Eighty Days White (12 page)

‘How dare you, young lady!’ I responded in the same tone, pretending I wasn’t in on the joke.

‘In the nicest possible way, of course,’ she added. ‘One minute you’re all shacked up with your older lover boy and the next minute you’re gallivanting off with a rock idol.’ She sighed. ‘I’m jealous. Though I would have gone for the lead singer or the guitarist. Drummers are definitely on the lowest rung of the groupie ladder, I reckon. Typical of you to start at the bottom. Do you plan to work your way up?’

‘Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m not the one who likes being tied up and spanked.’

‘Takes a slut to recognise a slut,’ Liana concluded the banter. ‘So, tell me everything. I want all the juicy details about your rock star. Was he wild?’

‘Not that wild,’ I reassured her. ‘Though he did introduce me to a few new tricks.’

‘He sounds like a beast,’ she continued.

‘Actually, he’s rather nice, although I wouldn’t call him the boyfriend type.’

‘Or the white picket fence type, I guess?’

‘Definitely not the marrying kind,’ I confirmed.

‘So, tell me about these new tricks. You never know, I might learn something.’

‘I doubt that,’ I laughed.

The weeks went by and Dagur and I continued to see
each other casually as his tour schedule and my work allowed. I quickly became inordinately fond of him during the time we spent together and enjoyed every single moment with him, both in and out of bed. He was fun to be with, an imaginative and energetic lover with a wicked sense of humour. In fact, a total contrast to Leonard whose melancholy inner life was never far from the surface, even when he was at his most expansive and joyous. When Dagur laughed, there was no holding back and the roar rising from his throat was anything but subtle, so full of life and uncensored. And when he fucked, he gave himself body and soul to the task, maybe a touch selfish but untiring and attentive to my responses and tremors, playing me like he did the drums with fire and precision, riding the rhythm, dictating the tempo, taking as much pleasure from his professional artistry as from the welter of physical sensations the lovemaking triggered inside his body.

He was not sentimental though.

Once he queried the ankle chain I still wore. The symbolic gift that meant that every time I looked down I was reminded of Leonard. ‘Another guy?’ he queried distractedly. When I nodded, all he said was, ‘I don’t mind. I really don’t, you know.’

Sex, for him, was a game, and one he enjoyed playing with gleeful abandon. As much as he enjoyed playing his drums, performing or eating. A basic need, which he indulged in wholeheartedly, quite free of reservations or afterthoughts.

Of course he liked me, but I had the sense that I could have been any girl. We were interchangeable, disposable, temporary harbour pleasures on an endless hedonistic road.
He would never hurt any of us, but neither would he make any promises of permanence or happy-ever-after to us. We were friends, fuck buddies. It didn’t mean anything beyond the moment and the brief comfort of good sex between relative strangers.

‘Sounds perfect,’ Liana observed on the phone one evening. ‘No hang-ups involved. Just enjoy it while it lasts,’ she added.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘So he’s not ideal, but who is?’ Liana queried.

Maybe, deep down, I didn’t aspire to be a slut after all.

When Dagur was hard and loud and metronomic, pumping inside me like a Viking warrior unleashed, I yearned for Leonard’s quiet gentleness, and when my horse-tattooed drummer had relaxed and wrapped his muscled arms around me in sensual embrace, I would be begging silently for one of those rare moments when Leonard’s face loomed above me with his expression stuck in eternal contradiction, as if his soul was battling with his innate sensibility, and his thrusts accelerated, aligning themselves with the rise of my own pleasure, taking the pulse of my life and responding in perfect unison.

One night, after Dagur had arrived at my flat late after a gig in East London and we lay folded up against each other in my narrow double bed, my body still suffused with the inner glow of our earlier lovemaking, I woke suddenly in the early hours of the morning. It was still dark outside, and I must have been dreaming, my thoughts all in a jumble, people, events, things scattered randomly across the back screen of my sleeping mind. Dagur was lying on his side with his arm clamped affectionately over me, snoring lightly,
a man sated and at peace with himself. I should have felt satisfied too, but when I looked up at him, I just began missing Leonard. Badly.

A case of the wrong man at the wrong time.

