Autumn

by Vina Jackson

  ‘I won’t …’

  ‘You will.’

  His voice had the softness of the devil. Because I knew he was right. He had perceived my weakness in a flash and known just how to exploit it.

  He waved the few remaining men in the steam room away until there were just the two of us left in the now cooling down sauna. He looked me over, relishing the spectacle of my devastation.

  ‘Get on your knees,’ he ordered.

  ‘I can’t take any more,’ I said. ‘I just can’t …’

  I tried to squat but my calves were too weak and I settled on all fours.

  I looked up at him.

  He was holding his flaccid penis in one hand.

  His jet of urine smacked me in the face. It was shockingly warm. Marking me. Like chattel.

  I hurriedly closed my mouth and it streamed down my cheeks and chin as I passively accepted this further humiliation.

  Once he had emptied himself he held his hand out to me and I rose.

  ‘Next time you will keep your mouth open,’ he proclaimed.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I muttered silently, inside the safety of my own brain. I did not have the courage to disobey him to his face.

  He led me to the now deserted showers where I washed the night away, insofar as I could.

  I retrieved my discarded puffa jacket and wrapped myself as tightly as I could within it before leaving the building in his company and, in the bleak light of dawn, walking with the stranger to where he had parked his car. He asked me whether I wished to be dropped off anywhere in particular. I turned his offer down and retrieved my violin case from the car’s boot. I wanted to walk home, determined to clear my mind. And I did not want him to know precisely where I lived. Across the road, a grocery store was opening and setting out its outside display of fruit and vegetables. I hankered for an apple.

  He handed me a business card. It had no name, just a telephone number. I swore to myself I would never call him but didn’t have the guts to dispose of it as soon as his Audi turned the corner and headed south towards Camden Town.

  I dug deep into my jacket pocket and found a pound coin and bought a shiny red apple from the store and began the lengthy walk back towards Hampstead.

  ‘I like to see you tied,’ Dominik says, with a glint of mischief in his dark brown eyes.

  ‘I like to be tied,’ I say.

  ‘Do you enjoy feeling helpless?’

  ‘Losing control.’

  ‘Thrown to the wolves.’

  ‘Ripe for plundering.’

  He is inside me, moving with exquisite slowness, his velvet cock mapping every single contour of my inner walls, sentient, exploring me.

  His tongue gently wets my lips. He raises himself slightly, his hands reach for my throat.

  ‘You like danger,’ he says.

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘It makes me feel alive.’

  His expert fingers press against my throat.

  ‘One day maybe we will go too far.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  My breath is shortening. I can feel him growing even thicker inside me. Will he ever tighten a rope around my neck?

  The games we play.

  I closed the front door behind me and hung my keys and coat on the hook in the hall. I was naked, besides my trainers, but not cold. It was as if the heat from the steam room had seeped into my bones, and even the long walk home hadn’t been able to banish the lingering warmth. I imagined that I was the right temperature for bacteria to grow on. Like a perfect petri dish in a science experiment gone wrong.

  I walked into the living room. The house looked the same as it had when I had left it, only minus the last few boxes of Dominik’s things. Lauralynn had packed them all up and taken them away. She had left something on the kitchen counter, alongside a note. I stepped across to it, padding gingerly along the floor as if I was at a crime scene, trying not to disturb the evidence.

  Thought you might want this,

  Lx

  It was Dominik’s watch. The watch that I had bought for him, to celebrate our last ‘anniversary’. We’d joked that it would be an impossible event for us to celebrate, since we’d had so many firsts. So I’d chosen the day, and bought him a gift. He’d worn it every day since. I picked it up and ran my thumb over the engraving on the back. Nothing fancy, just the date of our first meeting, in italic font, and our initials. D, S. It was our little in-joke, the coincidence of our first names beginning with letters that represented the style of our relationship, dominance and submission. I had revelled in that fact, and Dominik had rolled his eyes at me. He hated the acronym BDSM.

