Monsieur (17 page)

Do you remember everything?

Even that particular day?

It was the first morning in June when the heat made itself felt. I was almost naked when I opened the front door of our house in Nogent to you and you fumbled with me, no preliminaries, on the kitchen table, among the sprinkling of breadcrumbs from breakfast. I had to beg you to come to my room in the basement. I ran down the stairs, as your hands searched for me.

‘Switch the light on,' you commanded, noticing the skirts I had hung in front of the window in lieu of curtains. ‘I want to see all of you.'

We undressed in silence, at each end of the bed, panting loudly. I pretended I hadn't understood and, naked, jumped onto the bed. Hesitation in your eyes: you were torn between wanting to punish my insolence and the attraction of my arse. Then, in one bound, you took me in your arms, wrapping yourself around me. My face was in your neck and I could smell the musky sweat rising from the palms of your hands as they raced across my back. You pushed me down on my stomach, your hand hard against the back of my neck. I was still damp from the shower but even so I was uneasy with your perverse insistence on licking my arsehole before you moved on to my pussy.
What pleasure did it give you?

Sensing my unease, or wanting to make it worse, you brusquely turned me over, your face approaching my gaping thighs, your hot breath already so much more powerful than a caress, and whispered: ‘What is it you want, my love? Do you want me to eat your pussy or should I fuck you straight away?'

I cried: ‘Take me!'

And you methodically penetrated me, behind, even though I was laid out on my back, your eyes fixed on my cunt, which gaped slightly with every thrust. I was moaning, swinging between pleasure and pain. I couldn't rid myself of a certain embarrassment, even as you loomed above me and filled my ears with a stream of seductive filth. I'm about to write it all down, but my ears still go red at the thought.

‘Darling, you should always look into the eyes of men who are fucking you in the arse. Look at me now.'

I raised my eyes but I couldn't keep them on you: raw lust was written on your face. Then came the monologue. I shudder with wetness every time I think of it. You tightened your grip on my wrists and whispered: ‘Touch yourself. You have the right to do so. I understand, you know. With my cock deep inside your arse, it's quite normal you should want to wank.'

Truly, you were so convincing and my heavy hand sketched a caress, banishing my shame, as I wallowed in the obscenity of your words. Surprised by my boldness, I somehow managed to slip my fingers inside and felt the hardness of your cock sheathed inside my arse. A popular clip on YouPorn.com. We moved on quickly to a higher level.

It occurred to you to turn me around and position me on all fours, which is when I had a bad feeling: something was wrong. This wasn't the way I wanted things to be going. How could I explain it to you? (Just the thought of your smile somewhere in France sets my teeth on edge with feelings of shame and arousal.) It was like a smell. Maybe not a real smell. Maybe the seeds of doubt.

I was realizing that nothing good could come of our coupling, however long it lasted. I could already imagine the mortification, the scene endlessly repeating in my head months later, and the sight of you, unable to look at me as you did before. I wanted to get you out of there and, in some way, keep you in total ignorance of a possible diplomatic incident. Suck you, maybe. Anything to avoid you seeing me doing it.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. Unaware of the drama hatching with every passing second, you came somewhat quickly, warning me with that dark voice of yours that I was about to be ‘filled to the brim with cum'. An assortment of witty responses came to my mind, but I kept praying silently.

It was after that that the doubt solidified. You rapidly withdrew from me, leaving me gaping, a vision I'd rather you hadn't seen. I spent almost fifteen minutes just staring at your cock, while you held me against you, knowing it was often the best position to get me to whisper to you the endearments I normally reserved for Andrea. But time, our time together, faded away and you had to have your shower.

‘Why?' I asked, a touch hastily.

It was thirty-five degrees outside, and well over a hundred inside my arse. We were dripping with sweat and I had worn Shalimar, in a covert attempt to help your wife catch you out. But I needed you to say it. You smiled. ‘I'm going to be at the clinic all day, as if you didn't know.'

So I followed you to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, trying to dazzle you with my wit. Below my fringe, the machinery of surveillance and analysis women use on awkward occasions moved into a higher gear. It was just a total misunderstanding.

Back in the room, where our clothes were scattered across the floor, you gave me a lengthy look, smiling. ‘I like you so much . . .'

And my anguish ended. If you liked me so much, you didn't know that I'd tried to fuck you up.

You kissed me one last time on the threshold. I watched you walk away and blow me a kiss as you sat behind the steering-wheel of your black car, the smile of a satisfied woman spreading across my lips. The scar of your nails dissected the skin of my thighs. I felt good. I ran for a pee, a cigarette hanging from my lips. And though I know you have read all of de Sade, the despicable scenes from Apollinaire's
Eleven Thousand Rods
and Mandiargues until you've memorized them by heart, and I am only twenty years old, I must warn you now: this is where the story becomes excruciating.

I was about to wipe myself clean when I realized I'd been right to worry. My head began to spin. I threw my fag into the toilet, ran with my knickers around my ankles to my room, already well aware, like in a horror movie, of what was waiting for me in the still warm bed.

‘Two huge smears of shit,' I whispered to Babette over the phone, shuddering on the brink of manic (solitary) laughter.

Two huge smears of shit, which, as she noted an hour later, were the precise shape of fingers wiped across the sheet.

‘I've come to the almost suicidal conclusion he must have touched his cock by mistake, seeing I must have covered it with . . .'

‘Not at all!' Babette intervened, gazing at it. ‘When he had you on all fours, he must have pulled out and held it in his hand before he entered you again. He needed to support himself against something for a second and wiped his fingers on the sheet. Mind you, he could have stuck his hand on your bum cheeks. It could have been so much worse.'

