Eighty Days Amber (32 page)

Licking.

Exploring.

Digging.

Lubricating me.

Teasing me.

The moment the tip of his tongue breached my rosebud, the buzz inside me rose to another level and I was electrified. Wanting him wildly.

My sense of arousal was racing through my veins and travelling across my body at the speed of light or even faster, tiptoeing its way onto the wet tip of his intrusive tongue until he could feel its tremor of excitement.

On and on Chey went, playing with my lust until I felt like screaming for him to just take hold of me, however roughly he had to, and unreservedly do to me what he wanted. What I wanted.

Every nerve ending in my body now seemed to have assembled at the apex of my arsehole and I felt as though my legs might give way if he didn’t fuck me now.

‘Inside me, please,’ I begged.

‘Like a boy?’

‘Like a boy,’ I sighed, abdicating the notion that I had any control over my senses any longer.

Chey rose and entered me, bending me over the bed as he did so.

The initial discomfort rapidly vanished and he fitted into me as he always did. Chey was my dam, my lock. I pressed against him and relaxed, letting him carry me away on the totality of his ardour.

It was another sort of dance altogether.

Now that I was also his sailor.

A boat horn sounded in the distance on the high seas. In another two or three days, the captain had informed us over dinner that evening, we would be reaching port and the end of our long journey.

Summer tucked her precious Bailly gently back into its case.

Oh what stories the instrument could tell, if it had a voice, she thought. In a way the violin did have a voice, if only through melody.

She often thought of Luba and Chey and that night in Dublin when she had helped them to run away together. A tear came to her eye when she remembered the moment that she had noticed Luba’s heart rising imperceptibly in her chest and realised that the whole thing had been a terribly clever trick. They’d played their parts so well that for a brief, awful moment she had thought that Chey had actually killed Luba and then turned the gun on himself.

Summer had never been much of a romantic, and she felt reassured by her delight in the handsome couple’s happiness. She’d even agreed to take dancing lessons, to Dominik’s surprise. His gladness amused her. She would have jumped at any opportunity to have him lead her, and if that was in a waltz at the local community hall rather than on the end of a leash at a fetish club, well, each was as good as the other in its own way as far as she was concerned.

The familiar sound of furious tapping reached her ears as she eased open the study door. She watched in silence for a few moments, gauging the mood of her lover as he thumped the keyboard, caught in the white heat of creative fever.

He’d been like this since they’d returned from Dublin, desperately transmitting all the thoughts, emotions and images that he had absorbed onto the virtual page. He seemed to be living in fear that if he didn’t type quickly enough all the best stuff would vanish back into whatever wormhole it had popped out of in the first place and he
would be left with nothing but a vague feeling that he’d nearly caught a good idea by the heels.

It was a lonely existence, playing the muse – long stretches of waiting for the other to emerge from a cocoon-like state of daydream and return to the land of the living. Harder still was dealing with the seemingly insurmountable stretches of writer’s block, when Dominik forgot all of the good chapters that had gone before and stared dismally out of the window, complaining that each new word was like wringing blood out of a stone.

She had been just as bad, she knew – probably worse – a few months ago when she’d been working non-stop on her New Zealand-inspired album, spending night after night in the studio and moaning that getting each note exactly right was agony and so much harder than she had expected because of all the memories of home that had come flooding back and drowned her bow instead of energising it.

But these long islands of time where they inhabited their own worlds entirely gave them each a chance to be solitary, and that made the coming together again even better.

Hours later, night had fallen across the Heath and Summer had returned from her evening jog and was standing under the shower head and luxuriating in the hot running water that pooled over her body and soothed her aching limbs. She didn’t hear Dominik leap up the stairs two at a time and pull open the bathroom door. She remained lost in the fabric of a waking dream until he slid naked into the shower cubicle with her and dropped to his knees, burying his face in the refuge between her legs.

