by Freya North
Pip grasped the opportunity for a one-night stand to provide distance and a diversion from the perceived mess of the previous weeks.
Pip would like us to believe that it had a lot to do with altitude. The air being thin. Being so high. She’d rather not level too much responsibility against the many swigs of schnapps followed by a boozy fondue, for blurring her vision or influencing her actions. Would she have found Cat’s colleague Alex attractive if she hadn’t been wearing rose-tinted beer goggles? Or if her day hadn’t been so multicoloured by the dramas of the race and the high spirits (and bottled spirits) of all those around her? Would she have found Alex attractive enough to accept even a second date if she’d met him back home? In the mundane light of everyday life, would she have had a one-night stand with him in London? Would she even want to see him again?
However, up there, back then, on top of a mountain, thawing out over a steaming cauldron of kirsch-drenched fondue, Pip thought Alex charming and attractive and a pleasure to match, flirt for flirt. She justified the fact that he smelt rather strongly of garlic as a pitfall of the limitations of the press buffets. Not his fault. Not a reflection of his personality. It wasn’t as if it was something he couldn’t help, like smelly feet. Garlic was simply an occupational hazard for the journalists, she decided.
‘You don’t half stink of garlic!’ Pip said to him with a glint in her eye, nevertheless, as they were strolling back from the restaurant.
‘The Alps,’ he shrugged his broad shoulders, ‘a breeding ground for vampires. With my hot blood, I need to take every precaution to keep them at bay.’ His retort made Pip laugh and even like the garlicky wafts seeping from his skin and breath. ‘Have you any vampire tendencies?’ he asked her. ‘Any links with Transylvania, however tenuous?’
‘Derbyshire,’ Pip told him, ‘via Sutton Coldfield, originally,’ she elaborated, pulling her hands into the sleeves of her fleece. It was cold up there in the thin air of the mountain top. ‘And I can’t say blood is among my favourite tipples.’ Momentarily, Alex looked crestfallen. Pip couldn’t think what she’d said that could have upset him so. ‘Sutton Coldfield’s not that bad – there are some quite nice parts,’ she rushed, hoping to soften whatever blow it was she had unwittingly delivered, ‘and Derbyshire is divine.’ She unfurled the fingers of one hand from the fleece and touched his elbow.
‘Huh?’ Alex said. ‘Oh. No. I was just sad that you are not even a fraction vampire.’ He rubbed his brow and looked thoroughly perplexed. ‘How am I going to get you to suck anything of mine now?’
Fen, Cat, Ben and the gang kept walking. Pip stopped dead in her tracks, gobsmacked and motionless in the theatrical throes of a long, silent, outraged laugh. Alex stopped too, all wide-eyed and winsome, or as much so as his lumbering six-foot-two-inch frame would allow. Once she was breathing again, clasping her chest for dramatic emphasis, Pip regarded Alex with mock shock horror delineating her features, sending added sparkle to her eyes, her mouth agape. Before she knew what was happening, but long before her sisters turned around to see where she was, Alex had plugged Pip’s mouth with his tongue and given her right buttock an enthusiastic squeeze.
‘My bed – bottom bunk – 2.00 a.m.,’ he whispered, licking his lips and winking at her.
‘Dream on!’ Pip remonstrated. Though the fleece sleeves covered her fingers, she put her hands on her hips and held her head high in mock outrage. Alex’s plan was, of course, one she planned to carry out, but she wasn’t going to pamper his ego with even a quick ‘OK’. She stomped past Alex in contrived indignation, but with a concerted wiggle nevertheless. She linked arms with her two sisters and the three McCabe girls walked jauntily to the apartment. Each had a spring to her step. Each felt a growing sense of liberation and joie de vivre that none had felt for some time. Too much altitude? Too little oxygen? Too much alcohol? Too little sleep? So what! Who cares! The combination was obviously a rather good one. The three McCabe girls went to bed that night with smiles on their faces and minds full of larky memories.
Pip wakes with a start. It’s 4.00 a.m. How can that be? She’s two hours late for her bunk bonk. How and when did she fall asleep in the first place? Never mind that she’s only had three hours’ sleep in almost twenty-four hours. She’s bemused – she went to bed wide awake, willing Fen to fall asleep, watching the clock and imagining Alex yards away preparing a boudoir of debauchery for her. Instead, somehow, she fell dead asleep. Damn!
