The Pleasure Quartet (5 page)

‘Shall we go to bed?’ I suggested, hoping that there we would find the intimacy that words had not yet been able to restore. The flat was so cramped that the bed was barely a foot
away from the sofa, and yet we persisted in making the most of the little space that we occupied by eating most of our meals at the dining table and using the couch as if it were a living room,
saving the bed for sleep and sex.

Iris readily agreed.

I was working a matinée and an evening show the next day at the theatre but she had the weekend off as a reward for the monotony of her 9-to-5 job. So neither of us had to get up early,
which suited me fine.

I’d just stripped and slipped my pyjama top on and moved to our bed. Iris was in the shower. The water had been running for an age, and I imagined her standing under it still in a
champagne daze. She’d never had much of a resistance to drink, even back home. I was sitting up in bed, two sets of cushions behind my back shielding me from the sometimes damp dirty beige
wall we had to endure to justify the low rent we paid. I was leafing through a programme I’d brought home for the play I’d watched earlier. I’d actually counted how many I’d
managed to sell before the performance began and at the interval: a round thirty. Which was a bit of a surprise: like all theatre programmes, it was slim and unsubstantial and damn expensive. The
biographies of the actors consisted of lines of credits for other plays, TV shows or movies I’d never heard of.

Iris tiptoed out of the bathroom. She was naked.

Somehow the light shone on her sideways, a combination of the bare bulb on the bedside table and the flickering neon of the fish-and-chip shop across the road bouncing across our windowpane, and
her body was momentarily captured in a stage-like well of brightness that gave her a 3-D quality that I found entrancing.

Her hair was still damp.

‘Can you pass me my nightie?’ she asked.

I dug my fingers under the pillow on her right-hand side of the bed. The garment she’d requested wasn’t there. I explored deeper, checking under the sheets in case it had slipped
down the bed.

‘Not there.’

Her lips twisted.

‘Damn,’ she said. ‘I remember now: I put it in the washing this morning. It needed to be cleaned . . . And my other nightie, the black silk one, is also in there; we’re
overdue for the launderette.’ She sighed.

I smiled.

‘Just come as you are,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll keep you warm.’

Iris hesitated. She always made it a habit of wearing something in bed. Normally, I preferred to sleep at least half naked.

She turned and stepped towards the dresser.

‘I’ll find a T-shirt instead,’ she said.

‘No . . . Please . . . Don’t . . .’ I pleaded.

I wanted her nude.

Close to me.

Skin to skin. Where I could smell the receding echo of the soap she had washed with, the tinge of the toothpaste she had just used.

She still appeared unsure. It was a cool English summer and arriving in the bedroom, with its open window, was a comedown from the steamy heat of the shower.

‘Promise I’ll keep you warm,’ I said.

She shrugged and joined me, quickly pulling the top sheet all the way to her throat as she positioned herself between the covers and snuggled up against my side.

‘Friends again?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Iris replied, her voice just a trickle of sound, as if she were a touch unsure.

I switched the bedside lamp off.

‘You’re not reading?’ she asked.

I usually did before sleeping.

‘No, not tonight.’

She turned, her bare back to me. My hand was caught between our two bodies, fingers grazing her buttock. Her skin was soft and silky. God, I thought, no man could ever be so smooth, surely. I
was harder, more athletic, in spite of the fact that I seldom exercised and was never much of a participant in sports back at school.

Silence fell, punctuated by the slow, almost imperceptible in and out of her breath and the occasional confused mess of pop music from open-windowed cars racing by on the road outside the
building.

Iris broke the tension.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘About earlier.’

‘No need to be sorry . . . Kiss me.’

She rolled over, moved her lips towards mine until we were in alignment.

My heart lightened.

The peppermint freshness washing across her tongue was tempered by the now remote sweetness of alcohol and triggered a mighty flow of emotions inside me and I closed my eyes. I wanted to float
in darkness as my taste for her rose and we embraced, our bodies fitting together as naturally as a pattern of stars aligning in the night sky.

My Iris.

My sweet, delicate doll.

