Eighty Days Yellow (20 page)

My eyes filled with tears. Chris had always been the only person who I felt really understood me. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I lost him over this.

He stretched forward, carefully avoiding my breasts, and gave me a soft peck on the cheek. ‘Call me, OK? Or come round later if you wish, once you’re, um, finished here.’

‘OK,’ I replied. ‘See you later.’

He let himself out, and the bell rang again.

It took Charlotte a moment to articulate her request, as she was busy, kneeling on the floor, naked, her face buried in the cunt of another girl. She waited until I had had a good look at the action and then asked me to bring her a spoon and another bowl of ice cream.

‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I want you to watch.’

I was rooted to the spot, not entirely because she had instructed me to stay there. Charlotte was daintily spooning ice cream into her partner’s vagina and then ducking her head and sucking it out. The woman flinched with each transition from hot to cold, though her enjoyment was obvious. The man from the club, whom Charlotte had been sitting on earlier, was watching also, his cock straining against the crotch of his jeans. I wanted to unzip him and pull it out, but my arms wouldn’t move in response to the thought, either out of loyalty to Dominik, still constrained as I was in the confines of his corset, or because it didn’t seem appropriate, in my position as maid, for me to be so bold.

Charlotte turned her head to meet the eyes of the man behind her, nodded slightly in approval and then spread her long legs wide. He peeled off his jeans and his cock sprang straight out, unencumbered by underwear. He had a particularly beautiful penis, perfectly straight, evenly coloured, and a promising length and girth. It was like something you would expect to see carved in marble in an art gallery. He stopped for a moment, picking up his jeans and foraging in the pocket for a condom.

Then he bent his knees just low enough so that he could drive his cock into her from behind. As he did, Charlotte’s face was washed with pure pleasure, an almost religious ecstasy. I was forgotten, lost as she was to the sensation of the thick shaft pumping into her.

I forgave her in that moment. Charlotte was no less captive to her desires than I and evidently looked quite beautiful in the throes of passion.

I picked up her now empty plate and discarded spoon, and returned to the kitchen. The bell didn’t ring again, but still I waited, locked into the corset and stilettos, my feet now throbbing. The discomfort gave me a sense of peace, not dissimilar to the way that I felt when my body ached after a few dozen lengths of a swimming pool.

Eventually, the guests left and Charlotte called me a cab.

‘Was that OK for you, honey?’ she asked, her arm draped affectionately around my shoulders.

‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Actually, I kind of enjoyed it.’

‘Good,’ she said.

She stood on the front step, clutching a sheet, her only protection from the cab driver’s curious gaze, and watched me disappear into the night.

Dominik called the next day, to confirm our date.

‘There’s something different in your voice,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Tell me.’

I thought I detected a hint of worry, but I couldn’t be sure. Whether he really had been worried about me or this was just another turn in his game, I was no less compelled to answer his question than I had been to respond to his bell. I told him about the corset, and Charlotte, and how I had felt watching her being filled from behind.

He texted me, the night before our meeting: ‘Come at 10 p.m. tomorrow. You will have an audience. Of more than one.’

8

A Man and His Guest

It was a room in Dominik’s house that Summer had not yet encountered. On the top floor. It might well have been an attic at one time, but had undergone extensive renovation and conversion. Here and there the ceiling curved, following the path of the roof above. Only two of the walls were covered with bookshelves, mostly housing long runs of often yellowing-spined literary and film magazines, although the upper shelf on the left-hand wall was dominated with an assortment of older, leather-bound volumes of some sort, mostly with French titles. Summer was not allowed the time to take a closer look at the bookshelves and investigate further. There were no windows and the only light came from two square skylights carved into the ceiling.

The room featured nothing else, as if Dominik had deliberately emptied it of furniture or anything that might prove a distraction.

She had been asked to report at 10 p.m. This was to be an evening performance. Her first at such a late hour of the day, as all their previous encounters, as part of the unwritten contract between them, had taken place during the course of the day or in the early evening.

Dominik had greeted her at the door and given her a casual peck on the cheek. As ever, his features were inscrutable, and Summer knew she would not get any answers out of him, so she remained silent. He escorted her up the stairs and opened the door that led to the topmost level of the house.

