Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (8 page)

'Why did you move?'

'Interesting question...'

'And?'

'Hold on, I'm thinking.' I glanced down at his hand. 'This isn't the best time for thinking.'

He had cupped my breast and, like a plumber, his right hand was fiddling with the leak between my legs. He kissed my cheek below the mask and I continued.

'I needed a different landscape, you know, like Emily Brontë, she had the moors; or Daphne du Maurier with Cornwall. Did you know, it was her grandfather, George, who wrote
Trilby
.'

'I haven't read it.'

'I have, twice, actually. He invented Svengali. You remind me of him.'

'Me?'

'Yes.'

'In what way?'

'You must read the book.'

'I've got a lot to catch up on.'

'Me, too, there's never enough time.'

'Time for what?'

'For anything...writing, Twitter, working as a waitress at stupid events. I'm trying to write a blog, so the whole world knows how interesting I am, which I'm not. I've got, like, a million half-written stories; the emails keep coming, more every day. I worked it out. I'm going to have to live for 200 years and I'll still never catch up.'

'Poor baby,' he said.

I had turned to look into his eyes. I didn't want to talk about what I did, where I lived, why I had moved. I lowered my head and our lips met. He was a good kisser, a give-and-take kisser; relaxed, leisurely, kissing like someone eating melon at a picnic. I sucked his finger when he put it in my mouth and he wriggled the digit back between my legs. Life has few perfect moments. This moment was perfect, naked in a mask, his mouth roaming the nerve endings of my mouth, the pad of his finger nursing that mysterious place, so precious and vital it makes me believe that it isn't all random, all chaos, that there is some universal purpose to our lives; to everything.

Perspiration ran off me as if I had become a bubbling stream. The monkeys in my mind were still. I threw back my head and wedged my legs across the arms of the chair, his finger a hovering presence over my clitoris. I moved languidly like a dancer at two in the morning, like a leaf caught in the breeze. That small fist was opening and closing inside my belly. My breath raced. Contractions ran through me; it felt as if my insides were a length of wet cloth growing tighter as it was wrung out. The drummer in Hotel Costes filled the room with pulsing heartbeats.

I had a fleeting vision of myself in the black mask spread naked with the flame of my clitoris glowing and erupted like a burst balloon filled with water, the arc of silky discharge squirting in a shower of raindrops down my leg. I was proud and ashamed, I always had those twin feelings, and happy, too, happy in a way outside the normal register, like the first daffodil of spring can make you happy, or a snatch of Bach or Bizet.

My breath came in gasps. A snake slithered up my spine. Aftershocks raced down my legs, the ripples a flowing tide. My heart was bursting. Liquids flooded from me. I felt the same and different, my body retuned, recalibrated, replete. At the moment of orgasm you are living fully and totally in the present. An orgasm is anticipated, like the sunrise on a new day, and unexpected, like winning a prize in a competition you can't recall having entered. Time freezes and there isn't a feeling of loss, a void, a little death, but a reminder that of all human activity, none is more perfect. The orgasm is my driving force, the random consequence of meeting a stranger in a bar or at a ball and taking him home to warm the bed sheets.

The music switched to the next track. I turned in the chair so that I could kiss him again. I squeezed one of his nipples hard enough for him to recoil in pain and our teeth clashed. He bit my neck and I squirmed down across his chest until my knees touched the carpet. He went to pull me back, but I wriggled free. I loosened his belt, his jeans, his boxers. I pulled off his shoes, desert boots suitable for wandering in far away places. He was hard and I sensed his body relax as I licked the length of his cock. It was pretty, playful, the head pink, the column creamy white with thin blue veins like spider thread. I ran my tongue along the groove; the taste was feta and olives, Mediterranean, and I wanted to feel his sperm on my face.

