Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (6 page)

He took several pictures, but I wasn't posing, just standing there.

He clicked his fingers and pointed.

'If you please.'

I went to speak but my mouth fell open and nothing came out. My breasts were already on show, sun bronzed and pretty, rising and falling with the beat of my heart. Breasts are everywhere. In every newspaper and magazine, on television, on the sides of buses.

His brow went up and he repeated the same instruction. 'If you please.'

'But…'

He adjusted the camera. 'Hurry now. Before the light changes,' he said, his soft tone whispering my own unknown desires.

Each time he asked for more, I gave more, my blouse, my skirt. My bra. I was on a slippery slide and there appeared to be no way and no reason to get off. It wasn't that I nursed a repressed yearning to stand naked in front of a stranger; it just felt natural to obey. I was used to obeying at my strict school. It was easier than swimming against the current, and I always thought I would rebel like Bella in my own good time.

Our eyes met and I watched as he used the corner of his handkerchief to polish the camera lens. He looked me up and down. There was nothing prurient in his look, and I had that sensation that came to me sometimes standing on the platform in the Underground, the rush of air, the train charging from the tunnel, the feeling of being sucked towards the edge. So much seemed to depend on what I now did, perhaps my entire future, and I felt in some way detached from the decision.

My mind was spinning and my mouth was dry. My panties fit snugly, the elastic stretching like a bridge from the supports of my hip-bones in such a way that, had he leaned forward, he would have caught a glimpse of the dark forest of hair nestling below. He didn't look down. He was still staring into my eyes and I stared defiantly back. I was determined to shake my head and say no, but my will had gone, absorbed by something more profound and overpowering. I lowered my eyes and slowly lowered the soft fabric over my hips, over the cheeks of my bottom, and down my legs. I stepped from my panties in a little dance and stood up straight with them in the palm of my hand.

He took them from me as if I had offered him a gift and what he did was so unexpected, the scene still returns to me on nights when sleep is distant and the mind has its own mind. He stretched out the damp material, stared at the faintly stained gusset and held my panties to his nose like a connoisseur with good wine. He breathed in my bouquet and tucked the perfumed triangle in his pocket.

I was naked in a beam of sunlight with a man I didn't know. He was standing back to take more photographs. Perspiration coated the split in my bottom. I was aware of the scent of my arousal and realized with shame that the obscure pleasure of that moment came, not from any expectation of what might take place, but simply from exposing myself. I was free. I felt terrified and I felt completely, totally alive. I danced around the room. Snap, snap, snap went the camera. The camcorder whirred and I was sure I heard in the distance the song of the nightingale.

A table stood to one side of the balcony. He pointed. 'Good girl,' he said. 'Lean over the surface, let's really show them what we can do.'

I spread my legs, the camera clicked and captured my most intimate parts, the crease of my bottom, my bobbing breasts, my glassy eyes.

'That's lovely. Nice. Very nice. Push forward. Come on now, push out that cute little arse. Nice. Nice. Give it to me. Give me more.'

I climbed up on the table. He didn't need to tell me how to arrange myself, you just know these things: on my hands and knees with my bottom out, my breasts hanging. I twisted and turned like a spiral staircase and the more the camera clicked the wetter I got. There were butterflies in my tummy and up in the core of my being a little fist was tightening.

'Lay back, Katie, legs up, that's nice. That's nice. Go for it.'

He was reading my mind. With my back arched, my palms with stretched fingers went automatically to my breasts. My nipples were on fire. I turned the little buds. I bit my lips. I heard the sound of the world humming outside and rose up like a beautiful cat. I ran my right hand down my side, across the bony curve of my hip and into my pubic hair. My pubes were drenched. My inner thighs were wet. The juices gushed from me, hot and sticky, and the camera kept clicking, keeping the beat. I threw my head back and would have fallen from the table where I was perched had he not caught me in his arms.

He carried me to the bed. I felt as if I had come to the end of a long race and was panting. I had masturbated, of course, many times. But holding a picture of Simon in my head had never hit the magic button and the special feeling the girls described at school had never happened to me. Roger Devlin had touched something waiting to be touched; to be concluded. Every day I looked for the letter that would say whether or not I had been offered a place at Cambridge. That long wait had tied my intestines into knots. Now, suddenly, the tangles untied. I felt a wave of sangfroid. I felt free, philosophical, relieved.

He turned the video lens to face the bed. I wasn't watching him, I was drawn to the eye of the camera, struck by its ability to capture this moment. There was doubt and confusion in my head; fear too. I would think about it all later. I would remember always. But now, I laid back on the white bed and watched Roger Devlin remove his shirt, his jeans, his black boxers.

There was no ceremony, no kissing, no foreplay. I opened my legs. He entered me immediately, pushing hard and jerking upwards at the same time. I heard a SNAP. There was a stinging flash like an electric shock that brought a tear to my eye, and I thought about the camera, how it would preserve that instant, that small tear, the pain as it changed to pleasure and spread over my features.

