Page 39 of Glitterland
“You blushing?”
“No. So, Nabble. Basically you can only play words that aren’t in the dictionary.”
“You what? God, they teach weird stuff at university.”
I took the opportunity to haul myself out of the ridiculous sprawl in which he’d trapped me. “It’s really simple. Any made-up word counts, assuming you have the letters, and somewhere to place them, and you can make a case for what the word means. But if it’s not convincing, then it gets disqualified. So you couldn’t have, um, f-s-k-s-w-z for example, as it blatantly doesn’t mean anything. But you could have, I don’t know,dwelkin.”
“What’s a dwelkin then?”
“I think it’s probably a loosely knitted garment, a bit like a poncho, but made of yak hair.”
He considered it. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I can see that. I reckon there was probably like a trend a coupla summers back, but it nevva caught on proper cos they was naff.”
So I dug out my dusty—very dusty—Scrabble set and we sat on my living room floor, playing Nabble. Eventually I stretched out on my side, propping myself up with an elbow, nudging the letters around lazily with the fingertips of one hand. Darian, however, sat solemnly cross-legged, frowning over the board, a single lock of hair shaken loose from its gel, hanging in front of his eyes. A banal setting for a glitter pirate but it did not dull him. The sight of him stirred a wanting that was starting to feel familiar, though it was less frantic tonight. It was a warm, steady thing, like a heartbeat.
He was uncertain at first but soon he was nabbling like an old hand. First cameglink(“that like look what happens when two people are fancying each other from across the dance floor”), thengloffle(“like when you put too much toffee in your mouf at once”), thenmooshes(“ankle boots made out of crocodile levva wif pompoms hanging on ’em, big in New Zealand”),rapazzled(“off your head, obvs”), andquimpet(“like when hair extensions get all weird up at the top like what ’appened to Britney”). And then, somehow, I got silly and offered upsvlenkyto describe the motion of his hips while dancing, to which he responded withflinkling, which was apparently what my brow did when I was coming up with something sarcastic to say. From there we moved through a few variations too ridiculous to be recorded, I foolishly formulatedglimstruckas a representation of how it felt to be around him, and then we graduated to kissing, still fully clothed like a pair of teenagers, on the wreckage of the Scrabble board.
He crashed over me like a wave and I was drowning. He shone so brightly and I was burning. Touched, by his hands and his body and his unintended mercies, I needed my distance back. Difficult, though, when my skin sang at his closeness and I blazed with wanting. I wanted to put my lips against his neck. I wanted to lick the sweat from where it would gather like glitter in the secret hollows of his flesh. I wanted him naked in my arms, like I’d had him in Brighton, but with not even darkness between us this time. I wanted to give him pleasure. Lavish him in it. Bedeck him with it, like pirate gold. Weave him a crown of all my lost dreams. I wanted to kneel at his feet and suck his cock. I wanted him on his back, so I could look into his eyes while I fucked him.
“I want to watch you make yourself come,” I said against his ear, breathless and terrified.
His head came up. “Err…what?”
“I want to watch—”
“No, I gottit,” he said quickly. “I sorta meant why?”
Because I need you to stop touching me. Because I want to touch you.“Because I want to. And you did say you’d do what I said.”
“Yeah, but it’s embarrassing.”
“Why?”
I felt uncertainty in the small movements of his body on mine. “Well, it’s private, innit? And no point when I got you right ’ere, babes.” I felt him smiling as he kissed my neck. “More fun wif two.”
“I bet you look hot.”
“Naww, I probably look well naff.”
I slithered a hand beneath his T-shirt, my palm seeking out the delicate ridges of his muscles, learning the hidden landscape of his skin. “Haven’t you ever wanted to watch someone else?”
“Um, I ’aven’t really fought abaht it.”
“Don’t you think it might be hot?”
“I dunno,” he said dubiously.
He tried again to kiss me but I kept talking, my voice ringing distantly in my ears, like I was giving a sex lecture to a vast and empty room. “Well, there’s always an extent to which the erotic intersects with our notions of the forbidden and the repressed. Often the things that seem the most outrageous to our sensibilities are the ones that carry the most powerful erotic charge.”
“You fink way too much abaht everyfing, babes.”
I made a clumsy attempt to right my clothes, pulling my jacket onto my shoulders again and tucking my shirt back into my trousers. “Please.”
There was a pause.
“You…uh…you really want me to like…wif myself? Wif you watching? Wif all your clovves on?”
I nodded. Fuck knew what my face was broadcasting.