I wriggled out from under Dagur’s grip, reached across to my bedside table, and picked up my phone. Calling up the contact list, I scrolled down to Leonard’s number and my finger hovered over the ‘call’ button for an eternity, as my mind tripped the light fantastic between certainty and fear and a whole range of feelings in between.

Then it came to me that wherever he was – if he was still in Europe and not travelling somewhere else right now – it would be the middle of the night for him too and he didn’t deserve to be wakened from his slumbers at such a bad hour when all I would say was likely to make little sense and not change anything about what held us apart and always would do.

I then thought I could send him a text message, but quickly came to the realisation that I would be quite incapable of saying what I wanted to say properly, choosing the right words, conveying the precise feelings that were cutting me to shreds.

Maybe Leonard was, at the same moment, unable to sleep and also hesitating with his mobile phone in hand, sharing the same thoughts, juggling with the same doubts. I wanted to think so.

So I put the phone down on the floor by the bed, looked at Dagur’s broad shoulders and listened to his breath. My hand slipped under the covers and reached down to his crotch. I cupped his balls in my hand, feeling their inert weight and quickly he stirred and rolled onto his back and
his limp cock began to grow, just an inch away from my lingering fingers.

I slipped my head under the covers and took him into my mouth. In the darkness, surrounded by the sweet combined odours of our warmth, I sucked until he was fully erect and pulsing and then manoeuvred myself on top of him and deftly inserted his length inside me. His eyes were still closed, but I was sure he knew what was happening. I was riding him bareback and I didn’t care.

He moaned. A lazy sigh of satisfaction. I thrust against him determined, hungry, burying his rigid cock deep inside me.

Again and again, until it almost felt I was fucking myself, using him as a prop. The way he no doubt felt when he fucked me or another fan or groupie, I speculated.

I already knew I wouldn’t come this time. But I thirsted for his hardness to fill me, to split me apart until I screamed and the ghost of Leonard left the room, inconsequent, a thing of the past, someone I must forget if I was retain my emotional sanity. Hello, Dagur; goodbye, Leonard. That way, it almost sounded like the title of a song. Goodbye, Leonard, hello, rock ’n’ roll.

Dagur was oblivious to my discontent. It was neither here nor there to him who initiated the sex between us, and the fact that I might wake in the early hours of the morning desperate to be filled was, in his mind, an ordinary and perfectly acceptable state of mind and nothing to be remarked upon, though he did insist that if we were going to carry on fucking unprotected, we would need to get ourselves tested. His attitude made me blush, but it also gave
me a sense of confidence and freedom to more readily accept my own desire. Dagur merely frowned when I mentioned in jest that I had become a slut, as if he had never heard the word and couldn’t conceive of such a thing. Unlike many other men, Dagur didn’t believe there was such a thing as too much sex or too many partners. It was simply a necessary part of being alive.

I resolved to be more like him, and spend less time wondering about who I should and shouldn’t be going to bed with and just get on with the business of enjoying myself.

So when he called and invited me to come along with him on a photo shoot his management had set up, I decided to throw caution to the wind and agreed.

‘Aren’t the whole band coming?’ I asked Dagur, presuming that he must be doing promo with all the other members of the Holy Criminals.

‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘Promotional stuff goes through our manager, and he felt much of the publicity material that involved me was a bit out of date. He wants to refresh the portfolio. Viggo and the others all did new sessions weeks ago. I’m the only one left. I’ve been putting it off for ages, but our manager is getting a bit uptight.’

‘Scared the camera will leech your soul?’ I teased him.

‘Guess I am. He’s actually a well-known lenser. Better known for his fashion work. I heard about him through the gals in the management office. Today he might only be doing some test shots. Nothing formal. But I’ve always felt uncomfortable being snapped on my own; with the rest of the band it’s OK, we fool around a bit. So the photographer suggested that I bring a friend …’

I was flattered that Dagur had thought of me. I’d imagined that he must have a slew of blonde-haired, nymphlike admirers who he would turn to first to hold his hand.

‘Hi, I’m Grayson,’ said the photographer in a chirpy voice as we arrived. His eyes landed on my teardrop tattoo, but he didn’t remark upon it, and I liked him immediately.