She lies in the bed she’s sharing with Fen and listens to the lulled, rhythmic breathing of her sister sound asleep. Her heart is thuddering excitedly. The walls are thin. She can detect snoring from another room. Is it Alex? If so, isn’t that a turn-off? And if it is him, doesn’t it mean he’s fast asleep? And if so, should she not wake him? After all, he has to go to work tomorrow. Say he wasn’t serious in the first place? About 2.00 a.m.? About a bonk in his bunk? Dare she verify?
Which would benefit her more, sleep or sex? Pip pontificates at length until she wonders why on earth she’s wasting time. It’s now almost 4.15 a.m. Fen is still sound asleep. And whoever it is, is still snoring. Pip sidles from the bed and slips out of the bedroom. She’s relieved to deduce that the snoring is not Alex’s. His door is ajar. She eases it open, a breath of light coursing into the room and catching on his shoulders. He’s in the bottom bunk. Facing away from her. His shoulders are masculine. He looks too big for the bed. The duvet is half on the floor, managing to cover his modesty whilst presenting a muscled back tapering to a neat waist.
Pip fights to suppress a giggle and a snort. She feels extremely naughty, all this tiptoeing and lip biting in the silent watches of the night. Will the floor creak? Will someone hear? Will someone catch them at it? She is holding her breath because she doesn’t know if she wants to wake Alex or not, or whether or not he wants to be woken. She’s well inside his room now; so far, so silent. She eases the door to almost closed. The room is plunged into darkness. Her eyes aren’t adjusting but she knows the vague direction and distance to Alex. She pads across the floor. It’s disturbingly gritty under her bare feet. Never mind. It’s irrelevant. Really, all of this is somehow irrelevant – being so far from home, in a world as surreal as the entourage of the Tour de France.
For such a big bloke, Alex sleeps very delicately, his breathing less audible even than Fen’s. Pip is chewing her lip, clenching and unclenching her fists, swallowing giggles, telling her heart to hush up – surely people in the valley below can hear it pounding excitedly against her chest. She can make out Alex’s form without actually seeing him. She can sense the body heat emanating from the bunk. She thinks she can detect garlic. She bends down over him. The pattern of his breathing remains unchanged. Yes, she can smell garlic. She’s so fired up she refuses to think of it as an unpleasant aroma. She stays motionless, trying to compose a rhyme or pun on ‘vamp and vampire’, on ‘bunks and bonks’, on ‘better late than never’.
‘Psst,’ she hisses instead. ‘Oi!’ she whispers. ‘Alex?’
He rolls over and reaches a sleep-hot hand up to her cheek. He shunts over and holds the sheets open. She can smell man – all pheromones and sweat and garlic. It’s heady and thick and intoxicating and she’s keen to be skin close. She slips between the sheets. The bed is narrow and though they manoeuvre themselves this way and that, no matter how they entwine their limbs, lying side by side is simply not possible. By the time they have found a comfortable configuration, Pip is actually lying on top of Alex, and they are snogging with such intensity that the position seems entirely appropriate anyway.
He’s wearing pants – she knows they’re not boxer shorts because in the dark her hands have figured out a great deal about his body. He appears to be clad in rather scanty briefs. She fleetingly thinks how, if the light was on, such a sight would surely be a turn-off. They may even be patterned! God forbid they were brown. Didn’t all blokes do the boxer thing nowadays? At that ungodly hour, however, in the dark, on the top of L’Alpe D’Huez, it really didn’t m
atter and Pip wouldn’t have cared if Alex was wearing a lacy G-string. In brown.
They dry hump while they kiss. Alex’s hands travel and explore her body energetically and hungrily. Pip uses her fingertips to determine him – the quality of his skin, the tone of his muscles, the hair on his stomach, the length and thickness of his cock straining against the elastic of his underwear. She eases his pants down, trying to banish the term ‘posing pouch’ which keeps goading her.
