Under Purple Sheets

by Coco Houston

  “Marry me, Coco; please say you will marry me?” Brad speaks in serious tone, gazing into my eyes intently. Surely, this cannot be happening, I think to myself. This is only our third date together on his 50th birthday. How can he be so serious as he is still a married man? Yet I could tell by the way he is staring at me he means it all right. He meant every word of it; by now everyone in the place was paying attention to us.

  “Get up,” I whisper sternly, still shaken from the event I just look at him (now back on his feet, he stands waiting in anticipation) for what seemed like several minutes. “Yes, Brad Blake, I will,” I eventually retort, not sure what to think or do, at least he has no ring. Brad is ecstatic at my approval, kissing me before ordering a bottle of champagne for the table and a drink for everyone in the place. Everyone stares as I sit quietly stunned by his behaviour. He takes my hand, saying how much he loves me, more than anyone in this world. He loves me more than anyone ever in this whole world. He tells me I have become his life.

  As we arrive at Port Patrick, we parked up the jeep. We go into a hotel that sits on top of a hill overlooking the bay. I am so proud to be here with Brad. As Brad is up ordering drinks, I peer out the window, admiring the amazing view of the harbour below. I imagine going down to the boats bobbing about in the water, wishing I could sail away forever in one of them with Brad. We have a few drinks with me cuddled in his arms. It is so nice that he doesn’t care who saw us together, kissing me in public. Afterwards, we go around the village hand in hand, looking through the gift shops; one of them sells some unusual items. Brad buys me an old book, which is leather bound with a bronze clasp. It has blank pages inside, and Brad tells me to write my secrets in it, now that I’ve plenty. He writes the date inside the book; under it how much he loves me.

  Before heading back to Brad’s house, we decide to grab some dinner from a seafront hotel. I have scampi while Brad has fresh fish; romantically, we shared hot chocolate fudge cake with cream. I drink wine followed with coffee liquors while Brad can’t, he is driving.

  After a wonderful day out with Brad and luckily with the weather being good, we arrive back in his hometown. Back in his house in the lounge, we are kissing each other when Brad lays me down on the sofa once more. His tongue is going in and out of my mouth as his hand roams down my legs, caressing the skin through the ripped sections of my jeans. He slides his hand into a rip near my bum as his finger eases its way to my underwear, which he gently slides aside, now touching me for the very first time, he feels me silky smooth (as I have no hair at all), he whispers sexily “Oh God Coco!” before pushing his finger deep inside me.

  “Can I make love to you now, Coco, because I don’t think I can wait two more months?” he says desperately.

  “Brad, take me to bed!” I reply, wanting him so much but terrified at the same time. The two-month time limit of us waiting before we have sex is dismissed.

  Brad scoops me up instantly, carrying me to his room. As he kicks open the door, the cold air hits me; I can see the dim light of the moon shining through the window onto the bed. He puts me back down on my feet, he sat on the edge of the bed in front of me as he undoes my belt and slips off my jeans, then proceeds to unbutton my shirt, playing with my nipples through the silk lace before removing my bra, leaving me now standing wearing only my expensive silk tiny G-string.

  “God, Coco, you’re so beautiful!” he sighs, removing my tiny pants to reveal my fully naked body. He places his hands firmly on my bare buttocks, pulling me towards him, then flickers his tongue on my clitoris for the first time. He gets up then lays me on the bed, using his tongue on me over and over, causing me to whimper on the soft quilt. He spends ages pleasuring me as I orgasm multiple times.

  “Brad, oh Brad,” I half-whisper, half-scream as my body trembles at his every whim. “Fuck me,” I whisper in the shadows.

  He removes his clothes, laying his naked body on top of me, his chest pressing against my nipples as he enters me for the first time. His gorgeous cock pushes deep into me. We make love in the moonlight as the snow continues to fall. Brad moans as he pushes his hardness inside me, holding my hair. I respond raising my lips to his, scratching my nails down his back. Brad then kisses down my throat to my chest, sucking my erect dark nipples. We come together as his throbbing member penetrates me, filling me full of his sperm. I have wanted this for so long; it was as special as I wished it be, because it feels like I gave myself to him as a final birthday gift.