I sipped a coffee and watched as Grayson set up the lights and shifted equipment around. For half an hour, following the initial set of Polaroids, Grayson shot away at great speed, circling Dagur like a buzzing bee, varying the pauses and instructions. Throughout, Dagur’s smile was strained and fixed, his discomfort at being in the eye of the lens all too obvious.

‘You have to relax, man,’ Grayson said.

‘How do I manage that?’

‘Just do something that feels natural,’ Grayson suggested. He didn’t blink an eyelid as Dagur lifted his arms overhead and pulled off his long-sleeved T-shirt, then unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his jeans and peeled them down his legs and over his feet and tossed his clothes in a heap to the side.

Dagur winked at me and then at the photographer, his sense of mischief relaxing him, his tenseness disappearing by the minute.

Grayson smiled. ‘If that’s what it takes,’ he commented.

‘It does, a hell of a lot,’ Dagur said. ‘I’ll trust you and our manager to see that nothing compromising emerges from this, though.’

‘You have my word for it,’ the photographer said, resuming his dance around Dagur, who was now looser and less rigid.

Of course I had seen Dagur naked dozens of times before, but I’d never really observed him like this. Usually, when we undressed in front of each other, it was a matter of hastily tearing off clothes while embracing or rushing to dress again in the morning and hurry off to rehearsal or work. Undressing was never a ritual like it was with Leonard, one layer peeled slowly off before the next, as if each item of clothing represented another boiled-down emotion or inhibition removed, bringing us closer together one piece of fabric at a time, naked in mind as well as body.

But as Grayson focused a spotlight on the skin of Dagur’s chest, I found myself evaluating him in a whole new light. Despite his powerful shoulders and the rippling muscles that spread across his back and torso, he looked strangely vulnerable when motionless and unaroused. His cock hung short and soft, nestling between his legs in a frame of dark hair. Weak. Fragile.

I leaned back in my chair and did not bother to politely hide how much I was enjoying watching Dagur caught in the glow of the camera lights like an insect under the glare of a microscope. As he responded to Grayson’s instructions, I felt my nipples hardening and my panties beginning to dampen. I was grateful. With Dagur unclothed and me clothed and viewing the spectacle from afar, it was easy to fantasise that I had orchestrated the whole thing and now had my man trapped in the palm of my hand and subject to my every whim.

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ Dagur asked as Grayson disappeared into another room to change his camera battery.

He slipped his hand under my singlet and gave my breast
a squeeze. I hadn’t worn a bra that morning, on Dagur’s advice. If I was going to have any skin photographed, then it was better if my flesh did not sport the deep-red lines that often appeared in response to the constriction of underwired lingerie.

‘Hey,’ I said, playfully slapping his hand away. ‘Did I say you could do that?’

‘Not interrupting, am I?’ Grayson joked as he returned to the room just as Dagur was removing his hand from under my shirt.

I hadn’t paid the photographer much attention earlier. He’d been friendly enough, but with the cool detachment of a professional who was simply doing a job. He’d seemed to blend into his equipment so that it was easy to forget that he was even human and not just an extension of one of his cameras.

Now, as I felt a warm flush heat my skin and Dagur’s naked flank so close to my body, I looked at Grayson in a whole new light. He was in good shape too, I thought as I peered at his torso and tried to imagine how he looked under his clothes. He wore a tight T-shirt that stuck to him like a second skin and indicated he was lean beneath it, though not as muscular as Dagur who worked out regularly for the sake of the band’s sex appeal. His jeans were low cut and too big for him, they sat loosely on his hips, displaying the occasional flash of his designer-branded boxer shorts when he moved.

By the time Grayson had asked Dagur if he wanted any shots together with me, my nipples were as hard as rocks and I was momentarily too embarrassed to remove my shirt
as the effect that the two men were having on me would be immediately obvious.

Grayson did not appear to notice my rising ardour. His cool demeanour only served to increase the heat that was unfurling steadily like a flower blooming inside my body.

‘That’s great,’ the photographer said. ‘Great. Please, carry on, I’m just adjusting the lights.’

Dagur was sitting down on a striped black-and-white stool holding a pair of drum sticks and I slid behind him and straddled his back.