Taken by surprise, Summer moaned, and tangled her hands in his thick hair, holding his head in place, enjoying the rising sensation that was slowly saturating her, and the
building excitement burning through her sex with each forceful lick.

She had once worried that he might drown like this, and she would be responsible, but she consoled herself with the memory of the time she’d confessed her fear to Dominik and he had laughed and told her he could think of no better way to die.

He rose to his feet when he could no longer stand the ache in his knees and the water running into his eyes, and spun her around so he could rest the hardness of his erection against the cleft of her arse. Dominik took a moment to watch it sitting there, marvelling at the vision of her firm cheeks and the jut of her backbone and the inward curve of her waist and the way that she so easily relaxed and allowed him to move her about as he wished to with no thought to comfort or practicality. He leaned forward and turned the water off, cupping her wet breasts in his hand and squeezing her nipples before leading her into the bedroom.

Still damp, she knelt on the bed on all fours and stretched lazily, bending her spine like a cat and pushing her buttocks towards her heels and into the air, presenting herself to him. Dominik pushed her legs apart gently and observed the expectant pinkness of her vagina as her labia unfurled like the petals of a flower blooming.

It was the singular beauty of these images that made the pornographer’s heart inside him skip a beat. Dominik had never been the sort of man who read lads’ mags or watched X-rated film clips in all their predictably airbrushed tedium. He far preferred the purity of real life and the way that Summer so openly and intimately displayed herself to him.

He stretched out his hand and ran his fingers against her
slit, testing her wetness. She sighed with all the pleasure of familiarity and pressed herself against his palm.

Dominik leaned forward to whisper in her ear.

‘Kiss me,’ he said, tilting her face with his free hand and pressing his mouth to hers.

The first thing that I noticed when we landed in Darwin was the heat. We’d arrived in the middle of the wet season, having first made port in Sydney and then travelled the remainder of our journey to Australia’s Northern Territory by plane.

I had expected a sky as bright and blue as a computer screen and empty of so much as a single cloud, with red mountains lining the horizon like the postcard pictures that dotted the racks of newsagents through the airport. Instead, when the terminal doors opened, we were trapped between a plain as flat as any I had ever seen and the heavens as grey as an elephant’s skin and seeming to drop lower and lower to the earth with us squeezed in the middle like a sandwich.

The air felt heavy and cloying, pregnant, as if the atmosphere might burst and suffocate us or tighten around my neck at any moment and leave me strangled. We were here now though, and I made up my mind to make the best of it. Chey had selected Darwin after careful research, feeling that the Russians, should they not have swallowed the saga of our deaths hook, line and sinker, would expect us to choose a major city with a large population that we could lose ourselves in, and probably somewhere in the US or Europe. In the top end of Australia we would stand out like sore thumbs and therefore no one would bother to look for us here.

It was a quiet time of year as many of the city’s
inhabitants had left for more moderate climes and the tourists would not begin to arrive in their droves until the dry season began in April or May, so we were able to take our pick of the empty apartments available using our cash as a deposit.

Chey still had money left, and I had built up a fair sum during my dancing years. Having always been in fear of the law and also eager to evade the taxman, I had ensured that the Network always paid me in cash directly after each event. I’d been keeping my profits the old-fashioned way, sealed in envelopes under the mattress in Viggo’s guest bedroom, and in combination with Viggo’s gift we had enough money to keep us going for a few years.

We rented a small apartment in Nightcliff. It wasn’t much. We didn’t want to attract attention to ourselves, and in any case I’d grown weary of the trappings of wealth. Thinking of the sumptuous hotel rooms and the beautiful gowns that had been part and parcel of my employ with the Network left me feeling a little ill. So I was happy beyond measure with our little flat with its tiny veranda that overlooked the ocean, a view that would have cost a million in California, but was taken for granted by Darwinians. Like them, I grew used to seeing the sea from nearly every direction, to the noisy air-conditioning unit and thick protective screens on all the doors that kept out not just the flies but all manner of brightly coloured lizards with ruffs on their necks that puffed out like Dracula’s collar when they were angry or frightened.