He’s already done away with her T-shirt, and she wasn’t wearing knickers, anyway. His hands sweep up and down over her outer thighs and then fondle her inner thighs more slowly. Grasping and feeling and kneading. She bucks her body and spreads her legs. She knows she is wet and ready and she rather wants his hands and his fingers to cut the courteous detours and head straight for the playground. Alex obliges and his manual dexterity makes Pip gasp. Do that again! It’s still too dark to see, though as he touches her (God, do that again), she marvels at his long fingers. Longer than she remembers. Actually, she can’t remember how his hands look in reality. She can’t conjure a picture of them. She knows he doesn’t bite his nails but she can’t recollect any specific details. Just that his hands weren’t really worth noticing, for one reason or another. Anyway, they’re making a great impact on her now and surely that’s the point of them.
She’s thinking she ought to return the favour and pay his cock some attention. She’d be happy to. A tantalizing blow-job perhaps, with her body swung round so that he can feast on her simultaneously. A position she’s never been hugely comfortable with, on account of it leaving everything open to the elements and to scrutiny. But that’s with the light on. Or curtains open. On the bottom bunk on the top of the mountain, it’s pitch black, remember. So Pip straddles him, facing his feet. She sucks his cock down deep until she’s at risk of gagging. She thrusts her sex against his mouth, her bottom against his nose. He’s groaning. She sucks and licks and tongues him with energy and imagination. He groans and pants. She feels rather proud. She rotates her pelvis and pushes against his face. He’s moving vigorously, flinching, moaning, jerking. She all but suctions her nether regions against his face. He places his hands on her buttocks and shoves her away. ‘Can’t breathe!’ he gasps, with an audible exclamation mark. ‘Let’s just shag, hey?’
Alex stumbles from the bed, muttering ‘condoms’ under his breath, heading off into the dark void of the room to try and locate them. Pip lies stock-still and silent. Alex bumps into something. ‘Fuck!’ He trips over something else. ‘Wank!’ He makes a terrible noise as he rummages around in some bag or other. ‘Bugger, where are the sodding bloody things?’ Pip is on the bottom bunk. Suddenly, she’s all but blinded. Alex has switched the light on. It’s a moment of blaring reality. He squints at her, she blinks back. His hair is all over the place. The neon light is brash and it buzzes. The room is horrible. Alex’s stuff is everywhere. His bottom is hairy. His feet are huge. Pip sees it all in an instant and swiftly stares instead at the springs of the upper-level bunk. She’s concentrating on not letting the moment go. She wants to come. He’s searching through his bags, tossing out a fortnight’s worth of dirty laundry.
‘Bingo!’ he mutters on retrieving a bashed packet of prophylactics of a brand Pip doesn’t recognize.
Get on with it, Pip thinks. ‘Switch the light off,’ she whispers instead, as if it’s a kinky idea, rather than absolutely crucial. Alex does so and clomps his way back to the bunk.
‘Ouch! Wank!’ he exclaims hoarsely, having first bumped his head, then scraped his shoulder, on the cold metal frame of the upper bunk. For Pip, the moment has now all but gone. She could so easily give him a peck on the cheek and crawl back to bed with Fen and fall asleep for a welcome few hours. But suddenly it’s supremely important to bring to fruition what she set out to do. She wants to finish it with a full stop, not a comma. She’ll just come. Then she’ll go.
With a rustle and a jiggle and a snap or two, plus further fulminations, Alex is covered and ready for action. Penetration takes but one attempt and because of the height and width restrictions of the bed, they adopt a position that is deep and intense. They buck and hump. The mattress is lumpy but mercifully, the bed doesn’t creak. Both Alex and Pip opt to keep as quiet as they can. It adds to the intensity. It’s furtive and desperate and he drills into her while she grinds against him. She feels as though she’s sucking him up high, he feels as though he’s spearing her deep. Why is it called ‘missionary’? There’s nothing remotely pious about what they’re doing.
‘I’m close,’ Pip murmurs, ‘oh God!’ Despite his uncouthness, the garlic, the swearing, the clumsiness, right at the right moment Alex reveals expert knowledge and sensitivity on how to intensify Pip’s orgasm. He slows his pace right down and subtly changes the angle of thrust. As he senses her spasms subside, he picks up his own pace, rams into her and spurts. The fact that his cock jumps wildly, causes Pip’s orgasm to reprise. The feeling is fantastic and intense. She’s forgotten that the lights were ever on. That there’s grit on the floor. That Alex is messy and scruffy and has huge ungainly feet and a hairy backside. What she can’t deny is that he really does reek of garlic. She’s suddenly very tired, aware that it’s been a long day and there’s another to follow. She kisses Alex on the cheek. ‘That was rather nice!’ she whispers.