Her hands shifted under the covers and moved over my waist, holding onto the jutting ridge of my hipbones. Her grip was tight, as if she was trying to pull me open. Our breasts touched. My tips
hardened. So did hers. I wrapped a leg around hers and Iris gripped my thigh and pulled me against her tighter, her fingertips nearing my opening, teasing me but not venturing closer yet. We both
knew we had time for this. Savouring the gentle lull before the fever pitch. A silent ballet morphing into a jigsaw of limbs, the pieces fitting together neatly as our lust awakened with all the
ease of familiarity, a sequence of movements that we had perfected over months of sharing a bed. I loved this part of it, the prelude. Like feeling the steady suck of the pulling tide before being
knocked by the roaring crash of a wave.

I knew I still had to learn a lot about sex. Real-life sex, not the sex I’d read about in snatched glances at the pages of women’s glossy magazines that hinted but never revealed
enough or heard about in the playground from other girls who had been as ignorant as me, and inevitably, all of my unreliable sources spoke only of the love between a man and a woman. Even Joan,
Iris’s liberal grandmother, in all of her blunt stories had never recounted wooing or being wooed by another woman, although I often wondered whether something more than Joan ever admitted
had occurred between her and the beautiful flame-haired woman who had discovered her outside the Trocadero.

The light breeze outside picked up and the window pane rattled, as if even the elements were following the course of our lust. A gentle gust blew into the room and I felt the cool kiss of night
air against my slit, a damp breath of air caressing my open thighs. I was lying on my side, one leg straight, the other linked over Iris, my knee at a right angle bent up to her waist and her arm
around me, her hand stroking over my flank and down my waist and around the curve of my arse. I twisted on my hip, tightening my grip on Iris’s body and widening the gap between my legs,
letting my cunt spread open.

Iris’s fingertips journeyed between the valley of my buttocks, feather light. Her touch was tentative, a promise that one day she would venture inside me there, fill my hole with the
velvet of her flesh. Each time she glossed over my pucker I arched my spine like a cat’s, ever so slightly encouraging her to push harder, to press her finger inside me now. I stopped short
of asking her for what I wanted though. The words formed in my mouth like sawdust and floated away, unspoken.

The pace of her sweeping hand quickened. Her fingers clenched in small, juddering bursts – in out, in out, open and close – and I knew this meant she was climbing higher, nearing the
crest of her appetite. She craved for more.

Iris’s desire fuelled me. Her need was like the current in my ocean. Hearing her soft cries, the in-breaths that caught in her throat and came out in a whisper of sound like chiffon
falling through the air, made my heart thrill and my quim slick. I thrummed, pulsing with a swell of barely contained need that spilled from me in wet kisses and juice dripping down my thighs and
fingers that held onto her too tight. I was an overripe fruit, breaking through the skin, seeping want.

My fingers travelled over the curve of her mound until I found her entrance and circled her nub. Her clit was hard, already erect, and felt even hotter than the fiery surroundings in the heart
of which it dwelled. I drew closer to her centre and Iris’s whole body stiffened and exhaled.

‘Oh,’ she sighed.

I stalled for an instant. I was too fast, too eager. I allowed my mind to wander for a moment, finding a place of calm to pause within. Always, when we made love, there were brief epiphanies,
stretches when it felt as though we were melded in one, both of us connected like strands of the same coil.

Between those flashes of connection were spells like this when I retreated from my body to my thoughts. All kinds of things danced through my head during these intervals – the lewd and the
banal, dreams and memories. Tonight I imagined the pair of us on a stage, through the eyes of a watchful audience. The velvet milk of our skin, unbroken by the restriction of costume. Naked. A beam
of light bouncing across the dew of our sweat. Limbs entwined. A silent theatre, a hundred anonymous voyeurs, ears bent on catching the muted choir of our yearning. I painted the picture of us
fucking from the stalls and the wings, from up above. The view that God would have if he were watching, wicked thought. I didn’t care, I would be wicked.

Time spread out like a string of pearls and we floated along the beads.

‘Go on . . . please . . .’ Her voice was a murmur of wind, barely audible.

