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Proportion?
Star frowned, not understanding until he reached out and indicated her character’s flaccid penis.
‘I’m just an average-sized guy,’ he told her lightly. ‘I take a regular size ten or eleven shoe, that’s all. I’m no superman!’
To her chagrin Star could feel herself starting to blush as she realised what he meant. If her male character was rather more than averagely well endowed, then she had not made him so on purpose, and, in fact, hadn’t been aware of it until he’d pointed it out. A Freudian slip, some might say.
‘And she certainly isn’t my type,’ he added. ‘What made you choose her?’
‘She’s the complete opposite of me,’ Star responded angrily before she could stop herself.
‘Meaning?’ he queried quietly, dangerously focusing on her, refusing to allow her to withdraw her gaze from his.
‘I know exactly why you rejected my proposals for the advertising campaign, Kyle, and it has nothing to do with them being sexist,’ Star told him angrily.
He was still watching her and for no reason she could name Star felt an odd thrill of high tension course hotly through her body.
‘You and I are never going to be able to work together,’ she cried out, frustrated by her failure to break free of his penetrating gaze. ‘Your male pride, your shallow male ego will never allow you to forget that I showed you to be sexually incompetent.’
As she hurled the insult at him Star had the same sensation in the pit of her stomach as though she had stepped into a lift which had descended too fast, the shock of hearing her own words, of knowing how uncharacteristically out of control she was getting making her feel sick and weak, appalled by what she had said and by the frightening surge of her temper.
It was so unlike her; she was normally so calm and controlled, so logical and coolly incisive in everything she said and did, despite the colour of her hair. Losing one’s temper was a sign of weakness, a sign of vulnerability, an admission of self-doubt; she knew that and yet it was too late now to step back from the precipice she herself had so dangerously created. Her pride left her with no other course than to take a deep breath and fling herself over it as she heard Kyle saying with ominous calm, ‘Is that a fact? Well, for your information—’
‘Whatever you want to say, I don’t want to hear,’ she cut him off. ‘What exactly is it you’re trying to prove, Kyle? You come over here...you move into my apartment block...you talk about me...criticise me to my friends, telling them—’
‘Oh, no, I’m not letting you get away with that one,’ Kyle interrupted her grimly. ‘For starters, I’d already agreed to help Brad out over here long before I ever knew you existed, and as for me renting an apartment... It just so happens that the one I’d originally rented fell through—the owners decided not to go abroad as they’d planned, after all—and this was the only suitable vacancy the agents had on their books. If I’d known that you lived here—’ He broke off and then told her acidly, ‘Get a life, Star. Stop using your past and your father as a stick to beat the rest of the male sex with and an excuse for your emotional immaturity.’
‘What emotional immaturity?’ Star exploded, her self-control finally giving way beneath the combined pressure of Kyle’s unexpectedly skilful attack and her own shock.
‘Do I really need to tell you? You’re the one who said that the only kind of intimacy you wanted to share with a man was a sexual one, that you were too afraid of the potential pain any kind of emotional intimacy might cause to risk—’
‘I never said that,’ Star interrupted him furiously.
‘Not in so many words,’ Kyle agreed with a shrug. ‘But it’s obvious that you are afraid—’
‘No. That isn’t true,’ Star denied vehemently, shaking her head. ‘It isn’t true. And I don’t... You can’t... I want you to leave,’ she managed to calm down enough to tell him shakily as she tried to control the way her body was starting to tremble inwardly as well as outwardly.
She started to turn her back on him, terrified of him seeing how traumatically his quietly voiced words had affected her, but before she could he reached out and took hold of her wrist, the expression in his eyes suddenly changing as his thumb registered the too fast, nervous race of her pulse.
Her strangled, ‘Let go of me,’ was ignored as he insisted,
‘Look at me, Star! Look at me!’
