“That’s right. Show me what you’re made of.”
He did, sitting right back on his heels, cock pointed at the heavens, hands cupping and squeezing.
“Oh yes, jack off for me, Martin. Can you do that?”
He couldn’t not do that, he realized. The tide was rising in his clenching balls and his cock felt like hot iron under his stroking hand; he wasn’t walking out of this place tonight without shooting his load. When, almost absent-mindedly, she pulled down the front of her dress, revealing the golden orbs of her breasts, and began to play one-handed with her stiff brown nipples, he groaned out loud.
“What?” she inquired, archly. “Do you like that? Do you like me, Martin?”
He worshiped her. He was trying to keep his strokes slow and smooth, to prolong this moment, to give him more time to feast his eyes, but the taste of her pussy was already on his lips and the roiling in his balls was threatening to spill over into a full-blown eruption.
“You’re a goddess,” he said thickly. “A fucking goddess.” He’d never sworn before, during any sexual encounter. He’d been, up to this moment, a gentleman.
Lucy wet her lips and stepped in until she towered over him. Tenderly she touched his face, breaking the beads of sweat at his temple. Her eyes looked huge, and were green no longer, their color swallowed in the darkness of her dilated pupils.
“I’m going to come,” he grunted, his words all tumbled up.
“Yes,” she whispered, straddling him with her long legs and her lethal heels, grabbing the back of his head and moving her mons over his upturned face. “Yes you are.”
Her wet pussy engulfed his mouth. He was forced backward on his heels, back and belly and thighs straining, neck tilted at an agonizing angle. Only her grip on his head kept him in place. But none of that mattered. He rammed his tongue in among her folds and found her swollen clit and began to suck, his hand pumping now on his cock.
“Now!” she cried, her voice caught up in a rising squeal, and it was impossible to tell if she was referring to herself or to him in that moment, because she was climaxing again as she ground down on his mouth.
And his ejaculation was like a fountain, spurt after spurt jetting into the warm night air, all over—as he found out later—the back of her bare legs and the hem of her rucked dress, spills of cum falling on his white shirt and his best trousers, an irretrievable mess.
This is how a man breaks.
♦♦♦♦
He had knelt to lick off the jizz that had somehow ended up on her heel, just beneath the ankle-strap of those deadly shoes. She didn’t even have to order him.
Six months later they were married. It was the very first time she admitted his cock inside her. On their wedding night she pushed him down on the bed and ripped all the buttons off his dress-shirt; she scored his chest with her nails until she left raw streaks, and impaled herself on the stake of his cock and rode him without mercy.
She liked to rough him up, he knew by then. Just a little. Just enough.
It was the happiest moment of his entire life.
♦♦♦♦
Now he’s standing inside her hotel room, hands on the champagne trolley, staring around him. His eyes go to the great big double bed first, of course, but it’s immaculately made up still.
She’s not in the room.
Martin looks around. He’s not entirely sure what he expected, to be honest. Lucy and a hairy Latin lover cavorting on the sheets? His private detective has presented sheaves of photos tracing her this far, but no real indication as to what she gets up to inside.
Her case is here, though, flung open to reveal a silk wrap he bought her in Thailand. She always accompanied him on work trips before the children came along, all over the world, and she still does upon occasion. In fact, much of his current success can be laid at her feet: she has a network of social contacts among the higher echelons of society and after their marriage she was keen to advance his career, introducing him to clients he could never have dreamed of.
The air is heavy with the musk of orchids. Lucy loves orchids, and they stand in vases upon every piece of expensive furniture. There’s a large antique mirror with a rococo gilt frame on one wall, and he catches sight of his strained face in it. He’s a little thinner than on their wedding day, he knows, and his dark hair is flecked silver now, but it suits him. He’s better-looking, fitter, more confident, and ten times wealthier. It’s all down to her.
She has made him what he is today.
Lucy, it has occurred to him, has not changed at all. Not one extra wrinkle, not a stretch-mark, not a single pound of excess weight. After giving birth to Amelie and then Laurent, she’d gone straight back to swimming and her body is the same honed weapon that it was the day he met her.