I held my middle fingers together and slid deep into Iris, searching back and up until I found it, that ridged coin of flesh inside her that made her whole body convulse when I pressed against
it. She shook with tremors, feverish. Her mouth parted and she buried her chin in the hollow of my neck, her hair brushing against my cheek.

I shifted slightly, my teeth nibbling her ear lobe, my tongue flitting inside her ear’s hollow.

‘More?’ I whispered.

‘Yes, yes.’

I drew my face away from hers, distanced my hand from her sex and moved down between the crumpled covers, plunging deep through the moist heat that our bodies were generating in their closeness
until my lips reached the coarseness of her pubic bush. I got up on my knees, my rump tenting the bedcovers and, extending my hands held her cunt open and lapped the length of her opening from
bottom to top, then delved between her inner lips and finally plunged my tongue deep into the simmering heat of her.

Iris tensed her feet and lifted her butt up in immediate response. But the weight of my own body pressing down on her kept her pinned to the bed.

There was nothing that I could compare the taste of her to. The particular tang that was Iris, warm, sweet, sharp, salty, sometimes sour, but never bitter. Joan had once told us about a fleeting
love affair she’d had with an Asian man who had introduced a fifth taste to her palate, umami, that was somewhere between indescribable and all four other tastes combined, in perfect balance.
I wondered if that was how Iris tasted. Knowing those secretions were the very essence of Iris was a feeling like no other, it gave me a sense of awe, of almost religious adoration and I had no
need to analyse it. I just wanted to experience it, wallow in its oh so shocking intimacy, the way it connected us for ever. Her juices marking me as hers and my consuming her was a communion far
greater than any I had ever undertaken in church.

My tongue dived deep inside her, until it could venture no further, embedded, my taste buds mapping the texture of her pink inner walls, my lips on heat brushing against the hardness of her
jutting clit, her white thighs clamping me in place, tense, vibrant, her whole body under my control, open, effervescent, singing to the tune of my tongue.

Iris dug her fingers in my hair, pushing me hard against her midriff, holding me down.

‘That feels good,’ she moaned, her words reaching me through a cloud of sheets.

I briefly came up for air and then went down on her again with renewed energy and lust.

I was floating in space when I heard her ‘Do you want me to . . . do the same?’

I shook my head. I wanted to stay like this forever. Abolish time and space. Me, Iris, London, this bedroom, this bed, connected in greed and desire with her. Nothing else mattered. No one else.
This was pleasure enough.

With every flick of my tongue, Iris shivered.

With every passage of my lips across the beautiful ravaged rawness between her wide open thighs, Iris moaned, squirmed, swam against me.

Again, intent on pleasuring her until I dropped with exhaustion or cramp, I realised I was holding my breath and inhaled deeply. The heat floating upwards from her cunt warmed my whole face. Her
aroma washed over me. Stronger and stronger as I orchestrated her senses towards further delirium.

Buried in the welcoming delta of her legs, I failed to hear the words she muttered.

‘M . . . Moana . . . love . . . I . . .want . . .’

I surface from the sheets to understand her better.

‘Inside me . . .’ Iris gasped.

I froze. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely.’ I knew what she meant. It was something that until now we had shied away from. Like a border post for which we didn’t carry a valid passport.

I returned to the moist darkness that lay between the bedcovers and the sweet embrace of her thighs.

My fingers journeyed towards her opening and its humid warmth.

I inserted one and then another, and finally a third until it felt as if I was filling her.

Iris responded silently, a vibration rushing across her stomach as she pulled the badly crumpled sheet away from the top of her body and uncovered her slight, delicate breasts. My fingers delved
inside her, wading through heat and juices. Her plaints grew in intensity. I attempted as best I could to synchronise my fleeting movements within her soft walls with the inhale-shudder-exhale-grow
limp rhythm of her mounting orgasm, slowing, accelerating, forever delaying the moment. Stimulating her knowingly, timidly, fiercely in turn.

We had played with each other in this way before, but I had never delved so far inside her and so fully, somehow, it felt as if she was opening further and further to my exploration.