‘Which might mean he didn't realize it was all over his cock, and then his hand. I would have noticed if I'd been him. Definitely. Look at it. Those smears tell the whole story. He must have noticed.'

‘Why don't you ask him?'

‘I called him just before you arrived. Answer machine. Anyway, I'm not sure how I could raise the subject.'

‘Just ask him if anything unusual happened this morning. He'll understand.'

‘Of course he will. And he'll just say “
Yes, there was lots of shit.
”'

‘At least you'll know.'

‘But what do I say after that? What do we talk about?'

‘He'll find something.'

‘Sure he will. With his usual laughter, cunningly asking me
why I'm so embarrassed, these things happen when sluts get themselves fucked in the arse, eh, Ellie? Anyway, I enjoyed it, didn't I?
And he'll probably say it was all the more exciting.'

‘No one could be that filthy.'

‘The way that guy thinks, it was no accident. There's no place for accidents in Monsieur's sexual universe. Everything that happens is meant to happen because it's natural. I expect he believes I allowed myself to be fucked up the arse in full knowledge of the consequences, that it doesn't bother me. That I wanted it so bad I didn't pull back. But I'm telling you, Babette, there's no reason this should have happened to me.'

I couldn't bring myself to pull the cover over the sheet, unable to abandon the spectacle, even though the horror was fading. Babette sat on the bed, leaning over the smears to examine them forensically, looking for fingerprints or whatever. I slid down to the floor, my back against the wall.

‘
Why
did this have to happen to me today and with that particular guy? I'd spent hours in the bathroom stuffing myself with litres of water – I should have been as clean as a newly minted coin. That slut Ines lets them all fuck her arse when she's bloated and nothing ever happens to her.'

‘I know, but if Monsieur, from the depths of his dark soul, wasn't a bit drawn to shit, he wouldn't take the risk, would he? He wouldn't fuck your arse.'

‘I don't think there's a connection. Of course guys know women have to shit, but they surely don't want it confirmed so obviously.'

‘He's not your average man, Ellie.'

‘I know.' I sighed.

I wasn't reassured.

It was still too early for me to begin to understand how you thought of women, how you love them. Your relentless hunger was not assuaged when sheer filth mysteriously encountered the sublime at some crossroads. Or when sodomy was the only way to unveil the link between a woman's purity and her carnal instinct. The point at which a woman's sanctity becomes twisted and corrupt, transforming her into the holy slut who invariably gives them a hard-on. Months later, I sometimes think of the two smears of shit that might have ended our story. If they caused you to stop calling me and sending me the intoxicating messages that set our days on fire. How could I know? You disappeared from the surface of the earth. And I was caught between two monstrous explosions: your unexplained absence and the incident that might have caused it. They must be connected. The thought of changing the sheets was grotesque, like getting rid of the evidence, and I slept in Alice's bed, my mind churning with unanswerable questions. The ridiculous idea that I disgusted you now was eating me alive. Everything I knew of men, everything I had ever read, all my recently constructed theories resisted this insidious thought, because, let's be clear about this, there was no reason for you to leave. Just the day before we'd been communicating like two lovers the whole world could not have pulled apart – or, at least, not so abruptly.

And somehow, all this time later, now that I have become an ex-mistress who is only required on rare occasions, after I've taken my revenge on your defection, I still blame myself a bit.

One thing stopped me rushing to the clinic with my frantic air of abandonment: the evening when Édouard, who had learned of my recent trauma, had fucked me, slowly, tenderly, exploring my arsehole, first with his fingers, then with his pulsing cock, screaming,
Oh fuck Ellie, oh Ellie oh your arse
. I came with a vengeance, leaking slime across the cream-coloured sheets, as his darling hands convulsively kneaded my tits.

‘There's something so special about your arsehole, which other girls just don't have,' he whispered, as he fell asleep, having ejaculated over my tummy.

Before letting go of me, he always performed the same ritual: he twisted my hair around his forefinger, tickling my scalp and making me coo. But that night his right hand was nestling between my arse cheeks, unwilling to move away. When I woke up at five o'clock, his five fingers were deployed like a star across my pussy and my arse. I shook myself gently and Édouard laid a hand on my cheek, whispering, ‘Stay like this.' It was the first time in ages that a man with whom I'd spent a whole night had insisted on being close to me for a full ten hours.

He was teaching the following day at nine in the morning.

‘Just close the door when you leave,' he said, as he finished dressing.

I was lying across the still warm bed, fighting the impulse to sleep, resisting the idea of going home, leaving. I was about to get up when Édouard, dressed in brown, knelt at my feet and kissed my tummy. I stretched and turned over. And he, who had been so kind, suddenly spread my arse cheeks apart. I was too slack to react.

‘Stop,' I mumbled. ‘It's dirty.'

‘What's dirty?' Édouard asked.

That was the first time I made love with a man's tongue.

JUNE

There are so few things I could tell you about Monsieur.

I know he's forty-six, that his wife, a pretty blonde, is called Estelle. I don't remember his answer, but one day I did ask him how they had met. Some student party, I reckon, something banal and magical.

I know he has five sons: seventeen, fifteen, thirteen, ten and seven. Scandalous that they all look like him. They live in an apartment that I guess is rather plush in the centre of the Île Saint-Louis. An area I now visit sometimes; every step I take there is like an insight into the family life I know nothing about, drawing me inescapably towards it. Because I cannot ignore the fact that Monsieur is a father. Perhaps if he'd had a teenage daughter in the house, moping around in her underwear and smoking, he would have given more serious thought to the risk involved in touching up my bum.