Ten years, keeping herself lovely.
Obscurely, that troubles him. He’s asked her, half-seriously, how it is she stays so young. Botox darling, she’s answered, and dermatologists. But that’s too self-deprecating. He keeps a picture of her in his wallet, taken in the week they met, and she looks exactly the same as she does now. Her perfection verges on the uncanny.
And for ten years he’s had to take it on trust that that beauty is cultivated for him alone. Because on a Friday, she could be getting up to anything. He’s excluded. Every Friday night, without fail, without exception. Even when his parents came round to visit. Even when he was presented with a major professional award at a meeting in Switzerland. Even when they were invited to a dinner with the hottest Hollywood star de jour. Even when Christmas Day fell on a Saturday, and he had to tell the children their mother was out and wouldn’t be home until Saturday afternoon.
It is the single iron-clad condition of their marriage.
“I spend Friday night alone, all night, until Saturday noon. It’s me-time, and I give it up for nothing and no one. You can’t come, you can’t ask me where I go or what I get up to, you can’t complain. Do you understand?”
It was the only thing she’d asked of him. Of course, he’d agreed.
And aside from that, she’s been the ideal wife. To his initial surprise, outside of the bedroom she showed no sign of the dominance or appetite she displayed—and continues to display—within. She idles through life with serenity and contentment, even complacency. They’d bought a house with a full-sized pool and she swims every day, but aside from that her description of herself as ‘lazy’ seems not inaccurate. He’ll come home at night to find her curled up reading, or pottering about the kitchen. She’s always pleased to see him, in her easy, accommodating way. She’s perfect, really, for a man in his position—a superb hostess when it comes to entertaining clients, gently charming without being flirtatious, and absolutely unflappable. She adorns his arm on public occasions. She never argues, or panics, or stresses about anything, and she looks with fond amusement upon him when he grows strained. Only in erotic play does the other side of her personality surface—like, he thinks, a docile, sun-warmed snake suddenly waking and rising to strike. Behind bedroom doors she is appetite incarnate: ruthless, shameless and physically dominant. Sometimes he suspects she’s holding back for fear she might hurt him.
It’s the only time he senses any emotional conflict in her.
He admires her calm. After his previous marriage, he finds a tremendous relief in her phlegmatic ease with life. She has no close friends, no visible family except for him, and no ambition. She watches the world’s affairs with disinterest, as if she’s seen it all before. But she’s happy—and he’s been happy, until recently. Only a little bemused, perhaps, by her disengagement.
Even as a mother Lucy seems dispassionate. The hired nannies help take much of the strain out of it, of course, but Lucy’s calm never seems threatened. Martin was warned by friends that women go a bit crazy from the hormones while pregnant, and that afterwards they lose all interest in their husbands. Neither happened as far as Lucy was concerned. Bir
th was swift and easy; both children are pretty and compliant and slept through the night from the very start. They resemble their mother too, to an extent that’s almost startling—golden-blond, green-eyed children who play quietly and watch gravely and never give a moment’s trouble. When he hears other people complaining about the stresses of parenthood, Martin wonders what the fuss is about and suspects exaggeration.
Sex is always wonderful. He loves it. He loves her.
Yet … on the Friday night one day after giving birth to Amelie, Lucy took herself off to a private nursing suite with the baby and refused entry to anyone else, from Martin to the doctors, for eighteen hours. That had been awkward.
What on earth could she have been getting up to in those circumstances?
He looks at the closed en-suite bathroom door. That’s where she is.
As he moves closer he hears the splash of bathwater.
Does it make sense to imagine she’s had a barely-concealed lover all these years? What, even when they were honeymooning in the Maldives, and she took a boat out to a private island on the atoll that was no more than a strip of sand and a few palm trees, and had the hotel staff maroon her there overnight? He could remember her walking into their beach-front chalet next day, crusted with sand and sleepy with contentment, just as he was breakfasting.
