The New Rakes (19 page)

Mike paused. ‘I think you’ll have to ask her that yourself,’ he said.

The Ladies’ was at the back of the bar, a dim-lit room with orchids on the window sill. Lina was standing at the mirrors, leaning in close to apply her mascara.

‘Hi,’ said Kara, leaning against a basin and looking down at her feet.

‘Mike sent you in here,’ Lina stated, matter-of-factly. She screwed the lid back on her mascara and looked at Kara’s reflection. ‘You may be able to wrap him round your little finger, but the prick-tease act won’t work with me.’

Lina turned on a tap and washed her hands. Over the roar
of
the water, Kara tried to think of a strategy. Someone opened the door and entered one of the cubicles and Kara squirmed as she struggled to find the right words. As Lina dried her hands briskly and moved to leave, Kara felt the panic start to spiral again, prickling through her stomach and pressing down on her chest. It didn’t matter, she thought, if she made a fool of herself. She’d already sacrificed her band mates and her principles. Her pride was going to have to be next.

‘I’m sorry about the, uh, the wine,’ Kara said, staring fixedly at an orchid.

Lina gave a short harsh laugh. ‘Of course you are,’ she said. She pushed past Kara and headed towards the door. Kara saw all her hopes shrinking as Lina made to leave.

‘What will it take?’ she asked, shortly. ‘I need you to help with this gig. Just tell me what I have to do.’

At this, Lina hesitated. Slowly, she swung back to where Kara stood biting her lip. She circled her like she was sizing up a horse, glancing over Kara’s face, body, legs. Under her curious, judging gaze, Kara wanted to cover herself, but she set her jaw and stood straight, waiting. When Lina crossed her arms in front of her, Kara sensed her humiliation wasn’t over yet.

‘Please?’ she asked, the word bitter in her mouth.

‘Ah, the little bird sings,’ Lina mocked, moving in so close that her sweet heavy perfume made Kara’s eyes water. ‘And what do you think you could possibly do for me?’

Kara swallowed.

‘What the fuck do you think a wet-behind-the-ears chanteuse could do to please
me
?’

Lina turned, shaking her head, and paced across the tiled floor. ‘I’ve seen a thousand of you already, you know. Nice voice, nice tits, bit of sparkly attitude. You won’t last ten minutes out there. Once the gossip rags and the bitter old divas and the jealous young hopefuls get started on you. They’ll trample all
over
you,’ she said with relish, as though she were telling Kara her horoscope.

‘And which are you?’ Kara blurted out, unable to stop herself. ‘Bitter? Jealous? Or both?’

Lina shook her hair. She pressed her perfectly painted, glossy lips tight together. Had Kara gone too far? She cast around for a new way to apologise.

‘I didn’t know,’ Kara said, ‘about you and Mike. I didn’t realise.’

‘You wouldn’t have acted any differently if you had,’ Lina murmured, rocking back and forth on her heels. She still had her hands planted on her hips, but her jaw was working and Kara noticed something in the other woman’s expression that surprised her. Under the thick eyeliner and the gleam of superiority, Lina’s eyes were glittering. She looked, for once, not fearsome or glamorous or awe-inspiring. She looked hurt.

16

‘SO, YOU WANT
to make some kind of deal,’ Lina said.

‘I want us to work together,’ Kara said, ‘without all this shit getting in the way.’

Lina gave her a thin smile. Now that Kara was looking closely at her, talking to her instead of trading insults, she kept catching glimpses of a different woman. Underneath the quick, fierce intelligence and the glamorous sheen, Kara thought she could sense something deep and dark.

‘This goes no further,’ Lina said, pressing her lips together into a thin crimson line.

‘You mean – I mustn’t tell Mike?’

At the sound of his name, a frown passed over Lina’s face and her pupils swelled large and black. She turned her head away quickly. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘If you can keep yourself under control –’ she threw a scathing glance at Kara ‘– maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.’

Outside, the noise of the bar swelled against the door, brash laughter and clattering glasses.

‘There’s no point telling you to stop screwing him,’ Lina said, inhaling sharply. ‘He’d only get himself even more snarled up, wanting to win you back.’

Kara closed her eyes. As much as part of her hated Lina, at that moment she couldn’t watch her. It was like watching someone trying to make a bargain to win back their broken heart. Lina discussed the ‘arrangement’ calmly, but Kara knew that the thought of it was making her skin crawl.

