He pulled back.
She was now nude.
The look in her eyes said a million things.
“I want to know everything about you,” he blurted out.
She turned round, took a few steps towards the window and closed the curtain.
“It’s too bright,” she said.
It was only eleven fifteen in the morning. The sun shone outside. All that could be seen from the hotel room window was a car park.
Her arse was slightly square and also heart-shaped, a tad too large, but he wanted his hands all over her pale cheeks, Venus on a Tuesday, he distractedly thought. The straps of the garter belt had left a small indent at the top of her hips, outlining the majesty of the pelvis where her dark cunt beckoned.
“Aren’t you getting undressed?” she said.
He did, holding his stomach in as he pulled his trousers off.
She looked him up and down.
He took her by the hand and pulled her towards the bed.
Later, when he would recall their first time together, the image of her body next to him with the filtered light that came through the curtains shadowing it delicately, would remind him of a postcard he had in his study of a sand dune, where a dip in the sand evoked a woman’s navel and a rise the gentle slope of her small breast.
After the initial, obligatory nervousness, he surprised himself by managing erection after erection anew and making love repeatedly, entering her three times before the time came to clean up, leave the room rented for half a day and drive back to Charing Cross station for her 6.14 train.
“Oh, God,” he says, entering her, feeling the ridged texture of her cunt walls against the taut skin of his cock.
“Oh, Jeeeeezus,” she says, as he slides, thrusts in and out of her, realizing this is it, she has done it, she has a lover, she is an adulteress, and no longer fighting the pleasure coursing through her body.
“Oh, Christ,” he moans, his body convulsing as he comes inside her, and this is the first time, I want it to last forever, for eternity, and opens his eyes and notices she had kept hers open all along, the first woman he remembers making love to who has done so. What a wonderful quirk, he thinks. It strikes him deep. It touches him intensely.
Both speechless for a long time after the initial orgasm; he finally disengaged from her, pulling his now limp and moist penis from the warmth of her vagina and kissed her lips with all the tenderness he could muster, even as he knew that neither gestures nor words could properly express the epiphany he had just experienced. The cover of the bed is rumpled, they had not even bothered pulling it down to uncover the sheets. He gets up, pours her a glass of wine. His throat is dry.
“Shall we take a bath?” she asks.
Together in the regulation-size Trust House Forte bath tub which barely contains the two of them, he sees the dark bruises on her thighs and legs.
“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m always catching the corner of my desk at the office. I bruise so easily.”
He soaps her, his fingers lingering more than hygiene demands in the gaping crack of her cunt, caresses her breasts with lather until they shine like wet jewels, she rubs his back, remarks on the hairy birth-mark there, he kisses her and their wet bodies entwine in the lukewarm water, he tries to manipulate himself into a position where he can enter her, but the geometry of the bath tub defeats him. He is hard. Dripping over the bathroom tiles and then the bedroom’s grey carpet, they rush to the bed. Here, unbidden she opens her mouth over his prone body and takes his penis into her mouth. He closes his eyes, thinking, Christ, and this is only our first time, and feels her teeth graze against his glans. He watches her tousled hair, the million and one blonde curls bob up and down over his stomach, the regal expanse of her back and her rising anus as she sucks with loving gluttony on his cock. He extends his hand and touches her back, a finger circling the black beauty spot just below her right buttock, the soft invisible golden down in the small of her back that reminds him of sheer silk in its tactile delight. He feels a surge pass through his body and pulls her off his member, lays her out on the white sheets, spreads her legs wide, slips a wet finger into the gaping aperture of her vagina and guides his cock in to the hilt. He feels harder, thicker and longer than he has ever been. He digs in as deep as he can, scraping, thrusting, aiming at her most intimate innards, she moans, her eyes open, gazing deep into him, her hair falling back from her face, revealing her overlarge forehead, her exquisite innocence, her torn ear from a past accident with an earring that got caught somehow and was wrenched away, he pulls her legs up and places them over his shoulders, to increase the depth of his invasion, his hands move convulsively from her lips, to her shoulders, her breasts and move downwards to her arse. Impulsively, feeling the wetness in the valley separating her arse cheeks, he slips a finger into her anus. She screams with pleasure and comes instantly with a violent shuddering that courses in overdrive through her body from scalp to toes.
“Oh, Jeeeeezus, Jesus.”
They managed to get together again a week later. Initially, they were only going to see a movie. Some American indie effort. Throughout the film, he kept on wanting to touch her everywhere and found it difficult to concentrate on the pyrotechnic action on the screen.
“Me too,” she said to him as the credits rolled.
They rushed to his office, where they quickly stripped. Again she was wearing stockings and suspenders. He wondered, was it only for him? They fell on the hard floor and embraced, his cock straining for her in physical agony, his tongue inside her mouth, coming up for air when the pressure became too much. He kissed her everywhere, between her toes where she was ticklish, he licked her breasts, her stomach, counted every mole and mark on her body, imagining he knew every square inch of her flesh so much better than her husband, he moved his tongue from cheek to cheek on her backside and slid it down the valley of her arse and into her rear hole. She shivered. Later, he slipped his finger in, and then two.