What sort of secret lover would fly out to the Indian Ocean for a single night’s illicit rendezvous, during her honeymoon?
Maybe it isn’t one lover: maybe it’s a string of them. The thought has occurred to him of course. Perhaps she hires gigolos to satisfy an overwhelming addiction to novelty. Maybe she entertains two, three, a half-dozen ripped young men at a time, of every ethnicity—their enormous cocks like a nest of pythons swarming over her splayed body. Maybe she gobbles greedily at their huge dicks, moaning with pleasure, while other cocks service her pussy and ass. Perhaps it takes several men working in concert to satisfy those near-insatiable holes.
Those fantasy images have plagued Martin’s nights alone. Whenever she’s away, he has to masturbate to get himself to sleep. His visions have become more extreme over the years: he pictures her whipping men unconscious, or smothering them with her voracious cunt, sucking up the last spouting offerings of their cocks as their heels drum a dying tattoo. He’s ashamed of his fantasies, but they make him quake with lust. They make him come so hard he blacks out into sleep before he has time to pull the covers back over his damp and aching body.
Who would guess such a torrid love-life for such an amiable, long-married couple? Who would imagine that the laid-back trophy wife is a virago in bed, or that the dutiful accountant gets his rocks off on being forced and threatened and hurt?
But then, who could picture a mother who refuses to come to her child’s hospital bed?
When it happened, Martin rang her. She had a cellphone after all, and this, he figured, overrode any personal agreements between them. She didn’t pick up until 3 a.m. on the Saturday morning though, by which time the crisis was almost over.
“It’s Amelie,” he told her, hoarse with exhaustion. “We’re at the hospital. She fell out of the apple tree, onto the wall. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer?”
Lucy was evasive. She wanted to know if Amelie was alright. No bones broken? No internal injuries?
“They’ve done a bunch of scans. X-rays or whatever. They said … something about skeletal anomalies—but not to do with the fall, some sort of congenital thing. I didn’t really get it; that wasn’t what I was worrying about. She’s got a hairline fracture in her skull and cracked some ribs, but don’t panic, nothing like as serious as it should have been. You have to get back here though. She’ll need you when she wakes up.”
Her family were all resistant to injury, Lucy suggested vaguely. And she’d been told she had unusually flexible joints. And no, she couldn’t come back straight away. Tomorrow. “Lucy! For God’s sake!”
No. She couldn’t come.
“This is your daughter!”
There was no immediate danger. She would not come. Martin would manage fine on his own.
And she’d had her way.
That was nearly three years ago. That had been the turning point: the moment when her solipsistic whim turned from something mysterious and fey, to which his submission was almost an erotic thrill, into … something else. Something darker. ‘Me-time’ should not be enforced with such ruthlessness, surely, he asked himself? What was it that had such a hold over her that even maternal instinct could not prevail?
There had been arguments after that. Cold, one-sided quarrels of few words but many black looks. Martin did not know how to shout, or to bully. His tactic with his ex-wife had always been to retreat before her flaring frustration and withdraw into his own head, lips pressed together in silence. Now he found himself facing the same strategy. Lucy only flicked her golden hair over her shoulder and looked at him, long and sorrowfully, and when pressed to the limit said, “You promised.”
Yes, he’d promised. And he’s a man who reads the small print and accepts what he’s signed up for—so in the end he’d stopped reproaching her. But the resentment and the fear did not go away, only churned and curdled inside the pressure cooker of his ribcage, until he felt it leaking into every part of his life.
And now he’s standing at the door to her bathroom, in the luxury hotel bedroom, with his hand on the porcelain knob. He can hear the slop of water beyond the boards, and the hiss of a running tap. He knows she’s in there. Maybe she’s alone. Maybe not.
He knows he should not be here. He said he’d respect her privacy.
He promised.
The ceramic is slippery under his fingers as he turns it. The bathroom is lit by candles, reflecting off mirrors, and for a moment he can’t make out much more than the great sunken bath in the center of the floor. It’s the size of a small pool and she’s completely submerged beneath the darkly glinting water. It takes a moment for her head to rise above the surface, and in that moment he can feel his heart banging against his breastbone like a trapped animal trying to flee.