‘Keep on playing your games. He’ll be enjoying trying to break you down, I bet?’ Lina asked, a sharp note in her voice. Kara’s eyes snapped open. A smile twisted across Lina’s mouth, but her eyes were bitter. ‘It’s just what he loves,’ she murmured. ‘Finding the weakness in a woman. Finding the place where he can snake his way in and bend her the way he likes.’ Lina’s shoulders sagged a little, and she leaned forwards to grip the edge of the washbasin. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked, abruptly. ‘Rope? Other girls? Blindfolds?’

Her questions jolted into Kara like bullets.

‘And you like it, don’t you?’ Lina gazed into the mirror. Her eyes flicked from her own face to Kara’s, as though she recognised something in the reflections. She nodded slowly. ‘You spend every day fighting. For the music, the money, for all the things you think you want. And against all the things you can’t stand. Everything that frightens you.’ Lina played with the tap, turned it on so a trickle of water streamed over the china. ‘Mostly fighting yourself. And then he takes hold of your wrists and for one hour, one evening, one moment, the fight is over.’ She smiled.

It was as though Lina could see right inside her. As though she could see Kara’s whole inner landscape just by looking at her through the mirror. A blush crept up Kara’s cheeks and she swallowed, hoping Lina couldn’t guess just how accurate her insights were. And hoping too that Lina couldn’t really guess every twist and turn of Kara’s sex life.

‘Don’t worry, you can’t shock me,’ Lina said. ‘I told you, I’ve seen it all before.’

‘What do you want?’ Kara asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Lina’s lips tightened. She folded her arms. ‘Don’t let him fall in love with you.’

The word ‘love’ deepened the blush on Kara’s throat and
cheeks,
and the thud of her heartbeat banged in her ears. ‘That might not be up to me,’ Kara said.

‘You’ll find a way,’ Lina said, reaching for her handbag and then pulling out her phone. ‘You’ll work out how to break the spell. But just in case –’ she waved her phone at Kara ‘– I’ll take an insurance policy.’ Lina’s eyes narrowed and flashed. ‘Tam’s number.’

His name hit her like a punch in the solar plexus. Kara looked at Lina, at her polished skin and carefully maintained figure. There was a lot of power tucked into the designer clothes; a lot of wild, controlled desire that brimmed just under the surface. Lina was someone who knew exactly how to get what she wanted – she had the nous, the connections and the bravado. Could she compete? Kara wondered. Was it worth taking the chance?

She shook her head and tried to act careless. ‘It’s over with us,’ Kara said. ‘You can’t make it any worse than I have already.’

‘Maybe not. But I imagine the boy might need some comfort. Someone to give him the break he deserves. He’s got potential. Nice pout, nice ass. I could take him places.’

Kara would have laughed at anyone suggesting Tam could be made into some kind of flunky, but the look on Lina’s face made her hesitate. That dark deep longing had hardened into utter determination.

‘How are his pussy-eating skills?’

‘Cheap shot, Lina.’

‘You’re right. I forgot how you felt. And what about him? Is he hurting all over for you? Or has he already got his cock inside someone else?’

Kara pressed her lips together. Pictures flickered in her head – horrible, vivid pictures. She pushed them away and focused on her breathing. She wouldn’t rise to it. Wouldn’t think about it.

‘I could help him get over it,’ Lina continued. ‘Take his mind off it. I do know some good ways to distract a man.’ When she smiled, she showed the sharp points of her incisors. ‘And I know Judy’s foibles. I’d have him eating out of my hand in a week. Sex and success,’ she said, toying with the pendant round her neck as though she was lost in thought. ‘A lot of shiny promises. The perfect way to fix a broken heart. Only the more you promise someone, the harder it tends to shatter, of course. The next time.’

Kara stepped backwards as Lina approached her. The woman was hovering on the edge of somewhere scary.

‘I could break him and make sure he never recovered,’ Lina said finally. ‘Give me his number.’

Kara felt sick. Lina could get Tam’s number from Mike, of course, probably had it written down already somewhere. The bitch was just chasing thrills, trying to make Kara feel worse than she already did.

It worked.

