Page 156 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

and I’ve never been so frightened or run so fast since. Aisha walked past and

heard me saying this, and she smiled. She smiled. I’m a simple lad,
unfortunately the kind that Aisha can’t really smile at unless she wants a
boyfriend. I told her I was locked out and did all I could to inspire pity; she
asked me if I had a car and asked if we could go and pick up hitchhikers and take
them to their destinations. She’d always wanted to do that, she said. “Yeah, me
too!” I said. We drove up and down the A534 but couldn’t persuade anybody to
get into the car with us: Maybe we seemed too keen. We got back at dawn and

Pierre had come home; I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t.
—

AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings
and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour

later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour
or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move
her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think
this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction.
When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes
sense—it becomes possible to taste sound—that half hiccup, half sigh that tells
me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more

of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration
permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding
feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my
knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to
be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.
Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is

withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some
fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or fucking floppy-haired Theodore
Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional?
Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying
that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds
completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that
demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I

think—a leap or a fall—and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most
decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent
was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed
brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.