovely clothes pats me on the back, and tells me everything will be fine. ‘Just share your inner self,’ she says, as though my inner self could be so easily persuaded. I can’t even tell someone on the subway that they’re standing on my foot, let alone this.

Because, oh, this is something else.

The guy in the tweed with the nice professor’s face – he can’t stop masturbating. He masturbates so often that I find myself doing the maths in my head, but once I have I’m no less in awe. His weekly total is more than my yearly one. In fact, if I divide the four and carry the one, it’s more than I’ve ever masturbated in my entire life. I don’t even know how he’s functioning, in all honesty. I don’t even know how someone can physically crave something that much … something so small and ordinary and nothing. God, when I do it – it’s nothing.

But when he describes it …

‘It’s a rush,’ he says. As though it’s some new drug I wasn’t aware of. And then even more thrilling: ‘It’s a rush to think I might get caught. I do it in my office, sometimes, with the door unlocked, half hoping someone will walk in.’

And once he’s done, all I can think of is my old university professor, Dr McCaffrey. Dr McCaffrey, with those leather patches on his elbows and his pipe and his neatly parted hair. And most of all those steel-grey eyes of his, surveying the study hall with a kind of disaffection.

Did he have a secret life like this, behind the cold façade? Did he imagine keeping students behind after lectures – students more lovely than me, obviously – before offering them something strictly prohibited in the university handbook?

Bend over, he says in my head, and then he raises that pointer of his, about a second before I snap back to reality.

God, Lori’s right. My attitude to sex is weird. They’re talking about their problems, and I’m in the middle of some crazy fantasy featuring a teacher I once had. I’m imagining what it’s like to be this consumed by sex, to be this nuts about it. The woman on my right has a ritual, for fuck’s sake. An actual ritual.

She goes to the same bar every Saturday night, and picks up a dark-haired man – preferably with a moustache. And then she takes him back to her apartment, puts a collar on him and makes him stumble around her living room like a dog.

My Saturday-night ritual consists of me deciding whether to wear pyjamas or a nightie to bed. Is a jam sandwich a good idea, after ten-thirty? Or will I wake up feeling nauseated and too thirsty? Chances are I’ll be thirsty. And then I’ll drink half a pint of lemonade and need to pee at six in the morning – it’s a whole big thing, and far too much hassle.

Better that I don’t have the jam sandwich.

Yeah, that’s right. She has trouble fighting her urge to have wild and anonymous sex. I have trouble deciding about preserves and buttered bread. I’m ashamed of my attitude to late-night snacks. If I needed any further proof that I shouldn’t be here … that I should feel guilty about peeping in on their private feelings … this would be it.

I mean, these people are really hurting, about actual things. They’re all freaked out by their obsessions and unsure of what to do next – all of them are. Every last one of them, down to the girl who can’t even bring herself to say the word ‘vagina’ and the man who’s never so much as shaken a woman’s hand.

I don’t belong here.

And neither does that guy on the other side of the circle.

I don’t know how I missed him, at first. He’s completely unmissable, in every way possible. He’s like a sore thumb in a room full of perfectly healthy fingers, though I really don’t think I can be blamed for overlooking him. I was just so engrossed in other people’s sad tales and my own rampaging guilt that I didn’t pay any attention to the one other person in the room who isn’t real. Maybe I thought he was a mirror on the other side of the circle, reflecting me.

Because it’s obvious he is. He isn’t slumped in his chair, defeated, or full with celebration of some small victory over sex. He doesn’t look the least bit sad or ashamed about anything. His arms are folded jauntily over his chest, and I immediately notice two things because of this:

First, his arms and his general chest area are absolutely enormous. They’re so enormous that they briefly blot out all light in the universe, and cause a cataclysm the likes of which the world has never known.

And:

Those earth-destroying arms are covered in tattoos.

Though maybe all of that is just a slight exaggeration. He’s so incredible-looking I briefly hallucinate, and imagine him pounding downtown Los Angeles with his immense fists. He’s already taken root in my brain, and I don’t even know how. His face just exerts some kind of gravitational pull, and the moment I make the mistake of looking I’m caught for ever in his orbit.

I can’t explain it. Usually I barely register men at all, and I certainly don’t find myself engrossed in the way they look. Guys that women call attractive – footballers and rugby players and other rugged examples of extreme manhood – I barely pay attention to. I’d kind of accepted that my responses were mostly dead, in terms of actual men in real life.

But this guy … oh, this guy. I don’t even know what it is about him, but the moment his sultry blue gaze locks with mine something happens inside me. That dead thing rises from the grave and starts stumbling around, looking for loins. I’m lost, I think, I’m totally lost. I can’t even stop staring at him, despite all of my best efforts.