‘Here,’ he said.

Summer settled her violin case on the wooden floor.

‘Now?’ she asked Dominik.

‘Yes, now,’ he nodded.

She was dying to ask who would be in attendance in addition to him, but thought better of it. Pangs of arousal were beginning to swirl inside her at the thought of the audience who would witness her recital, her service, spying on her every movement and gesture.

She undressed. She’d come to Dominik’s wearing a pair of old jeans and a tight white T-shirt. He had told her there was no need to dress up today. Neither stockings nor high heels, he had indicated. She was to be totally nude. He appeared to enjoy the subtle variations of dress and undress in the continuing process of her ongoing exhibitions, the way he orchestrated her successive performances like a madcap, if thoughtful conductor.

She swiftly shed her few clothes and stood there naked, facing him. For a brief moment, she wished he would just take her right there and then, on all fours on the wooden floor, but she realised this was not his intention today, or at least not before she had conjured up the music that made him so lustful. Once again, they had agreed beforehand on the piece she would be playing: the solo from the final movement of the Max Bruch violin concerto.

His eyes kept on X-raying her. The room was warm; dying embers of sunlight filtered through the skylights.

‘Is that a new lipstick?’ he queried, glancing at her lips. He was observant. She normally switched lipsticks depending on the time of day, moving to a darker shade of red when night came. She’d been doing this for years. It made her feel the transition between her day and night self so much more acutely.

‘Not quite new,’ she answered. ‘I tend to wear a darker, warmer shade of lipstick for evenings,’ Summer replied.

‘How interesting,’ he remarked, appearing uncommonly thoughtful. Then, ‘Do you have the lipstick with you?’

‘I have both, of course,’ Summer said, indicating her small handbag, which lay on the floor next to her discarded jeans and T-shirt.

Dominik walked over, opened the handbag and retrieved the two tubes she kept there and looked closely at them, assessing the respective shades.

‘Night and day,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Summer confirmed.

He jettisoned one of the tubes, took the other between his thumbs and twisted it, causing the dark, waxy, finger-shaped lipstick to emerge from its plastic casing. He’d gone for the night colour.

‘Come here,’ he ordered.

Summer obeyed, unsure of what he might have in mind.

‘Straighten your back,’ he said.

Summer did so, thrusting her breasts ever so slightly forward in the process.

Dominik approached her, his lipstick-wielding hand moving to her nipples, where he carefully began painting her hardening tips. Summer gulped. One nipple. Two nipples.

Painted. Decorated. Enhanced. She looked down. It made her look so brazen. She smiled, admiring the perversity of his imagination.

But he wasn’t finished.

He took a step back, looked Summer in the eyes and said, ‘Open your legs wide,’ and got down on one knee, still wielding the lipstick tube. Following her gaze, he ordered her to look straight ahead, not down.

She felt his finger separating her labia, inserting itself inside her moistness, pinching each lip in turn and holding it while his other hand began drawing the lipstick vertically along her cunt and then across both cunt lips.

Summer felt a tremor race through her whole body, and for a moment her parted legs felt wobbly. She could only imagine what she looked like right now.

Dominik rose.

She had now been made up for her coming performance.

‘Painted like the Great Whore of Babylon,’ Dominik remarked. ‘Adorned. Perfect.’

Still shocked by what had just happened, Summer was struggling for words.

Dominik pulled a piece of black cloth from one of his trouser pockets and fastened the blindfold round her head and Summer was plunged into darkness.

‘I won’t know who is present?’ she protested feebly.

‘No.’

‘Whether it’s just one person or more?’

‘That’s for you to guess and for me to know,’ Dominik answered.

Another variation in the ritual.

As the implications of the situation crowded her mind, Summer drew her breath.

‘I’ll leave you now,’ Dominik said. ‘You may rehearse if you wish. I will be back with my guest . . . or guests . . .’ She noted the deliberate touch of irony in his voice. ‘When I return in a quarter of an hour or so, I will not be alone. I will knock on the door three times and then enter. Then you will play for us. Do you understand the rules fully?’