She opens her eyes and blinks away the water. He hefts the bottle of champagne.
“Happy anniversary, darling,” he says.
As she tilts her face up to him, the candlelight catches strangely in her dilated pupils, and for a moment he sees blank disks of cold fire. One glistening shoulder rises from the pool and her lips part. Between them there is darkness. He hears the hiss of her breath.
“Ten years,” she says, and she sounds calm but he can hear something huge pressing up behind those words, as if they are the bars of a wholly inadequate cage. “I’ve been waiting. I’ve wondered every single time if this is it, if this is the week.”
“Sorry to have kept you on tenterhooks, darling. It must have been quite a trial for you.” He swings an open palm to indicate the mirrors and the candles and the polished marble. There’s a quiver in his throat that he hopes she can’t hear. “Well, where is he?”
“Who?”
“The guy. The girl. Whoever it is that you come to meet.”
She tilts her head, leaning forward a little. Her shoulders catch the light and gleam like fire. “I come here to be alone.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of expensive baths, Lucy. What’s it about? All this?” His voice rises. “I’ve had enough. I want to know.”
She smiles, but there’s no warmth in it. “I suppose ten years isn’t so bad, Martin. Others have done worse.”
“Others?” He steps forward, feeling the sweat running down the insides of his thighs. He’s broken the only taboo, and now he realizes how much he’s afraid of her wrath.
Fear has given him a most inappropriate and tumescent erection.
“Well, you’re not my first husband, you know.”
He didn’t know. How could he, when she never talks about her past? When she never reveals anything ab
out where she comes from? He wants to be outraged, but he’s already overflowing with turmoil and there just isn’t room for more. He wants to stare her in the eye, but his gaze can’t help falling to where the water-line laps about the curve of her breasts, just barely concealing the twin points of her nipples. The hint of a dark areola nudges the surface. That almost-revelation, the tease of the near glimpse, itches at him.
“How long did the last one put up with this crap?” he asks.
Lucy curls her lip in a laugh that is all hiss and no humor. “Eighteen months. But the one before that, twenty-two years.”
Impossible. His cock is rubbing uncomfortably against the fabric of his pants and he wants to adjust it, but he doesn’t dare touch himself. “I’m so sorry I don’t have that much patience,” he growls.
“I’m sorry too.” Lucy arches her back and his cock twitches in gratification as her breasts break the veil of the water at last, nipples as stiffly erect as if it’s ice she’s been bathing in, droplets plashing from their swollen points. “I thought we had an understanding, Martin.”
It doesn’t need the beckon of her lifted hand to bring him forward; he’s already moving closer. He can’t help it. Right to the edge of the bath, looking down at her. Her skin gleams, lacquered by water and candlelight, and her nipples stare back up at him like bold dark eyes. She’s exquisite, and even after all these years she makes him ache. “I never understood,” he confesses. “What the hell’s going on here?”
She rises up in the bath before him, slowly, and the water sighs like it misses her. Up and up and up, until her face is level with his. Breasts and waist and hips and … He doesn’t understand. He looks for the juncture of her legs, the familiar pout of her pubic mound, but he doesn’t see it and he can’t understand what he’s looking at. No velvety cloven pussy with its promise of concealed delights, but a vertical cloacal slit. No thighs, no long long legs—just flesh, more flesh, a muscular unbifurcated column disappearing into the water where her knees should be. No joints. A tail. She has a tail instead of legs. She’s standing up on a thick pale length like a snake’s—no, more like a lamprey’s or a hagfish’s—and there must be coils and coils of it still underwater to support her upper body that way. He can see diaphanous fins whose webs of translucent skin glow like stained glass with the candlelight behind them, and the faint shimmery pattern on that skin that’s not truly scales but hints at it, and his mind is full of words like sea serpent and wyrm and his mouth is open and he’s forgotten how to breathe—but the air is going out of his deflating chest with a noise like he’s never made before in his life.
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