I glance at the pictures some kids have drawn on the opposite wall. I pretend my fingernails are suddenly as fascinating as the riddle of the Incas – but it’s all in vain. I end up taking in everything about him, whether I want to or not. I even take in the parts that are completely unremarkable, like his shortish dark hair, unstyled and lazy-looking. Or that tattered T-shirt he’s wearing, pulled taut across his unbearably broad chest, and those jeans that seem similarly thin and ready to expose him at any moment. His thighs look like ham hocks beneath the material, thick and juicy, but that’s not what draws my eyes the most out of everything he’s wearing.

His flip-flops do. His ridiculous flip-flops – so casual in a room of neatly tied and laced shoes. Everyone else is trying like mad to contain themselves, to be respectable and normal and totally OK.

Whereas he clearly doesn’t care. He’s half-smiling before he’s even started talking, with a mouth so wicked I’m afraid seeing it might constitute a sin. His lower lip is as plump as an overripe fruit, and, when he thinks no one’s looking, he licks it. He licks it in a way that makes my body respond – like some secret sex sign I didn’t even know existed.

Suck me right here, that sign says, and the worst of it is … I want to. I’d crawl across deserts to take that lower lip in my mouth. I’d renounce my life of jam sandwiches and terrible sitcoms for one kiss from a pout like that.

Because it is kind of a pout. His face is this insane mixture of rough masculinity and sensuous something-else, and the battle between the two is so engaging you just have to look. He’s covered in stubble, of course, and his strong nose is just a touch too big for his face. His eyebrows are thick, dark – almost oppressive, in fact.

But then they’re paired with the longest, blackest, loveliest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man. He shuts his eyes briefly and they fan over his cheeks like something a geisha girl would carry. And then he opens them, and that’s no better either. I don’t know if the blue is enhanced by the dark rings around them, or if his gaze is just naturally like this – naturally heavy, naturally smoke-screened, naturally hypnotic.

But either way I don’t suppose it matters.

He knows I’m looking, now. That little half-smile has quirked up a quarter of an inch, to see me falling all over myself – because he’s definitely that kind of man, I can tell. He’s the kind who thinks every girl is head over heels in love with him, to the point where he has to be a jerk just to get them to look the other way. The kind that shoulders past lesser people in bars, and strolls around town centres with his top off. I bet he goes on holiday with Club 18-30, even though he’s clearly over that, and when he returns he talks to everyone about larging it and getting his end away.

Yeah, I’ve got his number.

Until he speaks, and then I don’t know what I’ve got.

‘Yeah, so I’m Dillon. Dillon Holt,’ he says, like he’s introducing himself at a barbecue. You got any hotdogs, dude? I think, deliriously, before he plunges into the opposite world everyone else is in. There’s not a hint of discomfort in his voice, when he says: ‘I’d say I’ve slept with quite a substantial number of women – maybe a hundred?’

I think I can see him counting, in his head.

‘Maybe more like two hundred, huh?’

And to make matters worse, his accent isn’t some buttoned-up English thing, layered with a thousand years of repression. He’s American, I think, and his voice has that breezy, open, friendly quality to it that draws you in immediately. It makes you feel comfortable, even though you probably shouldn’t be.

I should still be guilty, and ashamed of myself.

But he makes short work of that.

‘Big girls, little girls, dark-haired, blonde, burgundy … girls with weird bits, girls who don’t know how to dress – I’m not fussy. I’ll take all comers.’

Oh, God, he’s not fussy. He’ll take all comers! Which probably shouldn’t seem like a good thing, here. And a second later, he seems to twig to that.

He clears his throat, and starts again.

‘I mean … uh … I used to take all comers, until I realised that was really bad and … uh … unhealthy for me, as a person, and also it … you know. Negatively affects those around me in terrible, terrible ways.’

Is he reading this out of a handbook? I kind of feel like he’s reading this out of handbook. He picked it up on his way in, and is now awkwardly fudging his way through the spiel he thinks he ought to give.

‘I’ve gotten myself into some really bad situations – on planes, on trains, in automobiles. And this one time, on a beach. Though in my defence, that last one wasn’t really my fault. I missed the sign that said, “You’re now wandering off the nudist part,” and after that I was just some guy on a beach with my nadgers out.’

Oh, Lord, I love the way he says nadgers. I love the way he says planes, trains and automobiles, like the pornographic version of a much-loved John Candy movie. It makes me realise that he’s not my reflection at all. He’s what my reflection would be, if I was without shame or any kind of nervousness. If I didn’t feel guilty about anything, and instead just reeled off the truth.