  Afterwards, we lie in each other’s arms. He tells me I am the best sex he’s ever had plus now he knows what love really is like and he also informs me he’d never given any woman oral sex before (not even her), he just couldn’t resist me.

  As I look down, I can see he is hard again. I slide between his legs now, taking him into my mouth for the first time. He tastes so sweet as I suck, licking every inch of him. He comes quickly from the excitement.

  Afterwards, he keeps my tiny G-string. He hides it in the inner pocket of his navy wool jacket. I smile watching him as I stand naked under his playboy robe. We laugh about how a playboy robe could only be got from the mansion. It is even funnier that Brad thought it was a Guinness one, it is brand new, never been worn and was a gift to him one Christmas some time back. I can hear water running as the bath fills. I go through to see what he’s doing, only to find he’d run me a lovely bubble bath. Sitting there I look around this woman’s bathroom, it feels a little strange to be in her home. I won’t stay the night here, I decide, not tonight anyway (plus that will keep Brad keen). I go back through and I sit in her kitchen in my bare just laid ass, wearing Brad’s robe, drinking her coffee, looking out at the snow in her garden, thinking I’m the happiest mistress in the world tonight.

  As Brad takes me home in the jeep, I am drinking wine from the bottle, singing along to the CD playing. I feel so rich sitting beside him with his sperm inside me. Brad thanks me for giving him the best birthday he has ever had. Brad also tells me he loves me more than ever and sex with me is so much better than ever he could imagine. Which he did, as he had masturbated many times thinking about me. To this confession from him, I am both shocked and absolutely delighted.

  “No problem, Blake, walk in the park, Blake, walk in the park,” I smile. As Brad drives through a white world of snow, I know for sure I have no regrets. Neither does he.

  Valentine’s Day

  As Brad and I are about to share our first Valentine’s Day together, I can honestly declare that this is the first time so far that I have felt the downside of being a mistress… you reap what you sow, I guess. This was sure to come eventually, I knew that. Now that it has arrived, I know the feeling would be back with a vengeance, no doubt at times bringing with it a lot more emotional baggage along the way.

  Holding this thought as I go to get ready for Brad coming, as he suggested we go out for lunch rather than dinner this evening as we both have to work tonight. So he is picking me up shortly and taking me to a little old-fashioned restaurant tucked out of the way, it sits across from Robert Burns’ (Famous Scottish poet) cottage. It’s a special place to us as it is the first place we ever went for coffee together. He hands me a Valentine’s gift. It is a bottle of expensive perfume (Coco Channel, Mademoiselle) with a lovely card. Inside it reads, ‘You are special, I have never bought perfume for anyone before (not even her) or ever given a Valentine’s card. I love you, Coco’. I adore the fact he makes me sui generis as compared to her, delighted I kiss him, saying thank you for his unique gesture of choosing this scent especially just for me.

  Brad takes my hand as he explains that he wants us to have sex exclusively with each other. Saying that he doesn’t do mistresses, that in his heart he considers me to be his real wife. He repeats that he doesn’t want me to sleep with anyone else, so he won’t either. I agree to his proposition… I will be completely faithful to him, so he better be to me. Doesn’t a mistress accept though that the man she sleeps with also has sex with his wife? Brad wasn’t having sex with her
though, so his proposition wasn’t about whether he had sex with her or not, he was making sure I had sex with no one else, full stop. Brad was looking after Brad.

  Later that night in the ward, one of the male patients gave me and another nurse a cake each with little plastic love heart rings on it.

  “Didn’t you get me one?” Brad jokes with the patient. The patient questions a ring or a cake or both. To which Brad answers laughing, a ring, of course.

  All of us in the ward tonight have already received Valentine’s Day cards, other than the other nurse who likes Brad, she is raging Brad didn’t get her one. She tried putting on the plastic ring from the cake but it broke on doing so, which only added fuel to her fire. When she got a moment alone with Brad, she asked him out on a date… absolutely no competition here either, Brad told her very clearly where to go and that he was not interested whatsoever… This made matters even worse as on the shift opposite to Bobby, she was our charge nurse. She made it quite clear on many occasions that she was obsessed with him, and she arranged a party on the ward for his 50th birthday, complete with a cake and candles, her motive being just so she could kiss him. She was telling me all of this with no inkling I was sleeping with Brad but then again even if she did, she was in complete denial because she told me she was determined to lay him. I could do or say nothing as she was more than capable of phoning his wife because he chose me and not her.