  The metal was ice cold against the sheen of sweat that still coated my skin. It reminded me that I’d never been good at gifts, in the way that Dominik was. He always managed to choose something that was both surprising but also utterly me. Blissfully symbolic. Whereas my gifts to him had something of a catalogue buy about them. As if I’d never really known him the way I should have, not truly. He’d been the one who was good with words, good with romantic surprises. I showed my love for him the only way that I knew how. With my body.

  ‘Shhh,’ he says. ‘Relax. Let go.’

  He has me pinned to the bed, belly down, his body over my body, his torso against my back, his breath hot against my neck as he whispers into my ear. My pulse flutters as he gently brushes a lock of my hair away from my throat.

  His erection presses against my anus. A solid, hard, unrelenting presence wedged between my buttocks, waiting for my initial resistance to subside, for me to welcome his cock’s entrance to my arsehole.

  My ever patient dominant Dominik, who never craves my subservience but rather my permission, not from the words I utter but from my flesh and bones, my muscles and sinews, the parts of me that are unable to lie, cannot be manipulated into giving away anything that I do not truly want to give. He does not want to take me, he wants me to open up to him.

  So he lies prone, expertly holding his weight above my body, careful to push just far enough but not too far as millimetre by millimetre I let him in.

  The hair on his arms tickles my skin as he lowers his head and plants a kiss on my cheek. My face is turned to one side. It’s an affectionate kiss. I can’t see him properly in this position, but I know he smiles, after he kisses me.

  I go to that place in my mind. The safe place. The place that knows this is Dominik, and I want Dominik to have all of me, to own me. I want to give him everything.

  I relax.

  He groans.

  His cock slides into me as if it was made to fit, even though when I am tense there, he feels unbearably large.

  My body shifts to accommodate him.

  My Dominik.

  I put the watch down again. I’d been gripping it so tightly that the tiny knobs that moved the watch’s hands had left two red indents embedded in the skin of my palm. I couldn’t bear to touch anything of Dominik’s when my flesh still bore the stink of the bearded stranger and the men from the sauna. I didn’t even cry, when I thought of them. It felt too unreal. Like I’d had a bad dream.

  I pressed the toe of one shoe against the back of the shoe on the other foot, sliding it off without undoing the laces. Then the same in reverse, my bare toenails scraping against my ankle. I hadn’t thought to put on any socks and the journey home in just trainers had left my feet scratched and sore. Good, I thought. My feet throbbing as a result of something as banal as a sockless walk gave me something else to think about, something for my mind to hold on to, distracting me from the other parts of me that ached for reasons far worse.

  The shower water, when I got in at last, was a soothing balm, and I turned the temperature up as hot as it would go and scrubbed myself with a body brush until I was red and tingling.

  I wrapped myself in a thick, white, soft dressing gown. In the mirror I looked blame
less, my mass of ginger curls, now washed and dried, a shock of colour against my white skin. The only sign that I was a scarlet woman.

  When I woke up it was almost a whole day later. I was lying on top of the bed still swaddled in the towelling robe, exactly where I had finally collapsed. It had been a sleep full of nightmares, images and unreal adventures combining with flashes of anonymous faces, tangled limbs, bodies known and unknown, and delicately etched portraits of pain.

  My eyes landed on the slim gold chain of Dominik’s final gift to me, the bracelet with the padlock attached. Thank god I hadn’t been wearing it in the sauna, I realised. I scooped it up and deposited it in the security of my bedside drawer. So that it couldn’t be tarnished, by touching my flesh.

  In the kitchen, I found the loaf of thick white toast bread and the bags of sweets that Lauralynn had brought with her. It was an unlikely meal, but I was hungry, and I didn’t care. I slathered slices of bread with butter, pressed jellied, sugar-

  coated candies into the middle and rolled them up like hot dogs, then wolfed down one after the other, barely chewing. Maybe, if I got fat enough, I wouldn’t need to worry about men like the bearded stranger coming across me playing naked on the Heath and wanting me, pressing all of my sexual buttons. But I knew this wasn’t true. Men like that want women like me for our minds and our desires, not just our bodies.