I often ask myself why I like being down on my knees in this way and assume the appeal was grafted on to my DNA by the repetition seven days a week during the school year in chapel. With my bottom resting on my heels and my elbows on the ledge of the pew in front of me, I stared at the life-sized carving of Saint Sebastian, the young Centurion martyred for his love of Christ by a flight of arrows. As I reached puberty and the first unexpected tingles began to prick my nipples, the statue began to appear to me less as an example of sacrifice than a symbol of masculine virility, a counterweight to the convent's toxic cocktail of oestrogen and exploding hormones. With his strong thighs half hidden by a toga, muscular chest, heavy lips, sharp cheekbones and dreamy eyes, Saint Sebastian looked more like a lead guitarist from a progressive band than a Christian martyr; more contemporary than historic. In my bed at lights out, alone for a moment with my own thoughts, the whittled saint with the woodworm holes drilled into his toes and sandals became an object of desire and also absurdity when I recalled the allegory of the sculptor, who makes religious images by day and kneels before them to pray at night. It's hardly surprising that I always preferred Camus to Sartre.

Tom had slid forwards in the chair, bettering the angle for my assault. I sucked his cock in the same steady way that he had nursed my clitoris, my lips moving slowly, gently, back and forth. His fingers locked at the sides of my head. I paused to nibble the sleek helmet before swallowing it down once more, sucking and licking, pausing to give my jaws a rest, and drawing the soft outer skin between my palms. I sucked his balls, one, then the other and plunged his cock back down my throat. I gagged momentarily, taking the entire length beyond my tonsils, then out again, up and down, the music far away, the light changing as the sun slipped from the wintry sky.

His grip grew tighter. I thought he was going to come and anticipated the stream of his semen pouring down my throat. But he stopped suddenly, grabbed the scruff of my neck and pulled me to my feet. He kept hold of me in this way, like a caveman grasping me by the hair. We crossed the room to my bedroom where he tossed me across the saffron sheets christened the night before.

I laid back, head on the pillow. He straddled me backwards, dipped between my legs, slid his palms beneath the cheeks of my bottom and his tongue oozed back into the soggy pool of my vagina. His cock swayed above like a battering ram at the gates of the castle keep and I opened my mouth to allow him entry. The pleasure of having his tongue tending my clit and his cock in my throat was almost too much to bear and I felt a spasm like a hot needle pass through me. I was like a thirsty creature at a salt lick lapping away, my dribble keeping his cock oiled, my throat expanding and contracting as I gulped it down. His tongue parted the cowling about my clitoris like the prow of a ship furrowing the sea. The little bulb was throbbing, and I had that rare feeling of transcendence, that my whole body had become one erogenous zone, a feeling bathed in the miraculous and sublime.

My heart beat faster. I licked and stippled, a painter with a fine brush. I sucked the bulbous head like you suck an ice cube. I bit down, his body grew tense and he withdrew, the motion jerky, unexpected, and I would have cried bitter tears but he slid round and eased up inside me, lips on my lips, his chest pinning me down. The spasms, paused like a video, started again. I arched my back, pushed down with my heels and gasped as his cock reached places never reached before, the membranes vibrating with unfamiliar sensations, my muscles firming and softening like a sea anemone swallowing a giant fish.

He had been silent all the time I was sucking him off, but now he started to pant like a runner at the end of a race. I could feel the tension across his shoulders, in his loins. I could feel myself coming and held back. The feeling started in my chest, ran down through my tummy into my womb and I roared as a climax like a tidal wave gushed through my body.

Tom was overcome by my spasm. He tensed, slipped from me as he was about to climax and, just as I had wanted, as I had telegraphed into his mind, the creamy stuff like milk from an urn poured over my belly, my breasts, my face, a long stream of semen, sticky as glue, body hot and tasting of bitter chocolate. He held on to his cock like it was the short handle on a whip, pumping out every last drop and I licked it up like the greedy girl I am.

He dropped to one side, snuggled under my arm and lay there panting, fondling my breasts; two gladiators given their freedom. He was puffing for breath.

'You're amazing, Katie.'

He turned my nipples in his fingers, then rubbed them with the flat of his palm. We were quiet for a long time, dozing. He stroked my hip bone. I loved the feeling, that sense that time was suspended. The shadows had folded into darkness and the mirror on the closet looked like a grey door that would lead to another dimension.

After making love, there's nothing like making love again, slowly, idly, like walking without a destination, or swimming in a warm sea. I had some bread and eggs, some Comté from Borough Market. I'd make a cheese omelette and open the bottle of red wine I'd brought back from Spain and had been saving for a special occasion. I would have just one glass, I decided, and keep refilling his glass. I wanted to know more about Tom Bridge. I wanted to know everything, and I wanted to wake up with him next to me in the morning.