  The following few weeks pass by with Brad and I on same shifts but different wards. Now I’m working permanent shifts in the female-only unit. We spend our breaks together, but I miss working with him a lot, we made a great team, even the patients agreed on wanting me back on the ward. He takes me back and forward to work still, then when we spend the night together in little exclusive hotels (Brad tells her he’s working overtime). It is great being with him; we share so many romantic moments, having amazing regular sex. He spoils me so much now. I love being his mistress. Everything seems to have turned out so well for me. We belong together, Brad and me.

  As I go about my life, I now look at the world in a different light, I wonder how many couples I see are in affairs, how many women are mistresses that I assume are out with their husbands, just like people take for granted that Brad and I are married. Husband and wife. Not a gentleman with his mistress. Wives are for cooking and cleaning, then moaning. Mistresses are for special occasions, I clarify in my stupid head, who grant naughty sex; mistresses, for a price, had you fucked on Valentines, spellbound and bewitched.

  Chapter IV

  April Brings Canada

  Towards the end of March, my rose-tinted view of the love affair begins to fall apart. On the 21st of March, when I celebrate Ostara, also known as Spring or Vernal Equinox, I don’t feel right. As I honour Ostara, who is the Goddess of Spring that we witches’ worship at this time of year as the season changes from dark winter to the brightening of spring, I feel deeply sad inside instead of looking forward to the new beginnings. I plant seeds in my garden to represent new life and paint some eggs to represent fertility. I hide some of these painted eggs, go for a walk in the woods to clear my mind. I come home make some coffee, eat some chocolates eggs. I clear my sadness with positive thinking but still I am constantly concerned about how I can’t invite Brad to spend the night with me at my house as I still have to consider my son, yet in other ways I suppose it suits me very well as we stay over in different high-class hotels as that was exactly what I had wanted was it not? Knowing how much he spoils me is great but despite that fact, it hurts too, because he stills goes back home to his wife every single fucking morning. Now in the forensic unit we barely get to see each other as although we are working the same night shift pattern, it’s in different wards, which have become unsettled so we can’t spend our breaks together anymore. Brad, however, still takes me back and forth to work when possible. Yet regardless of this and the fact of him being married, shit, I still can’t bear to lose him. Although sometimes if I’m to be honest to myself, I wish I’d never started this affair in the first place.

  April arrives, bringing with it warmer weather. The warm breeze blows the cherry blossoms off the trees in my garden; all the pink petals cascaded downwards in the wind. You would think the grass had just been married! It looks like pale pink confetti everywhere, it’s beautiful. I smile, thinking this is a very peaceful place to have my coffee; I love the smell of the rich beans first thing in the morning. I also enjoy eating them, first you feel the hard texture of the bean crunching, tasting the coffee dust in your mouth, next a feeling of smoothness follows as you taste the chocolate they’re dipped in melting. They’re expensive but worth it, not quite a suitable breakfast to have sitting amongst my trees but I do it anyway. I’m fascinated with trees, I always have been. As a little girl I would wander through the woods, wishing I had a huge tree house to stay in, so I’d able to hide amongst the trees, , all in a secret garden just for me. I smile sadly, reminiscing upon those days, with a fondness I can still imagine the soft scent of the pine conifers, especially when the smell of them is enhanced just after the rain. I do have my own trees now but not quite that forest. Robin Hood’s way of life very much appeals to me, even until this day. To stay in a den in the forest, taking money from the rich to give to the poor, I think wistfully is very much my style. Brad calls me ‘Coco of the Hood’. He torments me saying I steal all of his money now; yes perhaps, well maybe I do, but it’s not my fault he spends so much money on me, I don’t take it or ask him, he just gives it to me, so surely that guarantees that he can afford it! I tease him back.