She wanted to refuse, but somehow she could not do so, her gaze lifting angrily and defiantly to meet his as she tensed her muscles against his mental invasion of her emotions in much the same way as a nervous young virgin might have tensed her body against a more physical intrusion.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ he challenged her softly. ‘You are afraid of committing yourself emotionally to a man...to a relationship...’
‘Go to hell,’ Star hurled inelegantly at him as she finally managed to pull her wrist free. ‘And get out of my flat...’
To her relief he began to walk back towards the front door, but before he got there he paused, then turned round and simply looked at her, subjecting her whole body—from the tips of her toes to the top of her head—to a slow, seeking inspection of such unexpected and open sensuality that Star actually felt herself starting to curl her toes—an instinctive feminine reaction to the effect he was having on her.
She had been appraised sexually by men before, many, many times, but she had never experienced anything like this. It was like comparing... It was like comparing sex to making love, she acknowledged unwillingly as she heard Kyle saying softly to her, ‘And for your information, Star, I didn’t walk away from you that night because I didn’t want you, but because I did. Just like I do right now. Just like I do right now... Oh, yes,’ he continued, when he heard her indrawn breath, ‘right now there is nothing...nothing that the most primitive, basic male part of me wants more than to pick you up and carry you into your bedroom and lay your beautiful, naked body beneath mine whilst I prove to you just how very, very wrong you are...’
‘Really?’ Suddenly Star was back on safer, familiar ground, her voice gaining strength and developing a cynically mocking undertone as she challenged him, ‘So what’s stopping you? Surely not the fear that you don’t compare well with my...drawing?’
Star slid him a tantalising, slant-eyed look of laughing invitation but instead of taking her up on it Kyle shook his head and told her gently, ‘No! You are...or rather your fear, your refusal to let yourself let go of the past and to stop punishing yourself for your father’s faults. You aren’t to blame because he wasn’t there for you, Star. He is, and when the day finally comes when you can accept that, when you can share real intimacy with me instead of wanting to use sex as a means of punishing me for being a man, then—’
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Star advised him bitingly. Did he really think that she was stupid enough to believe in what he was saying?
When she could share real intimacy... Any woman who thought that s
he could do that with a man had to be a fool. It was like opening your door and inviting a thief to walk in and help himself.
As Kyle closed her front door behind him, Star’s telephone started to ring. She went to answer it, frowning as she heard her mother’s voice, her frown deepening as her mother explained that Star could not visit her over the weekend as she was going away with a ‘friend’.
Her mother’s coy use of the word made Star grimly demand to know just who her ‘friend’ was, but her mother, characteristically, refused to answer her.
Another man, Star guessed, but refrained from saying so.
Well, there was no way she was going to change her mind and go to Sally’s barbecue now, she decided when she hung up. She would just have to pretend that she was still going to her mother’s; after all, it wasn’t as though she didn’t have plenty of work to occupy her, she acknowledged as she glanced towards the drawings which had caused her such amusement and release earlier.
Now that the adrenalin buzz of excitement had drained away, leaving her feeling irritated with herself and deflated, she viewed the sketches in a different light, grimacing in distaste as she removed them and ripped them up. It had been a childish thing to do and something which she was now uncomfortably aware had, in a way, backfired on her and degraded her more than it had Kyle.
What it had also done, though, was give her several ideas on how she could subtly alter her original campaign. Quickly she retrieved her box of groceries and took them into the kitchen. Food first and then work, she promised herself.
And that was another advantage of working from home. There were no problems about working late into the night, nor did she have to get up early in the morning to get to an office. She could work all night and then drop into bed with the dawn if she wanted—and indeed had done so on occasion.
As she unpacked her groceries, she tried not to think about the fact that Kyle was now living right next door, his bedroom separated from hers by only a single internal wall.
His bedroom... Now why the hell should she be thinking about that...? Angrily she slammed the fridge door closed. There was no reason, none at all. She didn’t want him...she just wanted to prove to herself that she was right... Not that she had any doubts on that score, she assured herself hastily. Of course she didn’t. How could she have? No, of course she didn’t... It was just...