When the telephone rang in the next room, it sounded like a car bomb and the vision shattered like shrapnel through glass. I could just make out Lizzie leaving a message, and I suddenly had a cramp in my foot. He slid his arm from under my neck.

'Do you need to get it?' he asked.

I shook my head as if trying to shake away the sound. He turned on the lamp.

'I have to go,' he said, a sigh in his voice. 'I have a dinner tonight with some colleagues. It was arranged ages ago.'

I didn't say anything. He stroked my cheek. The phone message came to an end.

'Can we have breakfast together?' he then asked and I shrugged.

'I don't eat breakfast.'

'Can we not eat breakfast together?' he insisted; his eyes above me were bright, even with the light from the lamp behind him. 'And can I take you to lunch?'

'I'll have to check my diary.'

'With my sister?'

'Your sister.' I thought for a moment. 'Is she going to inspect me?'

'Probably.'

'I don't know if it's a good idea. Sisters don't like me.'

'I can't believe that.' He bent down and kissed the tip of my nose. 'I'm sorry I have to go.'

He swung around and stepped away. As he left the room, I was struck by the ivory white of his round bottom between the tan on his broad back and strong legs that could have been carved by the same sculptor who had shaped Saint Sebastian. He returned dressed, the tail of his scarf over one shoulder. He sat on the edge of the bed. The smell of sex in the room was overpowering, an aphrodisiac; the devil's perfume. I felt bereft and tried not to show it.

'I'm sorry,' he said again, and I sealed his lips with my finger, something men never like.

'Don't apologise. I'd promised to see a friend anyway.'

He knew I was lying and I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew.

It was a pact.

7

Stucchevole

From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier's novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can only have slipped by the censors by its sly subtlety and incisive examination of the human condition.

Set in the Paris Bohemia of the 1850s, it is in Trilby where we meet Svengali, a name from fiction that has found its way into the language, like quixotic, Scrooge and Catch 22. Svengali is a music teacher and would be impresario with a perfect ear and an eye for the main chance. Trilby O'Ferrall works as a laundress and artists' model. She is young, pretty and vulnerable. All the men she meets fall in love with her, which forms the body of the book. When she enters the orbit of Svengali, he becomes obsessed with making her his protégée and a singing star; a Diva.

Although Trilby is tone deaf, she is susceptible to hypnosis, another of Svengali's dark arts. Under his power, she performs in a trance. They travel across Europe, making their fortune, until Svengali has a heart attack during a concert in London and Trilby, as she sings on, is shown to be talentless without the maestro's influence. Having been acclaimed in high society and lived among the élite, Trilby O'Ferrall returns to her former role in the laundry, aware that her only gift is her fading prettiness, the fate of most women.

The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town and night begins to fall. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress with my book of cuttings, tears seeping into my eyes. My hands trembled and I squeezed my fists together, hurting my finger as I did so. I could see the tremor of my heart through my skin and was tempted to crawl into the darkness of the closet.

Car lights flickered across the wall. The man on the art-deco lamp puffed on his cigarette. A helicopter rattled the windows; they are always there, watching, filming, reading our wretched emails. I had suffered panic attacks before, but not for a long time, and I couldn't work out why it was happening now. He wanted to return for breakfast, have lunch, take me to be inspected by his sister. What was I panicking about?

I stood beneath the hot needles of the shower and the creature in my chest slowly grew still. I dried myself in front of the mirror, my reflection veiled in steam. I dream sometimes of flying solo in the fastest jet ever seen, or riding in a rodeo, bareback on a stallion, or grilling small fish for friends on a shady terrace in Spain. We live the life we live and I often wonder what it would be like to live another life far away beyond the window, somewhere warm with long sunsets.

It was raining again, continuous streaks slanting down in razor slashes, as if the banks and City buildings were an aberration to be razed like Sodom and Gomorrah. The sky split with lightning. I counted the rolls of thunder, one, two, three, four miles west along the river, where my parents were making their plans for the evening; when love goes, kindness stays.

After dressing in old things, I made an omelette, opened the bottle of wine and the phone buzzed with a text as I filled the glass.