At ten past four each day for weeks the heavens opened, dousing the city in a flood of rain. Big, heavy droplets, the sort that soaked you to the bone in two seconds flat if you got caught in it and left behind a feeling of relief, cleanliness
and the sweet smell of the eucalyptus trees, a little like the scent of damp fresh wood shavings. I began to love Darwin, even in the wet season. It was so different from anywhere that I had lived before and with all its weird animals and crazy weather conditions it had a vibe about it that was so vital, so alive.

We spent the rest of February and most of March making love indoors with the air con blasting at full pelt, only venturing out to walk along the beachfront after the sun sank casting a stream of pink, orange and violet ribbons into the sky in its wake. Chey laughed at the care I took to remain a few paces back from the waves that slapped lightly at the shore, always convinced that salt-water crocs were lurking beneath, ready and waiting to snap me up and swallow me whole at the slightest provocation. I might have been paranoid, but my fear was not unfounded. The local paper was full of stories about the latest croc sightings and tourists getting themselves into trouble.

After a few weeks of leisure time we began to get bored, and Chey rented a small shop in the Smith Street Mall where he sold precious stones and jewellery to the tourists. It was too dangerous yet for him to make enquiries about the import of amber, but we covered costs and made a small profit selling South Sea pearls and Australian opals.

Chey, who had always been a natural salesman and had cut his teeth in similar circumstances when he was still a teenager, manned the shop most days and I helped out by managing the stock and accounts, and when I decided that I needed more variety I took a jewellery-making course and began to work on minor repairs and stringing a few necklaces and earrings together. The work was precise and detailed and it appealed to my natural sense of order and
minimalist aesthetic. I made sure that nothing with even an iota of tackiness was allowed through the doors and before long we had developed a reputation for taste and quality that set us above the neighbouring stores that flogged joke tea towels, fridge magnets and novelty soaps along with their silver and gold.

I bought a bicycle and for a few days cycled the half-hour journey from Nightcliff to Smith Street, but after having the wits scared out of me when a lightning storm descended without warning, I asked Chey to teach me to drive and we purchased a second-hand Mazda, painted as bright blue as the sky in the dry season and I subjected the city to my frequent stalling and engine revving before I finally got the hang of it.

In May, when the rain disappeared, the clouds cleared and the touch of the breeze on my skin was like the lightest velvet, we set up a stall at the Mindil market two nights a week. I wore brightly coloured flowing cotton dresses and sandals and chatted to the endless variety of folk who stopped to watch me carefully beading a necklace or quickly piecing a pair of earrings together to match a customer’s request.

Darwin was a strange place, full of people who were running from something or had never quite managed to leave. There was a quotient of military people who inhabited the local army barracks, a bevvy of scientists and doctors who were attracted by the ever-changing meteorological conditions and the tropical diseases, a stream of Irish and English backpackers who landed by the busload, staffed the local bars and partied until October and left when the rain came, and then the hippies who stayed all year round attracted by the hot weather and the slow pace of life and
the sweetness of the mangoes that I consumed in such great quantities I was left with a rash on my hands from the sap.

Amongst this hotchpotch of life Chey and I fitted in as easily as two peas into a pod. For the first time in my life I made friends, and felt as though I had a purpose besides dancing.

A year passed and we did not hear so much as a peep from anyone from our chequered past. I still danced, but only in the living room, or on the porch in the cool of the evening, like a pagan welcoming in the night under the glow of the enormous tropical sun.

There was still an evening left until the New Year and Edward and Clarissa were sitting at a table at the beach cafe, sipping cocktails and enjoying the relaxed atmosphere at the boat club. They had no particular plans for the evening. Their world cruise had been ongoing for three months and the following week they were returning to the US.

As they reminisced about the good times and the bad times, they agreed they had led a full life already, and whatever happened to them next would just be a bonus, more butter on the bread.