“You’re so sensitive there,” he remarked.
“I know, I know,” she replied.
Later, in the days apart, he would dream of buggery. He knew she did.
He then moved her round onto her back and moved his mouth towards her sex.
“You can’t,” she said. “I have a tampon in. It’s my period.”
Nonetheless, he slipped a finger into her sex and felt the moistness and the unbearable heat.
“Let me pull it out,” he asked her.
“Oh, you wouldn’t,” she said.
And he began to tug gently on the thin string that peered out shyly from the folds of her labia, below the hood of her clitoris.
“I’ll do it myself,” she said and stood up, all 5ft 10 of nude pallor and unforgettable flesh, and walked to the toilet in the corridor of the empty building.
When she returned, he entered her with joy. Later, when his cock slipped out of her, it was baked with blood, and when she moved over, there was a dark red stain on the brown sofa which he cleaned as best he could. To this day, there is a remote trace of it, and his heart stops every time he looks at the damn sofa, to the extent that he feels he should get rid of it as the memories assault him all too painfully.
There were many more encounters in his office over the months that followed. Often crazed coupling punctuated by doubt and guilt and snacks on the floor, sate sticks, prawns from Tesco, sushi pieces. Because both their backs ached every next day after lovemaking on the hard carpeted floor – they never did use the sofa again – he bought a thick orange blanket which they would drape over the floor, their bed of illicit sex, and later, when autumn came, he even acquired a cushion, and a quilted bed cover to keep them warm. He wondered what his secretary thought if she ever came across the blanket, cushion and cover, at the bottom of his personal filing cabinet.
And then came the fateful weekend away in Brighton, after he had begged her repeatedly for a whole day, a whole night at least together for the first time. It had been her birthday the day before. H
er husband had bought her a brown leather waistcoat and taken her to Miss Saigon in the evening. She had found the performance dreary and, somehow, nerves about the coming weekend, impatience with him or guilt, they had begun quarrelling and he had ended up sleeping apart from her on their small apartment’s sofa bed.
The hotel was on the sea front. They took a cab from the station. Their alibi was another writers’ conference. In the room, as he had previously promised he would when guessing randomly at her many secret fantasies, he borrowed the lipstick from her handbag, and pressed the soft tube against her breasts and rouged the nipples a dark red, then squeezed her body tight against his own, slashes of colour blending into the hair on his chest. Then he laid her out on the bed, set our her limbs in a semblance of crucifixion, held the fleshy folds of her cunt apart and applied the lipstick to its outer lips. Then, they fucked and he told her that he loved her, and he whispered suggestively to her what they would do throughout the coming night, how he would wake her and enter her in the small hours of morning, how he would remain embedded in her warm cunt while they briefly slept. Fingers, almost his whole hand, then his tongue in her various apertures, bringing her to climax again and again in moist abandon while he waited for his cock to grow hard between the successive bouts of lovemaking. Fish and chips on the promenade for lunch. Back to the room. Sex. Ice-cream at the local Haagen-Dasz parlour. Sex. Tying her hands against the foot of the bed with the belt he thredded out of his trousers, wrapping one of her black stockings around her neck as he took her from behind. A late night meal at a noisy Mexican joint a few yards from the hotel. The room, a small isolated world away from the real world. Washing her in the bath, joining her there, listening to her pee from behind the bathroom door, furtively sniffing her knickers. Shaving in the morning, naked, with his back to her while she relaxed in the tub, it all felt so familiar, so comfortable, so natural.
He had soon realized he was hopelessly in love with her. It wasn’t just the sex, he knew. He just wanted to be with her all the time, holding her in his arms, buying her things, clothes, discovering books, music and movies together and he counted the interminable hours that would elapse between their stolen evenings and their furtive lunch hours in pubs none of their acquaintances frequented. He wanted more of her, all of her, and began pressing her, which made her nervous. Her husband and her had sold their small, claustrophobic flat and had to find a new house to move into soon. Irrationally – even though he would eventually be proven right – he felt this new house would be the cause of the end of their relationship.
“Of course not,” she defended herself. “We have to live somewhere, you know.”
On the Sunday morning, after breakfast, she rang her husband from the hotel lobby as she had agreed to and found out, to increasing panic, through talking to his brother when she could not reach him, that he had been trying to get hold of her the previous evening and had discovered she was neither registered at the conference nor resident at the hotel where the event was taking place. He had to drive up to Oxford unexpectedly and had only wanted to warn her. She burst out in tears when she returned to the room.
He clumsily attempted to comfort her, only for her to turn viciously against him. He was blamed for breaking up her marriage and she insisted they leave for London – immediately. It turned out to be a false alarm, and she lied her way through it, blaming matters on a mix-up between the hotel and the conference organizers. She said her husband was so immersed in his own job that he never even suspected. But the rot had set in. Having almost lost her, he now knew how much she really meant to him and he became absolutely terrified of losing her for good. He could no longer envisage life without her.
In his mind’s eye, he no longer wanted her to be the wave, but the sea.