-Missing you already xx

A smile lifted my lips and I hated myself for being so pathetic. I keyed in my reply.

- Only two kisses?

- For now. And here's two more xx

- x

The exchange made me instantly happy, ridiculously so, and I remembered Lizzie had left a message. I called back.

'Hi sweetie, it's me,' I said.

'I thought you must have died. How's lover boy?'

'Not sure yet. What are you doing?'

'I'm meeting Ray at ten.'

'Fancy a drink at
Jacques
first?'

'I could manage that,' she said after a pause, and I caught a hint of reluctance; a benevolence. 'About nine?'

I poured the wine down the sink, took two bites from the omelette and went to look at my shoes.

*

Jacques
is a champagne bar in Dean Street close to
Groucho's,
haunt of TV people and screenwriters, intense men with wild eyes and thumbed scripts in shoulder bags.
Pink,
scene of my capricious youth, is nearby. So is the French House, where George Orwell wrote items for the BBC during the war and Francis Bacon, in the years following, entertained friends and hangers-on. He said the job of the artist is
always
to deepen the mystery.

The job of the writer, then, is to pose questions, not answer them. You enter a novel as you enter a house of strangers, not knowing who you may meet or what might happen. Like a mirror maze, you must follow the reflections and distortions to the secrets veiled by the words. Bacon also said, Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.

It was in
Jacques
where I often sat on a high stool at the bar plotting my stories. A skinny girl in tight clothes writing in a notebook has a magnetic pull on those in the shadows. I was conscious of this, conscious that the man or woman who drew up the stool beside me would inevitably ask the same question: what are you writing? Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

On the occasions when I did accept company, it was only with those who had gone beyond the predictable, restless souls with an air of abstraction, of ambiguity.

You're not searching for a publisher, are you?

I'm not searching for anything.

Aren't we all searching for something?

Perhaps I've already found it?

You wouldn't carry a notebook if you had.

I would, on hearing the right code, accept the gift of a glass of champagne with the understanding that I would be travelling somewhere that night in the back of a black cab.

Was a glass of champagne my price; does every woman have her price? It's not as simple as that. It is the promise of novelty more than danger that makes my pulse race and I have suffered the consequences. There are men who can't resist kicking the heads off flowers. The white wall calls out for graffiti. Our ancestors sacrificed virgins to appease angry gods and the angry men who invent them. Abusing a casually met girl is the natural response to those primordial genes, a pleasure seldom but sometimes shared.

The bar in
Jacques
forms a long arc, allowing those perched on stools to see who is present at the zinc counter and who, with the benefit of the mirrors behind the bar, sits at the tables or dances on the polished wood circle of the dance floor that holds in paler wood the silhouette of a seahorse. It is where, on somnambulist nights, I have resisted the flutes of champagne offered by men with primitive desires and danced alone to my private thoughts.

Valmont places a glass before me and slowly pours. He is that rare thing, a quiet Australian; he is originally from Lyon and is making the customary pilgrimage back to Europe. He has never asked what it is that I write in my notebook.

'Bonne année.'

'Bonne année.'

He fills a shell-shaped dish with almonds, another with green olives. The music is soft, guitar and piano, a fusion, unidentifiable. I adjust my hair, flicking a loose curl back into the nest, a mannerism men at first find amusing and quickly tiresome.

I set my phone on mute, swivel in my seat, glass in hand. I adore these moments, the champagne bubbles fizzing; time suspended.

The lights are amber and grow like strange fruits with tulip-shaped blooms from the high ceiling. The walls are decorated with old black and white images of Paris blown up and vaguely distorted, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine with barges laden with coal, the bridges and street lights.

A girl sits alone in the corner, the amber light making a halo above her head. She wears a sleeveless white dress with thin straps quite like my own. The dress sparkles with sequins and her wide lips open like a fish as she tilts back her glass. She places the empty glass down on the table as a tall man with dark hair and a moustache paces across the dance floor towards her. He looks determined, uncompromising. I can't hear what he says, they are too far away, but the girl nods her head as he speaks and I can imagine his words as he lowers himself into a chair.