He moved steadily, rhythmically, up and down, and I moved with him, my back sliding against the bed-cover. My eyes were pressed shut. The soft slap and suck of our bodies pressing together sounded like waves drawing at a tropical beach. My skin tingled. Everything that had lain dormant came alive. Everything in hibernation was reborn. I was fully awake, fully conscious of my own repressed desires and passions.

I pushed down on my heels, arched my back like a drawn bow, and drew him up inside me. He moved like a piston, his breath warm and steady against my ear. Then he gasped for breath. His body stiffened and, that same moment, a shudder of contractions ran through me. I threw my head back and it felt as we climaxed as if a city of lights had lit up across my nervous system. I could see stars behind my closed eyes. I rose weightlessly from the bed and I was aware vaguely of the sun going down, the room where we lay beneath the white canopy turning slowly to shadow.

5

The Game

All writing is autobiography. If I were to write a story about a young black man from an estate in the north of England, my geographical, gender and ethnic opposite, I would provide him with patience and perseverance. I would make him quick on his feet, secretly ambitious, moody, easily manipulated and anxious to appear agreeable.

What happened that day with Roger Devlin I immortalised in a short story that lacked the fine detail that comes with experience; in writing as in life. I neglected to say that after he had severed my hymen and I screamed my way through my first orgasm, he was captivated by the spots of blood speckling the creamy smear on the bedcover. He reached for his camera and I listened as the shutter went snap, snap, snap, the steady beat the same rhythm as when he had made love to me. I laid back, breasts nursed in my palms, thighs wet, the waft of my own scent in a cloud below the white canopy.

It was Bella who came into my mind that moment. She always said people take sex far too seriously. It's just a bit of fun. I felt detached, tranquil, floating like a feather; not merely content, but the shadow of childhood had vanished in the beam of light piercing the room from the balcony. I had shed my virginity and it was rather perfect with a perfect stranger. There were no reproaches. No promises. No future. I instantly understood that sex was an unknown land to be explored, as the man who had once owned the house had explored Borneo for butterflies. Had I allowed Simon Wells to fumble his way inside me, it would have been clumsy, inept, and my journey along the diamond highway to erotica may never have begun.

Roger Devlin stopped taking close-ups and reached for his boxers. He blew out his cheeks.

'You're something else,' he said.

'Am I?'

'Damn right.' He paused. 'A virgin whore! I didn't think I'd ever get to meet one. He pulled on his jeans. 'I hope you're on the pill.'

'I'm not, actually.'

'Well, you ought to be.'

'I didn't plan on, you know...'

'Are you sure about that?'

He blew out his cheeks again and wore that look people have when they are dealing with a puppy that's just peed on the carpet.

'What if you get pregnant?'

'You'll just have to marry me.'

'I don't know what my wife would have to say about that.'

It made it even better somehow. I was the other woman. He buttoned his shirt, pulled on yellow socks, brown brogues that needed a polish; good quality. I watched and he watched me watching him.

'You enjoyed that, didn't you?' he asked, expecting praise, men, I would find, always do. A flush rose over my cheeks.

'Yes, actually.'

'You were dying to take your clothes off.'

'No I wasn't.'

He studied me for a few seconds, shaking his head. 'Well, now you'd better put them back on again.'

I rose reluctantly, padded across the room and stood looking out at the garden from the balcony. I liked being naked. I remained motionless, eyes closed, the sun warming my body.

'Come on, then, I've got a train to catch.'

My clothes were on the chair in front of the row of mirrors that concealed the walk in closets. With the sun behind me, my reflection revealed a version of myself that was different in ways that were subtle and understated. My cheeks were pronounced, rather than gaunt, and there was a serenity about my eyes that looked back as if the girl in the mirror was how I was destined to be and the girl who had woken in her bed that morning was someone else.

'Excuse me, when you've finished standing there admiring yourself.'

The light changed, a cloud must have passed over the sun. I watched in the mirror as he telescoped the legs of the tripod and placed it in the bag, the camcorder with its erotic narrative cased and placed on top. I dressed, then held out my hand.

'I think you have something that belongs to me.'

'I'm going to hang on to them, if you don't mind...'

I shook my head and wondered if he would hang my knickers on the wall as they hang the stuffed heads of stags in the corridor at Daddy's club. As I pulled on my shoes, I was still expecting him to say he was going to make an offer on Black Spires. But he didn't. I locked the house, with his help turning the key. I dropped him at the station, and I never saw Roger Devlin again – although that's not strictly true.

I have seen his naked back and white bottom many times. The video he shot of me barefoot in the garden, climbing the stairs, removing my clothes and spreading my legs was cut into a fifteen-minute film which he posted with a two-minute teaser on a website where, for 99 cents, my face pixelated, you can watch me losing my virginity over and over again.

Did I regret what had happened that day? No. On the contrary. I had taken off my clothes because I had wanted to. I could have told myself I was only trying to sell the house. But that's not true. After my long imprisonment behind the walls of school, I wanted to shrug off the past like a butterfly leaving its cocoon and be who I was, not who I appeared to be in my scarlet blazer, white blouse and blue skirt, the colours of the Union Jack that flew over the tower at Saint Sebastian's.

