Girl on the Net

I have a habit of staring. Not at strangers – that’s too creepy, even for me. I have a habit of staring at my boyfriend. He’s astonishingly beautiful, and I like to look at beautiful men during moments of downtime. When they’re not deliberately making an effort to be sexy, just going about their daily lives with no idea how stunning they actually are. Sometimes they catch me doing this.

The best and sexiest times to stare at men, in my opinion, are when they’re doing stuff with their hands. My ex used to get maximum stares when he was doing something fiddly with his hands: rolling joints; playing Xbox; writing code. I used to spend quite a lot of time just gawking at him as he’d press buttons on a keyboard or controller – swift, sure movements of his fingers performing tasks so complex to me that they were indistinguishable from magic. Hot.

My new boyfriend has deeply sexy hands – they’re the second best part of his body. I love watching him when he’s texting, which he does two-handed most of the time. For some reason this is much sexier than texting one-handed, I’m not sure why – maybe it’s just a quantity-plus-quality thing. An individual hand is hot and gets me thinking about fingering, two hands is even hotter and gets me thinking about how it would feel to have him slowly pull down my top and bra and gently pinch them with soft-soft fingertips. Maybe it’s because there’s a symmetry to two hands rather than one. Either way, the time I tend to stare at him most is when we sit together on the sofa: I’m catching up on Duolingo, and he’s responding to texts or posts on social media. While he’s occupied with his phone, I get distracted from mine and let my gaze wander – taking the opportunity to drink in how pretty he is.

He’s caught me a few times doing this heart-eyes-emoji staring: not quite slack-jawed but definitely entranced. And although I think it’s obvious why I’m doing it, until recently almost every time he’s caught me, he’s responded with a wary kind of shock. Like I’m scrutinising him for later critique.

“What?!” he’ll ask, on the defensive, as if I might say he’s got spinach in his teeth.

“Just thinking about how hot you are,” I’ll explain, and he visibly relaxes.

Just thinking about…

It might be weird if I went into too much detail about exactly what I was thinking. I usually save that for here on the blog, where I can write a thousand words about specifics like the curve of his beautiful head, and how much I love admiring it from the side. But if I were to allow myself to expand, as I occasionally do, I might go on to explain:

“Your hair is such a perfect length right now – just short enough that I can run my hands over it and feel the tiny pinpricks of each strand, but long enough that it provides contrast with the balder section on the top, where everything feels deliciously smooth under my palms.”

Or

“The softness of the skin just behind your ear, it looks so tempting – I want to gently kiss it.”

Or

“The colour of your eyes today is dreamy enough that you could pass as a fucking Disney character.”

I try not to go too hard on those things in casual conversation, though. He often responds to compliments with awkwardness and uncertainty, which on one level is incredibly cute: it’s fun to knock someone sideways with a left-field compliment that they didn’t expect. On another level, though, it gives me a little kick of panic in my chest. How can he not know instinctively that the things I’ll be thinking are good? Noticing, zooming in on, and articulating the details of what makes someone beautiful used to be my hobby, and now it’s my full-time job. On a bad day it’s my Achilles’ Heel, because I focus so much on the good stuff I often skate over and ignore things that might be going wrong. But on a good day I might say it’s my superpower.

If he’s worried that the thoughts swirling in my head are bad ones, then the good stuff I love to focus on is getting lost somewhere in translation. And if that’s the case, then how can I possibly show him the detail and shape of my love? What good are my powers? Where is my value?!

I don’t know why this weighs so heavily on my mind, other than it’s my job to navelgaze about this sort of shit. Maybe all I need is time: enough time to give enough compliments, in just the right moments… if I learn how to articulate these things better, one day maybe he’ll hear me. So in the meantime, when he says ‘what?!’, I reply ‘just thinking about how hot you are,’ and hope that the next time he catches me staring, he’ll know without having to ask.

“What?”

I’m thinking about how well-placed that specific tattoo is to draw attention to the pale, soft skin inside your upper arm. And that other one, which has a detail that peeks out of the sleeve of a hoodie, tempting me to go and roll it up so I can kiss your skinny wrist beneath it.

“What are you thinking?”

I’m thinking about your fingers – the shape of them. How softly you use them to touch me. The way they felt the first night we slept together, in bed afterwards with me babbling about how I don’t normally like it when men stay over, and you just lying calmly beside me, stroking those fingertips delicately up and down my spine. How that was enough to persuade me that I did not want you to leave.

“What are you looking at?”

I’m looking at how swiftly and deftly you use your beautiful hands to type something out on your phone. I’m looking at the frown of concentration on your face while you do that. The former makes me think of how softly you touch me, and the latter reminds me of the focused way you purse your lips as you’re trying to come.

It always surprises me when he asks me why I’m staring, in a tone that’s shot through with worry. As if I’d be thinking anything other than ‘you’re fit, and I’m so fucking lucky.’

But the other day we had a breakthrough. I doubt it even registered with him, but it felt pretty awesome to me: a shift in comprehension, like he suddenly saw the inside of my head while I was heart-eyes staring.

It was the morning after a random chilled-out evening, during which I’d told him many times how sexy his hands are. They were especially beautiful that day because he’d let me paint his nails. The fact that they were painted is obviously RED HOT. On top of that, he had told me that as long as I do the painting (EVEN HOTTER), he’d like to have his nails done more often (MY CUNT RUNNETH OVER). I’d done a little photoshoot of his hands while we were in bed the night before, taking pictures from different angles so I could drool over them later on my own, and (with his permission) share one with fellow hand-pervs on the internet. In short: he knew he was hot, and what’s more he could pinpoint exactly why. He understood the detail I’d be focusing on when given the opportunity to stare at him again.

So the next time he was sitting on the sofa, texting – two-handed, as ever – he once again caught me gawking at his hands in wide-eyed, cuntgush awe. But this time when he clocked it, he immediately grinned. A huge, broad, confident smile: no worry or suspicion.

I was just thinking about how hot he was. And he knew it.

Confidence is sexy, of course, and I love it when he’s self-assured. I adore hearing him talk about his work because it’s something that lights this fire of passion and certainty in him: he does something cool that he loves, he does it exceptionally well, and he knows it. But on top of the sexiness that is this genuine, heartfelt swagger, there was something extra about his confidence this time – like maybe it was partly down to me. I’d finally managed to show him a glimpse inside my head, and he liked what he saw. He got what I was saying, and understood. Instantly and instinctively.

With the heart-eyes staring at his beautiful, nail-varnished hands, I was telling him how hot he was.

And he heard me.