‘Night, Pip,’ he replies sleepily, with gratitude. He’s happy that she’s off. The bed is far too small to accommodate two, even for the briefest post-coital cuddle.
‘Goodbye, Alex,’ Pip says quietly, with intent.
TWENTY-SIX
So far, we’ve seen Pip with three very different men. In the East End. In her own bed. On top of a mountain. Although she would say that Caleb probably leads purely in terms of consistent erotic value, the orgasm with Alex actually ranks the highest. Though she’d currently dispute the final analysis, we can see that there is no contest with whom she has the best overall fit. Though she and Zac might just about recognize this, even if it is lurking in some far-flung region of their subconscious at present, the point is whether the accountant and the clown can digest humble pie and come together again to walk hand in hand into the sunset for us. Unfortunately, at this juncture, both have convinced themselves that they’re not remotely bothered about seeing each other again. Neither actually thinks that there’s even a future for a friendship now, let alone the potential for a relationship in the offing.
Currently, there’s no way they’d even have a one-off, no-strings shag again. Pip has quite put Zac off her. And she’s made her mountain-top shenanigans with Alex pale Zac into an insignificant slot in her past. Sexual sorbet. She had a bad taste in her mouth. She tells herself that the shag with Alex has cleared it and shoved Zac unceremoniously to the back of her mind. Or so she likes to think. If she thought otherwise, as indeed she did all too briefly in Derbyshire, she’d have to admit that the mess is of her own making – as are the amends. No. It’s much easier to put the baggage into storage. And that’s what she thinks she’s done.
‘Oh, hullo, is that Merry Martha the clown?’
‘Speaking!’
‘Hi there, this is June Price – we spoke a couple of weeks ago about my son’s party?’
‘Hold on a tick, I’ll just fetch my diary.’
‘This coming Sunday?’
‘Sunday, Sunday. Ah yes! Tom.’
‘Yup. Smashing – just to confirm a few details.’
‘Absolutely – fire away!’
Pip has always enjoyed August for work. It might not be the most lucrative month, but it’s certainly the most civilized. She detests December though she can easily double her normal wage. In August, there’s as much outdoor work for a clown as indoor. Plus, by then the children are well relaxed into the pace of their summer holiday from school. Behaviour is usually very good. Energy levels have been managed by plenty of exercise and fresh air. Parks and clubs lay on special activities that are godsends for parents and treats for children. Being with friends bec
omes special and something to look forward to, rather than run-of-the-mill as in term-time. The beginning of August is a time long before boredom. Parents are usually revitalized by the proximity of a gorgeous vacation abroad. Moods are generally good throughout the households.
Pip has every reason to look forward to working on the first Sunday in August. The party is local. Swiss Cottage. She’s not even needed till 3.30 p.m. There’ll be only fifteen children. Thus she needn’t be abstemious at the party Megan’s throwing the night before. She can have a good lie-in and a leisurely time with the Sunday papers. She’ll go to Covent Garden on Wednesday – she has no other appointments that day. She’ll buy something frivolous to wear (so what if it’s just the once) to Megan’s party. And she needs to replenish her supplies of slap. She’s working Tuesday and Thursday as Dr Pippity, of course. Friday morning she’ll be at Brent Cross shopping centre, hired by a children’s boutique to pull in the punters. No problem.
‘Oh, hi, this is a message for Merry Martha. Hullo, it’s June Price here – about the party on Sunday. Can you give me a quick ring at some point? Just want to discuss a few more details. Thanks so much. Oh, it’s now Thursday. Tea-time. Thanks. Bye.’
Pip returned Mrs Price’s call on Friday afternoon. Brent Cross had been frantic but fun and she’d been paid cash there and then.
‘Mrs Price? Merry Martha here.’ Pip had the telephone tucked under her chin whilst she wound tissues between her toes. She was giving herself a pedicure. After she’d finished clowning in Brent Cross, she’d popped into the branch of Fenwick’s there. With all that cash in hand, she’d treated herself to some Chanel nail polish. Rouge Noir. Reassuringly expensive. Now, with phone secured between ear and shoulder, Pip was gliding the varnish on in slicks the consistency of crude oil and the luscious hue of aubergine.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Price, who envisaged Merry Martha taking the call dressed as Merry Martha, ‘thanks for getting back to me.’