  The fallen petals remind me of confetti being flung all over me many years ago. The weather on my wedding day was terrible, wasting it all, the delicate tiny pieces of coloured paper in shapes of hearts and horseshoes all got broken by the heavy rain melting them into the ground, leaving behind a mess of wet mush in colours of the rainbow. Perhaps a sign I should’ve never taken those wedding vows, they meant nothing to me then or now. The broken omens of that day spoke clearly, how could there’ve been a Cinderella fairy-tale ending when I married him for money? So no happily ever after that expensive scenario turned out to be. No wishing it was different either, I never loved him anyway, I confirm to myself in honesty.

  Looking around all about me it suddenly dawns to me how big the trees have grown. Since then how much my life has changed, it seems like yesterday I planted them one by one. The dreams I had back then of how my world would be when the trees grew were all broken. I think of Brad, our affair and how his marriage is also broken. I’m going to get broken next, I think. No, I know I am. China, I feel made of china, china in his hands, with only time before I’m dropped. I also know given time or not this love affair is going to be very destructive, turning it into something very ugly that it is not. My instincts are warning me and they aren’t being subtle. As I sit here ironically thinking, if the trees could talk, fuck knows what they would tell the wind? If the petals could too, what would they whisper to the grass? I wondered as they continued to dance over it. Trees don’t talk in our world, they just stand silently watching over everything, sometimes out-living us in our adult lives, but they too tell their own stories by their appearance.

  I sat under one of them many moons ago, an ancient oak tree which was so tall, weather-beaten and known to be at least a hundred years of age or more and it showed. I sat down for a while in the shade under its old branches, whereupon a decrepit gypsy woman dressed in dirty rags approached me, offering to read my Tarot cards. I was very curious at the time and not so sure about going through with it. Father Peter would class both practising white witchcraft and Tarot cards to be considered to be dealing with the occult. Not the case in witchcraft though as I have three sets of Tarot cards now, I had my first set of Tarot cards at fourteen years of age, I never used them, I did not know how to but I wanted them anyway and kind of got the just of it. She gave me a piece of lucky heather, which I took, agreeing to the reading, that I was scared to refuse in case she put a curse on m
e. I was terrified even more so at how accurate the old gypsy so clearly read my past, trembling as she was so correct in my present day but delighted yet surprised of how she’d predicted my future. The cards clarified that I would someday have everything I ever dreamed of and everything that I ever wanted, but I’d need to wait a while for it until some time had passed but in the end, eventually, all my wishes would be granted… The cards must have been referring to Brad as my situation promised that the person who would become the love of my life was an older gentleman, the relationship would be formed in an unusual, far from suitable situation, wrong time, wrong place, but he would be the one. My position now was just this; he being married to someone else must have been what she’d seen. So I end up with him, right, it has to turn out better than the train wreck that was my last marriage… with Brad it’s going to be different, I hope, because just as the old gypsy had predicted, I really thought that he was my destiny!

  Instead of sitting here daydreaming with cups of coffee, I better move my ass. I have booked an appointment today to have a tattoo done bearing his name. Why? Maybe to try to convince myself and Brad that I am serious about staying with him. Hmm. Or maybe am doing it because I feel I am getting one over on his wife by wearing her husband’s name on my body, she’d never do a thing like that, probably have heart failure at the very thought… I am feeling unsettled though, knowing that at this very moment he is in that house with her. I ask myself if I still want to go through with this. The answer is – yes! I am sure I do, even though I know it is a bit extreme, I guess, just to prove a point. I get Brad tattooed in Japanese on the back of my neck (to keep the message slightly secret, besides it looked classy). Next, Bradford gets tattooed also in Japanese on my right hip (with little stars surrounding it, each one stood for my children and little dogs. All my loved ones captured in one very important permanent ink statement). So I think the pain has been worth it. I must’ve been crazy to have gone through with this, but it has been done now, so no turning back. Brad likes to call me his Highland cow, so now I’m branded, am I not? A long time ago on the spur of a moment I’d decided to get ‘Coco’ tattooed on my other hip, so now both our names sit opposite each other.