Summer signified her agreement.

Dominik left the room.

She picked up the violin and began her tuning exercises.

Dominik had asked Victor to leave his shoes downstairs, so when they entered the top-room floor, Summer was unable from the soft shuffle of socks on wood to analyse the sound with any degree of precision that might betray the number of visitors.

Seeing Summer standing in all her glory, violin in hand, her parts artificially enhanced by the scarlet shade of the lipstick, Victor beamed from ear to ear and turned to Dominik as if to congratulate him. He knew he was not allowed to speak.

Ever since he had assisted Dominik in recruiting Lauralynn’s short-manned string quartet, he had been pestering him for information about what specifically he had been organising. Dominik also suspected that Victor had more than a passing acquaintance with Lauralynn, and that they were in each other’s pockets. Victor had always been a shady presence on the campus and in Dominik’s academic social life. He had maddeningly complicated Eastern European roots that mischievously seemed to vary according to whomever he was telling his story to. He was a guest lecturer in philosophy and a music aficionado of note, who moved between universities like a low-flying pundit and seldom lingered in one place very long, gratifying the amphitheatres with cunning brilliance, rehearsed gusto and abstruse theories he somehow always managed to get into print in rarefied publications. Victor was of average height, with salt-and-pepper hair and a short Mephistophelean beard, which he trimmed with maniac precision.

Dominik was not one who listened to much gossip, but he knew the rumours surrounding Victor were plentiful, and often wonderfully spurious. He was the man to go to when it came to intrigue and matters libertine, with, supposedly, a seraglio of student affairs on his personal résumé. A head of department had once tut-tutted and hinted that there were certain extra-curricular duties automatically involved should any postgraduate researcher of the female kind want Victor to supervise a thesis. Indeed, very few students who were not pretty were ever taken on board by him, it had been noticed.

For some time now, Victor had been wheedling Dominik for information about his ‘project’, as he put it, and Dominik had finally given in and admitted to Summer’s existence and how the game he was playing with her had been developing, even if he kept some of the more intimate details back.

‘I must see her,’ Victor had said. ‘I absolutely must.’

‘She is quite fascinating, I agree,’ Dominik had replied. ‘Maybe . . .’

‘Not maybe, my dear boy. You just have to allow me. If only once. Surely she would consent?’

‘Well, she has consented to everything so far, or at any rate tolerated the strange detours this is taking,’ Dominik admitted to Victor.

‘Just as a spectator, you understand. Although not a disinterested one, naturally. Isn’t there a voyeur in all of us?’

‘I know,’ Dominik said.

‘Will you ask her. Please?’

‘Sometimes her consent is not actually expressed in words. I assume it. Or it’s in the eyes, the way she moves.’

‘Makes sense,’ Victor said. ‘So would you, Dominik? I’m so fascinated by the object of your experiment.’

‘My experiment?’

‘Isn’t that what it is?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is when you put it that way.’

‘Good. So we understand each other, no?’

‘You watch her play, that’s all, understood?’

‘Absolutely, my dear boy, absolutely.’

Victor distractedly fingered his short beard in a desultory fashion at regular intervals while Summer played. Her dark-red nipples were like targets bathed in the thin moonlight racing down through the square skylights, surrounding her with an uncanny halo that seemed to reverberate to the sounds of the music as the melody unfurled, journeying through its intricate avenues and side roads before reaching the perfection of its final destination.

Her fingers were on the fret board and the smooth movement of the bow across the taut strings was like a surfer riding a wave. The music coursed through her body at a subcutaneous level, transporting her, and the men watched in soundless communion despite the music that enveloped the room; she knowing she was being watched; them gazing at her and feasting on her physical charms and vulnerability. As to who was in control, that was another matter altogether.

Standing next to Victor, Dominik could hear the other man’s breath rise and fall, and realised Victor was as much transfixed as he was. Summer naked had this effect, her back so terribly straight it felt as if she was wantonly presenting herself for use, or examination, for ravaging. A mad thought flashed through his mind. Surely not? Or . . . maybe? He bit his tongue.