  I picked up the bottle of gin and poured it down the sink. Giving myself an alcohol problem on top of everything else was the last thing I needed. The acrid smell of it burned my nostrils as I watched it disappearing down the plughole. I wished that I could disappear in the same way, and I cursed the part of me that wanted to live. Damn me, why couldn’t I be suicidal? Death would have made everything easier. But at my heart, I remained resolutely pragmatic, and alive.

  Music and work. That is where I would seek solace. Without Dominik, it was all I had.

  Later, I rang my agent and asked her to set up a solo tour of small venues at short notice. She protested, explaining it would be a wrong career move and also gently suggested that I was not quite ready to embark on such a venture in the current circumstances. Meaning so soon after Dominik’s death. But I insisted and eventually she agreed. It would be easier, she said, to select venues across Europe, as British concert halls were all booked up too far ahead.

  In Brussels, I visited the Musical Instrument Museum which had been set up in an old department store and initiated a conversation with a middle-aged man in the strings room and fucked him in the men’s toilets, before rushing off to my gig with his smell still lingering across the surface of my skin, and played to the small audience with his come still inside me.

  Barely 48 hours later, in Amsterdam, I allowed myself to be picked up by a swarthy Russian who could barely speak English as I lingered with intent in a red light district sex shop. He poured champagne over my cunt and drank from me in his luxurious room at the Kempinski, oblivious to the ensuing mess on his bedsheets. He was probably wealthy enough to buy the entire hotel. Once he mounted me, he came too quickly and was unable to regain his erection and, in frustration, threw me out of the room with my clothes following shortly thereafter into the hush of the softly­-carpeted­ corridor.

  In Berlin, I flirted outrageously with one of the venue’s stagehands and, following the recital, had sex with him in the theatre’s basement, among discarded furniture and coils of dusty rope which he refused to use on me.

  The silver-haired aristocrat in Paris sent a lavish bouquet of flowers to my dressing room and I agreed to join him post-performance for a coffee. He had a certain elegance and was something of an expert on baroque music and could hold a conversation about the subject for hours on end. He liked to take photos and blindfold me. I spent a whole day with him, after which he gave me an amber brooch as a souvenir and asked me to become his mistress, which I declined, pretexting another involvement in another country.

  In Rome I was recognised by a restaurant head waiter. After the lunch service, he took me to the wine cellar and never stopped muttering obscenities under his breath as he took me anally with, I knew, half of the kitchen staff watching, the short floral skirt I had been wearing for my earlier morning rehearsal together with my abbreviated knickers bunched around my ankles.

  South of Barcelona, I found an isolated nude beach on a late spring afternoon and two young local men walked down from the dunes. Not a word was ever spoken between us, not that I knew any Spanish. They leaned over me, momentarily obscuring my view of the sun, provocatively enjoying the display of my body. I purposely refrained from covering myself and they both disrobed and lay on either side of me in the sand. They had beautiful cocks and I took them in each of my hands. Later they spit roasted me in silence. Hot with sweat and laughing, we swam together until I was out of breath and stumbled back to the beach where we shared a six pack of beer from one of the boys’ rucksacks. All too soon, my bladder filled and I had to pee. I indicated with a gesture that I had to relieve myself, pointing to the nearby dunes or the ocean, but they giggled, shook their heads and pointed to the sand. I squatted and allowed them to watch. I do think I even blushed as they observed this biological function in fascination. As I wiped myself clean with the back of my hand and made to rise to my feet, the two young men exchanged a look of complicity, and one of them moved behind me and took me by the shoulders while his friend bent over and picked me up by my feet and they carried me like a parcel to the shore and crying out uno, dos, tres!, dunked me into the water where they soon followed and pretended to wash me, their hands and fingers moving frantically all across and inside me while laughing hysterically. Back on the sand, the taller one stuffed his cock inside my mouth and I sucked him to hardness. Then they fucked me again. I never asked for their names.