Autumn deepened.
She had to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair as all dutiful publishers do. He had a book to promote in America. From her bleak German room, she ached for him and wished he was there with her, she said. In his impersonal mid-West motel suite, he pined for her and feared she would no longer wish to see him after their return from foreign climes. She was due to move house a few days after Frankfurt.
They did meet up again a few times, and the sex was as intense as the pain they both felt about the future. Searing, savage, filthy, entering her again and feeling a desire to literally impale her, tear her apart from orifice to orifice. Shades of Bertolucci’s Last Tango, he carried a small amount of butter in a plastic bag in his attache case, meaning to use it with her and penetrate her anally, but he never did, the tenderness of entering her normally sufficing in the gentle heat of the moment.
The fear and the uncertainty were driving him crazy. Should they part or should they stay together, where was it all leading to, did the others suspect, was the pain stronger than the joy the affair gave them? During a pub lunch break, she suggested they might stay apart for at least a month to consider their feelings and the situation. She was now thinking of him too much, she said, in the nights, at the weekends (as if he bloody well didn’t suffer in the same jealous, atrocious manner, too), and her husband was wondering why she was so distant, and after all this new house meant so much to him, and the shopping at IKEA for new furniture and knick-knacks he kept dragging her to in his cheery insouciance, and it all made her feel so guilty, she explained.
If this was it, he said, give me at least one more night. He could see how torn she was, how despite all her best intentions, she couldn’t bear to be the one to say it was possibly over. One night, he thought, and I will make love to her like never before and force a positive decision out of her. Not that he even believed himself. She agreed for the next day. Not tonight, her husband was doing the cooking at home and she was already late and he would be angry at yet another late night, and why was it that recently she had to work late so often, it wasn’t like that before, was it?
The next day, her husband received an anonymous letter at work.
At seven o’clock, just as he was laying out the blanket on the office floor ready for her arrival, and sucking on Polo mints to freshen his breath, she rang. She was in tears, full of rage. It could only be him. What could he say? It all pointed towards him. Things in the damn letter that only he could know. He had once even joked about an envelope with her company’s logo he had kept back, unused, from a note she had once given him at the pub. He wracked his brain in vain; sure, they hadn’t really been taking too many precautions, hadn’t always been discreet, but who? Her husband was an industrial journalist, could he have made enemies? Duplicitous friends who had pieced things together? Colleagues? Staff at his office who had assembled the clues of the puzzle together from his irrational behaviour, the stain on the sofa, the blanket, their regular telephone conversations? At any rate, she was heading home to save her marriage. She now hated him and nothing he could ever do or say would ever make her want to have any further contact with him again. He just stood there, paralysed, as she hurled abuse at him over the telephone line. He protested his innocence, too shaken to probably even sound convincing. The last time he saw her was standing at his building’s door, the look in her eyes so withering, come to reclaim her letters and the two photographs she had once given him of her. He supposed they had been taken by her husband. Their memory remained etched forever in his brain. One with her hair short and uncurled, disturbed by what looked like a cold wind on the Beaubourg Plain in Paris, taken soon after her graduation from Cambridge. The other, just some months before he had met her, in the Northumberland countryside, her tousled hair almost orange, her eyes small and remote, wearing a black jacket, jeans and heavy DM shoes. A few months later, he took his courage in both hands and rang her at home on a day he knew she had taken off to catch up on manuscripts, and confronted her about this certainty she had that he was the sender of the letter. It turned out the letter was too well written and spelt difficult words correctly, as well as giving his private phone number. In her grief, this was now damning and incontrovertible evidence, it appe
ared. She made him swear to never write, call or try to see her again. Even threatening police action. He felt he couldn’t fight. She was even now accusing him of a series of strange phone calls her husband and her had been getting for some months, conveniently forgetting they had begun long before their affair, as she had told him about them then.
For a few months, his life fell apart.
Living with pain is a boring story.
He masturbated often, thinking of her endlessly and fishing up to the surface of his troubled mind desperate images of her body, stroke up, the look in her eyes, stroke down, the maddening curls of her hair, stroke up, the colour of her lips, stroke down, the moving shades of pink in her cunt when he chewed on her and his eyes immodestly peered deep inside. It didn’t help much, but he managed to come, the white glue of his seed dripping into his fist.
Why does it have to hurt me, bruise me so? he reflected as he gazed at his drawn features in the small mirror in the toilet while he cleaned the mess off his hands. After all, millions have affairs, fall in lust, spiral in love, come apart. But at the back of his mind, an insidious voice also whispered that, somehow, some also did stay together in the end.
Christmas and its desert of longing and loneliness. Then the February torment of Valentine’s Day – would her husband send her a doggerel card, take her out for a meal, buy her flowers?
Came the time of writing stories again.
The Amputated Soul
– You know, I’m very angry at you.
–What have I done?
– You never even took any precautions, used a condom, asked me if I was on the pill.
– You’re married, I’d somehow assumed.
– Well I wasn’t.
– But your husband and you?
– We’ve always used condoms.
The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski Page 3