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, Kara,’ Lina said. ‘So long as you turn Mike off you. I’ll leave Tam alone and you’ll have the best gig of your life. Instant stardom. That’s a promise.’

Kara trusted Lina about as much as a rabid dog, but she didn’t have a choice.

Quietly, flatly, she recited Tam’s number. Lina punched it into her phone and, while she did so, Kara looked at herself in the mirror. She recognised the haunted, restless look that Lina had worn earlier when she talked about Mike. It was the look, she realised, of a woman who’d lost something very important and didn’t know how to get it back.

She followed Lina back to the table to find a small crowd had joined Mike. Kara vaguely recognised some of their faces. They had a burnished, slightly unreal look that fascinated
Kara.
One woman was a one-time pop star turned folk singer, another man Kara knew from the photo next to his newspaper column. She settled in her chair and tried hard to smile, knew that she should be making the effort. Rubbing shoulders with these kind of people was what made it all tick, what would get her noticed and keep the buzz going. She should do something outrageous – speak to the columnist who kept trying to catch her eye, flirt with the hangers-on, talk about her sex life, something.

But Kara found herself looking at Mike instead, the fine laughter lines that curled round his mouth and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. His hand reached for hers under the table and rested there, feeling her fingers one by one, massaging them with a steady insistent pressure.

Don’t let him fall in love with you
, Lina’s voice echoed in her head.
Break the spell
.

So that was what she had to do. Play Mike’s game, while she played Lina’s at the same time. Hope that she could make Mike fall out of love with her, without spoiling her chances as a singer.

And all along, she had to keep her mind as far away from Tam and heartbreak and failure as she possibly could.

That night, when Mike took her back to his place and pulled her down next to him on the couch, she kept a part of herself distant. When he lifted her arms over her head and held her wrists pinned to the armrest, she closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift. He leaned down to kiss her and she opened her mouth and let him.

All the time, while he fondled and caressed her and turned her one way and another, she listened for signs. Clues or signals that would show her how to break the spell. The trick was, she thought, to make him believe it was his idea.

When he held her thighs apart and licked a very slow trail from her asshole to her clit, stopping just a hair’s breadth from her nerve centre, she gasped. Her pussy swarmed with the need to be touched and she waited for the promised flick of his tongue with her breath held. But there was nothing – only empty air.

‘Good,’ he said, lifting his head up as she squirmed from side to side. ‘You’re back. I thought I’d lost you for a while there.’ He looked down at her thoughtfully, keeping her hips pinned in place and her pussy exposed. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Not missing Tam, are you?’

Kara shook her head and kept her mouth firmly shut. In her head, she cursed Lina for making everything so complicated. Kara had always avoided exactly these kinds of messed-up situation – always chased the sweet straightforward fucks that didn’t involved getting tangled in emotion. And now she was stuck right in the middle of the stickiest, messiest, most tangled fucking web she could imagine.

‘Hold on.’ Mike nodded at the armrest, and Kara gripped it tightly.

‘Don’t let go or I’ll stop altogether,’ he warned.

It was how he liked her – splayed and unable to pleasure herself. And, Kara realised, he didn’t even need to tie her up. If he made the right promises he could control her precisely, dictate exactly what she should or shouldn’t do. Just like everything else in Mike’s world – if she wanted to win the game, she had to play by the rules.

Even when those rules left her hanging in midair with nothing.

‘Make me come,’ she said, through gritted teeth.

Her pride was always the first thing to slip away. But tonight she needed more than an orgasm from Mike. She needed to find out what drove him and, as she remembered Lina’s threats, she struggled to keep a hold of herself.

Her body wanted otherwise. Her hips bucked down but the cushions under her were deep and maddeningly soft, so that she only sank into the spongy fabric. Her legs kicked at the back of the seat. Rolling her head from side to side, she swore under her breath.

‘Please,’ she said.

‘Not tonight, Kara. You won’t win just by playing desperate.’ Idly, Mike drew one fingertip lightly over the top of her pubis, dancing across her pussy lips and dragging a line straight to her asshole. ‘I think I want to teach you something new.’

His finger tickled at the entrance to her arse, circling and fluttering in a way that made her muscles clench up tight.

‘You’ll get your pleasure here,’ he said, pushing just the very tip of his finger inside her tightly bunched hole. Kara’s spine arched and she bit her lip. ‘You’ll love it.’