He turns to face the bar; he has the eyes of a cobra, black as obsidian, and clicks his fingers in the way of confident men from faraway places. Valmont, without hurry, carries a bottle and a bucket of ice to the table. He opens the champagne, the deep-throated pop of the cork like a canon from the
1812
finale. He pours two glasses. The girl smiles. She has blue eyes, a pretty retroussé nose. Her skin is luminous, the firmness revealing her age, eighteen, perhaps, her arms like streamers of white ribbon flashing in the semi-darkness. Her blonde hair is gripped in a chignon, and a ring with an ice-blue stone sparkles on her finger. She is Russian, most probably. They have appeared like a new species of orchids, tall sullen girls hard to read, sleek as new cars.

A smile lifted my lips as I recalled suddenly the way Tom had removed the bandage from my fractured finger and checked the movement. Like a watchmaker. I admired the look in his eyes, lively, concentrated, without guile. He made love aware of my every motion, the steady articulation of my legs, a rower in a skiff, the roll of my back, the way I opened myself fully to take him inside me.

After making love, making love with the same man rarely recaptures that sense of vertigo and wonder, the magic of it. With Tom, this man of whom I knew nothing, a stranger with tousled hair and soft hands, each touch of his flesh intoxicated me in a way only satisfied by more of the same. I could smell his smell about me even now. His tone, when he spoke, was deep, melodious, like the plucked strings of a cello, a voice used to being listened to and obeyed. There is a word in Italian:
stucchevole,
so delicious, so exquisite, just a little can be too much. I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.

Love and sex have never been confusing to me. I have Roger Devlin to thank for that. That summer's day at Black Spires had not left me with a sense of loss. On the contrary, I had driven back to the office with a sense of well-being. My dream of selling the house had been a delusion. Once you undo one button, the light comes on. You leap from the diving board. Mr Devlin had spied the misty island of my deepest instincts. There were no strings, no promises. Our lips never touched. It was just sex. I had turned virginity into a fetish, a phobia, and cast it aside with a sense of relief and liberation.

I've done it, I thought, I've finally done it.

As we passed through the tunnel of overhanging bushes into the sunshine, he ran his palm over my bare leg.

'You're something else,' he said

And I thought: I'm not, but I will be.

'Thank you,' I replied, and he took a photograph of me in profile.

'I'll send you a copy,' he added, but never did.

I dropped him at the station and the rest – the rest is fantasy.

They say after your first time you feel different and it's true. It's like getting over a long bout of illness. That night, I kept running upstairs to look at myself in the mirror. My lips seemed to be fuller and my cheekbones rose over the hollow of my cheeks; I ran my fingertips along the ridges of bone, the shape anticipating the mask waiting in the future. I was about to begin a journey and the butterflies in my tummy were like tiny fluttering hands packing a suitcase. Yesterday I was a girl, I thought, a child. Now I am not. Five years of anxiety and exams had washed away on the tide of Mr Devlin's raucous climax. My eyes sparkled like the lawn after being watered by the sprinkler and contained an expression impossible to interpret. I had rather enjoyed parading half naked in front of the gardener without knowing why. Now, I knew why.

I adjusted the mirrors, pulled off my clothes and studied myself from every angle. My spine had bowed, pushing out my bottom, and I had grown an inch taller. The last pubescent traces of baby fat had slipped from my cheeks and chin and seemed to have gathered around my breasts. I couldn't resist turning and squeezing my nipples, they were pert, delicate, the colour of coral, and tingled as if with the minute stabs of a thousand needles. Was I pregnant? I didn't even care. The lips of my sex were moist and, when I touched myself, my fingertip had the fragrance of the sea on a sunny day. It was the long hot summer of 2003. I was deeply tanned, quite beautiful, I thought, a small vanity, and felt in touch with my true nature.

The weekend came and there was just one person in the world with whom I wanted to share my secret. I called her. I packed two dresses, two pairs of knickers and a toothbrush in a shoulder bag. I kissed Mother on both cheeks and caught the 6.20 train from Canterbury to London. I stayed with Bella in a flat she shared in Notting Hill with Tara Scott-Wallace, one of the twins from school.

Bella knew the moment she looked into my eyes that I had finally left the cloying confines of Saint Sebastian behind me. She threw her arms around me.