After being compelled by Mother from the garden into the role of secret agent in her bridge partner's office, I was ready to do something that at the time would have seemed out of character, although, with the benefit of experience, was in reality a facet of myself that had been concealed as if below a layer of dust and just needed a puff of breath to blow it away.

The moment I took off my top, I was on a journey and it felt completely natural to take off everything. When naked you are in a sense reborn. The exams were over. There were no rat-faced nuns spying on me through half-closed doors. No Mother staring through the bedroom window. Flecks of gold hovered in the sunlight; the dust blown from the mirror of my hidden self. There was a humming silence like that feeling you get in your ears when you hold your breath. I was drugged by my own sense of daring and outrageousness, that feeling of letting go, of breaking the taboo.

Ever since that time when I was caught in the showers with Bella, kissing, just kissing, I had wanted to rebel. Now, I knew what I was rebelling against: the holy sisters, Mother, the snares and traps of my class and education. I was born to marry some clone of Simon Wells, breed, have affairs, fight with my daughters and go for long walks with small dogs. Suddenly, I felt free, feverish, defiant. As I ran my panties down my legs, I started to dance, each step as if on a highwire taking me across the abyss from my protected past to an unknown future.

Timing is everything. The first time for a girl is critical: the difference between an A or a B in the exams; the life-changing event that will determine your attitude, perhaps forever. Roger Devlin wanted sex without strings; sex with a young girl because girls make men feel young. What I didn't know, I still didn't know myself, not then, but I had an intuition the moment he slid through the warm waters of my vagina, that this was right for me: sex with a stranger without commitments, with the intensity and detachment I was going to need when I began to chronicle my life as fiction.

The girl I wrote about in the short story was eighteen. Ten years had gone by and I could see now how Roger Devlin had bent me to his will through a combination of perplexing mood swings and words as shrewd and perceptive as any poet. On the journey from Canterbury to Wingham, my thighs on show, my breasts accentuated by the seat belt, he didn't take sly peeks at me, no, he stared out the side window and only spoke to criticise my driving. He made me feel clumsy, immature, inept. By the time we reached Black Spires, I was sweaty, nervous and, as he seemed so hard to please, I had become disposed to do everything I could in order to please him.

Black Spires was like a set on a film lot, the sky sapphire, the light soft and hazy. The gravel crunched beneath his leather shoes as he walked away from the car. The camcorder whirred.

I make up my mind whether or not I want something by taking pictures.

The eye of the lens was on me. The nuance was unclear. But the elasticity of words, the intricacy of words, the supremacy of words, is like the invisible power of the wind that bends the trees and acts as a drug, a soporific. Why else would priests develop that deep resonant voice that calls to your soul; or tries to?

He looked directly into my eyes.

Just pretend the camera's not there. Can you do that?

By posing the question and my agreeing, we were now complicit.

You have to be strict with door locks, show them who's boss.

The word
strict
reminded me of school where I found it easier to obey than rebel. He asked if the piano was included, implying that he was serious about buying the house. He then said he
hated quibbling over small things
.

Those small things were peeled off one by one, starting when we reached the garden.

Take your shoes off, I want to get one of those barefoot in the grass shots.

This was a direction, not a suggestion. He said the camera liked me, that I could be a model and, with those words, like a spell, I played the model. I thrust out my hips, stared back over my shoulder, eyes widened, lips pursed, bottom tensed, the object of desire I tried to create alone in front of the mirror performed for a man with a camera that formed a barrier and a bridge between us. Being barefoot is sensuous; tactile. I was reminded of the gardener staring at me in my bikini, toes tended by the prickling blades of grass, perspiration veneered on my back. The air was motionless. It felt new; unbreathed, and I watched two twirling butterflies on wings the same shade of pink as my skirt.

We climbed the stairs. He didn't tell me to undo my blouse, he asked: Will you do something for me? To which I readily said yes, and once you undo one button, it is only a question of time before you undo them all. He had tapped into my fantasies. He swept aside my social programming and made me conscious of what I believed I wanted or, indeed, did want.

Girls, most girls, want to please. They answer yes to those men who know how to pose the right questions. What I didn't know at the time, and was shocked to learn, is that there is a guide for men who want to seduce women called
The Game,
an allegedly true memoir of how Neil Strauss, a shy, inhibited guy, turns himself into a smooth-talking womaniser of the Roger Devlin school.

The technique is basically this: when a man meets a woman he desires, he doesn't look directly at her and speaks to her with indifference. Strauss suggests that in this way, the woman grows anxious to please; programmed little Pavlov's dogs that we are. At the appropriate time, he touches her in a casual way (Devlin's hand on my leg in the car), and turns the situation around by giving her something – it's called anchoring – a glass of wine, his phone number, some attention. He pays her a small compliment (the camera likes you) and uses 'trigger' words (will you do something for me?) to show that he is agreeable if she responds positively to his requests.