  In Montpellier, I met Jean-Jacques on a tram. Later he would steal my handbag from my room as I showered post-sex. I never carried much cash and was able to report and replace the credit cards as lost with no particular inconvenience, and my passport had been safely secured in the hotel room’s safe using my date of birth for the combination as I and no doubt countless others always did.

  In Nice, my lover for a night took me from behind as I stood by the window watching the sea lap the sandy shore beyond the promenade. As he did so, I heard a piece by Mussorgsky in my head. At my concert the following day, I hastily rearranged the running order of my repertoire and insisted to the promoter that I had to play it even though it wasn’t listed on the programme he had printed for my recital.

  Was it in Dubrovnik or Zagreb that I picked up a gypsy fiddler, thinking that maybe two musicians in bed together would create even sweeter music? The sex was uneventful and at the next day’s concert I made a brief mistake whilst playing a Mendelssohn solo as my mind wandered. No one in the sparse audience noticed, I hope.

  The tour came to an end and I returned to London. I didn’t feel like doing so but had no other pressing plans and was, at any rate, getting tired of living from a suitcase and haunting hotel rooms and lobbies.

  In outward appearance, I was still the same. Inside I knew I was broken. In the pocket of my grey jacket hanging on the hook in the hallway, that anonymous business card with just a telephone number sat, challenging me. Every day, alone, lost in my conflicting thoughts, I almost walked down the stairs to retrieve it. Then thought better of it. But I knew that eventually my resistance would crumble. It existed there like a red rag to a bull.

  Dominik scoops me into his arms and we each curl up against the other in spooning position, as neatly and naturally as two bodies of water meeting and melting into the same sea.

  He closes his arms around me tighter, gives me one last squeeze.

  We’ve just fucked. Nothing out of the ordinary, but just right. Kissing in bed. A goodnight peck becoming passionate, open-mouthed, our tongues dancing and lips each pressing harder against the other’s then Dominik pulling his body on top of mine, sighing with pleasu
re as he takes his hard cock in his hand and sweeps it gently between the folds of my cunt and finds me already wet and plunges straight into me and I wrap my arms around him and cling on to his shoulders like a desperate woman at sea, holding on to a lifeboat or an improvised raft, and we rock back and forward until he comes.

  He lies on top of me until he goes soft, and the moment of desperate passion has passed. He knows his weight is heavy. I fidget beneath him.

  Then this, the best moment of all. The calm after the storm. The quiet after all the noise. We are at peace together, with each other.

  ‘I love the way you fit me so perfectly,’ I say, drifting into slumber. And I mean fit me. Not fit into me, or against me. Fit me. Dominik fits me, and I know that I fit him.

  ‘And I love you, Ms Zahova,’ he says sleepily. ‘You are perfect.’

  ‘I love you too,’ I reply.

  But I’m not sure if he hears me. I think he’s already fallen asleep.

  4

  The Vines! The Vines!

  ‘I’ve heard rather racy rumours spreading about you, darling …’ Lauralynn said. ‘What the fuck have you been up to while on the road? Look, I’m not one to judge and your private life is your own affair. But these sort of stories circulate pretty fast. If it gets any worse, it’s going to get you into some serious trouble,’ she insisted. ‘All it needs is for someone to leak a tasty morsel to the tabloids and you’ll be Page Three news. ‘‘Sex-crazed musician whores herself all across Europe’’ stuff, if not worse if one or other of your pick-ups provides any juicy details, and knowing you I’m sure they certainly would prove far from conventional!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I protested. Lauralynn had barged in past me the moment I had opened the front door to her. She was wearing a baggy tracksuit and a sheen of sweat coated her features. She must have jogged up the hill at a rapid pace. This was the nearest I’d ever seen her to angry. ‘Anyway, I don’t give a damn about my career. It means nothing to me.’